Finding reusable UML sequence diagrams automatically

In general, software reuse is defined as "the process of creating software systems from existing software". Software reuse does more than improve productivity in software development; it also increases the quality of the resulting software systems because it uses validated artifacts. However, requirements reuse lacks tool support. Techniques for retrieving, adapting, and consolidating reusable requirements have received relatively little attention in comparison with all the work on software reuse. The work in this area has not made sufficient progress to date to determine whether such approaches may be practical and may scale up. Our REUSER project seeks to address this tool gap by seamlessly assisting analysts as they reuse UML (Unified Modeling Language) artifacts. In particular, it automates artifact retrieval.     

Combining service-orientation and software product line engineering: A systematic mapping study

ContextService-Orientation (SO) is a rapidly emerging paradigm for the design and development of adaptive and dynamic software systems. Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) has also gained attention as a promising and successful software reuse development paradigm over the last decade and proven to provide effective solutions to deal with managing the growing complexity of software systems.ObjectiveThis study aims at characterizing and identifying the existing research on employing and leveraging SO and SPLE.MethodWe conducted a systematic mapping study to identify and analyze related literature. We identified 81 primary studies, dated from 2000–2011 and classified them with respect to research focus, types of research and contribution.ResultThe mapping synthesizes the available evidence about combining the synergy points and integration of SO and SPLE. The analysis shows that the majority of studies focus on service variability modeling and adaptive systems by employing SPLE principles and approaches.In particular, SPLE approaches, especially feature-oriented approaches for variability modeling, have been applied to the design and development of service-oriented systems. While SO is employed in software product line contexts for the realization of product lines to reconcile the flexibility, scalability and dynamism in product derivations thereby creating dynamic software product lines.ConclusionOur study summarizes and characterizes the SO and SPLE topics researchers have investigated over the past decade and identifies promising research directions as due to the synergy generated by integrating methods and techniques from these two areas.     

Industrial Applications of Software Synthesis via Category Theory—Case Studies Using Specware

Over the last two years, we have demonstrated the feasibility of applying category-theoretic methods in specifying, synthesizing, and maintaining industrial strength software systems. We have been using a first-of-its-kind tool for this purpose, Kestrel's Specware^TM software development system. In this paper, we describe our experiences and give an industrial perspective on what is needed to make this technology have broader appeal to industry. Our overall impression is that the technology does work for industrial strength applications, but that it needs additional work to make it more usable. We believe this work marks a turning point in the use of mathematically rigorous approaches to industrial strength software development and maintenance.It is interesting to note that when this technology is applied to software systems whose outputs are designs for airplane parts, the design rationale that is captured is not only software engineering design rationale, but also design rationale from other engineering disciplines (e.g., mechanical, material, manufacturing, electrical, human factors, etc.). This suggests the technology provides an approach to general systems engineering that enables one to structure and reuse engineering knowledge broadly.     

Knowledge-based approaches in software documentation: A systematic literature review

ContextSoftware documents are core artifacts produced and consumed in documentation activity in the software lifecycle. Meanwhile, knowledge-based approaches have been extensively used in software development for decades, however, the software engineering community lacks a comprehensive understanding on how knowledge-based approaches are used in software documentation, especially documentation of software architecture design.ObjectiveThe objective of this work is to explore how knowledge-based approaches are employed in software documentation, their influences to the quality of software documentation, and the costs and benefits of using these approaches.MethodWe use a systematic literature review method to identify the primary studies on knowledge-based approaches in software documentation, following a pre-defined review protocol.ResultsSixty studies are finally selected, in which twelve quality attributes of software documents, four cost categories, and nine benefit categories of using knowledge-based approaches in software documentation are identified. Architecture understanding is the top benefit of using knowledge-based approaches in software documentation. The cost of retrieving information from documents is the major concern when using knowledge-based approaches in software documentation.ConclusionsThe findings of this review suggest several future research directions that are critical and promising but underexplored in current research and practice: (1) there is a need to use knowledge-based approaches to improve the quality attributes of software documents that receive less attention, especially credibility, conciseness, and unambiguity; (2) using knowledge-based approaches with the knowledge content in software documents which gets less attention in current applications of knowledge-based approaches in software documentation, to further improve the practice of software documentation activity; (3) putting more focus on the application of software documents using the knowledge-based approaches (knowledge reuse, retrieval, reasoning, and sharing) in order to make the most use of software documents; and (4) evaluating the costs and benefits of using knowledge-based approaches in software documentation qualitatively and quantitatively.     

