Software Engineering Concepts Research Articles

A reference architecture for Farm Software Ecosystems

Smart farming is a management style that includes smart monitoring, planning and control of agricultural processes. This management style requires the use of a wide variety of software and hardware systems from multiple vendors. Adoption of smart farming is hampered because of a poor interoperability and data exchange between ICT components hindering integration. Software Ecosystems is a recent emerging concept in software engineering that addresses these integration challenges. Currently, several Software Ecosystems for farming are emerging. To guide and accelerate these developments, this paper provides a reference architecture for Farm Software Ecosystems. This reference architecture should be used to map, assess design and implement Farm Software Ecosystems. A key feature of this architecture is a particular configuration approach to connect ICT components developed by multiple vendors in a meaningful, feasible and coherent way. The reference architecture is evaluated by verification of the design with the requirements and by mapping two existing Farm Software Ecosystems using the Farm Software Ecosystem Reference Architecture. This mapping showed that the reference architecture provides insight into Farm Software Ecosystems as it can describe similarities and differences. A main conclusion is that the two existing Farm Software Ecosystems can improve configuration of different ICT components. Future research is needed to enhance configuration in Farm Software Ecosystems.

An Ontology-Based Multi-Agent System for Active Software Engineering Ontology

The ongoing trend towards multi-site software development not only brings the benefits but also creates additional challenges regarding remote communication and coordination. The Software Engineering Ontology (SE Ontology) was first developed to clarify the software engineering concepts and project information, and to enable knowledge sharing among dispersed teams. However, the current SE Ontology has the same passive structure as other ontologies that exist on the Web. Passive structure refers to a need to know exactly the concepts and relationships to which users are referring in the ontology. Otherwise, he/she may not be able to obtain the knowledge required. What is needed is active support that can help users find the information they need and provide them with meaningful output. In this paper, we propose an active Software Engineering Ontology through Multi-Agent System (SEOMAS) framework which is intended to provide active support to access software engineering domain knowledge and to recommend software project information captured in the SE Ontology. The UML and Agent UML are used to formalise the SEOMAS framework and to model interactions between the various agents. The prototype is developed and evaluated using several scenarios of the online shopping system development as a case study.

UML based Approach for System Reliability Assessment

Software Engineering is associated with development of software products using well defined principles, techniques and processes. The result of Software Engineering is an effective and reliable product. The software products have chances to fail during implementation and design phases. The design time testing and reliability measurement can enhance the process of development and their component management to work more effectively for long time. Software Testing is evaluation of the software product against system requirements gathered from users and system specification. That mainly comprises of validation and verification. The reliability analysis concerned with analyzing the system and their functions to get the amount of time when the system and their components works reliably. In this paper, Reliability Engineering based case study on software product development is performed. The concept of Software Engineering and the component based product development, use the Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams and create Reliability Block Diagram (RBD). RBDs are used to evaluate entire software components and their sub components to find their reliability according to the number of usages and increasing time factor. Therefore, to analyze the software system using RBD, UML to RBD conversion is required. The UML diagram for online shopping is first explored and then its sub use-case checkout is designed. The sub-case is then re-organized according to the functionality that can be similar to component diagram. The component diagram is used further to convert the software system into the RBD diagram. The result of RBD analysis defined in terms of Block failure rate, Block unreliability Vs. Time, Block Reliability vs. Time, System Reliability vs. Time and the System Reliability statistics. The finding of the experiments shows that the system can be improved through the RBD analysis. Additionally the improvements during the design phases can refine the productivity and reliability of the system.

A systemic approach to define and characterize Advanced Planning Systems (APS)

Advanced Planning Systems (APS) have become an important tool for manufacturing and production companies that require a specific system to optimize production, logistic, material and human resources, etc. with the goal of improving the economy of the companies and offer a good customer service. An APS must be integrated to the Enterprise’s System (such as an ERP), but this task usually lacks of a specific methodology to be performed and is generally made ad-hoc. With the ultimate objective to provide an approach to facilitate this integration, this work presents a characterization of the APS from a systemic point of view, using standardized Software Engineering concepts. The idea is to provide a definition and characterization of Advanced Planning Systems, by establishing the main goals of this type of system, and considering Functional Requirements, Quality Attributes and a reference model for the architecture. The selected choices are established on the base of several international standards from the Software Engineering area, such as the SEBoK (System Engineering Body of Knowledge) and the SQuaRE (Software product Quality Requirements and Evaluation) model, among others, and aim to serve as a base line for the general concept of APS.

