http://www.hindawi.com The latest articles from Hindawi Publishing Corporation © 2013 , Hindawi Publishing Corporation . All rights reserved. Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:53:24 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2013/432021/ Control flow graphs are a well-known graphical representation of programs that capture the control flow but abstract from program details. In this paper, we derive decision graphs that reduce control flow graphs but preserve the branching structure of programs. As an application to software engineering, we use decision graphs to compare and clarify different definitions of branch covering in software testing. Robert Gold Copyright © 2013 Robert Gold. All rights reserved. Thu, 11 Apr 2013 08:49:44 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2013/420394/ This paper presents a selective regression testing technique and an associated tool for object-oriented software. The technique is based on the concept of Control Call Graphs, which are a reduced form of traditional Control Flow Graphs. It uses static analysis of the source code of the program. The developed tool (1) identifies the Control Call Paths potentially impacted by changes, (2) selects, from an existing test suite, the appropriate test cases, and (3) generates new JUnit test cases for control call paths that are not covered by existing tests (new ones, or those whose structure has been modified after changes). In this way, the approach supports an incremental update of the test suite. The selected JUnit test cases, including the new ones, are automatically executed. Three concrete case studies are reported to provide evidence of the feasibility of the approach and its benefits in terms of reduction of regression testing effort. Nicolas Frechette, Linda Badri, and Mourad Badri Copyright © 2013 Nicolas Frechette et al. All rights reserved. Mon, 25 Mar 2013 15:35:37 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2013/803638/ Whilst several agent-oriented modelling languages have been developed by independent research groups, it is now appropriate to consider a consolidation of these various approaches. There are arguably three things that need consolidation and future standardization: individual symbols, the underpinning metamodel, and the diagram types. Here we address only the third issue by extending an earlier analysis that resulted in recommendations for various diagram types for the modelling of a multiagent system (MAS). Here, we take each of these previously recommended diagram types and see how each is realized in a wide variety (over 20) of current agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) methodologies. We also take the opportunity to express, as exemplars, some of these diagram types using the recently published FAML notation. Brian Henderson-Sellers Copyright © 2013 Brian Henderson-Sellers. All rights reserved. Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:12:46 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2013/129437/ Several studies have been proposed in the literature on software clones from different points of view and covering many correlated features and areas, which are particularly relevant to software maintenance and evolution. In this paper, we describe our experience on clone detection through three different tools and investigate the impact of clone refactoring on different software quality metrics. Francesca Arcelli Fontana, Marco Zanoni, Andrea Ranchetti, and Davide Ranchetti Copyright © 2013 Francesca Arcelli Fontana et al. All rights reserved. Mon, 25 Feb 2013 14:42:07 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2013/276105/ Software developers require information to understand the characteristics of systems, such as complexity and maintainability. In order to further understand and determine characteristics of object-oriented (OO) systems, this paper describes research that identifies attributes that are valuable in determining the difficulty in implementing changes during maintenance, as well as the possible effects that such changes may produce. A set of metrics are proposed to quantify and measure these attributes. The proposed complexity metrics are used to determine the difficulty in implementing changes through the measurement of method complexity, method diversity, and complexity density. The paper establishes impact metrics to determine the potential effects of making changes to a class and dependence metrics that are used to measure the potential effects on a given class resulting from changes in other classes. The case study shows that the proposed metrics provide additional information not sufficiently provided by the related existing OO metrics. The metrics are also found to be useful in the investigation of large systems, correlating with project outcomes. John Michura, Miriam A. M. Capretz, and Shuying Wang Copyright © 2013 John Michura et al. All rights reserved. Tue, 12 Feb 2013 07:51:07 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2013/507984/ Business Process Management (BPM) research resulted in a plethora of methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. This survey aims to structure these results and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in BPM. In BPM the concept of a process model is fundamental. Process models may be used to configure information systems, but may also be used to analyze, understand, and improve the processes they describe. Hence, the introduction of BPM technology has both managerial and technical ramifications and may enable significant productivity improvements, cost savings, and flow-time reductions. The practical relevance of BPM and rapid developments over the last decade justify a comprehensive survey. Wil M. P. van der Aalst Copyright © 2013 Wil M. P. van der Aalst. All rights reserved. Sun, 10 Feb 2013 15:32:27 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2013/121692/ Software maintenance is an important activity in software development. Some development methodologies such as the object-oriented have contributed in improving maintainability of software. However, crosscutting concerns are still challenges that affect the maintainability of OO software. In this paper, we discuss our case study to assess the extent of maintainability improvement that can be achieved by employing aspect-oriented programming. