Code Inspection Research Articles

General methods for software architecture recovery: a potential approach and its evaluation

Software architecture is a critical artefact in the software lifecycle. It is a system blueprint for construction, it aids in planning teaming and division of work, and it aids in reasoning about system properties. But architecture documentation is seldom created and, even when it is initially created, it is seldom maintained. For these reasons organisations often feel the need to recover legacy architectures, for example, as part of planning for evolution or cloud migration. But there is no existing general architecture recovery approach nor tool that can be applied to any type of system, under any condition. We will show that one way of achieving such generality is to apply systematic code inspection following a Grounded Theory (GT) approach. Though relatively costly and human-intensive, a GT-based approach has several merits, for example: (a) it is general by design; (b) it can be partially automated; (c) it yields evidence-based results rooted of the system being examined. This article presents one theoretical formulation of a general architecture recovery method–called REM–and reports on the evaluation of REM in the context of a large architecture recovery campaign performed for the European Space Agency. Our results illustrate some intriguing properties and opportunities of GT-based architecture recovery approaches and point out lessons learned and venues for further research.

An Empirical Study on the Effect of Testing on Code Quality Using Topic Models: A Case Study on Software Development Systems

Previous research in defect prediction has proposed approaches to determine which files require additional testing resources. However, practitioners typically create tests at a higher level of abstraction, which may span across many files. In this paper, we study software testing, especially test resource prioritization, from a different perspective. We use topic models to generate topics that provide a high-level view of a system, allowing developers to look at the test case coverage from a different angle. We propose measures of how well tested and defect prone a topic is, allowing us to discover which topics are well tested and which are defect prone. We conduct case studies on the histories of Mylyn, Eclipse, and NetBeans. We find that 34–78% of topics are shared between source code and test files, indicating that we can use topic models to study testing; well-tested topics are usually less defect prone, defect-prone topics are usually undertested; we can predict which topics are defect prone but not well tested with an average precision and recall of 75% and 77%, respectively; our approach complements traditional prediction-based approaches by saving testing and code inspection effort; and our approach is not particularly sensitive to the parameters that we use.

Examining the Role of Fire Prevention on Hoarding Response Teams: Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services as a Case Study

Hoarded homes present a significant threat to the safety of occupants of the home and adjacent homes as well as emergency responders. Extreme accumulation of combustible materials raises the fuel load and prevents egress. Despite having regulatory tools related to fire prevention, fire departments generally lack the necessary background to address the many challenges related to the complex mental health problem of hoarding. Using Vancouver as a case study, this paper highlights the role of Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services in the City’s coordinated hoarding response and outlines their fire code inspections protocol developed for use in hoarding cases. On the basis of fire inspection reports, we compare the processes and outcomes of complaint-driven hoarding inspections with standard annual fire inspections of restaurants. Hoarding cases take longer to resolve and are more challenging, but inspectors achieved satisfactory status in 94% of cases without prosecution. About 20% of hoarding complaints do not involve fire code violations. Although this approach requires an investment and engagement with other community agencies, it represents a useful model for other jurisdictions.

Investigating code quality tools in the context of software engineering education

ABSTRACTA key issue involved with software engineering education consists of how to guarantee that adequate software engineering principles are being followed at the code level, thus reinforcing that students produce high‐quality code. Reviewing and grading student projects to verify whether they followed such principles is a time‐consuming task, since this typically involves manual code inspection. In this paper, we exploit code quality tools and metrics to automatically assess student projects with respect to methods with many responsibilities (i.e., where the Extract Method refactoring should be applied), and evaluate their effectiveness. We conducted a study using two sets of student projects, developed in two academic semesters. Our results indicate that, to reduce the effort required to grade projects, two traditional code metrics, namely method lines of code and number of statements, perform best, and other metrics can be selected according to the system being implemented. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 25:230–241, 2017; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI 10.1002/cae.21793

Data Quality and Information Quality – the Case of the Negative Prognosis Plant Protection Model

The Negative Prognosis model (NPM) is a meteorological plant protection model that has been used in the farming practice for a long time now for controlling potato late blight, caused by Phytophthora infestans. NPM takes hourly air temperature, relative humidity (RH) and precipitation sums as input, generating recommendations on the first protective treatment date. The objective of the present work was to determine the impact of weather data quality on the NPM recommendations quality. Sensitivity analysis was conducted through inspection of source code and simulation. Data for simulation were prepared so as to measure a possible delay of the recommended date of the first treatment. Simulation experiments were performed to assess the recommendations quality for the direct-measurement data and the prepared data. It was established that the recommendations depend on the measurement precision of the RH near the value of 87% and air temperature near the values of 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 and 24 °C. The decisive factor is RH measurement precision. Small variations of RH of 2–3% may cause a serious miscalculation of the recommended date of the first treatment of 8-11 days.

