Software Development Framework Research Articles

Certifying delta-oriented programs

A major design concern in modern software development frameworks is to ensure that mechanisms for updating code running on remote devices comply with given safety specifications. This paper presents a delta-oriented approach for implementing product lines where software reuse is achieved at the three levels of state-diagram modeling, C/\(\text {C}^{_{_{_{++}}}} \)source code and binary code. A safety specification is expressed on the properties of reusable software libraries that can be dynamically loaded at run time after an over-the-air update. The compilation of delta-engineered code is certified using the framework of proof-carrying code in order to guarantee safety of software updates on remote devices. An empirical evaluation of the computational cost associated with formal safety checks is done by means of experimentation.

Factors affecting the software developer’s performance

The achievement of sustainable competitive advantage has been a major goal of every industry nowadays. In the rapidly growing software industry, the increasing number of competitors, availability of numerous software development tools and process with varied management technique has made the industry more complex and challenging. To understand thsis demand of constantly changing environment of software market, the known attributes and factors of employee behavior such as team size, requirements, innovation, culture, experience and software development frameworks should be considered to make decision. The interrelation between these available resources helps to better understand the developmental process and attain better result. This paper examines and compares the sustainable key factors in the IT companies of Nepal to get the better understanding of the factors which can help the companies grow and maintain their position in the market. For this study, the factors defined by Clarke & O’Connor (2012) were carefully looked and closely compared with the reviews from the software developers. The result suggest that the employee attitudes were highly dependent on some factors defined by Clarke & O’Connor (2012) which was later compared with Sobhani, Wahab, & Neumann (2017) employee performance factors to provide a perspective of employee behavior and decision making. Finally, the study sorts the result based on the priority and provides new perspective gained during the research, which could aid in strategic decision making for sustainable growth in software industry.

Smart-EIS: An End to End Enterprise Information Systems Framework

Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) are widely and extensively used in many domains such as banking, telecommunication, e-commerce and government. Although several research studies and investigations were performed that explore the importance of EIS, only a few studies have focused on effective and efficient end-to-end approaches to developing such systems. In this article, a proposed software development framework (Smart-EIS) is presented. The primary objective of Smart-EIS is making the development of high-quality EIS more effective and efficient. In particular, it aims to reduce the development cost and to provide built-in transparent quality, security, performance and user-experience features. A comprehensive review of the traditional EIS is presented. This includes a discussion of the characteristics and patterns of such systems, the layered architectural patterns and the main components of these systems. The working methodology for the work discussed in this article depends on dynamically construct the common and general aspects of EIS at runtime. The methodology starts with extracting metadata models from the traditional architectural and components patterns. Based on these metadata, APIs have been designed and implemented. These libraries were then composed to make the full and complete proposed framework. In terms of validation and evaluation, the proposed framework -including its APIs- has been implemented as open-source projects, used to build a simple human resource management system, then utilized to re-build a student information system. Results of validation and evaluation have been presented and discussed, which show promising potential.

SeMo: Service-Oriented and Model-Based Software Framework for Cooperating Robots

In the near future, it will be common that a variety of robots are cooperating to perform a mission in various fields. A key technical challenge to realize this vision is software challenge on how to specify the mission at the user level and how to program each robot separately. In this paper, we propose a novel software development framework that separates mission specification and robot behavior programming. For mission specification, a novel scripting language is proposed with the expression capability of dynamic mode change and multitasking. For robot behavior programming, an extended dataflow model is used for task-level behavior specification that does not depend on the robot hardware platform. In the proposed framework, the actual robot software is automatically generated from the model. The viability of the proposed framework is demonstrated with two real-life experiments.

