Professor Osterweil is developing process programming technology in the context of a distributed process-centered environment. A process centered environment interprets process programs, using them to coordinate the efforts of people, computers, and software tools. It also provides a platform for the evaluation, comparison, analysis, evolution and improvement of software development processes and their support. Programming software development processes will lead to better understanding and improvement of sotware production, as well as providing more effective computerized support for such processes.

The goal of Professor Osterweil's reearch in software analysis is to develop practical techniques that can help software developers determine whether software systems satisfy their requirements. The focus of most of our research is on the static analysis of concurrent software--the nondeterministic behavior introduced by concurrency means that dynamic analysis (testing) is not adequate for concurrent systems. Since concurrent systems are built of interacting sequential components, however, many of the techniques we use for analyzing concurrent systems can also be applied to sequential software.

Professor Osterweil is also developing a framework for tools interoperability that attempts to address a broad range of control and data model issues. Tool interoperability is a problem that must be addressed to allow software development environments to be extended easily with new tools or existing tools developed independently of the other tools in the environment. Interoperability support allows tools written in a variety of programming languages to cooperate by sharing data and passing control among themselves. Some of the more difficult issues being addressed in this researcg are