Formal engineering methods for software quality assurance

Conventional software engineering on the basis of informal or semi-formal methods is facing tremendous challenges in ensuring software quality.Formal methods have attempted to address these challenges by introducing mathematical notation and calculus to support formal specification,refinement,and verification in software development.     

In search for a widely applicable and accepted software quality model for software quality engineering

Software Quality Engineering is an emerging discipline that is concerned with improving the approach to software quality. It is important that this discipline be firmly rooted in a quality model satisfying its needs. In order to define the needs of this discipline, the meaning of quality is broadly defined by reviewing the literature on the subject. Software Quality Engineering needs a quality model that is usable throughout the software lifecycle and that it embraces all the perspectives of quality. The goal of this paper is to propose the characteristics of a quality model suitable for such a purpose, through the comparative evaluation of existing quality models and their respective support for Software Quality Engineering.     

应用软件质量工程中过程度量的研究

过程度量是软件开发过程中实施软件质量保证(SQA)的一个重要课题。文章对过程度量的概念进行了一些介绍,讨论了在开发应用软件过程中常用的几种度量,可供软件开发部门在实践SQA时参考。     

Reversibility in software engineering

Part of the attraction of object technology is its ability to remove or lower the walls that have traditionally stood between various aspects of software construction-analysis, design, implementation, maintenance. A good OO process should be reversible, allowing developers to move between tasks backward as well as forward, with many benefits for the quality of the process and the product. The author explains the concept     

Advances in software engineering

Software is the key technology in applications as diverse as accounting, hospital management, aviation, and nuclear power. Application advances in different domains such as these-each with different requirements-have propelled software development from small batch programs to large, real-time programs with multimedia capabilities. To cope, software's enabling technologies have undergone tremendous improvement in hardware, communications, operating systems, compilers, databases, programming languages, and user interfaces, among others. In turn, those improvements have fueled even more advanced applications. Improvements in VLSI technology and multimedia, for example, have resulted in faster, more compact computers that significantly widened the range of software applications. Database and user interface enhancements, on the other hand, have spawned more interactive and collaborative development environments. Such changes have a ripple effect on software development processes as well as on software techniques and tools. In this article, we highlight software development's crucial methods and techniques of the past 30 years     

Requirements engineering in software product line engineering

Many attempts have been made to increase the productivity and quality of software products based on software reuse. Software product line practice is one such approach, one that focuses on developing a family of products which have a majority of features in common. Hence, there are numerous requirements that are common across the family, but others are unique to individual products. Traditional requirements engineering methods were conceived to deal with single product requirements and are usually not flexible enough to address the needs arising from reusing requirements for a family of products. There is also the additional burden of correctly identifying and engineering both product-line-wide requirements and product-specific requirements as well as evolving them. Therefore, in this special issue, we want to highlight the importance and the role of requirements engineering for product line development as well as to provide insights into the state of the art in the field.     

Management-aided software engineering

Two veteran software managers examine some of today's management best practices for signs of what might become generally accepted practice in the near future. They present these practices from a small sample of healthy organizations. In addition, they envision how software management might mature over the next few decades to produce a new generation of best practices     

From knowledge based software engineering to knowware based software engineering

The first part of this paper reviews our efforts on knowledge-based software engineering, namely PROMIS, started from 1990s. The key point of PROMIS is to generate applications automatically based on domain knowledge as well as software knowledge. That is featured by separating the development of domain knowledge from the development of software. But in PROMIS, we did not find an appropriate representation for the domain knowledge. Fortunately, in our recent work, we found such a carrier for knowledge modules, i.e. knowware. Knowware is a commercialized form of domain knowledge. This paper briefly introduces the basic definitions of knowware, knowledge middleware and knowware engineering. Three life circle models of knowware engineering and the design of corresponding knowware implementations are given. Finally we discuss application system automatic generation and domain knowledge modeling on the J2EE platform, which combines the techniques of PROMIS, knowware and J2EE, and the development and deployment framework, i.e. PROMIS/KW＊＊.     

Search-based software engineering

This paper claims that a new field of software engineering research and practice is emerging: search-based software engineering. The paper argues that software engineering is ideal for the application of metaheuristic search techniques, such as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing and tabu search. Such search-based techniques could provide solutions to the difficult problems of balancing competing (and some times inconsistent) constraints and may suggest ways of finding acceptable solutions in situations where perfect solutions are either theoretically impossible or practically infeasible.In order to develop the field of search-based software engineering, a reformulation of classic software engineering problems as search problems is required. The paper briefly sets out key ingredients for successful reformulation and evaluation criteria for search-based software engineering.     

软件复用经济学模型比较分析

说明了软件复用经济学模型的主要目的和任务,对目前国际上提出的12个模型进行了比较分析。将复用经济学模型划分为两类：成本收益模型和投资分析模型,并举例介绍了相关类型的模型。对分析的所有模型列表比较,分析了它们的适用情况和异同点,并对领域存在的问题进行了讨论。     

The economics of software process improvement

Software process improvement is gaining momentum throughout the software industry. Many cities now have nonprofit SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) groups. In a visible sign that process improvement is now a mainstream technology, SPIN's national conference in Boston last spring drew several thousand attendees. Another sign is the frequency of journal articles devoted to process improvement. However, as often happens with software, process improvement articles tend to be theoretical. Comparatively little solid, empirical data is being published on three important topics: what does it cost to improve software processes? How long will it take to make tangible improvements? What kind of value can be expected in terms of better quality, productivity, or user satisfaction? The paper condenses some of my findings, which are based on studies of leading software producers in the United States, Europe, South America, and the Pacific Rim     

Unifying software engineering and systems engineering

The author describes CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) and the emerging project methods which demonstrate the opportunities for process improvement gains open to organizations. The organization that changes from separated software and system engineering processes to a more unified approach will find itself far more suited to developing dynamically changing, software-intensive systems. Culture change is never easy, but the alternative is even less palatable