Software has become the driving force behind most new technologies. But the engineering of software is becoming increasingly complicated. A software engineer must balance a variety of competing factors, including functionality, quality, performance, safety, usability, time to market, and cost. Moreover, the size of software systems that are being built is rapidly growing.

The Software Engineering Research Laboratory (SERL) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder is pursuing the discovery of principles and the development of technologies to support the engineering of large, complex software systems. The challenging targets for this work are organizations and software systems operating in the wide-area, heterogeneous, distributed, and decentralized context of wide-area networks such as the Internet.

Broadly speaking, there are six themes that underlie our research:

	Configuration Management
	Distributed Object Technology
	Software Architecture
	Open Hypermedia
	Web Technology
	Software Process

Our approach to research emphasizes the incremental construction of usable prototypes that capture the essence of our vision.

SERL is a member of the following research consortia:

	Arcadia
	Evolutionary Design of Complex Software (EDCS)
	Computer-Aided Education and Teaching Initiative (CAETI)