Software Product Lifecycle Research Articles

Synergizing Quality and Legislative Software Requirements: A Holistic Approach Across the Software Product Lifecycle

Abstract This scientific research investigates the intricate interplay between quality assurance and legislative software requirements, focusing on the holistic integration of these critical components across the software product lifecycle within the realm of Information Technology (IT). As software development and deployment continue to be shaped by an evolving regulatory landscape and an increasing emphasis on quality, the need to align these two pillars becomes fundamental to the success and compliance of software solutions. This study aims to provide a comprehensive examination of the challenges, opportunities, and strategies associated with synergizing software quality and legislative requirements, thereby offering valuable insights for IT practitioners, organizations, and policymakers. The research delves into the diverse stages of the software product lifecycle, encompassing requirements gathering, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance, and explores the implications of legislative compliance on each phase. By synthesizing industry standards, regulatory frameworks, and best practices, this study seeks to offer a nuanced understanding of the multifaceted landscape of legislative software requirements and their integration with quality imperatives. Moreover, the research endeavours to provide actionable recommendations and key strategies to support IT practitioners and decision-makers in enhancing their software development practices to meet the dynamic demands of regulatory compliance and quality assurance.

Translating the regulatory landscape of medical devices to create fit-for-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) cytometry solutions.

The implementation of medical software and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms into routine clinical cytometry diagnostic practice requires a thorough understanding of regulatory requirements and challenges throughout the cytometry software product lifecycle. To provide cytometry software developers, computational scientists, researchers, industry professionals, and diagnostic physicians/pathologists with an introduction to European Union (EU) and United States (US) regulatory frameworks. Informed by community feedback and needs assessment established during two international cytometry workshops, this article provides an overview of regulatory landscapes as they pertain to the application of AI, AI-enabled medical devices, and Software as a Medical Device in diagnostic flow cytometry. Evolving regulatory frameworks are discussed, and specific examples regarding cytometry instruments, analysis software and clinical flow cytometry in-vitro diagnostic assays are provided. An important consideration for cytometry software development is the modular approach. As such, modules can be segregated and treated as independent components based on the medical purpose and risk and become subjected to a range of context-dependent compliance and regulatory requirements throughout their life cycle. Knowledge of regulatory and compliance requirements enhances the communication and collaboration between developers, researchers, end-users and regulators. This connection is essential to translate scientific innovation into diagnostic practice and to continue to shape the development and revision of new policies, standards, and approaches.

Optimization of DevOps Transformation for Cloud-Based Applications

Rapid software development is critical for meeting company objectives and competing more effectively in the competitive IoT infrastructure. DevOps is a growing technique that enables enterprises to provide high-quality software capabilities through automation, to improve team communication, and to increase efficiency across the software product lifecycle. Research problem: Due to the increased demand for new products and technologies, a huge overwork shifted on the organizations for introducing software with pace and to become stable to compete with others. Due to this, the majority of organizations prefer an automated system for product development and require cloud-based applications. The git version control system is used for version management and Docker is used to package code and provide libraries. AWS services are leveraged to deploy an application as a cloud. Jenkins is used as a CI/CD pipeline to manage various phases of development and to make the development process continuous. The ELK stack is used to monitor and visualize the execution of code. In light of the findings, DevOps is an efficient method for cloud application deployment and resource selection based on the relative importance of each optimized objective in terms of value parameters such as cost, memory, and CPU capacity, and that the method can be tailored to specific application requirements. The findings of this analysis indicate that an application can be deployed to the cloud using DevOps techniques. The proposed approach cost 60% less at full weight 1.0 and 11.3% less with no weight compared to the benchmark solution’s 15.078%

Разработка приложения для получения метрик программного продукта на языке объектно-ориентированного программирования

