Rhineland-Palatinate Innovation Award again goes to Fraunhofer IESE

One of the special research awards in the context of the Rhineland-Palatinate Innovation Contest has now been awarded for the second time to the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) in Kaiserslautern. The award was given for the development of the software-based process SAVE (Software Architecture Visualization and Evaluation), which enables the analysis of software architectures with unprecedented speed and precision.

Hans-Artur Bauckhage, Minister for Economy, Transportation, Agriculture, and Viniculture of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, presented the award at the conference center of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Trier during a ceremony held on 08 December 2005. The executive director of Fraunhofer IESE, Prof. Dr. Dieter Rombach, as well as the developers responsible for the award-winning process, Dr. Dirk Muthig and Jens Knodel, accepted the award.

In his speech, Hans-Artur Bauckhage stated that the goal of the innovation contest is to promote the knowledge and creativity of the citizens of Rhineland-Palatinate in order to strengthen the competitiveness of the local industry. In this context, it is considered particularly important to remove barriers for small and medium-sized enterprises and give them access to external knowledge.

Prof. Dr. Dieter Rombach was delighted to receive the award, which was now won for the second time by a product developed by Fraunhofer IESE, after the success of the UNIX security tool “NiXE” at the Innovation Contest in 2001. He noted that “The analysis of existing software systems that have no detailed architecture documentation is Sisyphus work in software development, which nobody enjoys doing and which consumes a lot of effort. If you know that a common digital camera contains 400,000 lines of software code, it is easy to imagine the extent and the costs of a detailed analysis. The automated process SAVE does not only extract the data needed for the later analysis of the software architecture from the program code, but also packages them mathematically and visualizes the results in an easy-to-understand manner. Thus, the software engineer gets a quick and comprehensive overview of the internal setup of an undocumented system, which may be significant for further development or for eliminating defects.”

Dr. Dirk Muthig, under whose leadership SAVE was developed, provides impressive figures on the performance of the Fraunhofer process: “Both the extent of performance and the work saved are unique in the case of SAVE. The effort for architecture evaluations of software systems is reduced by 75 – 90 % on average when using SAVE instead of the (manual) processes used to date. Since the automated procedure allows evaluating raw data sets of practically any degree of complexity, the quality of the evaluation performed also increases. It is no longer necessary to make compromises caused by too much effort, which used to happen before.”

The Fraunhofer IESE representatives also emphasized that SAVE is the result of an intensive collaboration with the Fraunhofer Center Maryland, in which the competencies of the two institutes complemented each other in an ideal manner. Practical software development requirements and cost issues as well as state-of-the-art technical developments were considered in this product, which has already been proven in practice at renowned industrial partner companies.

An innovation award is presented by the Minister for Economy, Transportation, Agriculture, and Viniculture of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in cooperation with the state’s working committees of the Chambers of Industry and Commerce and the Chambers of Crafts and Trade to particularly innovative companies as well as research institutions or individuals from Rhineland-Palatinate in recognition of their achievements and their efforts for innovations in the state’s economy.
The Innovation Award is intended to motivate small and medium-sized enterprises, in particular, to develop innovative products and processes, respectively services, and introduce them to the market.

Fraunhofer IESE offers methodological instruments to make software development processes plannable and bring software-based products to market more efficiently by systematically applying engineering-style principles. Under the leadership of Prof. Rombach and Prof. Liggesmeyer, the institute performs applied research in various areas of software engineering such as product line architectures and measurement-based process improvement. The basic pillar of the institute is the experimental approach. This approach makes it possible to measurably prove the added value of innovative technologies and methods offered by the institute by applying them in the industrial practice. This added value is often visible in reduced costs, higher quality, or faster time-to-market of new products.

Contact at Fraunhofer IESE:
Dipl.-Inf. Jörg Dörr
Phone: +49 (0)631 6800 - 1601
Fax: +49 (0)631 6800 - 1699

New Address:
Fraunhofer IESE
Fraunhofer-Platz 1
67663 Kaiserslautern
Germany

This release was published on openPR.