Making the leap to a software platform strategy: Issues and challenges

ContextWhile there are many success stories of achieving high reuse and improved quality using software platforms, there is a need to investigate the issues and challenges organizations face when transitioning to a software platform strategy.ObjectiveThis case study provides a comprehensive taxonomy of the challenges faced when a medium-scale organization decided to adopt software platforms. The study also reveals how new trends in software engineering (i.e. agile methods, distributed development, and flat management structures) interplayed with the chosen platform strategy.MethodWe used an ethnographic approach to collect data by spending time at a medium-scale company in Scandinavia. We conducted 16 in-depth interviews with representatives of eight different teams, three of which were working on three separate platforms. The collected data was analyzed using Grounded Theory.ResultsThe findings identify four classes of challenges, namely: business challenges, organizational challenges, technical challenges, and people challenges. The article explains how these findings can be used to help researchers and practitioners identify practical solutions and required tool support.ConclusionThe organization’s decision to adopt a software platform strategy introduced a number of challenges. These challenges need to be understood and addressed in order to reap the benefits of reuse. Researchers need to further investigate issues such as supportive organizational structures for platform development, the role of agile methods in software platforms, tool support for testing and continuous integration in the platform context, and reuse recommendation systems.     

Variability in quality attributes of service-based software systems: A systematic literature review

ContextVariability is the ability of a software artifact (e.g., a system, component) to be adapted for a specific context, in a preplanned manner. Variability not only affects functionality, but also quality attributes (e.g., security, performance). Service-based software systems consider variability in functionality implicitly by dynamic service composition. However, variability in quality attributes of service-based systems seems insufficiently addressed in current design practices.ObjectiveWe aim at (a) assessing methods for handling variability in quality attributes of service-based systems, (b) collecting evidence about current research that suggests implications for practice, and (c) identifying open problems and areas for improvement.MethodA systematic literature review with an automated search was conducted. The review included studies published between the year 2000 and 2011. We identified 46 relevant studies.ResultsCurrent methods focus on a few quality attributes, in particular performance and availability. Also, most methods use formal techniques. Furthermore, current studies do not provide enough evidence for practitioners to adopt proposed approaches. So far, variability in quality attributes has mainly been studied in laboratory settings rather than in industrial environments.ConclusionsThe product line domain as the domain that traditionally deals with variability has only little impact on handling variability in quality attributes. The lack of tool support, the lack of practical research and evidence for the applicability of approaches to handle variability are obstacles for practitioners to adopt methods. Therefore, we suggest studies in industry (e.g., surveys) to collect data on how practitioners handle variability of quality attributes in service-based systems. For example, results of our study help formulate hypotheses and questions for such surveys. Based on needs in practice, new approaches can be proposed.     

Reuse of early life-;cycle artifacts: workproducts, methods and tools

In this article we describe the importance of reusing software artifacts resulting from the earliest stages of the development life-;cycle, i.e., software conception, requirements analysis, feasibility study, requirements specification, architectural and detailed design. Although reuse of early artifacts is deemed beneficial to software development projects, there are no readily available software tools that could facilitate their effective reuse. Hence, we identified nearly one hundred early artifact types. We analyzed, compared and contrasted them. We clustered similar artifact types into distinct artifact affinity groups. We then proposed several methods and techniques useful in the processing of these artifacts to support their reuse. We believe that the proposed methods could be utilized by tool builders to construct software development environments capable of assisting analysts, designers, architects and programmers to effectively reuse the results of early life-;cycle activities.     

Trends in software reuse research: A tertiary study

ContextThe reuse of software has been a research topic for more than 50 years. Throughout that time, many approaches, tools and proposed techniques have reached maturity. However, it is not yet a widespread practice and some issues need to be further investigated. The latest study on software reuse trends dates back to 2005 and we think that it should be updated.ObjectiveTo identify the current trends in software reuse research.MethodA tertiary study based on systematic secondary studies published up to July 2018.ResultsWe identified 4,423 works related to software reuse, from which 3,102 were filtered by selection criteria and quality assessment to produce a final set of 56 relevant studies. We identified 30 current research topics and 127 proposals for future work, grouped into three broad categories: Software Product Lines, Other reuse approaches and General reuse topics.ConclusionsFrequently reported topics include: Requirements and Testing in the category of Lifecycle phases for Software Product Lines, and Systematic reuse for decision making in the category of General Reuse. The most mentioned future work proposals were Requirements, and Evolution and Variability management for Software Product Lines, and Systematic reuse for decision making. The identified trends, based on future work proposals, demonstrate that software reuse is still an interesting area for research. Researchers can use these trends as a guide to lead their future projects.     

