Software Maintenance Problems Research Articles

Methods and ways for improving the exchange of information in the flight control system

Taking into account the shortcomings of the information exchange system through the ARINC 629 bus, which is widely used in new digital avionics systems (delay of information exchange, program errors, sensitivity to external influences, etc.), the fiber-optic information exchange system proposed in the article reduces the weight of aircraft in aviation systems, it allows solving many problems such as software errors, delays and maintenance problems. This system has a much higher transmission speed than traditional systems, significantly reduces the number of computers and wires, and the transition to modular avionics makes it more compact and easier to maintain.

The Application Of Machine Learning In Test Case Prioritization - A Review

Regression testing is very important but also a very costly and time-consuming activity that ensures the developers that changes in the application will not bring new errors. Retest all, selection of test cases and prioritization of test cases (TCP) approaches are used to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness in regression testing. While test case selection techniques decrease testing time and cost, it can exclude some critical test cases that can detect the faults. On the other hand, test case prioritization considers all test cases and execute them until resources are exhausted or all test cases are executed, while always focusing on the most important ones. Over the years, machine learning has found wide usage in solving different problems in software engineering. Software development and maintenance problems can be defined as learning problems and machine learning techniques have shown to be very effective in solving these problems. In the range of application of machine learning, machine learning techniques have also found usage in solving the test case prioritization problem. In this paper, we investigate the application of machine learning techniques in test case prioritization. We survey some of the most recent studies made in this field and provide information like techniques of machine learning used in TCP process, metrics used to measure the effectiveness of the proposed methods, data used to define the priority of test cases and some advantages or limitations of application of machine learning in TCP.

Review of Software Maintenance Problems and Proposed Solutions in IT consulting firms in Mauritius

Review of Software Maintenance Problems and Proposed Solutions in IT consulting firms in Mauritius

Tree Slicing in Clone Detection: Syntactic Analysis Made (Semi)-Semantic

Nowadays most of software contains code duplication that leads to serious problems in software maintenance. A lot of different clone detection approaches have been proposed over the years to deal with this problem, but almost all of them do not consider semantic properties of the source code. We propose to reinforce traditional tree-based clone detection algorithms by using additional information about variable slices. This allows to find intertwined/gapped clones on variables; preliminary evaluation confirms applicability of our approach to real-world software.

Design and implementation of health information systems in cardiology

The practice of collecting and maintaining information on health is as old as the history of medicine itself. Since the earliest times, those who were engaged in the art of healing found it necessary to record various outcomes in relation to the number of patients attended. At the beginning, health information systems were oriented to collect information on diseases and on health service outputs. In the meantime, there has been a tremendous progress in medicine as well as in informatics. In contemporary times, health information systems were transcended to the domain of modern health practices, and they hold great significance in the planning and decision-making of health delivery services [1-3]. Health information systems are there to bridge the gap between disease occurrence and the response of health professionals to fight diseases. The drive for the reform of health information systems coincided with a revolution in information and communication technology, as a result the computer has made its entry, but many of the resulting computerized systems are suffering from the lack of appropriately trained staff, thereby also facing hardware and software maintenance problems. However, it is important to make sure that, computerization of health information systems does not dominate the health information system reform improvement process [4]. The problems of implementation of information systems are well known and invariably they concern the interplay of human, organisational, and technical factors, which cannot be easily separated. It is important especially in field of cardiology. The heart is a specific organ, besides morphologic characteristics, the functional status is very important and the relationship between heart and blood vessels, well known as arterioventricular coupling. We can describe this complex interlinking by conceptualizing computer-based information systems as social systems in which technology is only one of the elements [5]. Information systems are much more than computers and telecommunications equipment, as they also involve people and their actions in the organizational settings in which they work. One of the good and in developing health information systems is provided in University Clinical Center Tuzla at Tuzla county in Bosnia and Herzegovina [6,7].

