Reuse Of Artifacts Research Articles

A hybrid DevOps process supporting software reuse: A pilot project

AbstractLarge software development organizations manage reusable software components through a reusable software repository in order to reduce development time and cost and to improve software quality and productivity. This paper presents a hybrid DevOps process with a systematic reuse‐based software development and management process to reduce the effort and cost required for the rework and to increase productivity. The proposed approach promotes the systematic reuse of software components based on both information retrieval and ontology‐based retrieval techniques. The reusable assets are presented in different styles to ease and support the reuse process with fine‐grained reusable artifacts. To evaluate our proposed process, a pilot project, aiming to monitor the health of a patient, was developed and monitored the reuse activities throughout the whole experiment. The results revealed that our proposed process got an average gain of 35.2% in terms of developed function points by reusing 30.63% of reusable artifacts available in the reuse repository.

Requirement Patterns: An Approach for Streamlining Requirements Engineering in Software Product Families

Reusable structure is essential in all reuse-based software development processes. This provides a solid foundation for seamless management of reusable artefacts especially in software product line engineering (SPLE). One of the potential benefits provided by a well-defined structure is systematic reuse of these artefacts. Requirements pattern approach provides guidelines for requirement engineers to reuse and specify requirements. Although a plethora of research on requirements pattern have been reported in the literature, no research available focuses on requirement engineering (RE) activities of SPLE. In this paper, we present an anatomy of software requirement pattern (SRP) for SPLE with a structured example from e-learning domain. To enable practitioners, understand the concept of requirement pattern more, we present a meta-model for the SRP concepts and their relationships. In addition, we describe how the requirement pattern approach, streamlines RE activities, design for and with reuse in both domain and application engineering processes of SPLE. The requirement pattern approach thus helps in achieving systematic requirements reuse (RR) and generation of structured software requirement specification (SRS) for individual applications.

Semi-Supervised Learning Based Tag Recommendation for Docker Repositories

Docker has been the mainstream technology of providing reusable software artifacts recently. Developers can easily build and deploy their applications using Docker. Currently, a large number of reusable Docker images are publicly shared in online communities, and semantic tags can be created to help developers effectively reuse the images. However, the communities do not provide tagging services, and manually tagging is exhausting and time-consuming. This paper addresses the problem through a semi-supervised learning-based approach, named SemiTagRec. SemiTagRec contains four components: (1) the predictor, which calculates the probability of assigning a specific tag to a given Docker repository; (2) the extender, which introduces new tags as the candidates based on tag correlation analysis; (3) the evaluator, which measures the candidate tags based on a logistic regression model; (4) the integrator, which calculates a final score by combining the results of the predictor and the evaluator, and then assigns the tags with high scores to the given Docker repositories. SemiTagRec includes the newly tagged repositories into the training data for the next round of training. In this way, SemiTagRec iteratively trains the predictor with the cumulative tagged repositories and the extended tag vocabulary, to achieve a high accuracy of tag recommendation. Finally, the experimental results show that SemiTagRec outperforms the other approaches and SemiTagRec’s accuracy, in terms of Recall@5 and Recall@10, is 0.688 and 0.781 respectively.

Software process line as an approach to support software process reuse: A systematic literature review

Abstract Context Software Process Line (SPrL) aims at providing a systematic reuse technique to support reuse experiences and knowledge in the definition of software processes for new projects thus contributing to reduce effort and costs and to achieve improvements in quality. Although the research body in SPrL is expanding, it is still an immature area with results offering an overall view scattered with no consensus. Objective The goal of this work is to identify existing approaches for developing, using, managing and visualizing the evolution of SPrLs and to characterize their support, especially during the development of reusable process family artefacts, including an overview of existing SPrL supporting tools in their multiple stages; to analyse variability management and component-based aspects in SPrL; and, finally, to list practical examples and conducted evaluations. This research aims at reaching a broader and more consistent view of the research area and to provide perspectives and gaps for future research. Method We performed a systematic literature review according to well-established guidelines set. We used tools to partially support the process, which relies on a six-member research team. Results We report on 49 primary studies that deal mostly with conceptual or theoretical proposals and the domain engineering stage. Years 2014, 2015, and 2018 yielded the largest number of articles. This can indicate SPrL as a recent research theme and one that attracts ever-increasing interest. Conclusion Although this research area is growing, there is still a lack of practical experiences and approaches for actual applications or project-specific process derivations and decision-making support. The concept of an integrated reuse infrastructure is less discussed and explored; and the development of integrated tools to support all reuse stages is not fully addressed. Other topics for future research are discussed throughout the paper with gaps pointed as opportunities for improvements in the area.

On the trail of Scandinavia's early metallurgy: Provenance, transfer and mixing.

