Support Software Development Research Articles

A context model for IDE-based recommendation systems

Context, as modeled through variables called contextual factors, can improve human-computer interaction. To date, in applications supporting software development, such as integrated development environments (IDEs) and recommendation systems for software engineering (RSSEs), contextual factors have generally been constrained to project artifacts, such as source code. In this paper, we present a context model that includes thirteen contextual factors, which capture various situations in which developers interact with an IDE. This context model can be used to support and enhance user interaction with an IDE or to improve the accuracy and timing of recommendations produced by RSSEs. To assess whether the proposed contextual factors are informative for a context model, we statistically evaluated the correlations between IDE command usage and different situations, as they are described by the factors. If a contextual factor correlates with the usage of a command this means that the user is using the command differently when the values of the contextual factor change. We discovered that different factors correlate with different commands and that all the factors correlate with some commands, hence, when a context change is detected, we can also expect a change in the interaction with an IDE.

Model-driven framework to support evolution of mobile applications in multi-cloud environments

Purpose The development of mobile applications in multiple clouds environment is a complex task because of the lack of platform standards in cloud computing and mobile computing. The source code involves various proprietary programming libraries for different platforms. However, functionalities are inevitably changed over time, as well as the platform. Therefore, a great deal of development effort is required, when changes need to be made at functional and platform level. This paper aims to propose SIMON, a framework that eases complexity of the development to support software evolution. Design/methodology/approach SIMON shields the developer from the complexity of mobile and cloud platforms in the development of mobile applications in multiple clouds environment. The framework uses model of application design to automate the development and support execution of mobile applications in system environment that needs integration to the number of data sources located on multiple clouds. The framework is composed of prefabricated components that support function changeability and platform adaptability. Findings The framework is examined with the development of a sample application. After it is evaluated with scenarios that involve changing at functional and platform levels, the result shows significant reducing of the development effort by comparing with the other approaches. Originality/value The framework facilitates the implementation of mobile applications in the software system that involves integration to multiple clouds, and it supports software evolution with lesser development effort.

Balancing Business and Technical Objectives for Supporting Software Evolution

Context: Successful software systems continuously evolve to accommodate feature requests of a diverse customer-base. At some point during this evolution, the variety of customer needs and increased system complexity suggests the consideration of a software product line (SPL).Aim: The goal of this research is to support the decision maker facing the enhancement of an evolving software system (ESS) by determining the most appropriate product line design (out of a given set of candidate SPL portfolios) to minimize the technical risk and maximize the business value.Method: The proposed method called OPTESS is aimed at finding an evolution plan for the ESS which optimizes both the given technical and business objectives. Business analysis using a value-based pricing mechanism is applied to a set of initially proposed SPL portfolios (for enhancing the ESS) such that profit is maximized. Technical analysis is applied to the same initially proposed SPL portfolios to minimize the risk of failure of ESS due to implementation of new features. Business and technical analyses improve the performance of solutions for their respective objectives by modifying the feature sets of candidate SPL portfolios. OPTESS helps the decision maker select a plan for enhancement of an ESS by performing trade- off analysis between economic and technical objectives.Results: The method was initially evaluated through a case study for a set of 9 new candidate features to be added to an open source text editing system called jEdit. OPTESS helped the decision maker to identify 3 non-dominated solutions judged to be the best contenders for addition when considering both technical and economic criteria.

Functional size approximation based on use-case names

Context: Functional size measures, such as IFPUG Function Points or COSMIC, are widely used to support software development effort estimation. Unfortunately, applying the COSMIC or IFPUG Function Point Analysis methods at early stages of software development is difficult or even impossible because available functional requirements are imprecise. Moreover, the resources that could be allocated to perform such measurement are usually limited. Therefore, it is worth investigating the possibility of automating the approximation of IFPUG Function Points or COSMIC early in software projects.Objective: Given a UML use-case diagram or a list of use-case names, approximate COSMIC and IFPUG FPA functional size in an automatic way.Method: We propose a two-step process of approximating the functional size of applications based on use-case goals. In the first step, we process the names of use cases, expressed in a natural language and assign each of their goals into one of thirteen categories. In the second step, we employ information about categories of use-case goals and historical data to construct prediction models and use them to approximate the size in COSMIC and Function Points. We compare the accuracy of the proposed methods to the average use-case approximation (AUC), which is their most intuitive counterpart, and the automatic method proposed by Hussain, Kosseim and Ormandjieva (HKO).Results: The prediction accuracy of the two proposed approximation methods was evaluated using a cross-validation procedure on a data set of 26 software development projects. For both methods, the prediction error was low compared to AUC and HKO.Conclusion: Developers who document functional requirements in a form of use cases might use the proposed methods to obtain an early approximation of the application size as soon as use-case goals are identified. The proposed methods are automatic and can be considered as a replacement for AUC.

