The automatic generation of translation software for graphicobjects

The authors discuss their effort to extend their translation architecture for textual, tabular, and mathematical material to include graphic objects. They begin with a brief overview of their testbed, the Chameleon Project. They analyze the feasibility of automatically generating translators in the graphics domain. They use an intermediate-form model for translation and establish criteria for the representation of the intermediate and variant forms if automatic generation is to be possible     

软件测试用例自动生成算法综述*

按照测试用例自动生成技术的不同,将测试用例自动生成算法分为随机、遗传、蚁群、粒子群四类,对上述各类算法的现状和进展进行介绍、分析和探讨。最后,对软件测试用例自动生成的研究进行了总结。     

Towards recursive block diagrams

Block diagrams have been recently successfully applied in programming safety critical control systems. This presentation investigates the interest of using recursion within this framework. First it identifies the necessary concepts for using recursion while remaining within the domain of real-time bounded memory, bounded response time systems and then it presents examples, which hopefully illustrate the interest of the approach.     

The automatic generation of load test suites and the assessment ofthe resulting software

Three automatic test case generation algorithms intended to test the resource allocation mechanisms of telecommunications software systems are introduced. Although these techniques were specifically designed for testing telecommunications software, they can be used to generate test cases for any software system that is modelable by a Markov chain provided operational profile data can either be collected or estimated. These algorithms have been used successfully to perform load testing for several real industrial software systems. Experience generating test suites for five such systems is presented. Early experience with the algorithms indicate that they are highly effective at detecting subtle faults that would have been likely to be missed if load testing had been done in the more traditional way, using hand-crafted test cases. A domain-based reliability measure is applied to systems after the load testing algorithms have been used to generate test data. Data are presented for the same five industrial telecommunications systems in order to track the reliability as a function of the degree of system degradation experienced     

Static generation of UML sequence diagrams

UML sequence diagrams are visual representations of object interactions in a system and can provide valuable information for program comprehension, debugging, maintenance, and software archeology. Sequence diagrams generated from legacy code are independent of existing documentation that may have eroded. We present a framework for static generation of UML sequence diagrams from object-oriented source code. The framework provides a query refinement system to guide the user to interesting interactions in the source code. Our technique involves constructing a hypergraph representation of the source code, traversing the hypergraph with respect to a user-defined query, and generating the corresponding set of sequence diagrams. We implemented our framework as a tool, StaticGen (supporting software: StaticGen), analyzing a corpus of 30 Android applications. We provide experimental results demonstrating the efficacy of our technique (originally appeared in the Proceedings of Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering—20th International Conference, FASE 2017, Held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2017, Uppsala, Sweden, April 22–29, 2017).

     

Automatic generation of process flow diagrams

An algorithm which automates the generation of process flow diagrams for distributed programs has been developed. The algorithm maps a graph specification to a graph diagram. The implementation of a graphics monitor uses process flow diagrams to monitor execution of distributed programs on an experimental multiprocessor system. Process states are superimposed onto process flow diagrams to enhance visualization of the execution sequence. Techniques of clustering and unclustering processes are also described.     

Small multiples Euler-time diagrams for software engineering

Over the years, software engineering has helped programmers and researchers to solve various problems, develop a product, within a particular time-frame whilst making the solution for an organisation. To make the solution effective and efficient, one of the problem that needs to be addressed is “which module in the software development has performed well or under-performed over a period of time and identify set relationships over time?”. Identifying and visualising set relationships in a software development is an interesting challenge and researchers have not considered a tool to monitor set relations evolving over time. In this paper, we considered a case study from the Alpha Technologies, India, who is constantly trying to understand set relationships and comparisons between various functionalities/modules in agile methodologies that are affected over a period of time. This motivated us to develop a novel decision-support visual method to generate small multiples Euler-time diagram, a set visualisation represented in small multiples over time. The tool is developed using data-driven documents (D3) and Google developing tool kit. The domain expert evaluation helped us get insight and how the tool can be enhanced considering various features based on the organisation requirements.     

Reviewing software diagrams: a cognitive study

Reviews and inspections of software artifacts throughout the development life cycle are effective techniques for identifying defects and improving software quality. While review methods for text-based artifacts (e.g., code) are well understood, very little guidance is available for performing reviews of software diagrams, which are rapidly becoming the dominant form of software specification and design. Drawing upon human cognitive theory, we study how 12 experienced software developers perform individual reviews on a software design containing two types of diagrams: entity-relationship diagrams and data flow diagrams. Verbal protocol methods are employed to describe and analyze defect search patterns among the software artifacts, both text and diagrams, within the design. Results indicate that search patterns that rapidly switch between the two design diagrams are the most effective. These findings support the cognitive theory thesis that how an individual processes information impacts processing success. We conclude with specific recommendations for improving the practice of reviewing software diagrams.     

海军舰艇作战系统通用测试环境仿真软件及自动生成工具

在探讨传统软件测试方法遇到的困境及其局限性基础上,有针对性地研究软件测试环境仿真技术。描述了通用测试环境仿真软件的应用架构,介绍了通用测试环境仿真软件自动生成的实现途径和具体方法。充分的实践证明,舰艇作战系统通用测试环境仿真软件自动生成工具功能完善,性能稳定可靠,具有较好的可扩展属性。     

Towards automatic tweet generation: A comparative study from the text summarization perspective in the journalism genre

In recent years, Twitter has become one of the most important microblogging services of the Web 2.0. Among the possible uses it allows, it can be employed for communicating and broadcasting information in real time. The goal of this research is to analyze the task of automatic tweet generation from a text summarization perspective in the context of the journalism genre. To achieve this, different state-of-the-art summarizers are selected and employed for producing multi-lingual tweets in two languages (English and Spanish). A wide experimental framework is proposed, comprising the creation of a new corpus, the generation of the automatic tweets, and their assessment through a quantitative and a qualitative evaluation, where informativeness, indicativeness and interest are key criteria that should be ensured in the proposed context.From the results obtained, it was observed that although the original tweets were considered as model tweets with respect to their informativeness, they were not among the most interesting ones from a human viewpoint. Therefore, relying only on these tweets may not be the ideal way to communicate news through Twitter, especially if a more personalized and catchy way of reporting news wants to be performed. In contrast, we showed that recent text summarization techniques may be more appropriate, reflecting a balance between indicativeness and interest, even if their content was different from the tweets delivered by the news providers.     