The rich and long-lasting Nordic Bronze Age was dependent throughout on incoming flows of copper and tin. The crucial turning point for the development of the NBA can be pinpointed as the second phase of the Late Neolithic (LN II, c. 2000–1700 BC) precisely because the availability and use of metal increased markedly at this time. But the precise provenance of copper reaching Scandinavia in the early second millennium is still unclear and our knowledge about the driving force leading to the establishment of the Bronze Age in southern Scandinavia is fragmentary and incomplete. This study, drawing on a large data set of 210 samples representing almost 50% of all existing metal objects known from this period in Denmark, uses trace element (EDXRF) and isotope analyses (MC-ICP-MS) of copper-based artifacts in combination with substantial typological knowledge to profoundly illuminate the contact directions, networks and routes of the earliest metal supplies. It also presents the first investigation of local recycling or mixing of metals originating from different ore regions. Both continuity and change emerge clearly in the metal-trading networks of the Late Neolithic to the first Bronze Age period. Artifacts in LN II consist mainly of high-impurity copper (so-called fahlore type copper), with the clear exception of British imports. Targeted reuse of foreign artifacts in local production is demonstrated by the presence of British metal in local-style axes. The much smaller range of lead isotope ratios among locally crafted compared to imported artifacts is also likely due to mixing. In the latter half of Nordic LN II (1800–1700 BC), the first signs emerge of a new and distinct type of copper with low impurity levels, which gains enormously in importance later in NBA IA.

Unique, Persistent, Resolvable: Identifiers as the Foundation of FAIR

The FAIR principles describe characteristics intended to support access to and reuse of digital artifacts in the scientific research ecosystem. Persistent, globally unique identifiers, resolvable on the Web, and associated with a set of additional descriptive metadata, are foundational to FAIR data. Here we describe some basic principles and exemplars for their design, use and orchestration with other system elements to achieve FAIRness for digital research objects.

Partially safe evolution of software product lines

Software Product Lines allow the automatic generation of related products built with reusable artefacts. In this context, developers may need to perform changes and check whether products are affected. A strategy to perform such analysis is verifying behaviour preservation through the use of formal theories. The product line refinement notion requires behaviour preservation for all existing products. Nevertheless, in evolution scenarios like bug fixes, some products intentionally have their behaviour changed. To support developers in these and other unsafe scenarios, we define a theory of partial product line refinement that helps to precisely understand which products are affected by a change. This provides a kind of impact analysis that could, for example, reduce test effort, since only affected products need to be tested. We provide properties such as compositionality, which deals with changes to a specific product line element, and general properties to support developers when safe and partially safe scenarios are combined. We also define a set of transformation templates, which are classified according to their compatibility to specific types of product lines. To evaluate our work, we analyse two product lines: Linux and Soletta, to discover if our templates could be helpful in evolving these systems.

Leveraging Evidence-Centered Design to Develop Assessments of Computational Thinking Practices

Computational thinking is a core skill in computer science that has become a focus of instruction in primary and secondary education worldwide. Since 2010, researchers have leveraged Evidence-Centered Design (ECD) methods to develop measures of students’ Computational Thinking (CT) practices. This article describes how ECD was used to develop CT assessments for primary students in Hong Kong and secondary students in the United States. We demonstrate how leveraging ECD yields a principled design for developing assessments of hard-to-assess constructs and, as part of the process, creates reusable artifacts—design patterns and task templates—that inform the design of other, related assessments. Leveraging ECD, as described in this article, represents a principled approach to measuring students’ computational thinking practices, and situates the approach in emerging computational thinking curricula and programs to emphasize the links between curricula and assessment design.

META-MODELING CONSTRUCTS FOR REQUIREMENTS REUSE (RR): SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS PATTERNS, VARIABILITY AND TRACEABILITY

Reuse is a fundamental activity, which increases quality and productivity of software products. Reuse of software artifacts, such as requirements, architectures, and codes can be employed at any developmental stage of software. However, reuse at a higher level of abstraction, for instance at requirements level, provides greater benefits in software development than when applied at lower level of abstraction for example at coding level. To achieve full benefits of reuse, a systematic approach and appropriate strategy need to be followed. Although several reuse approaches are reported in the literature, these approaches lack a key strategy to synergize some essential drivers of reuse, which include reusable structure, variability management (VM) and traceability of software artifacts. In line with this, we make our contribution in this paper by (1) presenting the concepts and importance of software requirements patterns (SRP) for reusable structure; (2) proposing a strategy, which combines three sub-disciplines of Software Engineering (SE) such as Requirements Engineering (RE), Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) and Model-driven Engineering (MDE); (3) proposing a meta-modeling constructs, which include SRP, VM and traceability and; (4) Relationship amongst the three sub-disciplines of the SE. This is a novel approach and we believe it can support and guide researchers and practitioners in SE community to have greater benefits of reuse during software developments.

