An industrial case study in reconstructing requirements views

Requirements views, such as coverage and status views, are an important asset for monitoring and managing software development projects. We have developed a method that automates the process of reconstructing these views, and we have built a tool, ReqAnalyst, that supports this method. This paper presents an investigation as to which extent requirements views can be automatically generated in order to monitor requirements in industrial practice. The paper focuses on monitoring the requirements in test categories and test cases. In order to retrieve the necessary data, an information retrieval technique, called Latent Semantic Indexing, was used. The method was applied in an industrial study. A number of requirements views were defined and experiments were carried out with different reconstruction settings for generating these views. Finally, we explored how these views can help the developers during the software development process.

The MINI software factory: Development of kernel mechanisms around process modeling and software bus techniques

The global evolution of software development leads to large projects involving many people. Organizing these people is a big challenge for software engineering. The ESF (Eureka Software Factory) program, funded by a number of European countries, relies on the idea of a software factory for improving the productivity and the quality of software development. The MINI is a software factory prototype. Based on the principles and the architecture defined by the ESF project, the MINI factory intends to demonstrate the cooperation of users involved in the management, production, and support of software development. Built from a set of heterogeneous and dissimilar components or tools, the MINI factory provides an integrated and coherent environment available for each actor of the software production. The MINI factory allows us to look at the users' daily activities within the context of a software factory, as well as at the integration mechanisms used to build such an environment.     

Knowledge Management for Building Learning Software Organizations

Due to the steadily increasing demands of the market, strategic management of knowledge assets, or learning organizations, are becoming a must in industrial software development. This paper presents work done at Fraunhofer IESE, where learning organizations for software development organizations are being developed and transferred into industrial practice. It describes how learning organizations for the software domain can be built upon both mature approaches from Software Engineering like the experience factory model and industrial strength technology from knowledge management. A system to support the learning software organization is sketched and experiences regarding the implementation of this system and learning software organizations in general are presented.     

Empirical evaluation of optimization algorithms when used in goal-oriented automated test data generation techniques

Software testing is an essential process in software development. Software testing is very costly, often consuming half the financial resources assigned to a project. The most laborious part of software testing is the generation of test-data. Currently, this process is principally a manual process. Hence, the automation of test-data generation can significantly cut the total cost of software testing and the software development cycle in general. A number of automated test-data generation approaches have already been explored. This paper highlights the goal-oriented approach as a promising approach to devise automated test-data generators. A range of optimization techniques can be used within these goal-oriented test-data generators, and their respective characteristics, when applied to these situations remain relatively unexplored. Therefore, in this paper, a comparative study about the effectiveness of the most commonly used optimization techniques is conducted.

基于大规模工程实践的软件工程专业建设的探索与创新

工程实践是软件工程专业建设十分重要的环节,如何通过与企业深入合作,在实战中培养从事大规模软件工程的软件人才,是建设软件工程专业的院校都需要面临的问题。本文介绍了浙江大学软件工程专业以大规模国际化产学研合作项目为基础,在教育体系、课程体系、工程实践体系和校企合作生态环境建设等方面进行的深入探索和创新。十余年的实践效果表明,探索取得了良好的建设成效。     

Achieving synergy in collaborative education

Professional software engineering continues to face problems that involve large-scale (complex) software systems development. Such efforts typically require team collaboration over months, possibly years. Once implemented, the system must be maintained for sometimes decades. This development and maintenance life cycle requires not only technical knowledge and skills in software development, but also the knowledge and skills associated with software process. We believe the traditional computer science curriculum fails to consider this spectrum of needs. We also believe, however, that software engineering must use certain elements of the core knowledge and skills taught by computer scientists as its foundation. We describe lessons learned from the 10-year collaboration between Monmouth University and the Software Engineering Center of the US Army's CECOM (Communications Electronics Command). The center recruits electrical engineering and computer science graduates from academic institutions in the geographic regions surrounding its various installations to be part of its intern program; Monmouth University, in turn, incorporates the demands of the intern program in its Master of Science in software engineering curriculum     