自动化软件平台发展趋势

<正>1工业化与信息化背景1.1工业化与信息化的融合工业化是驱动经济社会发展的重要动力,而信息化已经渗透到生产管理、经济生活的各个角落,信息化与工业化的融合代表了未来经济发展的方向,是占领后危     

Towards automatic software model checking of thousands of Linux modules—a case study with Avinux

Modular software model checking of large real‐world systems is known to require extensive manual effort in environment modelling and preparing source code for model checking. Avinux is a tool chain that facilitates the automatic analysis of Linux and especially of Linux device drivers. The tool chain is implemented as a plugin for the Eclipse IDE, using the source code bounded model checker CBMC as its backend. Avinux supports a verification process for Linux that is built upon specification annotations with SLICx (an extension of the SLIC language), automatic data environment creation, source code transformation and simplification, and the invocation of the verification backend. In this paper technical details of the verification process are presented: Using Avinux on thousands of drivers from various Linux versions led to the discovery of six new errors. In these experiments, Avinux also reduced the immense overhead of manual code preprocessing that other projects incurred. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Flow: A software development environment using diagrams

The multiuser software development system FLOW uses a diagrammatic language, FLOW-DL, to represent the system under development. Once a module has been keyed in, one of three post-processors is called to generate source code in Pascal, Fortran, or Cobol. A fourth post-processor generates documentation. The system also includes a syntax-directed editor, as well as a software production data base which holds the FLOW-DL source code, interface data relating to the program modules, and control information pertaining to the state of the system under development. The package is portable; a graphics terminal is not required. Versions of the production system have been used for the past 4 years to develop a number of medium-sized software systems.     

Towards deeper co-understanding of software quality

The major problem in understanding quality concepts has been explained by the characteristic that people see it quite differently from different perspectives. In the present paper we borrow this explanation for our starting point and broaden the consideration of software quality from the implementation-oriented in the individual and organization-oriented directions. Our main hypothesis is that these ‘soft’ aspects give us a deeper co-understanding of software quality. We proceed with three hermeneutic cycles such that after an introduction to five perspectives we analyse them through Kolb's experiential learning theory and finally deepen the analysis through the team and organization-oriented theory of Nonaka and Takeuchi.     

Automating application software generation

Many approaches have been proposed to enhance software productivity and reliability. These approaches typically fall into three categories: the engineering approach, the formal approach and the knowledge-based approach. But the optimal gain in software productivity cannot be obtained if one relies on only one of these approaches. This paper describes the work in knowledge-based software engineering conducted by the authors for the past 10 years. The final goal of the research is to develop a paradigm for software engineering which integrates the three approaches mentioned above. A knowledge-based tool which can support the whole process of software development is provided in this paper.     

Toward automatic detection of software failures

To date, no method has explicitly and cost effectively dealt with failure detection in software systems whose specifications are nondeterministic. In such systems, the specification permits multiple outputs for the same input sequence and system state. Nondeterminism in specifications is advantageous because the specification writer can avoid stating irrelevant behavior as mandatory, freeing the software designer to choose a behavioral alternative that would yield a more desirable implementation. Unfortunately, this flexibility comes at a cost to the failure detection mechanism. It must accommodate all the target system's legal behavioral alternatives and avoid favoring one of them. The article describes a hierarchical supervisor whose failure detection mechanism explicitly addresses systems with nondeterministic specifications. The supervisor, a unit separate from the target system, observes the system's external inputs and outputs and reports any failures. Its hierarchical structure results from splitting the task of identifying the behavioral alternative the target system chooses from the task of checking the details of system behavior. This structure makes it possible to efficiently trade off detection accuracy and computational cost. To evaluate their approach, the authors created a prototype supervisor and used it to supervise the execution of the control program of a small telephone exchange. Results indicate that the hierarchical supervisor can significantly reduce the computational cost of considering the target system's behavioral alternatives. However, although the supervisor's computational cost is significantly reduced, it is still higher than that for the target system     

Towards automatic generation of as-built BIM: 3D building facade modeling and material recognition from images

As-built building information model(BIM) is an urgent need of the architecture, engineering, construction and facilities management(AEC/FM) community. However, its creation procedure is still labor-intensive and far from maturity. Taking advantage of prevalence of digital cameras and the development of advanced computer vision technology, the paper proposes to reconstruct a building facade and recognize its surface materials from images taken from various points of view. These can serve as initial steps towards automatic generation of as-built BIM. Specifically, 3D point clouds are generated from multiple images using structure from motion method and then segmented into planar components, which are further recognized as different structural components through knowledge based reasoning. Windows are detected through a multilayered complementary strategy by combining detection results from every semantic layer. A novel machine learning based 3D material recognition strategy is presented. Binary classifiers are trained through support vector machines. Material type at a given 3D location is predicted by all its corresponding 2D feature points.Experimental results from three existing buildings validate the proposed system.