Software engineers are rewriting the rules of their own field to keep up with a world where people, devices, and data are no longer tied to fixed locations or schedules. The Open University’s SEAD group, backed by this platform grant, is tackling a fundamental mismatch: today’s software engineering practices were built for a world of static offices, wired computers, and nine-to-five connectivity, but the reality has shifted to global, mobile, and always-on systems. The problem is that current methods cannot reliably produce secure, adaptable, and user-friendly software for this new reality—think of a hospital’s patient-monitoring system that must work across continents, or a police dispatch network that adjusts to shifting teams and devices in real time. This grant will sustain a multi-disciplinary team—combining software engineering with social psychology—to build the foundational principles and tools needed for such systems. If successful, the work could quietly reshape the infrastructure behind healthcare, aviation, policing, and sustainability efforts, making the software that runs these critical services more resilient and trustworthy without demanding that users become experts in security or configuration.
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In the last decade, the role of software engineering has changed rapidly and radically. Globalisation and mobility of people and services, pervasive computing, and ubiquitous connectivity through the Internet have disrupted traditional software engineering boundaries and practices. People and services are no longer bound by physical locations. Computational devices are no longer bound to the devices that host them. Communication, in its broadest sense, is no longer bounded in time or place. The Software Engineering & Design (SEAD) group at the Open University (OU) is leading software engineering research in this new reality that requires a paradigm shift in the way software is developed and used. This platform grant will grow and sustain strategic, multi-disciplinary, crosscutting research activities that underpin the advances in software engineering required to build the pervasive and ubiquitous computing systems that will be tightly woven into the fabric of a complex and changing socio-technical world. In addition to sustaining and growing the SEAD group at the OU and supporting its continued collaboration with the Social Psychology research group at the University of Exeter, the SAUSE platform will also enable the group to have lasting impact across several application domains such as healthcare, aviation, policing, and sustainability. The grant will allow the team to enhance the existing partner networks in these areas and to develop impact pathways for their research, going beyond the scope and lifetime of individual research projects.
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