Applying a smoothing filter to improve IR-based traceability recovery processes: An empirical investigation

ContextTraceability relations among software artifacts often tend to be missing, outdated, or lost. For this reason, various traceability recovery approaches—based on Information Retrieval (IR) techniques—have been proposed. The performances of such approaches are often influenced by “noise” contained in software artifacts (e.g., recurring words in document templates or other words that do not contribute to the retrieval itself).AimAs a complement and alternative to stop word removal approaches, this paper proposes the use of a smoothing filter to remove “noise” from the textual corpus of artifacts to be traced.MethodWe evaluate the effect of a smoothing filter in traceability recovery tasks involving different kinds of artifacts from five software projects, and applying three different IR methods, namely Vector Space Models, Latent Semantic Indexing, and Jensen–Shannon similarity model.ResultsOur study indicates that, with the exception of some specific kinds of artifacts (i.e., tracing test cases to source code) the proposed approach is able to significantly improve the performances of traceability recovery, and to remove “noise” that simple stop word filters cannot remove.ConclusionsThe obtained results not only help to develop traceability recovery approaches able to work in presence of noisy artifacts, but also suggest that smoothing filters can be used to improve performances of other software engineering approaches based on textual analysis.     

Communication and personality profiles of global software developers

ContextPrior research has established that a small proportion of individuals dominate team communication during global software development. It is not known, however, how these members’ contributions affect their teams’ knowledge diffusion process, or whether their personality profiles are responsible for their dominant presence.ObjectiveWe set out to address this gap through the study of repository artifacts.MethodArtifacts from ten teams were mined from the IBM Rational Jazz repository. We employed social network analysis (SNA) to group practitioners into two clusters, Top Members and Others, based on the numbers of messages they communicated and their engagement in task changes. SNA metrics (density, in-degree and closeness) were then used to study practitioners’ importance in knowledge diffusion. Thereafter, we performed psycholinguistic analysis on practitioners’ messages using linguistic dimensions that had been previously correlated with the Big Five personality profiles.ResultsFor our sample of 146 practitioners we found that Top Members occupied critical roles in knowledge diffusion, and demonstrated more openness to experience than the Others. Additionally, all personality profiles were represented during teamwork, although openness to experience, agreeableness and extroversion were particularly evident. However, no specific personality predicted members’ involvement in knowledge diffusion.ConclusionTask assignment that promotes highly connected team communication networks may mitigate tacit knowledge loss in global software teams. Additionally, while members expressing openness to experience are likely to be particularly driven to perform, this is not entirely responsible for a global team’s success.     

Operationalised product quality models and assessment: The Quamoco approach

ContextSoftware quality models provide either abstract quality characteristics or concrete quality measurements; there is no seamless integration of these two aspects. Quality assessment approaches are, hence, also very specific or remain abstract. Reasons for this include the complexity of quality and the various quality profiles in different domains which make it difficult to build operationalised quality models.ObjectiveIn the project Quamoco, we developed a comprehensive approach aimed at closing this gap.MethodThe project combined constructive research, which involved a broad range of quality experts from academia and industry in workshops, sprint work and reviews, with empirical studies. All deliverables within the project were peer-reviewed by two project members from a different area. Most deliverables were developed in two or three iterations and underwent an evaluation.ResultsWe contribute a comprehensive quality modelling and assessment approach: (1) A meta quality model defines the structure of operationalised quality models. It includes the concept of a product factor, which bridges the gap between concrete measurements and abstract quality aspects, and allows modularisation to create modules for specific domains. (2) A largely technology-independent base quality model reduces the effort and complexity of building quality models for specific domains. For Java and C# systems, we refined it with about 300 concrete product factors and 500 measures. (3) A concrete and comprehensive quality assessment approach makes use of the concepts in the meta-model. (4) An empirical evaluation of the above results using real-world software systems showed: (a) The assessment results using the base model largely match the expectations of experts for the corresponding systems. (b) The approach and models are well understood by practitioners and considered to be both consistent and well suited for getting an overall view on the quality of a software product. The validity of the base quality model could not be shown conclusively, however. (5) The extensive, open-source tool support is in a mature state. (6) The model for embedded software systems is a proof-of-concept for domain-specific quality models.ConclusionWe provide a broad basis for the development and application of quality models in industrial practice as well as a basis for further extension, validation and comparison with other approaches in research.     