All groups of software product lifecycle processes executed by developers are complicated to implement. The code generation possibility and a requirement of evaluation for each participant contri-bution in case of teamwork also should be considered. A quantitative estimation for various aspects of software is proposed by code metrics calculation. The work purpose is development of a program for calculating the metrics of a software product for various object-oriented programming languages. The tasks are development of metrics exploitation approaches for evaluating and comparing code and imple-mentation of the metric calculation program. The description for subsets of the languages C#, C++ and Java was created. A values gradation Halstead metrics and the approaches for analyzing dynamic changes of a software product and comparison of different programs solving the same problem are pro-posed and first allowed calculated metrics values interpretation. “Metrics Observer” program was devel-oped. It calculates 11 metrics values for programs in object-oriented language and 16 metrics values that do not depend on the paradigm. Practical significance is to prepare solutions for comparing different implementations of the same task, identifying code modules for refactoring, estimating dynamic code quality changes during the development / refactoring process and individual contributions of developers to a project.

Transcendental Logic-Based Formalism for Semantic Representation of Software Project Requirements Architecture

This article is devoted to the analysis of the situation that has arisen in the practice of using artificial intelligence methods for software development. Nowadays there are many disparate approaches, models, and practices based on the use of narrow intelligence for decision-making at different stages of the life cycle of software products, and an almost complete lack of solutions brought to wide practical use. The article provides a comprehensive overview of the main reasons for the lack of the expected effect from the implementation of Agile and suggests a way to solve this problem based on the use of a self-organizing knowledge model. Based on the heuristic usage of transcendental logic in the terms of "ontological predicates", such a model makes it possible to create a formalism of the semantic representation of the requirements architecture of a software project, which could provide semantic interoperability and an executable semantic framework for automated ontology generation from unstructured informal software requirements text. The main benefit of this model is that it is flexible and ensures the accumulation of knowledge without the need to change the initial infrastructure as well as that the ontology inference engine is the part of the mechanism of collective interaction of active elements of knowledge and not some externally programmed system of rules that imitate the process of thinking.

Software quality model based on SQuaRE standards

Quality is one of the factors that ensure the commercial success and safety of using the software. Quality is understood as conformity the explicit and implicit requirements of various stakeholders. It is necessary to ensure a joint understanding between developers and users, engineers need to understand the meaning of the concept of quality, characteristics and importance of quality for the developed or maintained software. Measurements are the basis for quality assurance. They are the main tool for managing the life cycle of software products, assessing the implementation of plans and monitoring. To quantify quality, it is necessary to measure the characteristics of the software. Standardization provides unification of requirements for quality, its measurement and assessment. The use of standards has many potential benefits for any organization, especially in key areas such as measuring the quality of software products, information and measurement systems. Recognized international standards organizations have published the ISO/IEC 25000 series of standards for systems and software quality requirements and evaluation SQuaRE, which is gaining widespread practical application. The paper discusses a series of international standards SQuaRE, analyzes the relationship between the quality model, quality characteristics, quality measures and a new concept – a quality measure element of the software, presents the measurement of quality based on these standards.

Product Quality Evaluation Method (PQEM): To Understand the Evolution of Quality Through the Iterations of a Software Product

Promoting quality within the context of agile software development, it is extremely important as well as useful to improve not only the knowledge and decision-making of project managers, product owners, and quality assurance leaders but also to support the communication between teams. In this context, quality needs to be visible in a synthetic and intuitive way in order to facilitate the decision of accepting or rejecting each iteration within the software life cycle. This article introduces a novel solution called Product Quality Evaluation Method (PQEM) which can be used to evaluate a set of quality characteristics for each iteration within a software product life cycle. PQEM is based on the Goal-Question-Metric approach, the standard ISO/IEC 25010, and the extension made of testing coverage in order to obtain the quality coverage of each quality characteristic. The outcome of PQEM is a unique multidimensional value, that represents the quality level reached by each iteration of a product, as an aggregated measure. Even though a value it is not the regular idea of measuring quality, we believe that it can be useful to use this value to easily understand the quality level of each iteration. An illustrative example of the PQEM method was carried out with two iterations from a web and mobile application, within the healthcare environment. A single measure makes it possible to observe the evolution of the level of quality reached in the evolution of the product through the iterations.

