Hazel Asuncion's Site

My research interests are in traceability, workflows, and software architectures. During the software development lifecycle, it is difficult to manage the numerous heterogeneous artifacts produced (e.g. requirements specs, behavioral models, high-level design, code). Consequently, traceability is difficult to achieve in practice.

I define traceability as the ability to elucidate relevant relationships between artifacts in order to support various stakeholders in their software development tasks. One aspect of traceability that has received much attention is requirements traceability. An approach to managing artifacts is through interweaving traceability tasks with existing processes via workflows. This is the approach we took at an industry traceability project (see abstract). Another approach is using software architectures as the central artifact by which all other artifacts are related. We refer to this as Architecture-Centric Traceability for Stakeholders or ACTS (see abstract).

I've also looked at the traceability problem in other domains. I studied how techniques in e-Science support tracing data products across an entire experiment lifecycle (see abstract). More recently, I investigated the tracing of software license conflicts in heterogeneously composed software systems, in collaboration with Dr. Alspaugh and Dr. Scacchi (see Alspaugh, Asuncion, Scacchi. Intellectual Property Rights Requirements for Heterogeneously-Licensed Systems, To Appear).

Here is a demo of my prospective link capture tool: [mp4].

Here is a recent presentation on software license analysis presented at FLOSS 2009: [pdf].

Here is a recent presentation on software license analysis presented at ISR 2009: [pdf].