Progress in Research on String Analysis

随着软件应用范围的不断扩大,尤其是数据库软件和Web软件的广泛应用,字符串变量在软件程序中扮演的角色日益重要.与此同时,针对字符串变量的程序分析技术——字符串分析,也取得了长足的发展,并在软件工程中的很多领域中得到了成功的应用.字符串分析的基本应用模式是首先使用字符串值分析获得字符串变量的所有可能取值,然后使用字符串约束求解判断这些变量的取值是否满足一定约束,从而对程序进行正确性验证.为了使得字符串分析能够应用在安全分析和软件维护应用中,研究人员对字符串分析进行了扩展,进一步分析字符串变量的数据来源.综述了字符串分析技术的研究进展,提出了字符串分析的问题构型,介绍了这一领域现在的主要研究内容:字符串值分析、字符串约束求解、字符串数据来源分析以及字符串分析在软件工程中的应用.;With the ubiquitous software application, especially the wide usage of database applications and Web applications, strings have become a more important role in the software programs. At the same time, the program analysis techniques that consider the specialty of strings have been developed, and have been applied to various areas in software engineering. Usually, string value analysis is applied to acquire the possible values of a given string variable. Next, a constraint solver is applied to check whether the values satisfy predefined specifications, so that the correctness of the given string variable can be checked. To further apply string analysis to some security analysis and software maintenance problems, the string analysis is further improved to analyze the possible data origins of a given string variable. This paper presents a survey on string analysis, which mainly introduces the string value analysis, string constraint solving, string data origin analysis, and the applications of string analysis in software engineering.

Extending ER models to capture database transformations to build data sets for data mining

In a data mining project developed on a relational database, a significant effort is required to build a data set for analysis. The main reason is that, in general, the database has a collection of normalized tables that must be joined, aggregated and transformed in order to build the required data set. Such scenario results in many complex SQL queries that are written independently from each other, in a disorganized manner. Therefore, the database grows with many tables and views that are not present as entities in the ER model and similar SQL queries are written multiple times, creating problems in database evolution and software maintenance. In this paper, we classify potential database transformations, we extend an ER diagram with entities capturing database transformations and we introduce an algorithm which automates the creation of such extended ER model. We present a case study with a public database illustrating database transformations to build a data set to compute a typical data mining model.

Tree slicing: Finding intertwined and gapped clones in one simple step

Most of software nowadays contain code duplication that leads to serious problems in software maintenance. A lot of different clone detection approaches have been proposed over the years to deal with this problem, but almost all of them do not consider semantic properties of the source code.

Supporting change impact analysis for intelligent agent systems

Software maintenance and evolution is an important and lengthy phase in the software life-cycle which can account for as much as two-thirds of the total software development costs. Intelligent agent technology has evolved rapidly over the past few years as evidenced by the increasing number of agent systems in many different domains. Intelligent agent systems with their distinct characteristics and behaviours introduce new problems in software maintenance. However, in contrast to a substantial amount of work in providing methodologies for analysing, designing and implementing agent-based systems, there has been very little work on maintenance and evolution of agent systems. A critical issue in software maintenance and evolution is change impact analysis: estimating the potential effects of changes before they are made as an agent system evolves. In this paper, we propose two distinct approaches to change impact analysis for the well-known and widely-developed Belief–Desire–Intention agent systems. On the one hand, our static technique computes the impact of a change by analysing the source code and identifying various dependencies within the agent system. On the other hand, our dynamic technique builds a representation of an agent’s behaviour by analysing its execution traces which consist of goals and plans, and uses this representation to estimate impacts. We have implemented both techniques and in this paper we also report on the experimental results that compare their effectiveness in practice.

Knowledge mapping: encouragements and impediments to adoption

PurposeKnowledge maps (KMaps) are a relatively new concept. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that encourage or impede the adoption of KMaps by computer software maintenance professionals.Design/methodology/approachIn total, six prototypes were developed for a muti‐national software organisation and demonstrated during 19 semi‐structured interviews conducted to establish adoption factors. Data were analysed qualitatively through NVivoTMsoftware, according to the steps in Carney's Ladder of Analytical Abstraction.FindingsEncouragement factors were found to be those that organisational management has direct control over such as communicating and promoting KMaps and appointing a management champion. Impeding factors were those under the control of software maintenance management and are more difficult to manage. They focused on personal factors (staff's perception of the usefulness and ease of use of KMaps), subjective norms (peer influence and culture), behavioural control (training) and the design of the KMap itself.Research limitations/implicationsWhile the research has provided an exploratory KMap Adoption (KAM) Model, it has done so through the lens of innovation adoption and diffusion theories. There are opportunities to examine the topic in a wider manner to provide a more holistic view of KMap adoption.Practical implicationsFrom adoption factors, the study's explanatory framework, named the KAM, was synthesized and recommendations are made for push and pull strategies to maximise encouragement and minimise impediment factors identified in KAM.Originality/valueKMaps are ideally suited for resolving many of the traceability problems in computer software maintenance. They improve the ability to find the right “expert” to help solve a software problem quickly when it arises.