可复用技术在工业控制系统开发中的研究

用于工业控制系统开发的每种开发工具都有自己的优势和不足,本文结合作者在多个课题中积累的经验,讨论了当前工业控制系统开发中常用开发工具间代码重用的方法.通过可复用技术,解决了工业控制系统开发中窗体重用问题,充分发挥了各种开发工具在软件设计中的优势,提高了软件开发的生产率,降低了系统开发难度和成本.缩短了开发周期.同时,由于重用部分大都经过严格的质量认证,并在实际运行环境中得到了检验.因此,可复用技术有助于改善软件质量,提高软件的灵活性和标准化程度,有利于工业控制系统的升级与维护.通过多个项目的开发发现,可复用技术在实际应用中具有很大价值.最后.给出了可复用技术的具体实例.     

Prototyping in industrial software projects-bridging the gapbetween theory and practice

Prototyping, a method and technique frequently used in many engineering disciplines, has been adopted as a technique in software engineering to improve the calculation of new projects involving risks. However, there has so far been a lack of documented experience with the use of prototyping in industrial software production. The paper tries to close this gap. First, we introduce central prototyping concepts and terminology. We also present five industrial software projects in which explicit use was made of prototyping. Based on our analysis of these projects we present the resulting conclusions: prototyping means more than rapidly developing user interfaces; prototyping is a central part of a development strategy; prototyping means end user involvement; finding the right mixture of prototypes improves the development process     

Applying and combining three different aspect Mining Techniques

Understanding a software system at source-code level requires understanding the different concerns that it addresses, which in turn requires a way to identify these concerns in the source code. Whereas some concerns are explicitly represented by program entities (like classes, methods and variables) and thus are easy to identify, crosscutting concerns are not captured by a single program entity but are scattered over many program entities and are tangled with the other concerns. Because of their crosscutting nature, such crosscutting concerns are difficult to identify, and reduce the understandability of the system as a whole. In this paper, we report on a combined experiment in which we try to identify crosscutting concerns in the JHotDraw framework automatically. We first apply three independently developed aspect mining techniques to JHotDraw and evaluate and compare their results. Based on this analysis, we present three interesting combinations of these three techniques, and show how these combinations provide a more complete coverage of the detected concerns as compared to the original techniques individually. Our results are a first step towards improving the understandability of a system that contains crosscutting concerns, and can be used as a basis for refactoring the identified crosscutting concerns into aspects. M. Ceccato is a PhD student in ITC-irst in Trento, Italy. He received his degree in Software Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2003. The master thesis concerned the Re-engineering of an existing big-sized data warehouse application. The project was developed in the Information Technology department in Alcoa Servizi. His research interests are on source code analysis and manipulation, especially for the the migration of object-oriented code to aspect-oriented programming. He collaborates with King’s College London and Loyola College in Maryland on the automatic support for this migration process. He has been involved in the organization and in the program committee of a number of AOP-related events, such as Late Workshop, in Chicago (2005) and in Bonn, Germany (2006), held within the major Aspect Oriented Programming conference (AOSD) and 3rd European Workshop on Aspects in Software (EWAS’06) in Enschede, The Netherlands. Marius Marin is a Ph.D. researcher in the Software Evolution Reseach Laboratory at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. He was granted an engineering degree by the Technical University of Civil Engineering, Bucharest, in 2000, and Licentiate in Economic Computer Science from the Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, in 2002. Before starting his Ph.D. studies, he worked as a software engineer in industry. His main research interests are in the area of reverse engineering, software modularization and modeling, and aspect-oriented software development. He is the main author of the publicly available aspect mining tool FINT and he publishes at international conferences in the aforementioned topics. He has been involved in program- and organizing committees of several workshops related to aspect mining. Kim Mens obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, on “architectural conformance checking,” for which he used a declarative meta-programming approach. After his Ph.D. he became a full-time professor (chargé de cours) at the Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve (UCL). In addition to his current interest in logic meta-programming and intensional views, Kim Mens is one of the originators of the reuse contracts technique for automatically detecting conflicts in evolving software. He has been formally involved in several research networks related to software evolution. He has a strong interest in object-oriented and aspect-oriented software development and has actively participated in the organization of several workshops and conferences on those topics. He combines all these different research interests under the common denominator of co-evolution (between source code and earlier life-cycle software artifacts). Other research topics that fit this common theme and in which he is interested are software architecture, software maintenance, reverse engineering, software transformation, software restructuring and renovation, aspect mining and evolution of aspect programs. L. Moonen is an assistant professor in the Software Evolution Research Lab at Delft University of Technology and a researcher at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), the Netherlands. His research interests are the design and development of advanced program analysis tools and techniques that support development, maintenance and evolution of large software systems. Concrete topics include the reverse engineering and exploration of views on software systems and their use for understanding and assessing software quality attributes such as evolvability, reliability and security. Dr. Moonen received an MSc (cum laude, Computer Science, 1996) and PhD (Computer Science, 2002) from the University of Amsterdam. He is one of the founders of the Software Improvement Group, a company that specializes in tools and consultancy to help organizations solve their legacy problems. He publishes regularly at, and serves on organizing-, steering- and program committees of, international workshops and conferences on reverse engineering (WCRE), source code analysis (SCAM), software maintenance (ICSM), program understanding (ICPC), reengineering (CSMR), aspect mining (Dagstuhl 06302, TEAM) and software security (CoBaSSA). Paolo Tonella is a senior researcher at ITC-irst, Trento, Italy. He received his laurea degree cum laude in Electronic Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 1992, and his Ph.D. degree in Software Engineering from the same University, in 1999, with the thesis “Code Analysis in Support to Software Maintenance.” Since 1994 he has been a full time researcher of the Software Engineering group at ITC-irst. He participated in several industrial and European Community projects on software analysis and testing. He is the author of “Reverse Engineering of Object Oriented Code,” Springer, 2005. His current research interests include reverse engineering, aspect oriented programming, empirical studies, Web applications and testing. Tom Tourwé obtained the degree of Licentiate in Computer Science in 1997 and Ph.D. in Science in 2002 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is currently associated to the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he works as a post- doctoral researcher in the Ideals project. His main research interests lie in the broad area of software engineering, and include aspect-oriented software evolution and re-engineering in particular. He published several peer-reviewed articles on these topics in international journals and conferences, and organised a number of workshops on those themes.     