A domain model of Web recommender systems based on usage mining and collaborative filtering

Considering the increasing demand of multi-agent systems, the practice of software reuse is essential to the development of such systems. Multi-agent domain engineering is a process for the construction of domain-specific agent-based reusable software artifacts, like domain models, representing the requirements of a family of multi-agent systems in a domain, and frameworks, implementing reusable agent-based design solutions to those requirements. This article describes the domain modeling tasks of the MADEM methodology and a case study on the application of GRAMO, a MADEM technique, for the construction of the domain model of ONTOWUM, specifying the common and variable requirements of a family of Web recommender systems based on usage mining and collaborative filtering.     

Reusing software: issues and research directions

Software productivity has been steadily increasing over the past 30 years, but not enough to close the gap between the demands placed on the software industry and what the state of the practice can deliver; nothing short of an order of magnitude increase in productivity will extricate the software industry from its perennial crisis. Several decades of intensive research in software engineering and artificial intelligence left few alternatives but software reuse as the (only) realistic approach to bring about the gains of productivity and quality that the software industry needs. In this paper, we discuss the implications of reuse on the production, with an emphasis on the technical challenges. Software reuse involves building software that is reusable by design and building with reusable software. Software reuse includes reusing both the products of previous software projects and the processes deployed to produce them, leading to a wide spectrum of reuse approaches, from the building blocks (reusing products) approach, on one hand, to the generative or reusable processor (reusing processes), on the other. We discuss the implication of such approaches on the organization, control, and method of software development and discuss proposed models for their economic analysis. Software reuse benefits from methodologies and tools to: (1) build more readily reusable software and (2) locate, evaluate, and tailor reusable software, the last being critical for the building blocks approach. Both sets of issues are discussed in this paper, with a focus on application generators and OO development for the first and a thorough discussion of retrieval techniques for software components, component composition (or bottom-up design), and transformational systems for the second. We conclude by highlighting areas that, in our opinion, are worthy of further investigation     

一种面向复用的增量软件开发过程框架

以复用思想指导软件开发是软件产业发展的趋势,而当前主要面向复用的软件开发方法没有考虑到我国软件企业以中小型为主的现状,缺乏针对性,使得复用在我国软件开发中应用不够广泛。在基于构件开发的基础上提出了一种面向复用的增量软件开发过程框架。该过程框架适于我国中小型软件企业,采用了以体系结构为指导的增量开发模式,涵盖了可复用资产的生产过程和利用可复用资产的软件开发过程。     

Coproduction in successful software development projects

ContextCoproduction of new products has been deemed successful in organizational partnerships by adding to the quality and scope of the product. Techniques that involve users during the development of software tend to mimic this environment, but differ in the type of product and internal client roles. The question is thus, whether coproduction improves the outcomes of a software development project as it has in other disciplines.ObjectiveThis paper evaluates how the coproduction relationship between software developers and users improves the outcomes of a development project. Coproduction is believed to improve outcomes when available knowledge is accessible and applicable to the objective of the development project. Should the relationships hold, coproduction approaches to development can be approached with confidence and improvements made by attention to the development and deployment of expertise.MethodA quantitative questionnaire related to the coproduction environment was developed for four variables to include coproduction, applying expertise, locating expertise, and project success. 128 users from development teams responded to the survey and represent a variety of industries, individual characteristics, and project sizes.ResultsExpertise is crucial to the success of a software development project and coproduction improves the ability to access and apply the needed expertise. In addition, coproduction directly improves outcomes.ConclusionCoproduction can be an effective approach to the development of systems in terms of meeting project goals. Additionally, the assembly of expertise on the team is an important contributor to successful outcomes that may be enhanced through effective selection of team members. The ability to locate the available expertise is crucial, indicating the value of team building functions to promote awareness of expertise location.     

