Human and program factors affecting the maintenance of programs with deployed design patterns

Context

Practitioners may use design patterns to organize program code. Various empirical studies have investigated the effects of pattern deployment and work experience on the effectiveness and efficiency of program maintenance. However, results from these studies are not all consistent. Moreover, these studies have not considered some interesting factors, such as a maintainer’s prior exposure to the program under maintenance.

Objective

This paper aims at identifying what factors may contribute to the productivity of maintainers in the context of making correct software changes when they work on programs with deployed design patterns.

Method

We performed an empirical study involving 118 human subjects with three change tasks on a medium-sized program to explore the possible effects of a suite of six human and program factors on the productivity of maintainers, measured by the time taken to produce a correctly revised program in a course-based setting. The factors we studied include the deployment of design patterns and the presence of pattern-unaware solutions, as well as the maintainer’s prior exposure to design patterns, the subject program and the programming language, and prior work experience.

Results

Among the factors under examination, we find that the deployment of design patterns, prior exposure to the program and the presence of pattern-unaware solutions are strongly correlated with the time taken to correctly complete maintenance tasks. We also report some interesting observations from the experiment.

Conclusion

A new factor, namely, the presence of pattern-unaware solutions, contributes to the efficient completion of maintenance tasks of programs with deployed design patterns. Moreover, we conclude from the study that neither prior exposure to design patterns nor prior exposure to the programming language is supported by sufficient evidences to be significant factors, whereas the subjects’ exposure to the program under maintenance is notably more important.     

Fault-based test suite prioritization for specification-based testing

Context

Existing test suite prioritization techniques usually rely on code coverage information or historical execution data that serve as indicators for estimating the fault-detecting ability of test cases. Such indicators are primarily empirical in nature and not theoretically driven; hence, they do not necessarily provide sound estimates. Also, these techniques are not applicable when the source code is not available or when the software is tested for the first time.

Objective

We propose and develop the novel notion of fault-based prioritization of test cases which directly utilizes the theoretical knowledge of their fault-detecting ability and the relationships among the test cases and the faults in the prescribed fault model, based on which the test cases are generated.

Method

We demonstrate our approach of fault-based prioritization by applying it to the testing of the implementation of logical expressions against their specifications. We then validate our proposal by an empirical study that evaluates the effectiveness of prioritization techniques using two different metrics.

Results

A theoretically guided fault-based prioritization technique generally outperforms other techniques under study, as assessed by two different metrics. Our empirical results also show that the technique helps to reveal all target faults by executing only about 72% of the prioritized test suite, thereby reducing the effort required in testing.

Conclusions

The fault-based prioritization approach is not only applicable to the instance empirically validated in this paper, but should also be adaptable to other fault-based testing strategies. We also envisage new research directions to be opened up by our work.     

Service-oriented architecture for ontologies supporting multi-agent system negotiations in virtual enterprise

This paper offers a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for ontology-based multi-agent system (MAS) negotiations in the context of virtual enterprises (VEs). The objective of this paper is fourfold. First, it is to design a SOA which utilizes ontology and MAS to provide a distributed and interoperable environment for automated negotiations in VE. In this architecture, individual ontologies for both the VE initiator and its potential partners are constructed to describe and store resources and service knowledge. Second, a series of semantic ontology matching methods are developed to reach agents’ interoperability during the negotiation process. Third, correspondence-based extended contract net protocol is presented, which provides basic guidelines for agents’ reaching mutual understandings and service negotiation. Last, a fuzzy set theory based knowledge reuse approach is proposed to evaluate the current negotiation behaviors of the VE partners. A walkthrough example is presented to illustrate the methodologies and system architecture proposed in this paper.     

Task-driven e-manufacturing resource configurable model

Manufacturing resource configuration (MRC) plays a very important role in an e-Manufacturing system. Higher requirements for optimal configuration under online resource visibility and traceability have led to two main challenges. One is that more features of manufacturing tasks affecting the optimization results should be taken into consideration when establishing the MRC mathematical model for a manufacturing cell. The other is that manufacturing information should be given equal attention as MRC to realize real-time visibility and traceability of the resulting manufacturing cells. This paper presents a comprehensive mathematical model which considers more practical features of manufacturing tasks (e.g. batch volume and alternative processing routes) for manufacturing cell formation. This model adopts a fuzzy clustering method to group the manufacturing tasks and machines. Moreover, it is enabled by a smart equipment model to realize the configurable model of real-time manufacturing information and corresponding visualization and tracing methods. A case study is given to demonstrate the proposed models and methods.     