Measurement of software quality based on international standards

Quality is one of the factors that ensure the commercial success and safety of using the software. Quality is understood as conformity the explicit and implicit requirements of various stakeholders. It is necessary to ensure a joint understanding between developers and users, engineers need to understand the meaning of the concept of quality, characteristics and importance of quality for the developed or maintained software. Measurements are the basis for quality assurance. They are the main tool for managing the life cycle of software products, assessing the implementation of plans and monitoring. To quantify quality, it is necessary to measure the characteristics of the software. Standardization provides unification of requirements for quality, its measurement and assessment. The use of standards has many potential benefits for any organization, especially in key areas such as measuring the quality of software products, information and measurement systems. Recognized international standards organizations have published the ISO/IEC 25000 series of standards for systems and software quality requirements and evaluation (SQuaRE), which is gaining widespread practical application. The paper discusses a series of the SQuaRE international standards, analyzes the relationship between the quality model, quality characteristics, quality measures and a new concept, i.e., a quality measure element of the software, presents the measurement of quality based on these standards.

Challenges in Globalisation of Global Software Development: A Conceptual Study of Co-locating Key Roles and its Impact on Product Life Cycle

This study characterises the results of published scientific research in the field of Global Software Product Development (GSD). Based on the analysis of about 22 scholarly articles published between 2001 and 2014, it is observed that in spite of issues and challenges faced in its implementation, GSD is a business necessity. To ensure more successful realisation of the benefits of GSD, co-locating some of the key-roles at global locations along with software development could be exercised. This could have a positive impact on the software product life cycle. This relationship needs to be validated by further research backed with empirical data.
 
 
 

Framework for Observing the Maintenance Needs, Runtime Metrics and the Overall Quality-in-Use

The post-release maintenance is usually the most expensive phase in the software product lifecycle from the first design concepts to the end of product support. To reduce the costs related to post-release maintenance, we propose a run-time framework for measuring software quality characteristics applying the ISO/IEC 25000 software quality and software quality in use models as the starting point. Measurement probes are linked into the software during the development phase and used to collect quality information during the run time. As a proof-of-concept, we implemented measurements in an open-source software project to demonstrate the utility of the framework. As a result, this paper presents a framework for collecting runtime metrics and measuring software quality-in-use with a systematic interface. Additionally, examples of measurement scenarios are presented.

An industry experience report on managing product quality requirements in a large organization

ContextEliciting, managing and implementing product quality requirements (in-short quality requirements) in a large organization can be challenging when many stakeholders are involved and projects run in parallel; sometimes with varying priorities with regards to quality. In this case from a public organization in Norway, the separation between business units and the IT-department and the legacy burden are additional factors that increase the complexity of requirement management. ObjectiveThis paper presents results and experiences from three years long work with quality requirements, starting from ad-hoc handling of quality requirements in separate projects to systematic work across projects with reusable sets of requirements and processes. MethodWe present how quality requirements are captured and classified, as well as changes to the agile software development process as a consequence of increasing focus on product quality. ResultsThe ISO/IEC-25010:2011 standard is tailored for better context fit and is supported by concrete requirements and a methodology that covers the life cycle of software products in both greenfield and brownfield projects. In addition, the organization had to examine the current state of existing IT-capabilities in order to establish a quality baseline for future development, and develop shared vision and roadmaps for product quality. ConclusionsIn our experience, stakeholders prefer an iterative and lightweight approach in eliciting and refining quality requirements. The classification model and requirement lists are used as guidelines in requirement workshops. The developed terminology, updated templates and processes are reusable in projects and generalizable to different contexts, and are well adopted by the IT and business units.