Blending an Android development course with software engineering concepts

The tremendous popularity of mobile computing and Android in particular has attracted millions of developers who see opportunities for building their own start-ups. As a consequence Computer Science students express an increasing interest into the related technology of Java development for Android applications. Android projects are complex by nature and relatively large software products while their development calls for the application of established software engineering practices and tools. However, most software engineering courses focus on `conventional' software development for desktop or web applications. In this paper we report on the design, implementation and assessment of a novel short course aiming at bridging the gap between software engineering and Android development. The goal is to demonstrate the need for applying software engineering principles on Android development as well as to emphasize that writing software for mobile devices should be regarded as an equally serious programming activity. The proposed course covers design principles, patterns, metrics, refactorings and collaborative software development. The course has been delivered to three groups of undergraduate and postgraduate students at two different institutes. The course has been evaluated: a) by performing a student satisfaction survey, b) through summative assessment of students' performance, c) by investigating whether the proposed course modified the students' career interests and d) by employing assessment by peers based on rubrics. The results indicate that such a short course is capable of increasing student's interest on Android development as well as their awareness of the importance of software engineering concepts on mobile application software development.

Design and Evaluation of PMS: A Computerized Simulation Game for Software Project Management

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in the use of computerized simulation games to support the teaching and learning of software/IT project management. However, it appears that some of the existing simulation games mainly focus on software engineering concepts, and have less emphasis on project management issues such as scope, stakeholder and communication management. On the other hand, some project management simulation games focus on general project management concepts (e.g. the constraints among time, cost and scope), but fail to demonstrate the unique aspects and complexity of software/IT projects. This article presents the design and implementation of project management simulation (PMS), a computerized simulation game for the learning of software/IT project management. PMS addresses issues relevant to project management and software engineering literature. In the game, the player acts as a project manager and plans a video contest software development project. The player must analyze each project stakeholder’s requirements, properly define the project scope, and assign project activities to team members. The player communicates with the stakeholders proactively, develops software prototypes, and conducts quality review to increase stakeholders’ satisfaction and improve software quality. PMS aims to place a more balanced emphasis on the concepts of both software engineering and project management. This article includes an evaluation study to demonstrate the effectiveness of a learning exercise with PMS for supporting the teaching of the undergraduate course, ‘Software Project Methodology and Implementation’, at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The effectiveness of students’ learning with respect to the different project management knowledge areas was measured by comparing the students’ perceived levels of understanding of project management knowledge before and after playing the game. The pre and post learning exercise data show that the exercise with PMS significantly reinforced players’ knowledge in most project management knowledge areas, namely in human resource management.

An architecture to integrate IEC 61131-3 systems in an IEC 61499 distributed solution

The IEC 61499 standard has been developed to allow the modeling and design of distributed control systems, providing advanced concepts of software engineering (such as abstraction and encapsulation) to the world of control engineering. The introduction of this standard in already existing control environments poses challenges, since programs written using the widespread IEC 61131-3 programming standard cannot be directly executed in a fully IEC 61499 environment without reengineering effort. In order to solve this problem, this paper presents an architecture to integrate modules of the two standards, allowing the exploitation of the benefits of both. The proposed architecture is based on the coexistence of control software of the two standards. Modules written in one standard interact with some particular interfaces that encapsulate functionalities and information to be exchanged with the other standard. In particular, the architecture permits to utilize available run-times without modification, it allows the reuse of software modules, and it utilizes existing features of the standards. A methodology to integrate IEC 61131-3 modules in an IEC 61499 distributed solution based on such architecture is also developed, and it is described via a case study to prove feasibility and benefits. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed solution does not add substantial load or delays to the system when compared to an IEC 61131-3 based solution. By acting on task period, it can achieve performances similar to an IEC 61499 solution.

Grammar-based model transformations: Definition, execution, and quality properties

Model transformation is a key concept in model-driven software engineering. The definition of model transformations is usually based on meta-models describing the abstract syntax of languages. While meta-models are thereby able to abstract from superfluous details of concrete syntax, they often loose structural information inherent in languages, like information on model elements always occurring together in particular shapes. As a consequence, model transformations cannot naturally re-use language structures, thus leading to unnecessary complexity in their development as well as in quality assurance.In this paper, we propose a new approach to model transformation development which allows to simplify the developed transformations and improve their quality via the exploitation of the languages׳ structures. The approach is based on context-free graph grammars and transformations defined by pairing productions of source and target grammars. We show that such transformations have important properties: they terminate and are sound, complete, and deterministic.