面向航天嵌入式软件的形式化建模方法

航天嵌入式软件是航天型号任务成败的关键之一.航天嵌入式软件是一种周期性、多模式的软件.软件的每个模式表示系统处于一定的状态,并进行相应的复杂计算.因此,提出了一种名为SPARDL的形式化建模方法.为了满足型号应用的需求,对这一方法进行了若干改进.为了表达航天器的时序性质,提出了一种基于区间逻辑的性质规范语言.为了支持工业应用,还设计了代码生成方法.这一建模方法已在航天工业领域得到了应用.     

Challenges of working with artifacts in requirements engineering and software engineering

When developing or evolving software systems of non-trivial size, having the requirements properly documented is a crucial success factor. The time and effort required for creating and maintaining non-code artifacts are significantly influenced by the tools with which practitioners view, navigate and edit these artifacts. This is not only true for requirements, but for any artifacts used when developing or evolving systems. However, there is not much evidence about how practitioners actually work with artifacts and how well software tools support them. Therefore, we conducted an exploratory study based on 29 interviews with software practitioners to understand the current practice of presenting and manipulating artifacts in tools, how practitioners deal with the challenges encountered, and how these challenges affect the usability of the tools used. We found that practitioners typically work with several interrelated artifacts concurrently, less than half of these artifacts can be displayed entirely on a large screen, the artifact interrelationship information is often missing, and practitioners work collaboratively on artifacts without sufficient support. We identify the existing challenges of working with artifacts and discuss existing solutions proposed addressing them. Our results contribute to the body of knowledge about how practitioners work with artifacts when developing or evolving software, the challenges they are faced with, and the attempts to address these challenges.     

Discovering how end-user programmers and their communities use public repositories: A study on Yahoo! Pipes

ContextEnd-user programmers are numerous, write software that matters to an increasingly large number of users, and face software engineering challenges that are similar to their professionals counterparts. Yet, we know little about how these end-user programmers create and share artifacts in repositories as part of a community.ObjectiveThis work aims to gain a better understanding of end-user programmer communities, the characteristics of artifacts in community repositories, and how authors evolve over time.MethodAn artifact-based analysis of 32,000 mashups from the Yahoo! Pipes repository was performed. The popularity, configurability, complexity, and diversity of the artifacts were measured. Additionally, for the most prolific authors, we explore their submission trends over time.ResultsSimilar to other online communities, there is great deal of attrition but authors who persevere tend to improve over time, creating pipes that are more configurable, diverse, complex, and popular. We also discovered, however, that end-user programmers do not effectively reuse existing programs, submit pipes that are highly similar to others already in the repository, and in most cases do not have an awareness of the community or the richness of artifacts that exist in repositories.ConclusionThere is a need for better end-user programmer support in several stages of the software lifecycle, including development, maintenance, search, and program understanding. Without such support, the community repositories will continue to be cluttered with highly-similar artifacts and authors may not be able to take full advantage of the community resources.     

Evidence management for compliance of critical systems with safety standards: A survey on the state of practice

ContextDemonstrating compliance of critical systems with safety standards involves providing convincing evidence that the requirements of a standard are adequately met. For large systems, practitioners need to be able to effectively collect, structure, and assess substantial quantities of evidence.ObjectiveThis paper aims to provide insights into how practitioners deal with safety evidence management for critical computer-based systems. The information currently available about how this activity is performed in the industry is very limited.MethodWe conducted a survey to determine practitioners’ perspectives and practices on safety evidence management. A total of 52 practitioners from 15 countries and 11 application domains responded to the survey. The respondents indicated the types of information used as safety evidence, how evidence is structured and assessed, how evidence evolution is addressed, and what challenges are faced in relation to provision of safety evidence.ResultsOur results indicate that (1) V&V artefacts, requirements specifications, and design specifications are the most frequently used safety evidence types, (2) evidence completeness checking and impact analysis are mostly performed manually at the moment, (3) text-based techniques are used more frequently than graphical notations for evidence structuring, (4) checklists and expert judgement are frequently used for evidence assessment, and (5) significant research effort has been spent on techniques that have seen little adoption in the industry. The main contributions of the survey are to provide an overall and up-to-date understanding of how the industry addresses safety evidence management, and to identify gaps in the state of the art.ConclusionWe conclude that (1) V&V plays a major role in safety assurance, (2) the industry will clearly benefit from more tool support for collecting and manipulating safety evidence, and (3) future research on safety evidence management needs to place more emphasis on industrial applications.