The software engineering research has adopted an engineering approach to study large software systems. The major emphasis is on practical software organizations, with real project goals and environments, and organizational structures.

The Quality Improvement Paradigm/Experience Factory Organization:

This work focuses on providing a process and an organizational structure to support the development of models of various software processes and products in order to improve the software development and maintenance through the reuse of past experiences. Research projects vary from experimentation with techniques to the development of infrastructure technologies for experimenting in the software domain.

The Software Engineering Laboratory:

The SEL is a joint venture between the University, NASA/Goddard, and Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). It us ab example of an Experience Factory that has been used to understand and improve software development and maintenance process and products at Goddard since 1976. In 1994, the SEL recieved the IEEE Computer Society Award for Software Process Achievement in improving the software process.

The NASA EOSDIS Experience Factory:

This work focuses on developing an experience factory to support Hughes Applied Information Systems in their design and implementation of the NASA EOSDIS Core System. Although the reuse of products is the primary focus, the reuse of processes and other experiences originating from the system life cycle are being explored as a practical solution to the problem of developing higher quality systems at lower costs.

Interconnecting Heterogeneous Software:

The software bus organization developed by this research allows programmers to create applications whose components are written in different languages, distribute their programs across a network of diverse computers having different operating systems, and vary the choice of media or protocols used for communication among the application components.