A model to derive software maintenance policy decision

The problem of software maintenance is gaining considerable importance both for the user industry and the service providers. The area of equipment maintenance is very well developed one, but the same is not true for the software maintenance. In this paper, a model is developed and solved for deriving software maintenance decision. This model uses two criteria of maximum availability and minimum maintenance cost to make a decision between corrective maintenance and preventive maintenance. The model was used to obtain the appropriate maintenance policy and also for performing sensitivity analysis, the results of which are presented in this paper. The model presented in this paper has significant potential for application and further research.

Systematic evolution of model-based spreadsheet applications

Using spreadsheets is the preferred method to calculate, display or store anything that fits into a table-like structure. They are often used by end users to create applications, although they have one critical drawback—spreadsheets are very error-prone. Recent research has developed methods to reduce this error-proneness by introducing a new way of object-oriented modeling of spreadsheets before using them. These spreadsheet models, termed ClassSheets, are used to generate concrete spreadsheets on the instance level. By this approach sources of errors are reduced and spreadsheet applications become easier to understand.As usual for almost every other application, requirements on spreadsheets change due to the changing environment. Thus, the problem of evolution of spreadsheets arises. The update and evolution of spreadsheets is the uttermost source of errors that may have severe impact.In this paper, we will introduce a model-based approach to spreadsheet evolution by propagating updates on spreadsheet models (i.e. ClassSheets) to spreadsheets. To this end, update commands for the ClassSheet layer are automatically transformed to those for the spreadsheet layer. We describe spreadsheet model update propagation using a formal framework and present an integrated tool suite that allows the easy creation and safe update of spreadsheet models. The presented approach greatly contributes to the problem of software evolution and maintenance for spreadsheets and thus avoids many errors that might have severe impacts.

Special Issue on Search‐Based Software Maintenance

Search-based software engineering (SBSE) consists of the application of metaheuristic search techniques—such as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, hill climbing, and tabu search—to software engineering problems. This idea is based on the observation that some software engineering activities can be thought of as optimization problems, and on the fact that techniques providing exact solutions are, very often, unable to adequately scale to large, real-world software engineering problems. Define fitness functions to guide an automated search for solutions, rather than attempting to construct solutions from scratch by hand. SBSE moves the engineer up the abstraction chain, from the tedious and expensive role of detailed solution construction, to the potentially more productive and more cost-effective area of fitness function design. This approach has been repeatedly demonstrated to have successful applications across the software engineering life cycle from requirements and project planning to maintenance and testing. This special issue focuses on applications of search SBSE to the maintenance phase of the life cycle. After software testing 2, software maintenance is the most widely studied application area for SBSE research. Work on SBSE applications to problems in software maintenance can be traced back to the pioneering work of the Mancoridis et al. 3, which led to the development of the Bunch tool for software re-modularization 4. In the past five years there has been a significant increase in SBSE applications to software maintenance and evolution. Search-based techniques have been applied to post-development code improvement problems, such as object-oriented refactoring 5, 6, and imperative language slicing and transformation 7. Other applications are related to software engineering economics and project management problems, such as release planning 8-12, effort, and cost estimation 13-16, and project staffing and planning 17-20. Last, but not the least, SBSE has been applied to deal with service-oriented architectures, for example for services QoS-aware composition 21, service-level agreement negotiation 22, and testing 23. A complete overview of SBSE with a discussion of future research trends can be found in the recent International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) ‘Future of Software Engineering’ paper 24. This issue of the Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice features three outstanding papers, dealing with different aspects of software maintenance and evolution: release planning and staffing, re-factoring, and component substitution. The paper ‘Optimized Staffing for Product Releases—Focused Search and its Application at Chartwell Technologies’ by Puneet Kapur, An Ngo-The, Günther Ruhe, and Andrew Smith presents an approach for optimizing the staffing for product releases. The problem they solve can be viewed as part of the more general release planning problem, which assigns features to releases such that technical, resource, risk, and budget constraints are met. In particular, the genetic search-based approach the authors propose aims at assigning human resources to software development tasks, taking them from a pool of developers having different levels of skills. The applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated with an industrial case study. The paper ‘Search-Based Refactoring: an Empirical Study’ by Mark O'Keffe and Mel Ó Cinnéide presents an approach to automatically re-factor, using search-based techniques, object-oriented systems that undergo repeated addition of functionality. Such addition can, very often, deteriorate the quality of the system's underlying design. Their re-factoring is guided by the QMOOD quality model 25, and the paper compares different optimization techniques, such as Genetic Algorithms, Simulated Annealing, and Multiple Ascent Hill-Climbing. The results of experiments carried out on five software systems suggest that the latter technique outperforms the others. The paper ‘Search-based Many-to-one Component Substitution’ by Nicolas Desnos, Marianne Huchard, Guy Tremblay, Christelle Urtado, and Sylvain Vauttier presents a search-based approach that allows the replacement of an obsolete component with a composition of multiple components. When a component becomes obsolete, the approach searches for a minimal assembly of other components, exposing their functionality by means of ports that preserves the behavior of the original component. The proposed approach has been evaluated on a set of randomly generated components. We hope that readers will enjoy this special issue and find the selected papers insightful and inspiring. We would like to thank all the authors who presented papers for this special issue: there were many good quality papers, but unfortunately we could accept only three of them. Last, but not the least, we would like to thank the reviewers who provided timely, detailed and constructive feedbacks to the authors. Without their precious help this special issue would not have been possible.