중소규모 SW개발 프로젝트를 위한 시각화 기반의 Tool-Chain 품질관리 방법 제안

Since the concept of software engineering was first used in 1968 by NATO Science Committee, a lot of research work and improvements have been made on software development methodology and software quality control, but they still fall short of ensuring successful development of small and medium scale software systems. Under these circumstances, Center for Software Engineering (CSE) at National IT Industry Promotion Agency(NIPA) has been conducting studies on quality control methodologies of software visualization well-suited for small and medium scale software systems, and also working on the systemization and quantification of software quality control. In this paper, we attempt to scope on the software development management of domestic and foreign small and medium-sized enterprises that are lying in the blind spot, compared to large enterprises with well-organized software development systems. In particular, based on software visualization that CSE is pursuing for small and medium-sized developers, we propose a practical quality control methodology well-suited for small and medium scale projects, and a low-cost quality control management tool by combining open-source quality control tools. Our proposal is expected to induce developers` mind change in SI-specialized small and medium-sized software enterprises, increase their profits and improve customer satisfaction through project quality control.

UMLS Semantic Network as a UML Metamodel for Improving Biomedical Ontology and Application Modeling

In the domain of biomedical and health informatics, ontologies are widely used to capture knowledge ranging from bioinformatics such as gene, protein, protein interactions, etc. to clinical/healthcare informatics knowledge such as diseases, symptoms, treatment, medication, etc. Currently, one medical knowledge source that encapsulates a broad spectrum of medical knowledge is the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), which can be defined as a compendium of diverse medical ontological standards. The primary components of the UMLS are: Semantic Network (UMLS-SN) – designed by interconnecting well-defined semantic types with semantic relationships, and Metathesaurus (UMLS-META) – the base of UMLS system that is comprised of millions of medical concepts from diverse medical standards. However, within the biomedical and health informatics community, the concepts of software engineering and domain modeling (using meta-models such as ERD, UML, and XML) are very successful in designing and implementing biomedical/health domain application models. In the current status, the UMLS-SN is primarily employed for classification of medical concepts in UMLS-META, but UMLS-SN knowledge can't be viewed or employed as a modeling framework for designing ontological models and is restricted to the UMLS environment. Thus, the impact of the biomedical semantics captured by UMLS-SN might be minimal in medical facilities, research and healthcare organizations that are highly influenced by software engineering, meta-models and domain model-based practices. In order fill this gap, the authors propose a meta-modeling framework for UMLS-SN based on the UML Profile (built using UML meta-model) that will result in a customized domain specific meta-model. This specialized meta-model that encapsulates the medical knowledge semantics of UMLS-SN can then be employed for designing ontological models or relevant healthcare application models and simultaneously be coherent with software meta-models and domain modeling practices.

A located and user personalized event's dissemination platform

Ambient Intelligence has emerged lately as the integrating concept which includes Ubiquitous Computing, Ubiquitous Communication and Intelligent User Interfaces. The real implementation of such concepts is based on the use of new technology and innovative ways of development. Agent Oriented Software Engineering techniques and concepts have been used as a way of providing support to ubiquitous computing and communication. In addition, intelligent user interfaces require systems that provide a more efficient and rich interface with the user than the traditional ones. This paper presents a platform called MAPAS, which uses Ambient Intelligence concepts and techniques to give a fully scalable solution to a particular problem. The chosen system provides a solution, using the platform, to personalize the dissemination of events, that is, the system makes available to the user a set of events of his/her interest. This kind of systems requires a high degree of user's personalization. However nowadays, it is the user who must search the events of interest or subscribe to several different services or pages. The platform introduced in this paper takes profit of Agent Oriented technology to provide a system composed of various agents who may run in different devices, which communicate and provide a user personalized selection of events. Moreover, the system is aware of the surrounding environment, can be installed on smart devices, provides a rich and intuitive user interface and uses Augmented Reality techniques to give spatial location data about the events. Regarding the characteristics of the solution, it seems to be suitable for problems in the domain of Ambient Intelligence.

