Software Development Problems Research Articles

Limits of formal methods

Abstract Formal methods can help to increase the correctness and trustworthiness of the software developed. However, they do not solve all the problems of software development. This paper analyses some limitations of formal methods.

A New Framework for Improving Software Development Process on Small Computer Systems

While small computer systems have provided us with a wide array of development and operational environments, implementation methods, and domains of the software to be developed, it has also made the software development more risky. This paper proposes a new framework for improving the software development process on small computer systems to reduce software development risks. The key idea of the proposed framework is that the solutions to the software development problems can be extracted by the project manager, with relatively low overload, from the development processes that were actually executed in order to reduce the development risks, and then be formalized and stored in a database. The formalized solutions can be used not only for process improvement, but also for devising new solutions if new problems should occur in the future. We believe that the proposed framework is capable of making up for the difficulties in implementing CMM on small computer systems, and it encourages us to apply CMM to such risky software development.

A numbering of the vertices of special networks

We characterize acyclic digraphs which remain acyclic under a certain type of arc addition. The vertices of such digraphs D admit a labelling f such that f( x) < f( y) and f( x) = f( z) whenever ( x, y) and ( x, z) are arcs of D. The study of such digraphs has been initiated by a software development problem.

Soft issues and hard problems in software development (panel)

The key to making object technology work isn't technology. So what is it? This panel will cover a lot of the "soft" issues about dealing with people and teams. It's partly about managing software development, and mostly about doing it.

Building testable software

This paper examines a connection between well known specification, design, implementation methodologies and test-design which appears not to have been previously well-formulated. We refer to the fact that the use of finite state machines (FSMs) in each development phase (specification, design, implementation and testing) is well known and documented. However, despite the fact that much of this work is more than twenty years old, there appears to be no detailed proposal for a consistent FSM-based approach be used across all development phases for other than very specific application types. We suggest that the adoption of a systematic FSM-based approach across all phases, including implementation, may allow a number of major problems in software development to be either eliminated or simplified. In this way, testable, highly dependable systems can be produced. In such systems, behaviour is explicitly defined, built, and tested using both functional and structural methods. Undesired behaviours can be found and eliminated, and abnormal or unexpected input explicitly handled. We discuss the issues we consider to be involved, and the benefits which we expect may be gained. We also identify those areas where further work appears to be required.

Information Systems Development

Organizations, big or small, are still plagued with ageold problems of software development: too much backlog, projects being late and costing more than the budget, implemented systems not meeting user needs, and IS maintenance costs continuing to be very high. A conceptual model presented in this article, argues that, within the context of an organization and specific systems development project, optimal deployment of “people†and “methods†has the potential of alleviating these problems. Several researchable issues emerge out of this conceptual model. This paper then focuses on a comparison of IS development methods used in Singapore, USA, and Europe. For Singapore, a survey instrument was developed, pre-tested, validated and administered to 250 member organizations of DPMA in Singapore. For USA and Europe, existing data from previous studies were utilized. Important findings include: (1) large organizations adopt state-of-the-art methods significantly earlier than small organizations; (2) when comparing use of methods across different countries, organizational profile in terms of size, revenue level, and number of employees is an important intervening variable; (3) proactive planning and strategizing by the governments of developing countries can significantly increase the rate of transfer of state-of-the-art IS development methods from the advanced countries; (4) some differences in use of methods can be attributed to cultural and political differences

Strategies for managing requirements creep

One of the most chronic problems in software development is the fact that application requirements are almost never stable and fixed. Frequent changes in requirements are not always caused by capricious clients (although sometimes they are). The root cause of requirements volatility is that many applications are attempting to automate domains that are only partly understood. As software design and development proceeds, the process of automation begins to expose these ill-defined situations. Therefore, although creeping requirements are troublesome, they are often a technical necessity. Several threads of research and some emerging technologies are aimed at either clarifying requirements earlier in development or minimizing the disruptive effect of changing requirements later.