Managing the invisible assets [programmable logic controller

Introducing a new process into the plant requires managing the software - not just the hardware - when it comes to PLCs . The programmable controller (PLC) is the most vital control element in the manufacturing environment, yet the development and procurement of PLC programming services is ad hoc, often resulting in efficiency and maintenance problems. Those problems contribute to poor overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) figures and a resultant financial losses. Hardware assets tend to be fairly obvious to a company, but software assets can be neglected simply because they are invisible. And yet software assets control the machines and processes. The support documentation for those assets attests to the quality of the PLC program development process and is a useful tool for solving hardware and software maintenance problems. Anybody responsible for a plant's software systems would do well to look at the PLC documentation, to check how detailed it is and whether it contributes positively to the maintenance function.

Guest Editors' Introduction to the Special Section from the International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution

SOFTWARE maintenance and evolution are relevant to users, engineers, and researchers who come into contact with software beyond Version 1. The International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSM) is the premiere forum for software maintenance researchers and practitioners to examine, discuss, and exchange ideas regarding the key issues facing the software maintenance community. During the conference, participants from academia, government, and industry share ideas and experiences solving critical software maintenance problems. ICSM 2006 was held in Philadelphia on 24-27 September 2006 in cooperation with several colocated workshops. These included the Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Web Site Evolution (WSE), the Sixth IEEE International Workshop on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), the Second International IEEE Workshop on Software Evolvability, and the Second International Workshop on Predictive Models of Modern Industrial Software Engineering. ICSM 2006’s technical program was anchored by 45 papers selected from 147 submissions. The program also included keynote addresses from three distinguished speakers: Patrick Lardieri, David Notkin, and Richard Stallman. Of the 45 papers, seven were invited to this special issue with five passing the rigorous TSE review process. These five selected papers include two that discuss frameworks and three that present new techniques. The frameworks support the creation of language-independent program analyses and evolvable test suites. Two of the techniques consider source-code reengineering and the final one the challenging problem of making live updates to a software system while it is running. The first of the two framework papers, “An Extensible Metamodel for Program Analysis” by D. Strein, R. Lincke, J. Lundberg, and W. Lowe, describes a language-independent framework for building new analyses. The resulting architecture supports the construction of specific analyses (e.g., refactorings) and is easily extensible through the addition of new front ends to support new languages. This flexibility and the use of loose coupling between components of the existing framework support the easy integration of new components. The paper uses the implementation of the tools VIZZANALYZER and XDEVELOP as a proof of concept. Looking forward, further work includes empirical study (e.g., considering running time and memory consumption) and the incorporation of dynamic analysis into the framework (e.g., to support debuggers and profilers). This paper was published in the September 2007 issue of TSE; however, the abstract of this paper is included in this special section. The paper can be found in the Computer Society Digital Library at http://computer.org/tse/ archives.htm. In the second framework paper, “On the Detection of Test Smells: A Metrics-Based Approach for General Fixture and Eager Test” by B. Van Rompaey, B. Du Bois, S. Demeyer, and M. Rieger, a framework for evaluating the evolvability of white box tests suites alongside the program is presented. The goal of this approach is to avoid the (often significant) cost incurred when test cases must be coevolved with the program. The framework accomplishes this by describing a collection of test smells. Akin to code smells, test smells allow the concrete expression of what a good evolvable test is by exploiting the principles that underlie white box testing. The paper proposes a formal description of test smells by means of metric predictors, empirically evaluated for two example test smells. Looking forward, future work will consider the interplay between test smells and frequently changing test cases. Understanding how test smells emerge and grow should help in proactively detecting current and future smells. The third and fourth papers address reengineering, a problem into which significant software evolution energy is invested. The first of these two papers, “API-Evolution Support with Diff-CatchUp” by Z. Xing and E. Stroulia, addresses the API evolution problem. In short, reusable components, and thus their APIs, must evolve in response to client needs for improved functionality, quality, and generality. Applications using an API which evolve independently can thus “break.” To tackle the API-evolution problem, the paper presents a technique and a tool that automatically recognizes API changes in a reused component and proposes plausible fixes based on working examples of the framework code base. Looking forward, planned extensions to the work IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, VOL. 33, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2007 797

