The Software Quality Engineering Laboratory (SQUALL) is an industry-oriented, software engineering research laboratory, located in the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Our overall objective is to develop new methodologies and tools, and to evaluate existing methodologies and tools, to develop higher quality software in a cost-effective manner. We adopt a rigorous, problem-driven, realistic approach to every problem as we view software development as an engineering discipline.

Many of our projects are concerned with model-driven software engineering in the context of the Unified Modeling language (UML), that is to leverage specification and design documents (in UML) to support a wide variety of software engineering activities. The premise is that, if models of the specification and design are provided in an appropriate form, they can be exploited all along the development cycle to support, for example, change management and testing. The underlying objective is to promote the practice of software engineering at a higher level of abstraction, in a more engineering-like fashion.

Our research interests include:

  • Verification and validation of software systems, for instance through testing;
  • Model-driven development with the Unified Modeling Language (UML);
  • Automated support for improving system testability and maintainability;
  • Software quality assurance and control based on quantitative methods and measurement;
  • Technology evaluation, experimental software engineering;
  • Applications of artificial intelligence and evolutionary computing to software engineering.