Implementation Support of Security Design Patterns Using Test Templates

Security patterns are intended to support software developers as the patterns encapsulate security expert knowledge. However, these patterns may be inappropriately applied because most developers are not security experts, leading to threats and vulnerabilities. Here we propose a support method for security design patterns in the implementation phase of software development. Our method creates a test template from a security design pattern, consisting of an “aspect test template” to observe the internal processing and a “test case template”. Providing design information creates a test from the test template with a tool. Because our test template is reusable, it can easily perform a test to validate a security design pattern. In an experiment involving four students majoring in information sciences, we confirm that our method can realize an effective test, verify pattern applications, and support pattern implementation.

A Systematic Review on Characteristic and Sub-Characteristic for Sustainable Service-Oriented Architecture Towards Long Living Software

The credibility of integration application such as Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA) can ensure the achievement towards software sustainability in growing the accountability, reliability and functionality of software systems.The needs to recognize the element involved in sustainable SOA to support software development is significantly required.This paper is to investigate the state-of-the-art of sustainable SOA by identifying their important features and structuring into three dimensions of sustainability.The Systematic-Literature-Review (SLR) is used to achieve the objective in this study as to find the holistic understanding and views of sustainable SOA, including the recent processes, activities, performance, and limitations that relates to the importance of characteristic and sub-characteristic towards software sustainability. The investigation is based on 9,100 articles in the first iteration of databases that relates to the sustainable SOA. Currently, almost 676 articles are selected and only 49 articles are relevant in supporting the body of knowledge in this study.

Development of an aerodynamic control system for the evaluation of the Open Core Engineering technology

This paper describes the development of an aerodynamic control system used for the evaluation and demonstration of the award winning Open Core Engineering (OCE) technology. The aerodynamic control system was designed with physical properties that allow using it in rapid-control-prototyping (RCP) environments as well as with industrial motion-control components. Open Core Engineering is a quite modern technology invented by Bosch Rexroth AG that supports software development on several platforms for industrial automation applications. A 3D printed alternative design is explained as well.

Gravity Probe B data system description

The Gravity Probe B data system, developed, integrated, and tested by Lockheed Missiles & Space Company, and later Lockheed Martin Corporation, included flight and ground command, control, and communications software. The development was greatly facilitated, conceptually and by the transfer of key personnel, through Lockheed’s earlier flight and ground test software development for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Key design challenges included the tight mission timeline (17 months, 9 days of on-orbit operation), the need to tune the system once on-orbit, and limited 2 Kbps real-time data rates and ground asset availability. The result was a completely integrated space vehicle and Stanford mission operations center, which successfully collected and archived 97% of the ‘guide star valid’ data to support the science analysis. Lessons learned and incorporated from the HST flight software development and on-orbit support experience, and Lockheed’s independent research and development effort, will be discussed.

Advanced Features and Industrial Applications of FPGAs—A Review

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have established themselves as one of the preferred digital implementation platforms in a plethora of current industrial applications, and extensions and improvements are still continuously being included in the devices. This paper reviews recent advancements in FPGA technology, emphasizing the novel features that may significantly contribute to the development of more efficient digital systems for industrial applications. Special attention is paid to the design paradigm shift caused by the availability of increasingly powerful embedded (and soft) processors, which transformed FPGAs from hardware accelerators to very powerful system-on-chip (SoC) platforms. New analog resources, floating-point operators, and hard memory controllers are also described, because of the great advantages they provide to designers. Software tools are being strongly influenced by the design paradigm shift, which requires from them a much better support for software developers. Focusing mainly on this issue, recent advancements in software resources [intellectual property (IP) cores and design tools] are also reviewed. The impact of new FPGA features in industrial applications is analyzed in detail in three main areas, namely digital real-time simulation, advanced control techniques, and electronic instrumentation, with focus on mechatronics, robotics, and power systems design. The way digital systems are being currently designed in these areas is comprehensively reviewed, and a critical analysis of how they could significantly benefit from new FPGA features is presented.

