Assessing the state of software in a large enterprise

To be relevant to the goals of an enterprise, an industrial software engineering research organization must identify problems of interest to, and find solutions that have an impact on, the software development organizations within the company. Using a systematic measurement program both to identify the problems and assess the impact of solutions is key to satisfying this need. Avaya has had such a program in place for about seven years. Every year we produce an annual report known as the State of Software in Avaya that describes software development trends throughout the company and that contains prioritized recommendations for improving Avaya’s software development capabilities. We start by identifying the goals of the enterprise and use the goal-question-metric approach to identify the measures to compute. The result is insight into the enterprise’s problems in software development, recommendations for improving the development process, and problems that require research to solve. We will illustrate the process with examples from the Software Technology Research Department in Avaya Labs whose purpose is to improve the state of software development and know it. “Know it” means that improvement should be subjectively evident and objectively quantifiable. “Know it” also means that one must be skilled at identifying the data sources, performing the appropriate analyses to answer the questions of interest, and validating that the data are accurate and appropriate for the purpose. Examples will include how and why we developed a measure of software quality that appeals to customers, how and why we are studying the effectiveness of distributed software development, and how and why we are helping development organizations to adopt iterative development methods. We will also discuss how we keep the company and the department apprised of the current strengths and weaknesses of software development in Avaya through the publication of the annual State of Software in Avaya Report. Our purpose is both to provide a model for assessment that others may emulate, based on seven years of experience, and to spotlight analyses and conclusions that we feel are common to software development today.     

A user-friendly PC-based data acquisition and analysis system for respirometric investigations

We have developed an easy-to-use computer-based system for recording, displaying, storing and analyzing signals generated by Clark-type oxygen electrodes. A user-friendly interface of Windows-based program BioMed significantly increases the productivity of investigations. It allows to process, control, present and archive the experimental data in real time. A 12-bit analog-to-digital-converter, analog and digital filters, a possibility to zoom the obtained respiratory curves and calculation of the respiration rates by a linear regression method increase the resolution of the estimated oxygen consumption rates. The new system enables to register even small changes, such as 3-5 ngatoms O/min, in respiration rates of biological objects -- enzymes, mitochondria and permeabilized muscle fibers. The system has been developed and is regularly used for the respirometric investigations at the Laboratory of Biochemistry, Institute for Biomedical Research, Kaunas University of Medicine.     

Role of partition coefficients in determining the percutaneous penetration of salicylic acid and formaldehyde under varying occlusion durations

Context: Occlusion is widely utilized to enhance the percutaneous penetration of applied drugs in clinical practice; however, occlusion does not increase the penetration of all chemicals.

Objective: This study determines: (1) whether occlusion enhances the percutaneous penetration of the lipophilic salicylic acid or the hydrophilic formaldehyde when compared to non-occlusion, (2) evaluate whether occlusion duration affects the penetration of compounds and (3) establish to what extent occlusive films in clinical practice interact with topically-applied chemicals and possibly hinder penetration.

Materials and methods: Separately, single doses of [14C]-formaldehyde and [14C]-salicylic acid were applied onto human skin overlying diffusion cells under non-occlusion as well as various occlusive time periods (1, 4 and 8?h). The percent dose penetrating into each compartment as well the percent dose adhering to the plastic wrap were determined.

Results: The radioactivity recovery as percent of applied dose of [14C]-salicylic acid was significantly higher under occlusion versus non-occlusion in the epidermis, dermis and receptor fluid after 24?h (p?Conclusion: Occlusion duration, previously undocumented for in vitro studies, impacted the percutaneous penetration of the lipophilic salicylic acid more so than the hydrophilic formaldehyde. A strong correlation between occlusion-enhanced penetration and partition coefficients was observed, but we do not wish to overgeneralize these results until more compounds of varying physical--chemical properties are studied.     

Future of Mining Software Archives: A Roundtable

This article looks at what happens when you combine the four goal-driven approaches to testing classification (requirements-driven, structure-driven, statistics-driven, and risk-driven) with the three phase-driven approaches (unit testing, integration testing, and system testing).     

A Web laboratory for software data analysis

We describe two prototypical elements of a World Wide Webbased system for visualization and analysis of data produced in the software development process. Our system incorporates interactive applets and visualization techniques into Web pages. A particularly powerful example of such an applet, SeeSoft^TM, can display thousands of lines of text on a single screen, allowing detection of patterns not discernible directly from the text. In our system, Live Documents replace static statistical tables in ordinary documents by dynamic Webbased documents, in effect allowing the reader to customize the document as it is read. Use of the Web provides several advantages. The tools access data from a very large central data base, instead of requiring that it be downloaded; this ensures that readers are always working with the most uptodate version of the data, and relieves readers of the responsibility of preparing data for their use. The tools encourage collaborative research, as one researcher's observations can easily be replicated and studied in greater detail by other team members. We have found this particularly useful while studying software data as part of a team that includes researchers in computer science, software engineering, and statistics, as well as development managers. Live documents will also help the Web revolutionize scientific publication, as papers published on the Web can contain Java applets that permit readers to confirm the conclusions reached by the authors' statistical analyses.     

Towards building a universal defect prediction model with rank transformed predictors

Software defects can lead to undesired results. Correcting defects costs 50 % to 75 % of the total software development budgets. To predict defective files, a prediction model must be built with predictors (e.g., software metrics) obtained from either a project itself (within-project) or from other projects (cross-project). A universal defect prediction model that is built from a large set of diverse projects would relieve the need to build and tailor prediction models for an individual project. A formidable obstacle to build a universal model is the variations in the distribution of predictors among projects of diverse contexts (e.g., size and programming language). Hence, we propose to cluster projects based on the similarity of the distribution of predictors, and derive the rank transformations using quantiles of predictors for a cluster. We fit the universal model on the transformed data of 1,385 open source projects hosted on SourceForge and GoogleCode. The universal model obtains prediction performance comparable to the within-project models, yields similar results when applied on five external projects (one Apache and four Eclipse projects), and performs similarly among projects with different context factors. At last, we investigate what predictors should be included in the universal model. We expect that this work could form a basis for future work on building a universal model and would lead to software support tools that incorporate it into a regular development workflow.     

Variability and Reproducibility in Software Engineering: A Study of Four Companies that Developed the Same System

The scientific study of a phenomenon requires it to be reproducible. Mature engineering industries are recognized by projects and products that are, to some extent, reproducible. Yet, reproducibility in software engineering (SE) has not been investigated thoroughly, despite the fact that lack of reproducibility has both practical and scientific consequences. We report a longitudinal multiple-case study of variations and reproducibility in software development, from bidding to deployment, on the basis of the same requirement specification. In a call for tender to 81 companies, 35 responded. Four of them developed the system independently. The firm price, planned schedule, and planned development process, had, respectively, “low,” “low,” and “medium” reproducibilities. The contractor's costs, actual lead time, and schedule overrun of the projects had, respectively, “medium,” “high,” and “low” reproducibilities. The quality dimensions of the delivered products, reliability, usability, and maintainability had, respectively, “low,” "high,” and “low” reproducibilities. Moreover, variability for predictable reasons is also included in the notion of reproducibility. We found that the observed outcome of the four development projects matched our expectations, which were formulated partially on the basis of SE folklore. Nevertheless, achieving more reproducibility in SE remains a great challenge for SE research, education, and industry.