Software Engineering Discipline Research Articles

Requirement Pattern Extraction using Cluster Based Framework - RAPID

Background/Objectives: In Software Engineering discipline, requirement phase plays vital role in success of a project. To make the requirement analysis process more effective, developers adopt several methods like goal-oriented, aspectoriented, pattern-oriented etc. In the current scenario recurring requirements can be addressed effectively with requirement patterns rather applying a common procedure to all projects. Methods/Statistical Analysis: While adopting common procedure to all project results in increasing cost of quality or even project failure due to the fact that every project is not having similar characteristics. To perform requirement process effectively, it is necessary to select a suitable requirement pattern for a project. Selecting relevant, applicable and reliable pattern is challengeable and prior knowledge is required. Findings: The proposed framework groups project characteristics and the pattern sets into k-clusters based on the clustering algorithm. The best suitable pattern will be filtered from the available pattern clusters by applying the filtering algorithm. The suggested patterns along with the situational constraints for a given situation will be stored in the data store. The stack holder can add new pattern details or can update the details of existing patterns Applications/ Improvements: Finds the analysis patterns that match with the given situational characteristics and requirement of a project. Clustering enhanced with fuzzy to bring the improvement. Keywords: Clustering, K-Means, Mining, Pattern Extraction, Requirement Pattern, Software Reuse and Filtering

A Software Engineering Perspective on SDN Programmability

Software-defined networking (SDN) has received a great deal of attention from both academia and industry in recent years. Studies on SDN have brought a number of interesting technical discussions on network architecture design, along with scientific contributions. Researchers, network operators, and vendors are trying to establish new standards and provide guidelines for proper implementation and deployment of such novel approach. It is clear that many of these research efforts have been made in the southbound of the SDN architecture, while the northbound interface still needs improvements. By focusing in the SDN northbound, this paper surveys the body of knowledge and discusses the challenges for developing SDN software. We investigate the existing solutions and identify trends and challenges on programming for SDN environments. We also discuss future developments on techniques, specifications, and methodologies for programmable networks, with the orthogonal view from the software engineering discipline.

Exploring model-driven engineering method for teaching software engineering

Model-driven engineering (MDE) is an emerging software engineering discipline, which raised the level of abstraction. Although there are best practices in industry, the number of experiences describing how MDE is applied in software engineering teaching in higher school is still limited. In our previous work, students fail to implement a demonstrative system though they can hand in reports in time. In this article, we explore a model-driven engineering method for teaching software engineering. We present several factors affecting team project, and design both semi-model-driven project and code generation project in detail. Finally, we do an in-depth analysis on industrial context, size of project team, roles of university and company, and student satisfaction. Some lessons learned from the experiences of both projects are concluded as choice of pilot project, involvement of company and training before team project. The organisation of both projects is served as an inspiration for higher schools that want to develop a software engineering course.

Current and Future Challenges of Software Engineering for Services and Applications

ICT (Information and Communication Technology) and, in particular, software is more and more pervasive and it cannot be considered anymore as a minor element of a complex systems. In domains like cloud, big data, IoT (Internet of Things), CPS (Cyber-Physical Systems) it is the core element. We need to consolidate the software engineering discipline, which, despite the impressive achievements in the area of software technology, is probably one of the youngest scientific and technological disciplines with about 60 years of history. This paper summarizes the challenges that the Software Engineering for Services and Applications (SE4SA) cluster is considering as relevant.

원전 안전-필수 소프트웨어의 품질향상을 위한 최적화된 확인 및 검증 방안

ABSTRACTAs the use of software is more wider in the safety-critical nuclear fields, so study to improve safety and quality of the software has been actively carried out for more than the past decade. In the nuclear power plant, nuclear man-machine interface systems (MMIS) performs the function of the brain and neural networks of human and consists of fully digitalized equipments. Therefore, errors in the software for nuclear MMIS may occur an abnormal operation of nuclear power plant, can result in economic loss due to the consequential trip of the nuclear power plant. Verification and validation (V&V) is a software-engineering discipline that helps to build quality into software, and the nuclear industry has been defined by laws and regulations to implement and adhere to a through verification and validation activities along the software lifecycle. V&V is a collection of analysis and testing activities across the full lifecycle and complements the efforts of other quality-engineering functions. This study propose a methodology based on V&V activities and related tool-chain to improve quality for software in the nuclear power plant. The optimized methodology consists of a document evaluation, requirement traceability, source code review, and software testing. The proposed methodology has been applied and approved to the real MMIS project for Shin-Hanul units 1&2.