Implementation of use case point as software effort estimation in Scrum Framework

Estimation is a mechanism to estimate and provide a value for software development projects. Use Case Point (UCP) is a method of software estimation effort in software development based on Use Case model. Scrum is a framework for software development that can solve complex problems and always change. The aims of this study are finding the implementation of UCP as a method of estimating efforts software development with Scrum framework. The methodology of this research is identifying the estimation process with UCP and examine collaboration with Scrum Framework. The results of UCP and Scrum Framework collaborations will be simulated using a web-based project management system. The result of this research is an implementation of UCP and Scrum can be done by associate the User Stories on the Product Backlog with the Use Case on UCP and by modifying User Story attribute to Functionality and adding transaction attribute when defining the User Storie on Product Backlog.

An Enhanced Risk Assessment Framework for Software Development in Multiple Projects Environment

An Enhanced Risk Assessment Framework for Software Development in Multiple Projects Environment

PYGRID: A software development and assessment framework for grid‐aware software defined networking

AbstractThe Internet of Things (IoT) envisions to connect Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) to the Internet to facilitate efficient resource management in smart cities. Smart grid is the evolutionary approach towards a more dynamic, situation‐aware, and elastic power systems in smart cities. However, due to the huge scale, heterogeneity and complexity of the many interconnected cyber and physical devices, current network and security technologies are incapable of best serving these needs. Destructive attacks targeting these components such as Denial of Service (DoS) may fully use grid structure and disrupt its crucial service. Recent researches offer the use of modern Software Defined Networking (SDN) to solve synonymous Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) network and security challenges. These researches noted the lack of an adequate platform to simulate grid systems network infrastructure. Therefore, in this paper, we present PYGRID, a software development and assessment framework for grid‐aware SDN. Additionally, a top level SDN application is developed in SDN‐enabled smart grid network to demonstrate the effectiveness of such merger and to mitigate DoS attacks. PYGRID is developed using PYTHON, an OSI‐approved open source language considering standard client and server industrial communication protocols. IEEE 14‐bus power system is adopted to demonstrate the potent and effectiveness of the proposed solution. We conducted multiple experiments to validate the developed framework over 14‐bus system using PYPOWER. To the best of our knowledge, the resulted platform may be considered the first completely open source implementation of a secure SDN enabled smart grid simulator.

An end-to-end framework for safe software development

It is largely recognized that the architectures of embedded systems are becoming more and more complex both at hardware and software levels. Despite the significant advances in the development tools, developing the software of such systems while ensuring their safety is still a difficult task. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end programming framework to ease the development of safe software systems. The programming framework, supported by a proper methodology and workflow, make it possible to design safe/secure software that implements functional requirements while respecting multiple non-functional requirements and mastering architectural complexity, time-to-market and cost. The programming framework is based on five concepts: (1) model-based system engineering: MBSE, (2) design-by-contract approach, (3) formal analysis of models based on symbolic execution, (4) code generation, and (5) static and dynamic code analysis. The effectiveness of the methodology has been demonstrated through multiple use-cases. The framework is realized using CEA LIST (http://www-list.cea.fr/en/) open-source development platforms: Papyrus, Frama-C, and UNISIM-VP. These platforms are results of many research and industrial projects such as FP7-SafeAdapt11SafeAdapt project was funded by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Program under the grant number “608945”., FUI-EQUITAS22EQUITAS project was funded by Bpifrance under call FUI-AAP16 with a contract number “F1312031-Q”., FP7-STANCE33STANCE project was also funded by the European Commission under the ICT theme of the 7th Framework Program with the grant agreement number “317753”., CATRENE-OpenES44OpenES project was funded under the CATRENE Program with the agreement number “CA703–2013”., FSN-SESAM Grids55SESAM Grids is a “Programme d'Investissement d'Avenir” project funded by “FSN-Briques Génériques du Logiciel Embarqué N°3” with contract number “O14830-67155”., and H2020-VESSEDIA66VESSEDIA project is funded by the European Commission under the SEC theme of the H2020 Framework Program with the grant agreement number “731453”..