Analyzing and visualizing information flow in heterogeneous component-based software systems

Context: Component-based software engineering is aimed at managing the complexity of large-scale software development by composing systems from reusable parts. To understand or validate the behavior of such a system, one needs to understand the components involved in combination with understanding how they are configured and composed. This becomes increasingly difficult when components are implemented in various programming languages, and composition is specified in external artifacts. Moreover, tooling that supports in-depth system-wide analysis of such heterogeneous systems is lacking.Objective: This paper contributes a method to analyze and visualize information flow in a component-based system at various levels of abstraction. These visualizations are designed to support the comprehension needs of both safety domain experts and software developers for, respectively, certification and evolution of safety-critical cyber-physical systems.Method: We build system-wide dependence graphs and use static program slicing to determine all possible end-to-end information flows through and across a system’s components. We define a hierarchy of five abstractions over these information flows that reduce visual distraction and cognitive overload, while satisfying the users’ information needs. We improve on our earlier work to provide interconnected views that support both systematic, as well as opportunistic navigation scenarios.Results: We discuss the design and implementation of our approach and the resulting views in a prototype tool called FlowTracker. We summarize the results of a qualitative evaluation study, carried out via two rounds of interview, on the effectiveness and usability of these views. We discuss a number of improvements, such as more selective information presentations, that resulted from the evaluation.Conclusion: The evaluation shows that the proposed approach and views are useful for understanding and validating heterogeneous component-based systems, and address information needs that could earlier only be met by manual inspection of the source code. We discuss lessons learned and directions for future work.

Improving HIV Surveillance Data for Public Health Action in Washington, DC: A Novel Multiorganizational Data-Sharing Method.

BackgroundThe National HIV/AIDS Strategy calls for active surveillance programs for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to more accurately measure access to and retention in care across the HIV care continuum for persons living with HIV within their jurisdictions and to identify persons who may need public health services. However, traditional public health surveillance methods face substantial technological and privacy-related barriers to data sharing.ObjectiveThis study developed a novel data-sharing approach to improve the timeliness and quality of HIV surveillance data in three jurisdictions where persons may often travel across the borders of the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia.MethodsA deterministic algorithm of approximately 1000 lines was developed, including a person-matching system with Enhanced HIV/AIDS Reporting System (eHARS) variables. Person matching was defined in categories (from strongest to weakest): exact, very high, high, medium high, medium, medium low, low, and very low. The algorithm was verified using conventional component testing methods, manual code inspection, and comprehensive output file examination. Results were validated by jurisdictions using internal review processes.ResultsOf 161,343 uploaded eHARS records from District of Columbia (N=49,326), Maryland (N=66,200), and Virginia (N=45,817), a total of 21,472 persons were matched across jurisdictions over various strengths in a matching process totaling 21 minutes and 58 seconds in the privacy device, leaving 139,871 uniquely identified with only one jurisdiction. No records matched as medium low or low. Over 80% of the matches were identified as either exact or very high matches. Three separate validation methods were conducted for this study, and they all found ≥90% accuracy between records matched by this novel method and traditional matching methods.ConclusionsThis study illustrated a novel data-sharing approach that may facilitate timelier and better quality HIV surveillance data for public health action by reducing the effort needed for traditional person-matching reviews without compromising matching accuracy. Future analyses will examine the generalizability of these findings to other applications.

Applying Failure Modes and Effects Analysis to Public Health Models: The Breathe Easy at Home Program

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a structured process used to identify and prioritize risks by ranking them based on severity, occurrence, and detectability. Historically, FMEA has been used within industries, including automotive and health care. This project explored the adaption of the FMEA template to a small public health program designed to improve asthma outcomes. The Breathe Easy at Home (BEAH) program is a multi-sector partnership that uses a web-based system to link clinical sites with housing code inspections and enforcement for patients with asthma. In July and August 2014, an FMEA was conducted to uncover risks within the BEAH process, and failures were prioritized for corrective action. The FMEA team prioritized risk based on severity, occurrence, and detectability to apply the FMEA process to a public health program. The FMEA team developed an action plan to improve failure modes that received the highest rankings. To fit the needs of a relatively small public health program, Joint Health Commission and U.S. Veterans Administration rating scales were adapted. The FMEA process can be adapted to a public health systems evaluation framework in order to prioritize areas for improvement.