Inferring Use-cases from GUI Analysis

One of the most arduous and tedious tasks in the life cycle of an application is Software Maintenance and Evolution. In this context, the most time-consuming activities are those that the programmer must execute to get a complete understanding of the system. Based on this need, Program Comprehension (PC), a Software Engineering discipline, arises to tackle the problem. This article presents SSPIA, a strategy that assists software engineers to understand a system by inferring its use case model. SSPIA uses concepts, techniques and tools of PC to carry out its purposes. In order to extract use cases, some specific system static information is collected. This information serves as input to a process that implements a clustering technique based on system's Graphical User Interface (GUI). Almost all clustering techniques take as main criteria graph's structural properties. However, in the context of PC, some Problem Domain information must be considered. The strategy proposed in this article takes into account an essential component strongly related to system's Problem Domain: Graphic User Interfaces. As a main aim, the proposed strategy seeks to assist the arduous cognitive process that involves understanding a system

MADCE - TVD - Model Agile Development Educational Content for Digital Television

The software engineering discipline that allows to develop methods and processes that ensure success in building software products, consequently is relevant to instantiate these practices in the development of educational content for t-learning, enabling the development and supply of educational content for digital television. This article proposes a MADCE-TVD - Agile Development Model of Educational Content to Digital Television This is based on the methodologies, agile values and principles. This research is part of the model of good practice for the development of educational content for T-learning.

Empirical investigation of key business factors for digital game performance

Game development is an interdisciplinary concept that embraces software engineering, business, management, and artistic disciplines. This research facilitates a better understanding of the business dimension of digital games. The main objective of this research is to investigate empirically the effect of business factors on the performance of digital games in the market and to answer the research questions asked in this study. Game development organizations are facing high pressure and competition in the digital game industry. Business has become a crucial dimension, especially for game development organizations. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate empirically the influence of key business factors on the business performance of games. This is the first study in the domain of game development that demonstrates the interrelationship between key business factors and game performance in the market. The results of the study provide evidence that game development organizations must deal with multiple business key factors to remain competitive and handle the high pressure in the digital game industry. Furthermore, the results of the study support the theoretical assertion that key business factors play an important role in game business performance.

Towards a Development of an Operational Process for Software Requirements: Case study application for Renewable Energy Software's

This research study introduces the operationalization process for the requirements activity of software engineering discipline to build renewable energy projects. It describes a new development approach composed of three phase’s methodology to undertake the operationalization process combined with the development of an operational model. A theoretical implementation is provided in addition to the development of a practical implementation on a standalone photovoltaic system case study. Moreover, the author’s expect that this will help in a better understanding of the principles of software engineering, in the implementation of these principles for the development of renewable energy projects as well as to contribute to build the research knowledge of software engineering foundations.

A Review of Value Based Software Engineering and its Impacts

Profitability is the main goal of every software organization. Software companies develop products to capture greater market place and gain the attention of targeted customers or stakeholder. In the past the software engineering field was not able to determine the stakeholder’s value of the developing product as mostly systems were based on value neutral setting. With the emergence of Value based software engineering (VBSE) the traditional software engineering discipline is vastly changed as during product development the stakeholder’s value proposition plays an important part and the development is done accordingly. In this article I cover some important aspects of value based software engineering regarding their impact in software reusability and quality. Different value based pricing criteria are discussed. Empirical research and value based selection of best suitable automated tools and existing Component off the shelf (COTS) and conflicts between different stakeholders of the same system are also taken into account. In the 3rd section Critical review of the all papers is performed and their plus and negative points are mentioned. At last the Conclusion and future work in value based software engineering field is presented.

Putting engineering into software engineering: Upholding software engineering principles in the classroom

Ever since it emerged in the late (nineteen) sixties, the discipline of software engineering has set itself apart from other engineering disciplines in a number of ways, including: the pervasiveness of its products; the complexity of its products and processes; the criticality of its applications; the difficulty of managing its processes and estimating its costs; the volatility of its workforce; the intractability of its process lifecycles; etc. A number of principles have emerged from recent software engineering research, that have the potential to bring a measure of control to the practice of this discipline; but they have not made it into routine practice in industry. We argue that the classroom is a good place to start acquainting students with these principles, and to start getting them into the habit of adhering to them as a matter of routine practice.

