Prosoft Research Group

Prosoft is a research group on Software Engineering, in the Instituto de Informática at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), coordinated by Prof. Ingrid Nunes.

This research group was founded in the mid 80s by Prof. Daltro Nunes. Prosoft started its activities with the development of an integrated environment that was used as a laboratory for experimentation of new technologies that support software development with high quality and productiveness, involving several undergraduate and graduate students, researchers and professors from Instituto de Informática, as well as cooperating institutions in Brazil and from other countries.

The Prosoft main focus is the intelligent and rigorous development of high-quality software. Specific research topics investigated by the group includes the support to the software development process and its evolution with the proposal of process models and automation tools. Given that our goal is to provide intelligent support to the software development, artificial intelligence techniques that give foundation to such support are also part of the research performed by the group. In order to analyse proposed approaches in real-world contexts, the Prosoft searches for cooperation with the industry.

Some of our recent work has focused on the following areas, or themes:

  • Software engineering
    • Aspect Oriented Software Development
    • Experimental Software Engineering
    • Formal Software Specification
    • Software Architecture and Design
    • Software Maintenance and Evolution
    • Software Processes
    • Software Product Lines
    • Verification and Testing
  • Artificial intelligence
    • Agent-oriented Software Engineering
    • Decision Making
    • Preference Reasoning
    • Recommender Systems

We are involved in research projects and contribute to the organisation of Software Engineering events, such as conferences and workshops.