Towards Ontology-based SQA Recommender for Agile Software Development

Agility is heavily dependent on tacit knowledge, skilled and motivated employees, and frequent communications. Although, the Agile Manifesto claims fast and light software development process while maintaining high quality, it is however not very clear how current agile practices and methods attain quality under time pressure and unstable requirements. In this paper, we present an ontological approach for process-driven Quality Assurance support for agile software development. Challenges related to the role of Quality Assurance in agile projects are addressed by developing a process-driven recommender that provides tailored resources to user’s queries. The proposed ontological model embeds both conceptual and operational SQA knowledge about software processes and their requirements, including quality attributes, SQA measurements, SQA metrics and related SQA techniques and procedures.

Service4All: a scalable PaaS platform for service-oriented software

Software developers with service-oriented technologies usually put a lot of efforts to deploy and manage supporting middleware and tools. Meanwhile PaaS in cloud computing aims at providing efficient support for software developers. In the light of this consideration, we have designed and implemented Service4All, a service cloud platform targeting at improving productivity of service-oriented software developers. In this paper, we describe the key technical issues, architecture design and implementation technology of SAE, a key component in Service4All, in terms of scalability. First, we propose a software appliance-based mechanism for elastic middleware management. Second, we describe a micro-kernel-based AppEngine core for efficient coordination of various components. Third, we present a scalable replication framework to achieve highly scalable application services. Finally, through a real application deployed on Service4All, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution.

Collaborative Computational Project for Electron cryo-Microscopy

The Collaborative Computational Project for Electron cryo-Microscopy (CCP-EM) has recently been established. The aims of the project are threefold: to build a coherent cryoEM community which will provide support for individual scientists and will act as a focal point for liaising with other communities, to support practising scientists in their use of cryoEM software and finally to support software developers in producing and disseminating robust and user-friendly programs. The project is closely modelled on CCP4 for macromolecular crystallography, and areas of common interest such as model fitting, underlying software libraries and tools for building program packages are being exploited. Nevertheless, cryoEM includes a number of techniques covering a large range of resolutions and a distinct project is required. In this article, progress so far is reported and future plans are discussed.

Towards Knowledge Management in RE Practices to Support Software Development

Requirement engineering in any software development is the most important phase to ensure the success or failure of software. Knowledge modeling and management are helping tools to learn the software organizations. The traditional Requirements engineering practices are based upon the interaction of stakeholders which causes iteratively changes in requirements and difficulties in communication and understanding problem domain etc. So, to resolve such issues we use knowledge based techniques to support the RE practices as well as software development process. Our technique is based on two prospective, theoretical and practical implementations. In this paper, we described the need of knowledge management in software engineering and then proposed a model based on knowledge management to support the software development process. To verify our results, we used controlled experiment approach. We have implemented our model, and verify results by using and without using proposed knowledge based RE process. Our resultant proposed model can save the overall cost and time of requirement engineering process as well as software development.

Quantifying usability of domain-specific languages: An empirical study on software maintenance

A domain-specific language (DSL) aims to support software development by offering abstractions to a particular domain. It is expected that DSLs improve the maintainability of artifacts otherwise produced with general-purpose languages. However, the maintainability of the DSL artifacts and, hence, their adoption in mainstream development, is largely dependent on the usability of the language itself. Unfortunately, it is often hard to identify their usability strengths and weaknesses early, as there is no guidance on how to objectively reveal them. Usability is a multi-faceted quality characteristic, which is challenging to quantify beforehand by DSL stakeholders. There is even less support on how to quantitatively evaluate the usability of DSLs used in maintenance tasks. In this context, this paper reports a study to compare the usability of textual DSLs under the perspective of software maintenance. A usability measurement framework was developed based on the cognitive dimensions of notations. The framework was evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively using two DSLs in the context of two evolving object-oriented systems. The results suggested that the proposed metrics were useful: (1) to early identify DSL usability limitations, (2) to reveal specific DSL features favoring maintenance tasks, and (3) to successfully analyze eight critical DSL usability dimensions.

Developmental disorders: deciphering exomes on a grand scale

Developmental disorders: deciphering exomes on a grand scale

Genetic diagnosis of developmental disorders in the DDD study: a scalable analysis of genome-wide research data