A Measures and Metrics Framework for Software Safety

A set of software-safety metrics is presented in this paper. The proposed metrics framework is intended to address software-safety risk assessment and can be used to evaluate the software-safety quality of a process. The framework attempts to assess safety risks from the beginning of the software development lifecycle and helps to implement efficient solutions. The complete framework is based on McCall's Factors, Criteria and Metrics approach and useful for assessing the degree of safety risk prevalence. The objective is to identify software elements that can lead to accidents if not properly addressed with the support of the safety engineering and software engineering disciplines. Various safety analysis methods including hazard analysis, standards, and guidelines are reviewed for their limitations and practical problems are considered. The framework considers measures that contribute to safety assessment through metrics in each of the Software Development Life Cycle phase. An experimental laboratory setup as 'Safety-Critical System' called Railroad Crossing Critical System (RCCS), which implements a safety-critical software, is used for demonstration and to validate the utility of the framework.

Release Cycle Management: A Contextualist Inquiry into Recurrent Software Development

Software development is increasingly conducted in a recurrent fashion, where the same product or service is continuously being developed for the marketplace. Still, we lack detailed studies about this increasingly important form of software development. Against this backdrop, this paper presents an action research study into Software Inc., a large multi-national software provider. The research addressed the challenges the company faced in managing releases and organizing software process improvement (SPI) to help recurrently develop and deliver a specific product, Secure-on-Request, to its customers and the wider marketplace. The initial problem situation was characterized by recent acquisition of additional software, complexity of service delivery, new engineering and product management teams, and low software development process maturity. Asking how release management can be organized and improved in recurrent development of software, we draw on Pettigrew’s contextualist inquiry to focus on the ongoing interaction between contents, context and process in organizing and improving release cycle practices and outcomes. As a result, the paper offers two contributions. Practically, it contributes to the resolution of the problem situation at Software Inc. Theoretically, it introduces a new software engineering discipline, release cycle management (RCM), focused on recurrent delivery of software, including SPI as an integral part, and grounded in the specific experiences at Software Inc.

Design Specification of Technical Projects: a Study Case

This paper focuses on construction of a conceptual representation in the form of a diagram showing production of an industrial artifact as an output of the design phase in development. Typically, SysML is utilized in model-driven systems engineering to analyze, specify, design, and verify complex systems with the aim of bridging the semantic gap between systems, software, and other engineering disciplines. The claim in this paper is that SysML results in a “fragmented process” with hybrid diagrammatic descriptions and notations (e.g., blocks, activities, uses,...) with no over-arching design that brings the components together. While preserving the model-driven approach, this paper proposes a new foundation for diagrammatic representation that has the potential to form an alternative or at least an enhancement to SysML. The new methodology is applied to a known project previously described in SysML, to exhibit its features and capabilities. Comparing the results side by side indicates the viability and potential of the proposed new modeling methodology.

Using extended Axiomatic Design theory to reduce complexities in Global Software Development projects

Global Software Development (GSD) projects could be best understood as intrinsically complex adaptive living systems: they cannot purely be considered as ‘designed systems’, as deliberate design/control episodes and processes (using ‘software engineering’ models) are intermixed with emergent change episodes and processes (that may perhaps be explained by models). Therefore to understand GSD projects as complex systems we need to combine the state-of-the-art of GSD research, as addressed in the software engineering discipline, with results of other disciplines that study complexity (e.g. Enterprise Architecture, Complexity and Information Theory, Axiomatic Design theory). In this paper we study the complexity of GSD projects and propose an upper bound estimation of Kolmogorov complexity (KC) to estimate the information content (as a complexity measure) of project plans. We demonstrate using two hypothetical examples how good and bad project plans compare with respect to complexity, and propose the application of extended Axiomatic Design (AD) theory to reduce the complexity of GSD projects in the project planning stage, as well as to keep this complexity as low as possible during the project execution stage.

Software Metrics Validation Methodologies in Software Engineering

In the software measurement validations, assessing the validation of software metrics in software engineering is a very difficult task due to lack of theoretical methodology and empirical methodology [41, 44, 45]. During recent years, there have been a number of researchers addressing the issue of validating software metrics. At present, software metrics are validated theoretically using properties of measures. Further, software measurement plays an important role in understanding and controlling software development practices and products. The major requirement in software measurement is that the measures must represent accurately those attributes they purport to quantify and validation is critical to the success of software measurement. Normally, validation is a collection of analysis and testing activities across the full life cycle and complements the efforts of other quality engineering functions and validation is a critical task in any engineering project. Further, validation objective is to discover defects in a system and assess whether or not the system is useful and usable in operational situation. In the case of software engineering, validation is one of the software engineering disciplines that help build quality into software. The major objective of software validation process is to determine that the software performs its intended functions correctly and provides information about its quality and reliability. This paper discusses the validation methodology, techniques and different properties of measures that are used for software metrics validation. In most cases, theoretical and empirical validations are conducted for software metrics validations in software engineering [1-50].