Benefits of reverse engineering technologies in software development makerspace

In the recent decades, the amount of data produced by scientific, engineering, and life science applications has increased with several orders of magnitude. In parallel with this development, the applications themselves have become increasingly complex in terms of functionality, structure, and behavior. In the same time, development and production cycles of such applications exhibit a tendency of becoming increasingly shorter, due to factors such as market pressure and rapid evolution of supporting and enabling technologies. As a consequence, an increasing fraction of the cost of creating new applications and manufacturing processes shifts from the creation of new artifacts to the adaption of existing ones. A key component of this activity is the understanding of the design, operation, and behavior of existing manufactured artifacts, such as software code bases, hardware systems, and mechanical assemblies. For instance, in the software industry, it is estimated that maintenance costs exceed 80% of the total costs of a software product's lifecycle, and software understanding accounts for as much as half of these maintenance costs. To facilitate the software development process, it would be ideal to have tools that automatically generate or help to generate UML (Unified Modeling Language) models from source code. Reverse engineering the software architecture from source code provides a valuable service to software practitioners. Case tools implementing MDA and reverse-engineering constitute an important opportunity of software development engineers. So MDA and reverse engineering is an important key witch make makerspace more productive and more efficient.

Methods for cost estimation in software project management

The speed in which the processes used in software development field have changed makes it very difficult the task of forecasting the overall costs for a software project. By many researchers, this task has been considered unachievable, but there is a group of scientist for which this task can be solved using the already known mathematical methods (e.g. multiple linear regressions) and the new techniques as genetic programming and neural networks. The paper presents a solution for building a model for the cost estimation models in the software project management using genetic algorithms starting from the PROMISE datasets related COCOMO 81 model. In the first part of the paper, a summary of the major achievements in the research area of finding a model for estimating the overall project costs is presented together with the description of the existing software development process models. In the last part, a basic proposal of a mathematical model of a genetic programming is proposed including here the description of the chosen fitness function and chromosome representation. The perspective of model described it linked with the current reality of the software development considering as basis the software product life cycle and the current challenges and innovations in the software development area. Based on the author's experiences and the analysis of the existing models and product lifecycle it was concluded that estimation models should be adapted with the new technologies and emerging systems and they depend largely by the chosen software development method.

Active Internationalization of Small and Medium - Sized Software Enterprises - Cases of French Software Companies

Implementations of software production processes usually ignore organizational, market, and economical attributes of products that are to be inserted in international markets. Software engineering has begun to deal with the business aspects of software products only recently. The Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge v3.0 presents two concepts of life cycle: the software development life cycle and the software product life cycle. The second is more concerned with business issues related to software products, but research on those issues is still due. In this sense, this paper aims to answer the following question: what factors allow small and medium software enterprises to offer high value added products in order to enter and remain in the international market? This work selects four research dimensions from literature and explores a number of variables inside those dimensions, which are considered as candidates to help explaining a successful process of active internationalization. The paper presents a multiple case study that shows that although innovation, entrepreneurship, and foreign market knowledge are important dimensions for the active internationalization, networking is not as relevant as it could be thought.

Early knowledge organization assisted by aspects

Throughout the lifecycle of software products, changes arise. The repercussions of these changes increase in more advanced stages of the development process. The aspect-oriented proposal is a software development paradigm that provides principles to manage changes. However, the current proposals for the development of the early stages of software do not provide an effective means for functional changes and updates. This paper presents a knowledge modeling methodology in the aspect-oriented context focused on the early stages of the software development. This methodology aims to ease the software evolution through a standardized knowledge representation, a multidimensional organization, and an appropriate advanced separation of concerns. The proposal of a conceptual modeling of early-aspect provides the means for an organization of multidimensional knowledge. The use of ontological techniques under the principles of knowledge-engineering allows specification of early knowledge. This paper presents a case study developed using the methodology and is used as a base to evaluate the methodology, comparing the efficiency in the changes against classic approaches. The results show that it is possible to ease the changes with the proposal presented in this paper.