SummaryBackgroundHuman genome sequencing has transformed our understanding of genomic variation and its relevance to health and disease, and is now starting to enter clinical practice for the diagnosis of rare diseases. The question of whether and how some categories of genomic findings should be shared with individual research participants is currently a topic of international debate, and development of robust analytical workflows to identify and communicate clinically relevant variants is paramount.MethodsThe Deciphering Developmental Disorders (DDD) study has developed a UK-wide patient recruitment network involving over 180 clinicians across all 24 regional genetics services, and has performed genome-wide microarray and whole exome sequencing on children with undiagnosed developmental disorders and their parents. After data analysis, pertinent genomic variants were returned to individual research participants via their local clinical genetics team.FindingsAround 80 000 genomic variants were identified from exome sequencing and microarray analysis in each individual, of which on average 400 were rare and predicted to be protein altering. By focusing only on de novo and segregating variants in known developmental disorder genes, we achieved a diagnostic yield of 27% among 1133 previously investigated yet undiagnosed children with developmental disorders, whilst minimising incidental findings. In families with developmentally normal parents, whole exome sequencing of the child and both parents resulted in a 10-fold reduction in the number of potential causal variants that needed clinical evaluation compared to sequencing only the child. Most diagnostic variants identified in known genes were novel and not present in current databases of known disease variation.InterpretationImplementation of a robust translational genomics workflow is achievable within a large-scale rare disease research study to allow feedback of potentially diagnostic findings to clinicians and research participants. Systematic recording of relevant clinical data, curation of a gene–phenotype knowledge base, and development of clinical decision support software are needed in addition to automated exclusion of almost all variants, which is crucial for scalable prioritisation and review of possible diagnostic variants. However, the resource requirements of development and maintenance of a clinical reporting system within a research setting are substantial.FundingHealth Innovation Challenge Fund, a parallel funding partnership between the Wellcome Trust and the UK Department of Health.

Theorizing about software development practices

The paper focuses on the challenge of generating theoretical support for software development, especially when human software developers are involved in the software development process. We outline a model, “Coat Hanger”, for theorizing about development practices. The model focuses on the intended rationale for the actual realization and resulting impacts of using particular practices in varying contexts. To illustrate the use of the model, we have studied recent practice-oriented articles in the journal Science of Computer Programming. A survey of articles in the journal between 2010 and 2013 showed that out of 371 articles, only four studied software development in professional organizations with actual software practitioners as informants. The Coat Hanger model was then used to identify the theoretical strengths and weaknesses of these four practice descriptions. The analysis is used as the basis to declare the potential of our model as a conceptual aid for more structured theorizing about software development practices. The contribution of the model is the introduction of a concretization of how theorizing can be done through reflection-in-action, instead of regarding research on software practices plainly from the prevailing viewpoint of technical rationality.

Managing Sustainability with Eco-Business Intelligence Instruments

Abstract In response to increasing concerns of society about environmental degradation and increasing demands for a transition to a more sustainable society, the business companies are increasingly active in aligning their processes and services with a sustainability agenda. Production, distribution and supply of goods and services require material and energy consumption, having an impact on natural resources both quantitatively and qualitatively, generating waste, pollution and disrupting ecosystems. Ecobusiness intelligence is the capacity of people, processes and applications/tools to organize business information, to facilitate consistent access to them and analyse them in order to improve management decisions, for better performance management of the organizations that are increasingly pressed to synchronize their processes and services with a sustainable development agenda, through the development, testing and implementation of decision support software. This paper advances the idea that BI methods and tools have an important but as yet not well studied role to play in helping organizations implement and monitor sustainable and socially responsible business practices.

An integrated infrastructure in support of software development

This paper describes the design and the current state of implementation of an infrastructure made available to software developers within the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) to support and facilitate their daily activity. The infrastructure integrates several tools, each providing a well-identified function: project management, version control system, continuous integration, dynamic provisioning of virtual machines, efficiency improvement, knowledge base. When applicable, access to the services is based on the INFN-wide Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure. The system is being installed and progressively made available to INFN users belonging to tens of sites and laboratories and will represent a solid foundation for the software development efforts of the many experiments and projects that see the involvement of the Institute. The infrastructure will be beneficial especially for small- and medium-size collaborations, which often cannot afford the resources, in particular in terms of know-how, needed to set up such services.

Barefoot usability evaluations

Usability evaluations provide software development teams with insights on the degree to which a software application enables a user to achieve his/her goals, how fast these goals can be achieved, how easy it is to learn and how satisfactory it is in use. Although usability evaluations are crucial in the process of developing software systems with a high level of usability, their use is still limited in the context of small software development companies. Several approaches have been proposed to support software development practitioners (SWPs) in conducting usability evaluations and this paper presents two in-depth empirical studies of supporting SWPs by training them to become barefoot usability evaluators. Findings show that the SWPs after 30 hours of training obtained considerable abilities in identifying usability problems and that this approach revealed a high level of downstream utility. Results also show that the SWPs created relaxed conditions for the test users when acting as test monitors but experienced problems with making users think aloud. Considering the quality of problem descriptions, we found that the SWPs were better at providing clear and precise problem descriptions than at describing the impact, cause, user actions and providing data support for observations.