Surf, turf, and above the Earth [robotics education]

The Santa Clara University School of Engineering conducts a low-cost, aggressive, integrative educational program focused on developing intelligent robotic systems. The centerpiece of this program is a set of yearly undergraduate design projects in which teams of senior students completely design, fabricate, test, operate, and manage high quality robotic systems. These systems include spacecraft, underwater vehicles, terrestrial rovers, airships, telescopes, and industrial robots.     

An empirical study of predicting software faults with case-based reasoning

The resources allocated for software quality assurance and improvement have not increased with the ever-increasing need for better software quality. A targeted software quality inspection can detect faulty modules and reduce the number of faults occurring during operations. We present a software fault prediction modeling approach with case-based reasoning (CBR), a part of the computational intelligence field focusing on automated reasoning processes. A CBR system functions as a software fault prediction model by quantifying, for a module under development, the expected number of faults based on similar modules that were previously developed. Such a system is composed of a similarity function, the number of nearest neighbor cases used for fault prediction, and a solution algorithm. The selection of a particular similarity function and solution algorithm may affect the performance accuracy of a CBR-based software fault prediction system. This paper presents an empirical study investigating the effects of using three different similarity functions and two different solution algorithms on the prediction accuracy of our CBR system. The influence of varying the number of nearest neighbor cases on the performance accuracy is also explored. Moreover, the benefits of using metric-selection procedures for our CBR system is also evaluated. Case studies of a large legacy telecommunications system are used for our analysis. It is observed that the CBR system using the Mahalanobis distance similarity function and the inverse distance weighted solution algorithm yielded the best fault prediction. In addition, the CBR models have better performance than models based on multiple linear regression. Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar is a professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Florida Atlantic University and the Director of the Empirical Software Engineering Laboratory. His research interests are in software engineering, software metrics, software reliability and quality engineering, computational intelligence, computer performance evaluation, data mining, and statistical modeling. He has published more than 200 refereed papers in these areas. He has been a principal investigator and project leader in a number of projects with industry, government, and other research-sponsoring agencies. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the IEEE Computer Society, and IEEE Reliability Society. He served as the general chair of the 1999 International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE’99), and the general chair of the 2001 International Conference on Engineering of Computer Based Systems. Also, he has served on technical program committees of various international conferences, symposia, and workshops. He has served as North American editor of the Software Quality Journal, and is on the editorial boards of the journals Empirical Software Engineering, Software Quality, and Fuzzy Systems. Naeem Seliya received the M.S. degree in Computer Science from Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA, in 2001. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Florida Atlantic University. His research interests include software engineering, computational intelligence, data mining, software measurement, software reliability and quality engineering, software architecture, computer data security, and network intrusion detection. He is a student member of the IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery.     