Using PDCA as a General Framework for Teaching and Evaluating the Learning of Software Engineering Disciplines

Software engineering disciplines need to be taught in contexts as diverse as undergraduate courses and large corporations training programs. A primary challenge in teaching such disciplines, in any context, is to quickly and effectively evaluate the students learning and measure their strengths and weaknesses. Another challenge is to make students of different instances of a discipline end up with the same basic foundations, making the knowledge independent of the instructor. To overcome these challenges we propose an approach for software engineering teaching based on adapted PDCA cycles and checklists as instruments of evaluation. We also report a case study which shows the implementation of this approach in teaching a first year undergraduate software engineering course. With a careful definition of checklists, the use of the adapted version of PDCA as a methodology for software engineering teaching is promising, allowing an efficient form of evaluation.

Improving Quality of Perception (QoP), Quality of Experience (QoE), and Quality of Service (QoS) in agile development using Cleanroom Software Engineering (CSE)

Pioneering ideas from the software engineering discipline have factually affected every sphere of life. Agile software development approach has been promoted since its commencement and stipulates strategies that improve the quality of software product. To consummate fast and reliable development processes, several agile approaches are charted and are quite popular. For quality improvement and to achieve defect free system, the concept of Cleanroom Software Engineering (CSE) is ingrained into agile development life cycle. For embedding users concerns, it is important to distinguish three approaches to quality: Quality of Service (QoS), User-perceived QoP, and Quality of Experience (QoE). QoS is technology centered approach, so by using Incremental Planning of CSE, it shall facilitate the customer's clarification of system requirements and will control the technical complexity. Usage Specification and Usage Modelling will be used during the Certification phase of CSE which will help to achieve QoP and QoE, being user centered approaches. Results collected from Survey conducted, explains above mentioned factors improvement.

Design for future: managed software evolution

Innovative software engineering methodologies, concepts and tools which focus on supporting the ongoing evolution of complex software, in particular regarding its continuous adaptation to changing functional and quality requirements as well as platforms over a long period are required. Supporting such a co-evolution of software systems along with their environment represents a very challenging undertaking, as it requires a combination or even integration of approaches and insights from different software engineering disciplines. To meet these challenges, the Priority Programme 1593 Design for Future—Managed Software Evolution has been established, funded by the German Research Foundation, to develop fundamental methodologies and a focused approach for long-living software systems, maintaining high quality and supporting evolution during the whole life cycle. The goal of the priority programme is integrated and focused research in software engineering to develop methods for the continuous evolution of software and software/hardware systems for making systems adaptable to changing requirements and environments. For evaluation, we focus on two specific application domains: information systems and production systems in automation engineering. In particular two joint case studies from these application domains promote close collaborations among the individual projects of the priority programme. We consider several research topics that are of common interest, for instance co-evolution of models and implementation code, of models and tests, and among various types of models. Another research topic of common interest are run-time models to automatically synchronise software systems with their abstract models through continuous system monitoring. Both concepts, co-evolution and run-time models contribute to our vision to which we refer to as knowledge carrying software. We consider this as a major need for a long life of such software systems.

An ontology framework for developing platform-independent knowledge-based engineering systems in the aerospace industry

This paper presents the development of a novel knowledge-based engineering (KBE) framework for implementing platform-independent knowledge-enabled product design systems within the aerospace industry. The aim of the KBE framework is to strengthen the structure, reuse and portability of knowledge consumed within KBE systems in view of supporting the cost-effective and long-term preservation of knowledge within such systems. The proposed KBE framework uses an ontology-based approach for semantic knowledge management and adopts a model-driven architecture style from the software engineering discipline. Its phases are mainly (1) Capture knowledge required for KBE system; (2) Ontology model construct of KBE system; (3) Platform-independent model (PIM) technology selection and implementation and (4) Integration of PIM KBE knowledge with computer-aided design system. A rigorous methodology is employed which is comprised of five qualitative phases namely, requirement analysis for the KBE framework, identifying software and ontological engineering elements, integration of both elements, proof of concept prototype demonstrator and finally experts validation. A case study investigating four primitive three-dimensional geometry shapes is used to quantify the applicability of the KBE framework in the aerospace industry. Additionally, experts within the aerospace and software engineering sector validated the strengths/benefits and limitations of the KBE framework. The major benefits of the developed approach are in the reduction of man-hours required for developing KBE systems within the aerospace industry and the maintainability and abstraction of the knowledge required for developing KBE systems. This approach strengthens knowledge reuse and eliminates platform-specific approaches to developing KBE systems ensuring the preservation of KBE knowledge for the long term.