Robot Operating System (ROS) Compatible Low Cost Rotating Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) Design

Robot Operating system (ROS) is collection of software frameworks for robot software development. Researchers that work with ROS will have an opportunity to use or to be exact to reuse any software framework from another researcher as long as they use a similar robot platform, or similar device that has been include in the ROS. This paper present a design for a low cost rotating Lidar that compatible with ROS. As all we know distance measurement is the basic for building an autonomous capability for robots. Rotating lidar is among one the most popular device used to acquire this kind of information. However most of them are not suitable for low budget project because of their high cost. The design presented here tries to build a low cost rotating lidar based on Lidar Lite device with the compatibility with the ROS. The design incorporate a control board based on a microcontroller.

Agile Dynamics at Scale

ABSTRACTWider adoption of Lean‐Agile software development methods has prompted interest in tailoring these small team methods to meet the needs of larger organizations. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) for Lean Software Development incorporates many Lean‐Agile best practices and has become a leading proposition for applying agile methods at scale (Leffingwell 2016). To help managers visualize how SAFe might work for their organization, we have created a management flight simulator based on a system dynamics model of SAFe. Using these tools, decision makers who consider transitioning their organizations to SAFe can perform virtual experiments by changing parameters such as team size, developer experience level, sprint length, and whether developers perform continuous integration to explore how these programmatic decisions affect the rate at which work is completed. Such process prototyping can provide a justification for adopting SAFe, which often includes costly training and organizational restructuring, by forming a basis for quantifying return on investment. We applied our system dynamics model to a real program and showed that instituting continuous integration can improve throughput by 54% while decreasing defects by 88%.

Sprint Backlog Estimating and Planning Using Planning Poker Technique in Agile Scrum Framework

Today and during the recent years, Agile Product Development Framework has been common used framework for software development particularly, Scrum is the most widely known methodology under the umbrella of agile, including many sprints to manage the development process of software. One of the most important terms in each scrum sprint is the planning and estimation phase. Many techniques to plan the sprint backlog and specify the required time and resources to perform each single backlog item. As some of planning techniques as Planning Poker, T-Shirt Sizes and Relative Mass Valuation. Planning Poker is considered an effective and powerful technique according to its algorithm of work which evolves the whole team members estimation to user stories backlog. Planning Poker gets the backlog items and input and gives the well estimated tasks and output. Planning Poker helps the product owners and scrum team to successfully estimate the work that ensures working Relative Value Points Return On Investment goals specified since the beginning of the software development life cycle phases. The importance of Planning Poker is in giving the optimum estimation with consideration to high priority backlog items and user stories.

A Systematic Literature Review on the Application of Ontologies in Automatic Programming

One of the main goals of the Software Engineering discipline is to find higher abstraction levels and ways to reuse software in order to increase its productivity and quality. Ontologies, which are typically considered as a technique or an artifact used in one or more software lifecycle phases, may be used to help achieve that goal. This paper provides a systematic literature review of the proposed solutions for applying ontologies in automatic and generative programming. The paper aims to identify ontologies and software development tools, frameworks, prototypes, design patterns and methodologies that use them as development artifacts for source code generation or product derivation. The review provides researchers with the state of the art, while also identifying challenges and gaps that require further exploration and development.

Message Encryption in Robot Operating System: Collateral Effects of Hardening Mobile Robots

In human-robot interaction situations, robot sensors collect huge amounts of data from the environment in order to characterize the situation. Some of the gathered data ought to be treated as private, such as medical data (i.e., medication guidelines), personal and safety information (i.e., images of children, home habits, alarm codes, etc.). However, most robotic software development frameworks are not designed for securely managing this information. This paper analyzes the scenario of hardening one of the most widely used robotic middlewares, Robot Operating System (ROS). The study investigates a robot’s performance when ciphering the messages interchanged between ROS nodes under the publish/subscribe paradigm. In particular, this research focuses on the nodes which manage cameras and LIDAR sensors, which are two of the most extended sensing solutions in mobile robotics, and analyzes the collateral effects on the robot's achievement under different computing capabilities and encryption algorithms (3DES, AES and Blowfish) to robot performance. The findings present empirical evidence that simple encryption algorithms are lightweight enough to provide cyber-security even in low-powered robots when carefully designed and implemented. Nevertheless, these techniques come with a number of serious drawbacks regarding robot autonomy and performance if they are applied randomly. To avoid these issues, we define a taxonomy that links the type of ROS message, computational units, and the encryption methods. As a result, we present a model to select the optimal options for hardening a mobile robot using ROS.