Timelink—A practical work study management system

The principal function of industrial engineering is to determine and optimise, implement, measure and maintain the procedures to be followed in manufacturing. Major problems arise in handling the volume of information originated in executing this function, resulting in skilled industrial engineers being involved in low-grade clerical activities and being subjected to interruption from lay enquirers.Building on experience of discrete computer-aided industrial engineering applications software, TIMELINK was introduced in 1980 and greatly expanded in 1981 to give a computer-aided Integrated Industrial Engineering System which is commercially available and can be implemented on a wide range of mini and mainframe computers.TIMELINK Integrated Industrial Engineering System is a fully interactive system composed of interconnected application software modules, each applying a conventional industrial engineering technique or function including compiling and applying work measurement standard data, analytical work study (MTM-2), estimating, standards application, manual study storage and routing generation. A central access facility allows enquiries to be made of the industrial engineering database created and for the automatic transfer of data to other computer systems, including other TIMELINK installations for networking purposes.TIMELINK is establishing itself as a multi-function system, combining technical computer-aided industrial engineering applicatios with an industrial engineering database and information distribution and enquiry facilities, giving considerable technical and managerial benefits.     

项目驱动的软件人才培养方案(英文)

The education of software talent is the basis of the development of China's software industry.This article demonstrates the software training goals for undergraduate students in the School of Software Engineering of Chongqing University,and put forwards the education program of the software talent based on project-driven.The program aims to cultivate software talents of "compound,application-oriented,international" characteristics to meet the development of China's software industry through a series of integrated courses on project practice and training.     