Combining genetic approach and integer programming to solve multi-facility economic lot-scheduling problem

Economic lot-scheduling problem (ELSP) has been studied since the 1950??s. ELSP deals with the scheduling of the production of several items on a single facility in a cyclical pattern. The facility can only produce one single item at a time, and there is a set-up cost and set-up time associated with each item. Because of the rapid development of many emerging markets nowadays, many common items are produced in different places in order to satisfy the demands in different markets. This becomes the multi-facilities ELSP problems. In ELSP problems, it is known that if more items types to be produced by the facility, the production frequency of each item type will increase because of the balancing of the production rate and the demand rate. Consequently, the number of set-up time and set-up cost increases accordingly. Thus, reallocating the common items, which can be produced in any facilities, to be produced only on certain facility can certainly reduce the number of production frequency, and lead to lower related costs. The objective of this paper is to propose an optimization methodology combining Integer Programming and Genetic Algorithm to solve multi-facility ELSP problems. This paper proposes to divide the main problem into a master problem and sub-problems, which are solved by Integer Programming and Genetic Algorithm respectively. To demonstrate the significance of reallocating the common items and aggregating them to produce in certain facility, several models have been designed and tested. The comparison of the models demonstrates the reduction of the costs benefited by result of common items reallocation.     

基于超像素分割的无线内窥镜出血图像检测

将图像形态学处理和计算机辅助诊断方法应用于无线内窥镜出血图像检测。在对无线内窥镜图像进行形态学处理和超像素分割的基础上,提出红色纯度特征,应用最小二乘支持向量机分类器对分割后的图像进行分类。试验结果表明,该方法能够有效地检测无线内窥镜图像中的出血区域,敏感性、特异性和准确率分别达到了99%、94%和95%,可以作为临床医生的辅助诊断工具。     

受控振动柱体对波浪影响的数值模拟研究

以不可压缩黏性流体的Navier-Stokes方程为控制方程,采用RNG k-ε湍流模型,利用VOF方法追踪运动的自由表面的方法,建立了三维数值波浪与振动柱体相互作用的模型.基于经典绕射理论验证了波浪绕固定柱体传播的数值模型的可靠性,再采用动边界技术赋予柱体振动规律,研究受控振动柱体对波浪传播的影响,并通过控制柱体初始振动相位变化,系统地给出了在柱体振动的不同初始相位下柱体前后波浪变化的规律.     

Capability and limitation of max- and sum-type construction of Lyapunov functions for networks of iISS systems

This paper addresses the problem of verifying stability of networks whose subsystems admit dissipation inequalities of integral input-to-state stability (iISS). We focus on two ways of constructing a Lyapunov function satisfying a dissipation inequality of a given network. Their difference from one another is elucidated from the viewpoint of formulation, relation, fundamental limitation and capability. One is referred to as the max-type construction resulting in a Lipschitz continuous Lyapunov function. The other is the sum-type construction resulting in a continuously differentiable Lyapunov function. This paper presents geometrical conditions under which the Lyapunov construction is possible for a network comprising $n\ge 2$ subsystems. Although the sum-type construction for general $n>2$ has not yet been reduced to a readily computable condition, we obtain a simple condition of iISS small gain in the case of $n=2$. It is demonstrated that the max-type construction fails to offer a Lyapunov function if the network contains subsystems which are not input-to-state stable (ISS).     

On Kalman filtering over fading wireless channels with controlled transmission powers

We study stochastic stability of centralized Kalman filtering for linear time-varying systems equipped with wireless sensors. Transmission is over fading channels where variable channel gains are counteracted by power control to alleviate the effects of packet drops. We establish sufficient conditions for the expected value of the Kalman filter covariance matrix to be exponentially bounded in norm. The conditions obtained are then used to formulate stabilizing power control policies which minimize the total sensor power budget. In deriving the optimal power control laws, both statistical channel information and full channel information are considered. The effect of system instability on the power budget is also investigated for both these cases.     

Robust tracking control of an array of nanoparticles moving on a substrate

Control of nanosystems with frictional dynamics using feedback control methods is important to a wide range of applications of nanotribology. This paper studies the tracking control problem of an array of nanoparticles moving on a substrate with friction between the substrate and the particles. The focus of this study is on control design and stability analysis. The major challenges in this problem include nonlinearities and uncertainties in the frictional dynamics and limited availability of measurable states in nanosystems. The particle–substrate interaction is considered to be unknown, and the unknown effect of unmodeled particle dynamics on the dynamics of the center of mass of the array is also considered. A nonlinear identifier is first developed to identify these unmodeled dynamics. A feedback controller is then developed based on the identifier to control the center of mass of the particles to track a desired trajectory. Boundedness of the closed-loop states and semiglobal asymptotic stability of the tracking error are proven using Lyapunov theory for the case of linear inter-particle interactions. An example with more general Morse-type inter-particle interactions is included to provide some level of confidence that the results are general but not assuredness that they are. Numerical simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the developed identification and control law.