Formal and semi-formal verification of a web voting system

Purpose – This paper aims to present the verification process conducted to assess the functional correctness of the voting system. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) is the most important research institution in Argentina. It depends directly from Argentina’s President but its internal authorities are elected by around 8,000 research across the country. During 2011, the CONICET developed a Web voting system to replace the traditional mail-based process. In 2012 and 2014, CONICET conducted two Web election with no complaints from candidates and voters. Before moving the system into production, CONICET asked the authors to conduct a functional and security assessment of it. Design/methodology/approach – This process is the result of integrating formal, semi-formal and informal verification activities from formal proof to code inspection and model-based testing. Findings – Given the resources and time available, a reasonable level of confidence on the correctness of the application could be transmitted to senior management. Research limitations/implications – A formal specification of the requirements must be developed. Originality/value – Formal methods and semi-formal activities are seldom applied to Web applications.

Agile 방법론과 MDA/MDD 기법을 활용하여 전자정부 표준 프레임워크 프로젝트의 품질 향상 사례

This paper analyzes the effect on productivity by measuring Function Point per MM(man-month) in a software development project and code inspection which performed in Agile methodology, and introduce the method of applying MDA/MDD technology in the e-government standard framework project. MDA/MDD which recently raising its head is technology that increase software development productivity through automatic transformation form abstract model into lower abstract model, or from model to code. but, many Lessons obtained through the case studies, the analysis suggests a limited effect measurements. In this study, efficient development methodology and utilizing a e-government framework to measure the effectiveness of the MDD to the new measures through a case study applied to real information system development process. In addition to, managing information modeling through integrated repository presents a traceability and visibility.

An exploratory study on exception handling bugs in Java programs

Most mainstream programming languages provide constructs to throw and to handle exceptions. However, several studies argue that exception handling code is usually of poor quality and that it is commonly neglected by developers. Moreover, it is said to be the least understood, documented, and tested part of the implementation of a system. Nevertheless, there are very few studies that analyze the actual exception handling bugs that occur in real software systems or that attempt to understand developers’ perceptions of these bugs. In this work we present an exploratory study on exception handling bugs that employs two complementary approaches: a survey of 154 developers and an analysis of 220 exception handling bugs from the repositories of Eclipse and Tomcat.Only 27% of the respondents claimed that policies and standards for the implementation of error handling are part of the culture of their organizations. Moreover, in 70% of the organizations there are no specific tests for the exception handling code. Also, 61% of the respondents stated that no to little importance is given to the documentation of exception handling in the design phase of the projects with which they are involved. In addition, about 40% of the respondents consider the quality of exception handling code to be either good or very good and only 14% of the respondents consider it to be bad or very bad. Furthermore, the repository analysis has shown (with statistical significance) that exception handling bugs are ignored by developers less often than other bugs. We have also observed that while overly general catch blocks are a well-known bad smell related to exceptions, bugs stemming from these catch blocks are rare, even though many overly general catch blocks occur in the code. Furthermore, while developers often mention empty catch blocks as causes of bugs they have fixed in the past, we found very few bug reports caused by them. On top of that, empty catch blocks are frequently used as part of bug fixes, including fixes for exception handling bugs.Based on our findings, we propose a classification of exception handling bugs and their causes. The proposed classification can be used to assist in the design and implementation of test suites, to guide code inspections, or as a basis for static analysis tools.

Evaluation of Code Inspection on an Outsourced Software Project in Mauritius

Software inspection is a proven methodology that enables the detection and removal of defects in software artifacts and thus contributes towards software quality assurance. It eventually leads to significant budget and time benefits. To be most effective, inspections must be an integral part of the software development life cycle and form part of the development schedule. This study considers code inspection as it is the most frequently used inspection in the software development process. For the implementation part of this research, code inspection is carried out in a selected outsourced project in a company situated in Mauritius, and the results are evaluated based on the inspection process and feedback of people involved in the inspection process. General Terms Software Code Inspection.