Middleware-Oriented Deployment Automation for Cloud Applications

Fully automated provisioning and deployment of applications is one of the most essential prerequisites to make use of the benefits of Cloud computing in order to reduce the costs for managing applications. A huge variety of approaches, tools, and providers are available to automate the involved processes. The DevOps community, for instance, provides tooling and reusable artifacts to implement deployment automation in an application-oriented manner. Platform-as-a-Service frameworks are available for the same purpose. In this work we systematically classify and characterize available deployment approaches independently from the underlying technology used. For motivation and evaluation purposes, we choose Web applications with different technology stacks and analyze their specific deployment requirements. Afterwards, we provision these applications using each of the identified types of deployment approaches in the Cloud to perform qualitative and quantitative measurements. Finally, we discuss the evaluation results and derive recommendations to decide which deployment approach to use based on the deployment requirements of an application. Our results show that deployment approaches can also be efficiently combined if there is no `best fit' for a particular application.

An ontology-based technique for the specification of domain and user models in multi-agent domain


 
 
 Because of its facilities for the generalization and specialization of concepts and the unambiguous terminology they provide, ontologies are being used for the representation of reusable software artifacts. This work describes GRAMO, an ontology-based technique for the specification of domain and user models in Multi-Agent Domain Engineering. ONTODUM, an ontology-based tool supporting GRAMO is also introduced. ONTODUM represents the knowledge of GRAMO. Some case studies developed to evaluate GRAMO are also briefly described.
 
 

An exploratory study of the standard reuse practice in a medium sized software development firm

Reuse has been a topic of interest in software engineering since 1968. Although many academic papers have been written about adopting software reuse in companies, such a process in practice has proven difficult, long and costly to implement. At present, rigorous studies on the current practice of reuse in industry are scarce. Objective: The aim of this paper was to study the current practice of software reuse at a medium sized company, in particular, we aimed to alleviate the lack of data and identify barriers and success factors. Method: An exploratory study based upon descriptive surveys. Results: The predominant practice of reuse is ad hoc (73%) and the reusable artefacts were shared by means of a central repository (81%). Most practitioners use the Web to look for artefacts (92%), trying to understand them by studying code snippets or the artefact's documentation. The existence of a well-established reuse process (81%) and a high quality of the artefacts (70%) were the two most mentioned facilitators for reuse. Conclusions: All participants view software reuse as a beneficial process and believe that management should promote it. The results offer opportunities for further interpretation and comparison to software developers, project leaders, and researchers. However, these results cannot be generalized due to the specificity of the context we have studied. Replications of this study, in other business domains, are needed to generalize the results.

A dynamic control technique to enhance the flexibility of software artifact reuse in large-scale repository

Reuse is the activity of developing new software systems using software components (or artifacts) that are already proven and reliable. However, traditional reuse-based software development has difficulties in finding the components that have the proper information (feature) to match the developers’ needs, or reusing a component without modification, because it has various and mixed information (features). In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a dynamic control technique to enhance the reusability of software components. In particular, this technique focuses on the reuse of software documents that are created during the software research and development processes. We define a new unit of document reuse as a microComponent; this is a basic unit of reuse defined with a section of a software document. Based on the microComponent, it is possible to fast find more suitable components from a large-scale document repository; to control the reuse granularity from a section to an entire document; and finally, to improve the reusability of existing reusable assets.

Debugging and maintaining pragmatically reused test suites

ContextPragmatic software reuse is a common activity in industry, involving the reuse of software artifacts not designed to anticipate that reuse. ObjectiveThere are two key issues in such tasks that have not been previously explored. (1) Subtle bugs can be inserted due to mistakes on the part of a developer performing the pragmatic reuse. The reused code, integrated in the target system, should be (re-)validated there. But it is not clear what validation strategies would be employed by professional developers, and which of these strategies would be most effective to detect and to repair these inserted bugs. (2) Although semi-automated reuse of the associated test suite has been previously proposed as a strategy to detect such inserted bugs, it is unknown if the reused test suite would be maintainable in practice and how its maintenance characteristics would compare against alternative strategies. MethodWe present two empirical studies with industrial developers to address these open issues. ResultsWe find that industrial developers use a few strategies including test suite reuse, but that test suite reuse is more reliably effective at discovering and repairing bugs inserted during pragmatic reuse. We also find that, in general, semi-automatically reused test suites are slightly more maintainable than manually reused test suites, in pragmatic reuse scenarios; specific situations can vary wildly however. Participants suggested specific extensions to tool support for semi-automated reuse of test suites. ConclusionsWhile various validation strategies are employed by industrial developers in the context of pragmatic reuse, none is as reliable and effective as test case reuse at discovering and repairing bugs inserted during pragmatic reuse. Despite the fact that semi-automatically reused test cases contain non-trivial adaptive code, their maintainability is equivalent to or exceeds that of manually reused test suites. The approach could be improved, however, by adopting the suggestions of our participants to increase usability.