From function design to system design in model-based software development

The amount of software in modern electronic control units (ECUs), and the degree of networking between them, has reached such proportions that they increasingly cause software development and maintenance problems for vehicle manufacturers and suppliers. To meet this challenge head on, dSpace, the leading supplier of tools for developing automotive software, has added System Desk to its tool chain. System Desk introduces a model-based development process at system level, allowing users to extend existing development processes

Software maintenance seen as a knowledge management issue

Creating and maintaining software systems is a knowledge intensive task. One needs to have a good understanding of the application domain, the problem to solve and all its requirements, the software process used, technical details of the programming language(s), the system’s architecture and how the different parts fit together, how the system interacts with its environment, etc. All this knowledge is difficult and costly to gather. It is also difficult to store and usually lives only in the mind of the software engineers who worked on a particular project. If this is a problem for development of new software, it is even more for maintenance, when one must rediscover lost information of an abstract nature from legacy source code among a swarm of unrelated details. In this paper, we submit that this lack of knowledge is one of the prominent problems in software maintenance. To try to solve this problem, we adapted a knowledge extraction technique to the knowledge needs specific to software maintenance. We explain how we explicit the knowledge discovered on a legacy software during maintenance so that it may be recorded for future use. Some applications on industry maintenance projects are reported.

From Composition Filters to AspectJ: A Platform Specific Model Transformation

Both model driven architecture (MDA) and aspect oriented programming (AOP) are promising paradigms that are very attractive for the software engineering community. While the former is an approach to application design and implementation using models as first class entities, the latter advocates the separation of concerns as an approach to tackle most software development and maintenance problems. MDA and AOP can be related in various ways and their combination seems to be a promising issue. In this article, we focus on the transformation of two AOP approaches, composition filters (CF) and AspectJ, considered as platform specific metamodels within the MDA context. We propose a transformation of CF models into AspectJ models using a syntax directed translation and a set of transformation templates. In addition to being easy to implement, our transformation approach covers the most important concepts of CF.

Static analysis of Lyee requirements

Software development has been suffering, for many decades, from the lack of simple and powerful methodologies and tools. Despite the tremendous advances in this research field, the crisis has still not been overcome and the proposed remedies are far from resolving the problems of software development and maintenance. Lately, a new and very promising methodology, called Lyee, has been proposed. It aims to automatically generate programs from simple user requirements. The purpose of this paper is, on the one hand, to provide a short and technical introduction to the Lyee methodology, and on the other hand, to show how some classical static analysis techniques (execution time and memory space optimization, typing, slicing, etc.) can considerably improve many aspects of this new methodology.

Attitudes of maintenance personnel towards maintenance work: a comparative analysis

Previous IS research has shown that problems related to maintenance staffing (as distinct, for example, from technological problems) are among the more important problems in software maintenance. In particular, the attitudes of maintenance personnel toward their work can have adverse effects on their performance and the quality of the application portfolios they help to sustain. This paper reports on a study of Singapore maintenance personnel who are actively involved in maintaining application systems, or who directly supervise the maintenance process. These ‘maintainer’ views are compared with the views of maintenance managers. The results are also compared against findings from prior studies conducted in the USA. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.