Performance analysis model for big data applications in cloud computing

The foundation of Cloud Computing is sharing computing resources dynamically allocated and released per demand with minimal management effort. Most of the time, computing resources such as processors, memory and storage are allocated through commodity hardware virtualization, which distinguish cloud computing from others technologies. One of the objectives of this technology is processing and storing very large amounts of data, which are also referred to as Big Data. Sometimes, anomalies and defects found in the Cloud platforms affect the performance of Big Data Applications resulting in degradation of the Cloud performance. One of the challenges in Big Data is how to analyze the performance of Big Data Applications in order to determine the main factors that affect the quality of them. The performance analysis results are very important because they help to detect the source of the degradation of the applications as well as Cloud. Furthermore, such results can be used in future resource planning stages, at the time of design of Service Level Agreements or simply to improve the applications. This paper proposes a performance analysis model for Big Data Applications, which integrates software quality concepts from ISO 25010. The main goal of this work is to fill the gap that exists between quantitative (numerical) representation of quality concepts of software engineering and the measurement of performance of Big Data Applications. For this, it is proposed the use of statistical methods to establish relationships between extracted performance measures from Big Data Applications, Cloud Computing platforms and the software engineering quality concepts.

Design for future: managed software evolution

Innovative software engineering methodologies, concepts and tools which focus on supporting the ongoing evolution of complex software, in particular regarding its continuous adaptation to changing functional and quality requirements as well as platforms over a long period are required. Supporting such a co-evolution of software systems along with their environment represents a very challenging undertaking, as it requires a combination or even integration of approaches and insights from different software engineering disciplines. To meet these challenges, the Priority Programme 1593 Design for Future—Managed Software Evolution has been established, funded by the German Research Foundation, to develop fundamental methodologies and a focused approach for long-living software systems, maintaining high quality and supporting evolution during the whole life cycle. The goal of the priority programme is integrated and focused research in software engineering to develop methods for the continuous evolution of software and software/hardware systems for making systems adaptable to changing requirements and environments. For evaluation, we focus on two specific application domains: information systems and production systems in automation engineering. In particular two joint case studies from these application domains promote close collaborations among the individual projects of the priority programme. We consider several research topics that are of common interest, for instance co-evolution of models and implementation code, of models and tests, and among various types of models. Another research topic of common interest are run-time models to automatically synchronise software systems with their abstract models through continuous system monitoring. Both concepts, co-evolution and run-time models contribute to our vision to which we refer to as knowledge carrying software. We consider this as a major need for a long life of such software systems.

Method of Software Development Research Based on Mobile Platform

Software Engineering in 1968 made ​​by the NATO Science Committee, put forward the concept of the original software engineering software development rambling into a systems engineering, software development work to drive from individual behavior to the collaborative development forward, which also large systems may provide software development, this paper now mobile platform software development, how to introduce the concept of software engineering research, analysis software differences in the characteristics of mobile platform software development and in the traditional sense, learn software engineering concepts to guide the movement software development platform.

Design and Implementation of an Interpreter Using Software Engineering Concepts

In this paper, an interpreter design and implementation for a small subset of C Language using software engineering concepts are presented. This paper reinforces an argument for the application of software engineering concepts in the area of interpreter design but it also focuses on the relevance of the paper to undergraduate computer science curricula. The design and development of the interpreter is also important to software engineering. Some of its components form the basis for different engineering tools. This paper also demonstrates that some of the standard software engineering concepts such as object-oriented design, design patterns, UML diagrams, etc., can provide a useful track of the evolution of an interpreter, as well as enhancing confidence in its correctness

Современное состояние исследований в области обфускации программ: определения стойкости обфускации

Program obfuscation is a semantic-preserving transformation aimed at bringing a program into such a form, which impedes the understanding of its algorithm and data structures or prevents extracting of some valuable information from the text of a program. Since obfuscation could find wide use in computer security, information hiding and cryptography, security requirements to program obfuscators became a major focus of interests for pioneers of theory of software obfuscation. In this paper we give a survey of various definitions of obfuscation security and main results that establish possibility or impossibility of secure program obfuscation under certain cryptographic assumptions. We begin with a short retrospective survey on the origin and development of program obfuscation concept in software engineering and mathematical cryptography. In the introduction we also point out on the main difficulties in the development of practical and secure obfuscation techniques. In the next section we discuss the main line of research in the application of program obfuscation to the solution of various problems in system programming and software security. Finally, in section 3 we present and discuss a compendium of formal definitions of the program obfuscation concept developed so far in mathematical cryptography - black-box obfuscation, gray-box obfuscation, the best possible obfuscation, obfuscation with auxiliary inputs, etc.. We also make a comparative analysis of these definitions and present the main results on the (im)possibility of secure program obfuscation w.r.t. every such definition.

