Machine learning service virtualisation research gets grant boost

Swinburne University of Technology and the University of Melbourne are partnering with CA Technologies for a three year project to advance service virtualisation.

Backed too by an Australian Research Council grant, the researchers will seek to find a method of using machine learning to automatically derive a service virtualisation model.

“By using machine learning, development teams can write software without needing all the other systems within their environment. This will ultimately increase software development speed and reliability,” CA explained in a statement.

They will also look at ways of modelling a whole network of services, which takes into account their interdependencies. Another stream of research aims to put the ‘human back into the loop’, the company said.

“Trying to completely replace humans means that there can be errors that then must be fixed by a human. The objective of this project is to effectively combine machine learning and human input so that the two are working harmoniously,” it said.

The research team is made up of; four professors from across the two universities: Professor Jun Han, Associate Professor Jean-Guy Schneider, Professor Chengfei Liu and Professor Chris Leckie; four PhD researchers; one research fellow and a team of domain experts from CA.

The new partnership follows a 2014 grant project between CA and Swinburne, which focused on allowing a service to be virtualised in the absence of expert knowledge and explicit documentation.

“Our previous service virtualisation grant project with CA aided product development to the point of being included in new service virtualisation products that are now being sold to customers across the world. That’s a compelling prospect and our aim is to achieve similar success,” said Professor Han.

Professor Leckie, who has worked with CA previously, also hoped that the current research would be realised in the company’s product offerings.

“There have been some extremely compelling outputs,” he said. “I’m confident that our combined effort will result in new developments that become commercially available via CA products.”

CA has partnered with both Swinburne and Melbourne universities on research projects since 2006.

The aim is to increase the reliability of software deployment and reduce the delivery time for software applications from development to release, CA said.

“We’re glad to be able to embark on this new journey and hope the result is new DevOps solutions that help our customers more efficiently and effectively run their organisations,” said Steve Versteeg, vice president of research at CA Strategic Research, Melbourne.