Modern Software Development Process Research Articles

Unit Testing in ASP Revisited: Language and Test-Driven Development Environment

Abstract Unit testing frameworks are nowadays considered a best practice, included in almost all modern software development processes, to achieve rapid development of correct specifications. Knowledge representation and reasoning paradigms such as Answer Set Programming (ASP), that have been used in industry-level applications, are not an exception. Indeed, the first unit testing specification language for ASP was proposed in 2011 as a feature of the ASPIDE development environment. Later, a more portable unit testing language was included in the LANA annotation language. In this paper we revisit both languages and tools for unit testing in ASP. We propose a new unit test specification language that allows one to inline tests within ASP programs, and we identify the computational complexity of the tasks associated with checking the various program-correctness assertions. Test-case specifications are transparent to the traditional evaluation, but can be interpreted by a specific testing tool. Thus, we present a novel environment supporting test-driven development of ASP programs.

USE OF MICRO-SERVICES ARCHITECTURE AND CONTAINERIZATION FOR THE FAST DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING OF THE CUBESAT NANOSATELLITES SOFTWARE

Abstract. CubeSats as a sub-class of nanosatellites have become a game-changer in the industry of scientific research and exploration of the new space technologies. Their cost effectiveness, relative ease of manufacturing, and predicted lifecycle are the main factors of success, leading to roughly 2280 nanosatellites being put on the Earth’s LEO. However, many issues still arise in regard to the effective development, testing, and successful mission control of the CubeSats. The authors of the article suggest the combination of well-known software development processes, design paradigms, patterns, and techniques, that are creating a new way of making CubeSat software development as flexible and as easy as possible. The very first part of the research suggests the outlook on modern software development processes and their evolution over the last years. The second part of the research looks into virtualization and containerization principles as the architectural response to complex software development. The third and fourth parts of the research concentrated on the selection and proper testing of the container execution engine and its performance with the most common algorithm used in embedded software development. Via the porting and proper performance test of the WASM3 WebAssembly interpreter, the authors provide valuable research in regard to the practical use of micro-services, and containerization in the CubeSats. For the sake of the usefulness and completeness of the porting and performance testing – the authors suggest the most-known STEM platforms as the test environments. Concluding the research by the practical porting and testing steps, and found limitations of the containerization, the authors come up with a newly defined concept of so-called Software Defined Satellites. Such a concept could help the industry to minimize risks in reusing the software, perform several missions on the same CubeSat spacecraft, and thus, drastically decrease the cost of CubeSats launches.

Continuous Integration for a development process of the information technology of remote monitoring and control

The current state of using CI/CD in commercial and open-source projects is analyzed. CI/CD pipelines are shown to be essential to the modern software development process, where they are used to configure workflows. Centralized and distributed approaches to building a software source code version control system are analyzed. For the web-oriented SCADA project, the choice and use of the version control system are justified. We provide concrete examples of using CI/CD that will allow ordinary developers, not DevOps specialists, to take the first steps to configure workflows for their projects and provide basic steps for configuring task execution using the example of the build and test phase of the source code of a real project that uses several programming languages. Figs: 4. Refs. 20 titles.
 Keywords: CI, CD, VCS, git, workflow, actions, building, testing, Agile.

NOBRAINER: A Tool for Example-Based Transformation of C/C++ Code

Refactoring is an integral part of the modern software development process. Often, the refactoring must be performed at the global level with modifications in a large number of files. Making these modifications is a long and painstaking work. However, users rarely employ automated tools for this purpose because they consider them unreliable and difficult to use. In this paper, a new tool for transforming the source code is described. It is based on the intuitively clear specification of transformation rules in the form of short code fragments in C or C++. These rules describe the code before and after the transformation. We believe that, due to the absence of additional abstractions (such as domain-specific languages), this approach can be easily used in practice. Even though the tool uses source code templates, it operates on the level of the abstract syntax tree. This enables the tool to better analyze the code and verify the validity of transformations.

A Novel Hybrid ABC-PSO Algorithm for Effort Estimation of Software Projects Using Agile Methodologies

Abstract In modern software development processes, software effort estimation plays a crucial role. The success or failure of projects depends greatly on the accuracy of effort estimation and schedule results. Many studies focused on proposing novel models to enhance the accuracy of predicted results; however, the question of accurate estimation of effort has been a challenging issue with regards to researchers and practitioners, especially when it comes to projects using agile methodologies. This study aims at introducing a novel formula based on team velocity and story point factors. The parameters of this formula are then optimized by employing swarm optimization algorithms. We also propose an improved algorithm combining the advantages of the artificial bee colony and particle swarm optimization algorithms. The experimental results indicated that our approaches outperformed methods in other studies in terms of the accuracy of predicted results.

Improved pairwise test suites for non‐prime‐power orders

Software testing has become a critical component of the modern software development process. Therefore, a lot of research has been done in this area in recent years, and as a result new algorithms, methodologies, and tools have been created. One of the most used testing strategies is pairwise testing; this technique ensures that all possible combinations of values between any two input parameters are covered by at least one test. In this work, a new algorithm called add factor and stochastic optimisation (AFSO) is used to build small pairwise test suites for non-prime-power orders. Starting from an orthogonal array of order v ∈ { 10 , 12 , 14 , 15 , 18 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 24 } , AFSO iteratively adds a factor and then reduces to zero the number of uncovered combinations by means of a simulated annealing algorithm. The results of the AFSO algorithm improved the size of 92 pairwise test suites with non-prime-power orders. One of these improved test suites is used in a real-word application to show the usefulness of the new results.