The Efficiency of Critical Slicing in Fault Localization

In software testing, developing effective debugging strategies is important to guarantee the reliability of software under testing. A heuristic technique is to cause failure and therefore expose faults. Based on this approach mutation testing has been found very useful technique in detecting faults. However, it suffers from two problems with successfully testing programs: (1) requires extensive computing resources and (2) puts heavy demand on human resources. Later, empirical observations suggest that critical slicing based on Statement Deletion (Sdl) mutation operator has been found the most effective technique in reducing effort and the required computing resources in locating the program faults. The second problem of mutation testing may be solved by automating the program testing with the help of software tools. Our study focuses on determining the effectiveness of the critical slicing technique with the help of the Mothra Mutation Testing System in detecting program faults. This paper presents the results showing the performance of Mothra Mutation Testing System through conducting critical slicing testing on a selected suite of programs. Zuhoor Abdullah Al-Khanjari is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Sultan Qaboos University, Sultanate of Oman. She received her BSc in mathematics and computing from Sultan Qaboos University, MSc and PhD in Computer Science (Software Engineering) from the University of Liverpool, UK. Her research interests include software testing, database management, e-learning, human-computer interaction, programming languages, intelligent search engines, and web data mining and development. ~Currently, she is the coordinator of the software engineering research group in the Department of Computer Science, College of Science, Sultan Qaboos University. She is also coordinating a program to develop e-learning based undergraduate teaching in the Department of Computer Science. Currently she is holding the position of assistant dean for postgraduate studies and research in the College of Science, Sultan Qaboos University, Sultanate of Oman. Martin Woodward is a Senior Fellow in the Computer Science Department at the University of Liverpool in the UK. After obtaining BSc and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from the University of Nottingham, he was employed by the University of Oxford as a Research Assistant on secondment to the UK Atomic Energy Authority at the Culham Laboratory. He has been at the University of Liverpool for many years and initially worked on the so-called ‘Testbed’ project, helping to develop automated tools for software testing which are now marketed successfully by a commercial organisation. His research interests include software testing techniques, the relationship between formal methods and testing, and software visualisation. He has served as Editor of the journal ‘Software Testing, Verification and Reliability’ for the past thirteen years. Haider Ramadhan is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Sultan Qaboos University. He received his BS and MS in Computer Science from University of North Carolina, and the PhD in Computer Science and AI from Sussex University. His research interests include visualization of software, systems, and process, system engineering, human-computer interaction, intelligent search engines, and Web data mining and development. Currently, he is the chairman of the Computer Science Department, College of Science, Sultan Qaboos University, Sultanate of Oman. Swamy Kutti (N. S. Kutti) is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Sultan Qaboos University. He received his B.E. in Electronics Engineering from the University of Madras, M.E. in Communication Engineering from Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore), and the MSc in Computer Science from Monash University (Australia) and PhD in Computer Science from Deakin University (Australia). His research interests include Real-Time Programming, Programming Languages, Program Testing and Verification, eLearning, and Distributed Operating Systems.     

计算机控制系统在工业危险废物焚烧中的应用

针对天津市工业危险废物处理厂焚烧流程，设计了计算机控制系统。该系统包括各工艺流程自动控制、在线监视、报警、联锁保护、自动生成报表等功能，对废物焚烧系统的工艺流程进行了简介，详细分析了计算机控制系统的软硬件构成及生产过程中的各个自动控制系统。两年多的实践表明，该系统满足实际工艺要求，是可靠实用的。     

System requirements-OSS components: matching and mismatch resolution practices – an empirical study

Developing systems by integrating Open Source Software (OSS) is increasingly gaining importance in the software industry. Although the literature claims that this approach highly impacts Requirements Engineering (RE) practices, there is a lack of empirical evidence to demonstrate this statement. To explore and understand problems and challenges of current system requirement–OSS component matching and mismatches resolution practices in software development projects that integrate one or more OSS components into their software products. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with 25 respondents that have performed RE activities in software development projects that integrate OSS components in 25 different software development companies in Spain, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The study uncovers 15 observations regarding system requirements-OSS components matching and mismatch resolution practices used in industrial projects that integrate OSS components. The assessed projects focused mainly on pre-release stages of software applications that integrate OSS components in an opportunistic way. The results also provide details of a set of previously unexplored scenarios when solving system requirement–OSS component mismatches; and clarify some challenges and related problems. For instance, although licensing issues and the potential changes in OSS components by their corresponding communities and/or changes in system requirements have been greatly discussed in the RE literature as problems for OSS component integration, they did not appear to be relevant in our assessed projects. Instead, practitioners highlighted the problem of getting suitable OSS component documentation/information.     