SCRUM su KANBAN naudojančios organizacijos programų sistemų kūrimo proceso vertinimas

Seeking for a higher quality of developing products, organizations often look for ways to improve their software development process. Consequently, the probability of winning a contest increases, since projects can be finished faster together with sticking to budget and meeting deadlines. Various models of process assessment can be used to evaluate the development process of a company. Organizations tend to choose them using one or another software development methodology or framework in order to improve the assessment. But in the long-term period, the methodology chosen first often appears to be insufficient in achieving a higher maturity of the process; therefore, this leads to the implementation of additional methodologies. It is critical for the organization to know how a chosen methodology will affect its maturity. This paper investigates how the CMMI-DEV assessment of the development process changes when the organization, using Scrum as the base of its software development process, extends it with Kanban. It was found that an organization combining Scrum together with Kanban would increase the number of fully implemented practices by 75%.

Open-source implementation of an ad-hoc IEEE802.11a/g/p software-defined radio on low-power and low-cost general purpose processors

This work proposes a low-cost and low-power software-defined radio open-source platform with IEEE 802.11 a/g/p wireless communication capability. A state-of-the-art version of the IEEE 802.11 a/g/p software for GNU Radio (a free and open-source software development framework) is available online, but we show here that its computational complexity prevents operations in low-power general purpose processors, even at throughputs below the standard. We therefore propose an evolution of this software that achieves a faster and lighter IEEE 802.11 a/g/p transmitter and receiver, suitable for low-power general purpose processors, for which GNU Radio provides very limited support; we discuss and describe the software radio processing structuring that is necessary to achieve the goal, providing a review of signal processing techniques. In particular, we emphasize the advanced reduced instruction set (RISC) machine (ARM) study case, for which we also optimize some of the processing libraries. The presented software will remain open-source.

Ros_control: A generic and simple control framework for ROS

In recent years the Robot Operating System (ROS) has become the 'de facto' standard framework for robotics software development. The `ros_control` framework provides the capability to implement and manage robot controllers with a focus on both _real-time performance_ and _sharing of controllers_ in a robot-agnostic way. The primary motivation for a sepate robot-control framework is the lack of realtime-safe communication layer in ROS. Furthermore, the framework implements solutions for controller-lifecycle and hardware resource management as well as abstractions on hardware interfaces with minimal assumptions on hardware or operating system. The clear, modular design of `ros_control` makes it ideal for both research and industrial use and has indeed seen many such applications to date. The idea of `ros_control` originates from the `pr2_controller_manager` framework specific to the PR2 robot but `ros_control` is fully robot-agnostic. Controllers expose standard ROS interfaces for out-of-the box 3rd party solutions to robotics problems like manipulation path planning (`MoveIt!`) and autonomous navigation (the `ROS navigation stack`). Hence, a robot made up of a mobile base and an arm that support `ros_control` doesn't need any additional code to be written, only a few controller configuration files and it is ready to navigate autonomously and do path planning for the arm. `ros_control` also provides several libraries to support writing custom controllers.

ОБЗОР СТАТИЧЕСКИХ МЕТОДОВ ВОССТАНОВЛЕНИЯ ЧАСТИЧНЫХ СПЕЦИФИКАЦИЙ ПРОГРАММНЫХ БИБЛИОТЕК НА ОСНОВЕ АНАЛИЗА ПРОГРАММНЫХ ПРОЕКТОВ

Introduction: Wide usage of third-party software libraries and frameworks for software development along with the lack of their precise documentation actualize the problem of creating formal software library specifications. Recovery of such specifications could be performed with the application of successfully developed open-source projects. Purpose: Analysis and classification of prospective approaches to automated extraction of the most expressive complex software library specifications based on the methods of static code analysis. Results: Various approaches used to describe library components have been reviewed and compared. We have discussed the ways of deriving standard (frequent) specifications using static analysis methods, and recovered the common algorithm they share. It is found out that most methods based on static analysis of the code presume the usage of templates to define a set of rules. Specifications frequently recovered in this way should only describe a lifecycle for objects of a single class. The quality of the resulting specifications is usually quite low so far. To obtain better results, complex specifications should be used whose recovery methods are currently few in numbers and not systematized.