Software component search

An important problem in software development is to make better use of software libraries by improving the search and retrieval process, that is, by making it easier to find the few components you may want among the many you do not want. This paper suggests some ideas to improve this process: (1) Associate analgebraic specification with each software component; these specifications should include complete syntactic information, but need have onlypartial semantic information. (2) User queries consist of syntactic declarations plus results forsample executions. (3) User queries may be posed in standard programming notation, which is then automatically translated into algebraic notation. (4) Search is organized asranked multi-level filtering, where each level yields aranked set of partial matches. (5) Early stages of filtering narrow the search space by using computationally simple procedures, such as checking that the number of types is adequate. (6) Middle levels may findpartial signature matches. (7) Pre-computedcatalogues (i.e., indexes) can speed up early and middle level filtering. (8) Semantic information is used in a final filter withterm rewriting, but complete verification is not attempted. (9) The series of filters is implementedincrementally, so as to backtrack to lower ranked components in case of failure. This approach avoids the need for complex theorem proving, and does not require any knowledge of algebraic specification from the user. Moreover, it does not require either specifications or queries to be complete or even fully correct, because it yields partial matches ranked by how well they fit the query. The paper concludes with a description of some preliminary experiments and some suggestions for further experiments.

Optimal release policy for hyper-geometric distribution software-reliability growth model

The hyper-geometric distribution software-reliability growth model (HGDM) can estimate the number of initial faults in a software program. An important problem in software development is to determine when to stop testing and then release the software. This paper mainly investigates the optimal software release policies which minimize the mean total software cost and satisfy the software-reliability requirement based on the HGDM. The optimal software release times are determined and shown to be finite. A numerical example illustrates these optimal software release policies.

Problem decomposition for reuse

An approach to software development problems is presented and illustrated by an example. The approach is based on the ideas ofproblem frames and structuring specifications by views. It is claimed that decompositions obtained by this approach result in a more effective separation of concerns, and that the resulting components are more likely to be reusable than those obtained by more conventional approaches. The characteristics of desirable integration mechanisms are discussed, together with some other considerations arisingfrom the presented approach.

Integrated Design for Research Oriented Systems: The Software Bottleneck

Successful integrated system design requires the seamless fusion of domain specific knowledge from the encompassing disciplines into a single product. One of the problems which hampers the efficient design of systems is the fact that in many cases end users are initially unable to specify complete requirements. This is also true for software development, and a major bottleneck in the design and evaluation of systems is caused by software development problems. Various rapid prototyping tools exist to aid the user with the requirements specification. This paper discusses an approach which has the capability to smoothly progress beyond the prototyping phase.

Software process reengineering: Toward a new generation of CASE technology

Business process reengineering is generating considerable interest in the business community because of its demonstrated capacity to reduce costs and increase an organization's responsiveness to competitive challenges and opportunities. The software crisis, as evidence by escalating costs and sluggish responsiveness to changing requirements, is similar to the business problems now being addressed through the application of business process reengineering principles. This article applies three of these same principles to the software crisis: (1) the surfacing of tacit assumptions and an examination of them for error, obsolescence, or irrelevance; (2) a radical redefinition of processes; and (3) the use of technology as a process enabler. After applying these principles to the problems of software development, maintenance, and reengineering, we derived a radical redefinition of the software process. The capabilities of three integrated multitool CASE environments are proposed as an enabling technological infrastructure for the reengineered software process. These are the software specification, software engineering, and software reengineering environments. The reengineered software process and integrated environments are shown to leverage human resources from three sources: legacy software, domain architectures, and reuse libraries.

Mathematical simulation of two-dimensional problems of diffraction on compositely shaped screens

We propose a mathematical simulation of the two-dimensional problems of diffraction of an Epolarized electromagnetic wave on conducting screens of composite shape and configuration based on the method of virtual sources. Some problems of software development and evaluation of accuracy of computations are considered. Examples of numerical calculations for some characteristic diffraction problems are given.

