Software Engineering
Software Engineering research at the University of Glasgow focuses on the tools, methods, and practices needed to engineer complex contemporary software systems. Through the Software Engineering Laboratory, researchers investigate how software can be developed more effectively, reliably, and sustainably in rapidly changing technical and organisational environments.
A major theme is agile software engineering, including the development and evaluation of novel applications of agile principles and practices in industry. This work examines how agile approaches can be adapted to different organisational settings, project scales, and development challenges, and how teams can maintain agility as software systems, organisations, and collaborations grow in complexity.
Research also considers software engineering at scale, addressing the coordination, processes, architectures, and development practices required for large and distributed software projects. This includes understanding how development teams collaborate, how engineering practices evolve in real-world settings, and how tools and processes can support productivity, software quality, and maintainability.
By combining rigorous software engineering research with strong engagement with industrial practice, Glasgow's work seeks to bridge the gap between research and real-world software development, producing methods, evidence, and tools that help organisations build dependable, adaptable, and high-quality software systems.
Project Highlights
Longitudinal Evaluation of Software Engineering At Scale (LEANSEAS)
Lloyds Banking Group are implementing an Agentic AI-first policy in software engineering practice for capacity creation between 2026 and 2030. The aim of this policy is to only increase software development capacity where this cannot currently be done through AI. The Software Engineering Lab is collaborating with Lloyds Banking Group to determine the extent to which current generation agent driven software engineering (ADSE) technologies can be exploited to create capacity at scale in diverse dimensions of software engineering processes. Following an Action Research methodology, the EDP leadership, practitioners and University research team collaborate to iteratively develop the research programme. We select opportunities for agentic technology adoption within software engineering practices, deploy these to multiple software development teams and utilise appropriate empirical and qualitative methods to evaluate the impact on workflows and practitioner experiences.