Continuous quality assessment with inCode

In spite of the progress that has been made over the last ten years in the research fields of software evolution and quality assessment, developers still do not take full advantage of the benefits of new assessment techniques that have been proposed by researchers. Beyond social factors, we believe that there are at least two main elements that contribute to this lack of adoption: (i) the insufficient integration of existing techniques in mainstream IDEs and (ii) the lack of support for a continuous (daily) usage of QA tools. In this context this paper introduces inCode, an Eclipse plugin aimed at transforming quality assessment and code inspections from a standalone activity, into a continuous process, fully integrated in the development life-cycle. But inCode not only assesses continuously the quality of Java systems; it also assists developers in taking restructuring decisions, and even supports them in triggering non-standard, complex refactorings. This paper introduces inCode's differentiating features, it presents the design goals that shaped our construction decisions, and describes a controlled experiment designed to validate the usability of the tool. The experiment has indicated that developers using inCode are more efficient in refactoring design fragments affected by design flaws.

Defect prediction as a multiobjective optimization problem

SummaryIn this paper, we formalize the defect‐prediction problem as a multiobjective optimization problem. Specifically, we propose an approach, coined as multiobjective defect predictor (MODEP), based on multiobjective forms of machine learning techniques—logistic regression and decision trees specifically—trained using a genetic algorithm. The multiobjective approach allows software engineers to choose predictors achieving a specific compromise between the number of likely defect‐prone classes or the number of defects that the analysis would likely discover (effectiveness), and lines of code to be analysed/tested (which can be considered as a proxy of the cost of code inspection). Results of an empirical evaluation on 10 datasets from the PROMISE repository indicate the quantitative superiority of MODEP with respect to single‐objective predictors, and with respect to trivial baseline ranking classes by size in ascending or descending order. Also, MODEP outperforms an alternative approach for cross‐project prediction, based on local prediction upon clusters of similar classes. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

E-Government in Rhode Island: what effects do templates have on usability, accessibility, and mobile readiness?

This study examines state and local e-government Web sites in Rhode Island with an eye toward determining the effects of templates on accessibility, usability, and mobile readiness. After examining 132 state and local e-government sites, using a combination of code inspection, heuristic evaluation, and automated analysis, the researchers found that templates had, at best, mixed success in promoting these key issues. The results suggest that while best practice-based templates may be helpful in improving usability, accessibility, and mobile readiness, it is critical that designers at the local level receive training in these areas and that governments monitor state and local Web sites for compliance with industry and legal standards.

LAROB: Laser-Guided Underwater Mobile Robot for Reactor Vessel Inspection

In a nuclear power plant, there are several cylindrical vessels such as a reactor vessel and pressurizer. The vessels are usually constructed by welding large rolled plates or nozzle pipes together. To ensure the integrity of the vessel, their welds should be periodically inspected using sensors such as ultrasonic transducers or visual cameras. To inspect these welds effectively, we developed an underwater mobile robot, which is guided by a laser pointer. The robotic system was devised to reduce the inspection time and schedule during mandatory code inspections compared to a conventional inspection machine with a large structure. The system mainly consists of an underwater mobile robot, a laser positioning unit, and a main control station. The underwater mobile robot is guided by a laser positioning unit with a precise resolution of 0.05°. The mobile robot moves on the reactor vessel wall with four magnetic wheels. This paper presents the design and implementation of the underwater mobile robot. The laser guidance control of the mobile robot is also described along with the experimental results. The system was integrated with the main control station, and tested in the reactor vessel of a Korean nuclear power plant. After many improvements in its design and engineering, the system is expected to dramatically reduce the critical path of the reactor vessel inspection, if the system is used practically.

The links between human error diversity and software diversity: Implications for fault diversity seeking

Software diversity is known to improve fault tolerance in N-version software systems by independent development. As the leading cause of software faults, human error is considered an important factor in diversity seeking. However, there is little scientific research focusing on how to seek software fault diversity based on human error mechanisms. A literature review was conducted to extract factors that may differentiate people with respect to human error-proneness. In addition, we constructed a conceptual model of the links between human error diversity and software diversity. An experiment was designed to validate the hypotheses, in the form of a programming contest, accompanied by a survey of cognitive styles and personality traits. One hundred ninety-two programs were submitted for the identical problem, and 70 surveys were collected. Code inspection revealed 23 faults, of which 10 were coincident faults. The results show that personality traits seems not effective predictors for fault diversity as a whole model, whereas cognitive styles and program measurements moderately account for the variation of fault density. The results also show causal relations between performance levels and coincident faults: coincident faults are unlikely to occur at skill-based performance level; the coincident faults introduced in rule-based performances show a high probability of occurrence, and the coincident faults introduced in knowledge-based performances are shaped by the content and formats of the task itself. Based on these results, we have proposed a model to seek software diversity and prevent coincident faults.