State of the art in software quality assurance

The authors present a summary of their understanding of the publications that appeared in the computing literature during the last five-year period, with the word quality as part of their title and dealing with some or other aspects of software quality assurance. Specifically, the summary covers the following eight sub-topics, viz., (i) quality models; (ii) timely QA feedback; (iii) quantitative approaches to predicting software quality and the effectiveness of software QA; (iv) optimal choice of QA methods; (v) design level QA; (vi) impact of parallel development options on software quality; (vii) continued QA efforts even after the operational deployment of the software product; and (viii) use of CASE tools and perceived value for QA at NASA JPL. This digest also includes summaries of three short papers describing ongoing research on (i) prioritizing QA efforts; (ii) QA in an Agile development context; and (iii) presenting the software quality status to stakeholders during development. Major trends observed in the summary pertain to (i) continuing software QA efforts even after the operational deployment of the software product, which may also be pertinent to the proliferation of mobile applications; (ii) presenting the current software quality status to different stakeholders using concise sets of software metrics; and (iii) the effectiveness of hybrid approach of tool use combined with expert judgment for software QA. The emphasis on software QA activities spreading throughout the software product life cycle, from its beginning to end, is clearly observed in the reviewed literature.

Extraction of State Transition Diagrams from Legacy C++ Application

Software maintenance plays an important role in the life cycle of software product. It is estimated that more than 80% of code in production is unstructured and not well documented. Since the coding style varies to each programmer, it is very difficult to do a change in existing software. It necessitates the developer to reconstruct the design module and requirements specification from existing code.This paper presents an approach to reverse engineer the internal state of an object from C++ programs, resulting in state machines. The state of an object can be determined in two ways. In the first approach objects can be extracted by statically analyzing the programs. In the second approach extraction of objects and the transitions between the objects can be achieved by executing a program on set of test cases which can be restricted by testing the independent paths in the behavior of an object.

Integrating Preventive Maintenance within the Product Life Cycle

complexities associated with software system implemented often makes it imperative to maintain the existing software as a system of high functionality and throughput regime even in the face of changed external environment. It is preferable to enhance the functional operation by upgrading the existing software than changing entire systems as is demonstrated by continued usage of proprietary systems in large banking, insurance, logistic, shipping and airline systems etc. This makes preventive maintenance a very critical tool in the hands of organizations who wish to bring software reliability and maintainability in the future operations of the software systems. Preventive maintenance focuses on the re-engineering of the software rather than its operational maintenance. In this paper we attempt to analyze that preventive maintenance as an inevitable option for the maintenance of the software systems. There is also an attempt to integrate the preventive maintenance into the existing software product life cycle with the focus on the pre and the post deployment phase till the retirement of that software.

A holistic approach to managing software change impact

Change is inevitable in the software product lifecycle. When a software change occurs, all of the stakeholders and related artifacts should be considered in determining the success of the change action in a collaborative development environment such as JAD (joint application development). In this regard, current implementation-based or homogeneous impact analyses are insufficient; therefore, this paper presents a holistic approach to change impact analysis in handling not only software contents but also other items such as requirements, documents and data. This approach characterizes product contents and relates heterogeneous items by using attributes and linkages. It also uses an object-oriented propagation mechanism to handle dynamic looping in determining the impact of changes. A prototype, EPIC, was built to realize this approach and these concepts. A walkthrough example is provided in order to verify the work of the proposed approach. An empirical study is presented to discuss the benefits of the proposed approach and the application of EPIC in a software company. Lessons learned from the case study and improvement issues of the proposed approach and the tool are also discussed.

Exploiting Thesauri Knowledge in Medical Guideline Formalization

As in software product lifecycle, the effort spent in maintaining medical knowledge in guidelines can be reduced, if modularization, formalization and tracking of domain knowledge are employed across the guideline development phases. We propose to exploit and combine knowledge templates with medical background knowledge from existing thesauri in order to produce reusable building blocks used in guideline development. These templates enable easier guideline formalization, by describing how chunks of medical knowledge can be combined into more complex ones and how they are linked to a textual representation. By linking our ontology used in guideline formalization with existing thesauri, we can use compilations of thesauri knowledge as building blocks for modeling and maintaining the content of a medical guideline. Our paper investigates whether medical knowledge acquired from several medical thesauri can be molded on a guideline pattern, such that it supports building of executable models of guidelines.