Balancing Product and Process Assurance for Evolving Security Systems

At present, security-related engineering usually requires a big up-front design (BUFD) regarding security requirements and security design. In addition to the BUFD, at the end of the development, a security evaluation process can take up to several months. In today's volatile markets customers want to be able to influence the software design during the development process. Agile processes have proven to support these demands. Nevertheless, there is a clash between traditional security design and evaluation processes. In this paper, the authors propose an agile security evaluation method for the Common Criteria standard. This method is complemented by an implementation of a change detection analysis for model-based security requirements. This system facilitates the agile security evaluation process to a high degree. However, the application of the proposed evaluation method is limited by several constraints. The authors discuss these constraints and show how traditional certification schemes could be extended to better support modern industrial software development processes.

Research on DB2 Performance Testing Automation

Software testing play a significant role in modern software development and maintenance process, which is also an important means to ensure software reliability and improve software quality. With the continuous improvement of quality requirements of the software products and software engineering technology become more sophisticated, software testing has been participating into every phase of software lift cycle, become more and more important in software development and maintenance. DB2 Performance testing consists of four parts, which are environment setup, workload run, data measurement and environment clean up. Before all the operations are done manually and need about two hours continuous attention. Whats worse, even three times a day. This mechanical and complicated procedure is clearly unacceptable. This paper put forward a reusable automated testing framework based on IBM automated testing tools RFT to achieve the whole testing procedure automation. It reduces the count of human-computer interaction and greatly improves the efficiency of DB2 performance testing.

A newly introduced Industry Voice Column

We are proud to announce a new column for the journal that is about to start with this very issue, where a first paper is included.We have started it, because we thinkmodeling is an essential part of modern software and systems development processes. It is used in a variety of ways including informal design sketches, the basis of system analysis such as security and safety, and as a basis for industrializing software production from models. The science of software and systems modeling has been developed from the earliest days of software engineering when it was realized that abstraction is a fundamental tool for system design. Modeling research has matured through the development of many well-defined theories and notations, and is well served in terms of prominent conferences and journals including SoSyM. The application of modeling within industry is now widespread and has developed through the application of research results and as a result of standardization efforts, most notably the UML notation. Industrial model based development

Project Planningmeasures in CMMI

Computer information project planning is one of the most important activities in the modern software development process. Without an objective and realistic plan of software project, the development of software process cannot be managed effectively.This research will identify general measures for the specific goals and its specific practices of Project PlanningProcess Area in Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). CMMI is developedin USA by Software Engineering Institute (SEI) inCarnegie Mellon University. CMMI is a framework for assessment and improvement of computer information systems. The procedure we used to determine the measures is to apply the Goal Questions Metrics (GQM) approach to the three specific goals and its fourteen specific pra ctices of Project PlanningProcess Area in CMMI.

A model of job satisfaction for collaborative development processes

Modern software development relies on collaborative work as a means for sharing knowledge, distributing tasks and responsibilities, reducing risk of failures, and increasing the overall quality of the software product. Such objectives are achieved with a continuous share of the programmers’ daily working life that inevitably influences the programmers’ job satisfaction. One of the major challenges in process management is to determine the causes of this satisfaction. Traditional research models job satisfaction with social aspects of collaborative work like communication, work sustainability, and work environment. This study reflects on existing models of job satisfaction in collaborative environments, creates one for modern software development processes, and validates it with a retrospective comparative survey run on a sample of 108 respondents. In addition, the work investigates the impact on job satisfaction and its model of the agile practice of Pair Programming that pushes job sharing to the extreme. With this intent, the questionnaire also collected feedback from pair programmers whose responses were used for a comparative analysis. The results demonstrate that Pair Programming has actually a strong positive effect on satisfaction, work sustainability, and communication.

Evergreen in context

Evergreen in context

Enough of Processes - Lets do Practices.

All modern software development processes try to help project teams conduct their work. While there are some important differences between them, the commonalities are far greater - and understandably, since the end goal of them all is to produce working software quickly and effectively. Thus, it doesn’t matter which process you adopt as long as it is adaptable, extensible, and capable of absorbing good ideas, even if they arise from other processes. To achieve this kind of flexibility things need to change. The focus needs to shift from the definition of complete processes to the capture of reusable practices. Teams should be able to mix-and-match practices and ideas from many different sources to create effective ways of working, ones that suit them and address their risks. In this new approach to process, which we call “EssWork”, teams select practices, which are then composed and integrated seamlessly into their development environments to provide dynamic and contextualized guidance, active facilitation, and even help remove mundane tasks through clever automation. In this paper we examine the issues facing the current generation of processes and show why we have all had enough of them. We then introduce the concept of practices and demonstrate why this is a superior approach to traditional process documentation, and the innovations needed to bring the practices to life. Finally we present EssWork and show how it can help teams realize their investment in learning, developing, and documenting best practices.

Repositories for co-operative information systems

Repository technology has become a pervasive part of the software development process. The role played by the repository within the modern software development process is to support a particular software engineering (SE) environment, and to provide an extensive set of services that allows CASE tools to interface with the repository. The next generation of Information Systems (ISs), often referred to as Co-operative Information Systems (CISs), will involve a number of information agents distributed over large computer and telecommunications networks. One of the most prominent problems faced by such CISs is the problem of co-operation and collaboration. It is realized that such problems are analogous to those in software development process addressed by repository technology. This paper presents the experience of introducing repository technology into a CIS. The goal of developing a shareable and reusable central repository is achieved by deploying the object-oriented data model paradigm. This paper also presents a novel way to deal with real-time CISs by separating the services of a repository into two distinct subsets provided by its off-line component and its on-line component. The successful incorporation of repository technology with a real-world CIS application has demonstrated both the feasibility and the benefits of such integration.