What can software engineers learn from manufacturing to improve software process and product?

The purpose of this paper is to provide the software engineer with tools from the field of manufacturing as an aid to improving software process and product quality. Process involves classical manufacturing methods, such as statistical quality control applied to product testing, which is designed to monitor and correct the process when the process yields product quality that fails to meet specifications. Product quality is measured by metrics, such as failure count occurring on software during testing. When the process and product quality are out of control, we show what remedial action to take to bring both the process and product under control. NASA Space Shuttle failure data are used to illustrate the process methods.     

Mapping software: Are we nearing standardization?

As software technologies advance, the software community uses the newest and most powerful technology and associated notations. However, mapping software with a set of notations that would survive the test of time is becoming increasingly difficult. A survey of current methodologies indicates that half‐lives of various software notations are short. The dependence of software notations on programming languages and environment specific methodologies often makes these notations obsolete. In this paper, development of a standard set of software notations that is independent of programming paradigms, yet extensible enough to accommodate programming needs, is proposed. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

What is software?

This paper suggests that there may be other types of software besides computer software. The paper identifies parallels between computer software and such other societal artifacts as laws, processes, recipes, and instructions (e.g. for driving and kitbuilding), and suggests that there are similar parallels in the ways in which these artifacts are built and evolved. The paper suggests that technologies for supporting the automation of computer software development and evolution might facilitate work in these other domains. It also suggests that successful approaches in these other domains could have useful and important application to the domain of computer software. It is further suggested that it might be important for discussions such as these to lead to a deeper understanding of the nature of “software”.     

Are test cases needed? Replicated comparison between exploratory and test-case-based software testing

Manual software testing is a widely practiced verification and validation method that is unlikely to fade away despite the advances in test automation. In the domain of manual testing, many practitioners advocate exploratory testing (ET), i.e., creative, experience-based testing without predesigned test cases, and they claim that it is more efficient than testing with detailed test cases. This paper reports a replicated experiment comparing effectiveness, efficiency, and perceived differences between ET and test-case-based testing (TCT) using 51 students as subjects, who performed manual functional testing on the jEdit text editor. Our results confirm the findings of the original study: 1) there is no difference in the defect detection effectiveness between ET and TCT, 2) ET is more efficient by requiring less design effort, and 3) TCT produces more false-positive defect reports than ET. Based on the small differences in the experimental design, we also put forward a hypothesis that the effectiveness of the TCT approach would suffer more than ET from time pressure. We also found that both approaches had distinctive issues: in TCT, the problems were related to correct abstraction levels of test cases, and the problems in ET were related to test design and logging of the test execution and results. Finally, we recognize that TCT has other benefits over ET in managing and controlling testing in large organizations.     

What's ahead for embedded software?

Once deemed too small and retro for research, embedded software has grown complex and pervasive enough to attract the attention of computer scientists. There are many research questions, but most center around one issue: how to reconcile a set of domain-specific requirements with the demands of interaction in the physical world. How do you adapt software abstractions designed merely to transform data to meet requirements like real-time constraints, concurrency, and stringent safety considerations? The answer to this question has given rise to some promising research angles, including novel ways to deal with concurrency and real time and methods for augmenting component interfaces to promote safety and adaptability     

Is the Church-Turing thesis true?

The Church-Turing thesis makes a bold claim about the theoretical limits to computation. It is based upon independent analyses of the general notion of an effective procedure proposed by Alan Turing and Alonzo Church in the 1930's. As originally construed, the thesis applied only to the number theoretic functions; it amounted to the claim that there were no number theoretic functions which couldn't be computed by a Turing machine but could be computed by means of some other kind of effective procedure. Since that time, however, other interpretations of the thesis have appeared in the literature. In this paper I identify three domains of application which have been claimed for the thesis: (1) the number theoretic functions; (2) all functions; (3) mental and/or physical phenomena. Subsequently, I provide an analysis of our intuitive concept of a procedure which, unlike Turing's, is based upon ordinary, everyday procedures such as recipes, directions and methods; I call them mundane procedures. I argue that mundane procedures can be said to be effective in the same sense in which Turing machine procedures can be said to be effective. I also argue that mundane procedures differ from Turing machine procedures in a fundamental way, viz., the former, but not the latter, generate causal processes. I apply my analysis to all three of the above mentioned interpretations of the Church-Turing thesis, arguing that the thesis is (i) clearly false under interpretation (3), (ii) false in at least some possible worlds (perhaps even in the actual world) under interpretation (2), and (iii) very much open to question under interpretation (1).     

What makes measuring software so hard?

We often hear that it is difficult to get software measurement into practice. Traditional measurement addresses the decisions that support increased quality, increased programmer productivity, and reduced costs: key elements for organizations strategically focused on operational excellence. But what if the organization's highest priority isn't operational excellence? The article shows that such organizations have different measurement needs and presents ideas on how to address those needs, thereby making measurement more appealing. While the disparity discussed here involves measurement, it applies to all areas of software process improvement. For example, the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model for Software is silent on two of the three strategies of high-performing organizations: customer intimacy and product innovation. Like traditional measurement, the Capability Maturity Model applies only to organizations wanting to be operationally excellent     

Can you trust software capability evaluations?

In the early 1989s, the US Department of Defense suffered many monetary, schedule, and performance costs because it misjudged the ability of its contractors to develop software. Recognizing that this was less a reflection on the organizations themselves than on the general immaturity of the software industry, the DoD helped create the Software Engineering Institute with the aim of studying ways to help the software industry grow responsibly. In 1987, the SEI established the software capability evaluation (SCE) as a formal way to determine an organization's software process maturity framework and generally measure its software development competence. SCEs are widely used to determine an organization's Capability Maturity Model rating, but their results can be misleading. The authors reveal how certain practices distort results and waste time and money, through intentional contractor vagueness and detail, inappropriate sample projects, and staff coaching. They go on to suggest ways to improve the process     

What do software architects really do?

To be successful, a software architect—or a software architecture team, collectively—must strike a delicate balance between an external focus—both outwards: Listening to customers, users, watching technology, developing a long-term vision, and inwards: driving the development teams—and an internal, reflective focus: spending time to make the right design choices, validating them, and documenting them. Teams that stray too far away from this metastable equilibrium fall into some traps that we describe as antipatterns of software architecture teams.     

How healthy are software engineering conferences?

In this article we study the health of software engineering conferences by means of a suite of metrics created for this purpose. The metrics measure stability of the community, openness to new authors, introversion, representativeness of the PC with respect to the authors' community, availability of PC candidates, and scientific prestige. Using this metrics suite, we assess the health of 11 software engineering conferences over a period of more than 10 years. In general, our findings suggest that software engineering conferences are healthy, but we observe important differences between conferences with a wide scope and those with a more narrow scope. We also find that depending on the chosen health metric, some conferences perform better than others. This knowledge may be used by prospective authors to decide in which conferences to publish, and by conference steering committees or PC chairs to assess their selection process.     

software软件

快速访问已免疫的目录；备份Word工具栏设置；DownloadRAR无法设置保存位置；成功删除Norton杀毒软件；如何去除PDF中的水印；提取Flash中的声音。     

software软件

双系统下显示器分辨率有差异 Q我电脑中安装的是Windows XP和Windows 2003的双系统,现在在Windows XP系统下设置好桌面分辨率显示是正常的,但是切换到Windows 2003后却又显示异常,每次都需要再次设置。请问这是什么原因？