Bifrost: A Python/C++ Framework for High-Throughput Stream Processing in Astronomy

Radio astronomy observatories with high throughput back end instruments require real-time data processing. While computing hardware continues to advance rapidly, development of real-time processing pipelines remains difficult and time-consuming, which can limit scientific productivity. Motivated by this, we have developed Bifrost: an open-source software framework for rapid pipeline development. (a) Bifrost combines a high-level Python interface with highly efficient reconfigurable data transport and a library of computing blocks for CPU and GPU processing. The framework is generalizable, but initially it emphasizes the needs of high-throughput radio astronomy pipelines, such as the ability to process data buffers as if they were continuous streams, the capacity to partition processing into distinct data sequences (e.g. separate observations), and the ability to extract specific intervals from buffered data. Computing blocks in the library are designed for applications such as interferometry, pulsar dedispersion and timing, and transient search pipelines. We describe the design and implementation of the Bifrost framework and demonstrate its use as the backbone in the correlation and beamforming back end of the Long Wavelength Array (LWA) station in the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, NM.

A Formal Ontology for Describing Interactive Behaviors and Supporting Automated Testing on User Interfaces

Nowadays many software development frameworks implement Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) as a mean of automating the test of interactive systems under construction. Automated testing helps to simulate user’s actions on the User Interface and therefore check if the system behaves properly and in accordance to scenarios that describe functional requirements. However, tools supporting BDD run tests on implemented User Interfaces and are a suitable alternative for assessing functional requirements in later phases of the development process. However, even when BDD tests can be written in early phases of the development process they can hardly be used with specifications of User Interfaces such as prototypes. To address this problem, this paper proposes to raise the abstraction level of both system interactive behaviors and User Interfaces by means of a formal ontology that is aimed at supporting test automation using BDD. The paper presents an ontology and an ontology-based approach for automating the test of functional requirements of interactive systems. We demonstrate the feasibility of this ontology-based approach to assess functional requirements in prototypes and full-fledge applications through an illustrative case study of e-commerce applications for buying flight tickets.

MMA‐EoS: A Computational Framework for Mineralogical Thermodynamics

AbstractWe present a newly developed software framework, MMA‐EoS, that evaluates phase equilibria and thermodynamic properties of multicomponent systems by Gibbs energy minimization, with application to mantle petrology. The code is versatile in terms of the equation‐of‐state and mixing properties and allows for the computation of properties of single phases, solution phases, and multiphase aggregates. Currently, the open program distribution contains equation‐of‐state formulations widely used, that is, Caloric‐Murnaghan, Caloric–Modified‐Tait, and Birch‐Murnaghan–Mie‐Grüneisen‐Debye models, with published databases included. Through its modular design and easily scripted database, MMA‐EoS can readily be extended with new formulations of equations‐of‐state and changes or extensions to thermodynamic data sets. We demonstrate the application of the program by reproducing and comparing physical properties of mantle phases and assemblages with previously published work and experimental data, successively increasing complexity, up to computing phase equilibria of six‐component compositions. Chemically complex systems allow us to trace the budget of minor chemical components in order to explore whether they lead to the formation of new phases or extend stability fields of existing ones. Self‐consistently computed thermophysical properties for a homogeneous mantle and a mechanical mixture of slab lithologies show no discernible differences that require a heterogeneous mantle structure as has been suggested previously. Such examples illustrate how thermodynamics of mantle mineralogy can advance the study of Earth's interior.