FORMAL METHODS TO AID THE EVOLUTION OF SOFTWARE

There is a vast collection of operational software systems which are vitally important to their users, yet are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, enhance, and keep up to date with rapidly changing requirements. For many of these so-called legacy systems, the option of throwing the system away and rewriting it from scratch is not economically viable. Methods are therefore urgently required which enable these systems to evolve in a controlled manner. The approach described in this paper uses formal proven program transformations, which preserve or refine the semantics of a program while changing its form. These transformations are applied to restructure and simplify the legacy systems and to extract higher-level representations. By using an appropriate sequence of transformations, the extracted representation is guaranteed to be equivalent to the code. The method is based on a formal wide spectrum language, called WSL, with an accompanying formal method. Over the last ten years we have developed a large catalog of proven transformations, together with mechanically verifiable applicability conditions. These have been applied to many software development, reverse engineering, and maintenance problems. In this paper, we focus on the results of using this approach in the reverse engineering of medium scale, industrial software, written mostly in languages such as assembler and JOVIAL. Results from both benchmark algorithms and heavily modified, geriatric software are summarized. We conclude that formal methods have an important practical role in software evolution.

Parallel computational chemistry made easier: The development of NWChem

We describe the design philosophy, structure, and supporting tool kits of the NWChem computational chemistry package. The primary purpose of this effort was to develop efficient parallel algorithms for a broad range of methods commonly used in computational chemistry. To facilitate this, we developed a shared nonuniform access memory model which simplifies parallel programming while at the same time providing for portability across both distributed- and shared-memory machines. In addition to this specific focus on parallelization, a substantial effort has been made to simplify the general problem of large-scale software development, which is common to many research groups. We find that this simplification can be achieved through judicious use of ideas from the computer science field of software engineering in the design and implementation of the program with minimal extra effort on the part of the chemist. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An Empirical Analysis of Tasks Imposed on On-Site Management System for Tunnel Construction Project

This paper presents the results of empirical analysis of tasks imposed on on-site management system for tunnel construstion project. The analysis is carried out from the view-point to understand that development of soft-ware in on-site management considering “human” is very important as well as which has been hard-ware studied and developed actively in recent three years. Focussing on soft-ware development problem relating to human factors, safety-management problem is selected to be analized in this study. In this study, based on empirical information collected by questionnaire to many engineers being engaged and having engaged in actual tunelling project, actual problems in on-site safty-management works are analized. To solve those problems understood at above analysis and to attain desirable safety-management level, effective idea arealso obtained by above stated questionnaire. Finally a proposal is shown for education system for potential up of on-site safety management ability.

Problems, methods and specialisation

Software engineering is not a discipline; it is an aspiration, as yet unachieved. Many approaches have been proposed, including reusable components, formal methods, structured methods and architectural studies. These approaches chiefly emphasise the engineering product; the solution rather than the problem it solves. An approach to understanding and classifying software development problems in terms of problem frames is suggested. In addition to such general approaches, specialisation is essential; the established branches of engineering are all specialisations. Some specialisations have arisen in software development, notably in compiler construction and software for personal computers; more are needed.

The European conflicts guide

This article describes a project which involved an attempt to integrate an expert system with a hypertext database of primary and secondary text materials. Our chosen legal domain was that of the Convention on Jurisdiction and the Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters (The Brussels Convention 1968). In this article, we address three dimensions of system design. With regard to the legal dimension, we consider the choice of domain and the representation of both knowledge and data in the system. On the technological dimension, we discuss the selection of software development tools and problems associated with keeping knowledge bases and databases up-to-date. Finally, we pay particular attention to the `Cinderella' dimension of legal expert system development -- the user interface.

Modelling software quality in the commercial environment

Achieving quality is a perennial problem in software development. It is commercially significant because of the large sums of money spent correcting problems within information systems. The literature shows how various theoretical treatments have developed since the late 1970s. However, many of these models are of academic interest only, because they are not perceived by IT professionals to meet their needs.

The Core method for real-time requirements

The member companies of the Software Productivity Consortium develop large, mission-critical, real-time applications. For these companies, requirements are the top-priority problem in systems and software development. These requirements have driven the development of the Consortium Requirements Engineering (Core) method and its prototype CASE tools. Core is a single, coherent method for specifying real-time requirements that integrates object-oriented and forward models, integrates graphical and formal specifications, permits nonalgorithmic specifications, and provides a machine-like model. The Core requirements, component technologies, and conceptual model are discussed. Some important Core features are illustrated with an example of safety-shutdown software for a shipboard fuel-control system.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>