On Empirical Comparison of Checklist-based Reading and Adhoc Reading for Code Inspection

nspection is a proven approach that is commonly used to manage software quality. To this end many inspection techniques such as Checklist-Based Reading (CBR), Perspective-Based Reading (PBR), Usage-Based Reading (UBR), and Defect-Based Reading (DBR) have been proposed in the literature. Unfortunately, plethora of empirical studies carried out to evaluate these reading techniques have produced inconsistent and conflicting results. Consequently, ad hoc reading and CBR still remain the standard reading techniques in software organizations. This paper investigates the performance of ad hoc and CBR techniques in a traditional paper-based environment. Seventeen undergraduate students of computer science majority of whom are in their final year were used as subjects in a controlled experiment. Results of the experiment indicate that CBR is significantly superior to ad hoc reading in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, effort, and number of false positives. On the average, 4 faults were detected in 69 minutes using ad hoc reading while 11 faults were detected in 42.5 minutes using Checklist-based reading. Also the average number of false positive is about 3.13 in checklist-based approach as against about 6.44 in ad hoc approach.

E-뱅킹 시스템의 효율적인 인스펙션 범위 설계

오늘날 금융이 급격하게 변화함에 따라 e-뱅킹 시스템을 개발하는 프로젝트의 구축 기간은 점차 짧아지고 있고, 이로 인해 구축에서의 위험 또한 증가하고 있다. 때문에 금융사는 프로젝트 개발 중에도 시스템의 품질을 검토하길 요구한다. 하지만 개발사 입장에서 이와 같은 추가적인 품질 검토는 투입되는 노력으로 인해 개발을 지연시키는 요인이 되고, 결국 금융사와 개발사의 갈등을 야기한다. 이와 같은 문제를 해결하기 위해 이 논문에서는 e-뱅킹 시스템에 특성을 고려하여 우선순위를 정의하고, 이를 통해 효율적인 코드 인스펙션을 위한 범위 우선순위 판단 기준을 설계한다. 설계된 코드 인스펙션 범위를 이용하여 적은 노력으로 효율적인 코드 인스펙션을 수행할 수 있으며, 해당 범위를 활용하여 좀 더 고품질의 프로덕트를 개발할 수 있을 것으로 기대된다. Nowadays, the finance changes so rapidly that the time period of developing a e-banking system has been shorter. As a result, the risk of developing in the new e-banking system has increased. Therefore financial institutions constantly ask to review the quality test of their system during the project development. However, from the developer's point of view, additional system quality inspection will delay the development time for a new project, so financial investors and developers, because this problem will cause conflict. In order to solve this problem, in this paper define priority that considered characteristics of e-banking system and thereby design range priority decision criteria for efficient code inspection. Even in the e-banking system development, it is expected that using newly designed range of code inspection will allow high efficient quality performance.

Variation factors in the design and analysis of replicated controlled experiments

In formal experiments on software engineering, the number of factors that may impact an outcome is very high. Some factors are controlled and change by design, while others are are either unforeseen or due to chance. This paper aims to explore how context factors change in a series of formal experiments and to identify implications for experimentation and replication practices to enable learning from experimentation. We analyze three experiments on code inspections and structural unit testing. The first two experiments use the same experimental design and instrumentation (replication), while the third, conducted by different researchers, replaces the programs and adapts defect detection methods accordingly (reproduction). Experimental procedures and location also differ between the experiments. Contrary to expectations, there are significant differences between the original experiment and the replication, as well as compared to the reproduction. Some of the differences are due to factors other than the ones designed to vary between experiments, indicating the sensitivity to context factors in software engineering experimentation. In aggregate, the analysis indicates that reducing the complexity of software engineering experiments should be considered by researchers who want to obtain reliable and repeatable empirical measures.