Model‐based design of IoT systems with the BIP component framework

SummaryThe design of software for networked systems with nodes running an Internet of things operating system faces important challenges due to the heterogeneity of interacting things and the constraints stemming from the often limited amount of available resources. In this context, it is hard to build confidence that a design solution fulfills the application's requirements. This paper introduces a design flow for web service applications of the representational state transfer style that is based on a formal modeling language, the behaviour, interaction, priority (BIP) component framework. The proposed flow applies the principles of separation of concerns in a component‐based design process that supports the modular design and reuse of model artifacts. The BIP tools for state‐space exploration allow verifying qualitative properties for service responsiveness, ie, the timely handling of events. Moreover, essential quantitative properties are validated through statistical model checking of a stochastic BIP model. All properties are preserved in actual implementation by ensuring that the deployed code is consistent with the validated model. We illustrate the design of a representational state transfer sense‐compute‐control application for a Wireless Personal Area Network architecture with nodes running the Contiki operating system. The results validate qualitative and quantitative properties for the system and include the study of error behaviours.

Conceptual approach for reuse of test automation artifacts on various architectural levels

When creating a test automation infrastructure, one of the main considerations for the buildup process is its efficiency. A main cause and method for improvement might come from reuse of test automation artifacts. Following that, one may ask ?To what extent can the test automation artifacts be re-used??. In this paper we present a model and test automation architecture for achieving such a goal. Repository Driven Test Automation (RDTA) is a conceptual approach for the buildup process of test automation infrastructure that employs reuse of testing artifacts. This paper discusses aspects of reuse of software test automation artifacts on various levels. Then, practical implications and adjustments arising from the implementation of this new paradigm are discussed. The proposed concept is documented by a case study in an international innovative computer hardware manufacturer, one of leaders in the market. The documented results are significant and confirm the validity of the concept.

Dynamic Reconfiguration of robot software component in real time distributed system using clustering techniques

The requirement of the distributed system in optimum resource is creating the new scope of business for the software industry in the area of component based technology with data mining techniques. In optimization of software, the development cost, redesign complexity, resource planning has been growing area of search based software engineering. The reuse of artifacts has been growing over the last decade and the recent works have focus on dynamic reconfiguration of logical component design. However, there are still gaps for identification and reconfigurations of software service component. In this paper, the proposed algorithm gives effective approach for dynamically reconfigurable of the design in real time application with new software service component using clustering techniques. This algorithm is able to handle the large system data set and also applicable for the multiple hierarchy redesign problem. The proposed algorithm compared against similarity score algorithm using a case study of robot path planner class diagram.

Generation of Simulation Models in MATLAB-Simulink Based on AutomationML Plant Description

Process simulations are useful test-beds for experiments and optimizations along the entire industrial plant life-cycle. Shifting testing and tuning of industrial plants and their automation systems from the real world to simulated environments is a part of a virtualization, which is one of the key movements in emerging areas of Industry 4.0 and factories of the future. Although simulations bring a large variety of benefits, they suffer from a time-consuming and error-prone design phase, which limits their use in industrial practice. This paper proposes a new design method called AML2SIM, which transforms the real plant description represented in AutomationML (AML) and generates a dynamic simulation model (SIM). The proposed method signifcantly improves the engineering and re-design of simulation models in terms of saving time and effort of experts as the models can be easily re-generated based on a given AutomationML plant model. Simulations are assembled from simulation blocks that are shared among various projects in simulation libraries, hence the method contributes to reuse of simulation artifacts.

Formalization of Technological Knowledge in the Field of Metallurgy using Document Classification Tools Supported with Semantic Techniques

AbstractThe process of knowledge formalization is an essential part of decision support systems development. Creating a technological knowledge base in the field of metallurgy encountered problems in acquisition and codifying reusable computer artifacts based on text documents. The aim of the work was to adapt the algorithms for classification of documents and to develop a method of semantic integration of a created repository. Author used artificial intelligence tools: latent semantic indexing, rough sets, association rules learning and ontologies as a tool for integration. The developed methodology allowed for the creation of semantic knowledge base on the basis of documents in natural language in the field of metallurgy.

Special issue on software reuse

Special issue on software reuse