Analisis dan Perancangan Aplikasi E-Meeting Berbasis Web

Information technology is closely related to wide area networks. BINUS University pays much attention to the development of information technology. Yet, it has not applied all concepts of information technology. There are still activities carried out conventionally such as meeting activity. This is the main attraction of the authors to implement a new system. The purpose of this research is to analyze and design an e-meeting application of Computer Science Department of BINUS University. By using this application, user will be easyto conduct meeting without location barrier. This research is using analysis method on literacy study, as well as analysis on current meeting process through interview with expert and user to detect current problem. Design method usies software engineering concept, by Unified Modeling Language and Entity Relationship Diagram. UML notation explains the overview and the detail of e-meeting system. Relational database explains data structure used in this system. The result of this research is a development of e-meeting web based application to help improve meeting activity to be more effective and efficient. E-meeting application has many helpful features as used in regular meeting, as well as administration panel to control and manage user of this application.

Derivative-based hybrid heuristics for continuous-time simulation optimization

The topic of simulation–optimization has not been fundamentally tackled by many continuous-time modeling and simulation tools, yet. Common simulation-based optimization problems are usually coupled with standard optimization algorithms like any other simulation-free nonlinear optimization problems. While such couplings are usually based on many state-of-the-art software engineering concepts with a high-level user interface for flexible incorporation of simulation and optimization, the design of specialized optimization strategies targeting simulation-based objective functions is lacked within many simulation–optimization tools. In this work, new redefinition of Non Linear Programming (NLP) problems in the context of continuous-time simulation optimization is presented. Then, the modified optimization problems are efficiently tackled using derivative-based hybrid heuristics. In order to specify, illustrate and implement such heuristics, a new terminology is proposed. According to the proposed terminology, derivative-based hybrid strategies are implemented by hybridizing naive multistart derivative-based optimization methods with population-based metaheuristics. It is shown that the adoption of derivative-based optimization methods within hybrid optimization strategies significantly improves the solution quality of continuous-time simulation optimization problems.

Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of AspectJ, JBoss AOP and CaesarJ, using Gang-of-Four design patterns

Several languages are currently proposed to apply the basics of the aspect oriented programming and choosing one language or another is not obvious since they are sophisticated languages that deal with new sophisticated concepts of software engineering. A comparison between these languages is therefore worthwhile, not only to help developers choosing the right language for their needs but also to improve these languages themselves. However, such a comparison requires important investigations to put into evidence strengths and weaknesses of each language and ultimately operate a synergy between these languages. In this study we have selected three of well known advanced separation of concerns (ASOC) languages: AspectJ, JBoss AOP and CaesarJ, and we have conducted a comparative study using the GoF design patterns as hypothetical benchmarks. Our starting point was our confidence in the fact that design patterns are seamlessly powerful elicitation artifacts to test separation of concerns languages. Indeed design patterns cover most of the problems associated with the design and implementation of large and complex software systems. This article reports on our quantitative and qualitative comparisons using eight GoF design patterns in each of the AspectJ, JBoss AOP and CaesarJ languages. The result of this work allowed us to highlight strengths and weakness of each language and showed that the use of design patterns as benchmarks is an effective way for comparing ASOC languages.

Experiences with a real projects for real clients course on software engineering at a liberal arts institution

A Real Projects for Real Clients Course (RPRCC) is a course that provides students with the opportunity to develop a solution to a problem. Students interact directly with a client, and work on solving a problem for that client. RPRCCs are examples of service learning. Within the computing sciences, there has been a recent surge in the integration of RPRCCs into the curriculum. They are argued to offer an increased industrial awareness, and to help retain computing majors, especially among women. In this paper, we present our experiences with a senior-level computer science course on software engineering (SE) at a liberal arts institution. We have found that recruiting so-called real from within the liberal arts college setting is surprisingly easy; and that once you have established an initial set of clients is mostly self-sustaining. We demonstrate that an RPRCC enables students to develop their skills in teamwork and applied problem solving. The RPRCC offers the SE course a framework where students gain experience applying a variety of software architectures, design patterns, and other important SE concepts; and simultaneously develop teamwork skills.