Jim Buckley

Jim Buckley obtained an upper 2:1 Honours, BSc degree in Biochemistry from the University of Galway in 1989. In 1994 he was awarded an MSc degree in Computer Science from the University of Limerick and he followed this with a PhD in Computer Science from the same University in 2002. He currently works as a Professor in the Computer Science and Information Systems Department at the University of Limerick, Ireland.

He is a Principal Investigator in Lero and performs a significant portion of his current research work in the TREES Programme; a programme entirely funded by Huawei.

He leads the ARC group within Lero, a team dedicated to supporting software developers who are tasked with maintaining and evolving software systems. In this capacity, he has one of the most frequently cited taxonomies in software evolution and his work has substantially refined theories of software comprehension and information seeking: core subtasks in the evolving of software systems. He has also defined a state-of-the-art approach and tooling for evaluating software systems’ architectures. This approach has been (independently) identified as a leader in the field and has been used by seven companies based in Ireland today. Likewise, his research on feature location: the task of identifying where in the source code a specified functionality of the system is implemented. 

In specific he has providing guidance to researchers designing empirical evaluations of their proposed feature location techniques. And under his leadership, the group have also developed approaches and illustrative prototype tools that were used by his commercial partners. One of these approach’s associated tooling has been licensed to an international consultancy company who specializes in evolving mature legacy software systems.

Recently his work has focused more on the adoption of AI4SE and SE4AI approaches: In collaboration with industrial partners, he has developed an LLM-based approach for clone detection that, unlike the existing state-of-the-art in that area is scalable. This has resulted in two IP assignments to the company and several top-tier academic publications. Likewise, he has led a team that have proposed a novel XAI approach, that also manages to retain high accuracy. Finally, he is interested in the changing face of third-level software engineering education, in the context of the new AI4SE generative approaches that are becoming available to professional software developers and their undergraduate counterparts.

As can be seen from the above, Dr. Buckley's research work is moving towards AI-supported software engineering and the engineering of AI systems. It is underpinned by close collaboration with industry, in line with the University’s strategic goal of being industry-led: He has worked with/continues to work with companies as diverse as IBM, Fidelity, Information Mosaic, ACI Ireland, QAD Ireland, Wood Group Kenny, Huawei, Horizon Fintech and the HSE. In these collaborations, problems are identified through consultation with the partners and solutions are derived from both academic reviews and observation of practice. The resultant solutions are then trialled in industry, leading to further design refinements and renewed empirical trials.

 If you have any software evolution issues in your company that you would like to discuss, we would be more than happy to hear from you at jim.buckley@Lero.ie.