A knowledge-based tool for designing cyber physical production systems

Changing production systems and product requirements can trace their origin in volatile customer behaviour and evolving product requirements. This dynamic nature of customer requirements has been described as a constantly moving target, thus presenting a significant challenge for several aspects of product development. To deal with this constant and sometimes unpredictable product evolution, cyber physical production systems (CPPS) that employ condition monitoring, self-awareness and reconfigurability principles, have to be designed and implemented. This research contributes a CPPS design approach that proactively provides the required CPPS design knowledge. This approach aims to minimise or avoids future consequences and disruptions on the CPPS. This knowledge needs to be provided at the right time whilst not being intrusive to the production system designer’s cognitive activity. To effectively deal with the complexity of the cyber physical production system design activity with a manual method would lead to a time consuming, and complex support tool which is hard to implement, and difficult to use. The CPPS design approach has therefore been implemented in a prototype digital factory tool. This paper describes in detail the system requirements and system architecture for this tool. In order to establish the effectiveness of the proposed approach for designing cyber physical production systems, the prototype digital factory tool has been evaluated with a case study and a number of semi-structured interviews with both industrial and scientific stakeholders. The encouraging results obtained from this research evaluation have shown that such an approach for supporting the CPPS design activity makes stakeholders aware of their decision consequences and is useful in practice. This result can lead the way for the development and integration of such knowledge-based decision-making approaches within state-of-the-art digital factory and Computer Aided Engineering Design (CAED) tools.     

An Examination of Determinants of Software Testing and Project Management Effort

Software estimation research has primarily focused on software effort involved in direct software development. As more and more organizations buy instead of building software, more effort is spent on software testing and project management. In this empirical study, the effect of program duration, computer platform, and software development tool (SDT) on program testing effort and project management effort is studied. The study results point to program duration and software tool as significant determinants of testing and management effort. Computer platform, however, does not have an effect on testing and management effort. Furthermore, the mean testing effort for third generation (3G) development environment was significantly higher than the mean testing effort for fourth generation (4G) environments that used IDE. In addition, the management effort for 4G environment projects without the use of IDE was lower than nonprogramming report generation projects.     

A Framework for Design Tradeoffs

Designs almost always require tradeoffs between competing design choices to meet system requirements. We present a framework for evaluating design choices with respect to meeting competing requirements. Specifically, we develop a model to estimate the performance of a UML design subject to changing levels of security and fault-tolerance. This analysis gives us a way to identify design solutions that are infeasible. Multi-criteria decision making techniques are applied to evaluate the remaining feasible alternatives. The method is illustrated with two examples: a small sensor network and a system for controlling traffic lights. Dr. Anneliese Amschler Andrews is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Denver. Before that she was the Huie Rogers Endowed Chair in Software Engineering at Washington State University. Dr. Andrews is the author of a text book and over 130 articles in the area of Software Engineering, particularly software testing and maintenance. Dr. Andrews holds an MS and PhD from Duke University and a Dipl.-Inf. from the Technical University of Karlsruhe. She served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. She has also served on several other editorial boards including the IEEE Transactions on Reliability, the Empirical Software Engineering Journal, the Software Quality Journal, the Journal of Information Science and Technology, and the Journal of Software Maintenance. She was Director of the Colorado Advanced Software Institute from 1995 to 2002. CASI's mission was to support technology transfer research related to software through collaborations between industry and academia. Ed Mancebo studied software engineering at Milwaukee School of Engineering and computer science at Washington State University. His masters thesis explored applying systematic decision making methods to software engineering problems. He is currently a software developer at Amazon.com. Dr. Per Runeson is a professor in software engineering at Lund University, Sweden. His research interests include methods to facilitate, measure and manage aspects of software quality. He received a PhD from Lund University in 1998 and has industrial experience as a consulting expert. He is a member of the editorial board of Empirical Software Engineering and several program committees, and currently has a senior researcher position funded by the Swedish Research Council. Robert France is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Colorado State University. His research interests are in the area of Software Engineering, in particular formal specification techniques, software modeling techniques, design patterns, and domain-specific modeling languages. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal on Software and System Modeling (SoSyM), and is a Steering Committee member and past Steering Committee Chair of the MoDELS/UML conference series. He was also a member of the revision task forces for the UML 1.x standards.     

Software factory principles, architecture, and experiments

The software factory concept which symbolizes a desired paradigm shift from labor-intensive software production to a more capital-intensive style in which substantial investments can be made at an acceptable risk level is discussed. Most traditional software environments emphasize support for producing code and associated documents. In a software factory, the focus shifts to coordinating information between producers and consumers so that the right person always has the right information at the right time. A CASE environment architecture and two factory experiments, one a prototype software factory environment for real-time system development, and the other a factory for exploring information logistics, are reviewed