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a relatively new approach that emphasizes dealing with crosscutting concerns. To demonstrate the maintainability improvement, we refactored a COTS-based system known as OpenBravoPOS using AspectJ and compared its maintainability with the original OO version. We used both structural complexity and concern level metrics. Our results show an improvement of maintainability in the AOP version of OpenBravoPOS. Kagiso Mguni and Yirsaw Ayalew Copyright © 2013 Kagiso Mguni and Yirsaw Ayalew. All rights reserved. Thu, 07 Feb 2013 16:45:03 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2013/782174/ The cloud computing paradigm has brought the benefits of utility computing to a global scale. It has gained paramount attention in recent years. Companies are seriously considering to adopt this new paradigm and expecting to receive significant benefits. In fact, the concept of cloud computing is not a revolution in terms of technology; it has been established based on the solid ground of virtualization, distributed system, and web services. To comprehend cloud computing, its foundations and technological landscape need to be adequately understood. This paper provides a comprehensive review on the building blocks of cloud computing and relevant technological aspects. It focuses on four key areas including architecture, virtualization, data management, and security issues. Nattakarn Phaphoom, Xiaofeng Wang, and Pekka Abrahamsson Copyright © 2013 Nattakarn Phaphoom et al. All rights reserved. Wed, 06 Feb 2013 19:24:25 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2013/384903/ Coordination models and languages are meant to provide abstractions and mechanisms to harness the space of interaction as one of the foremost sources of complexity in computational systems. Nature-inspired computing aims at understanding the mechanisms and patterns of complex natural systems in order to bring their most desirable features to computational systems. Thus, the promise of nature-inspired coordination models is to prove themselves fundamental in the design of complex computational systems|such as intelligent, knowledge-intensive, pervasive, adaptive, and self-organising ones. In this paper, we survey the most relevant nature-inspired coordination models in the literature, focussing in particular on tuple-based models, and foresee the most interesting research trends in the field. Andrea Omicini Copyright © 2013 Andrea Omicini. All rights reserved. Wed, 30 Jan 2013 09:52:19 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2013/198937/ Context. Software metrics are surrogates of software quality. Software metrics can be used to find possible problems or chances for improvements in software quality. However, software metrics are numbers that are not easy to interpret. Previous analysis of software metrics has shown fat tails in the distribution. The skewness and fat tails of such data are properties of many statistical distributions and more importantly the phenomena of the power law. These statistical properties affect the interpretation of software quality metrics. Objectives. The objective of this research is to validate the effect of power laws on the interpretation of software metrics. Method. To investigate the effect of power law properties on software quality, we study five open-source systems to investigate the distribution and their effect on fault prediction models. Results. Study shows that power law behavior has an effect on the interpretation and usage of software metrics and in particular the CK metrics. Many metrics have shown a power law behavior. Threshold values are derived from the properties of the power law distribution when applied to open-source systems. Conclusion. The properties of a power law distribution can be effective in improving the fault-proneness models by setting reasonable threshold values. Raed Shatnawi and Qutaibah Althebyan Copyright © 2013 Raed Shatnawi and Qutaibah Althebyan. All rights reserved. Tue, 08 Jan 2013 15:27:46 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2013/404525/ The wide availability of high-performance computing systems, Grids and Clouds, allowed scientists and engineers to implement more and more complex applications to access and process large data repositories and run scientific experiments in silico on distributed computing platforms. Most of these applications are designed as workflows that include data analysis, scientific computation methods, and complex simulation techniques. Scientific applications require tools and high-level mechanisms for designing and executing complex workflows. For this reason, in the past years, many efforts have been devoted towards the development of distributed workflow management systems for scientific applications. This paper discusses basic concepts of scientific workflows and presents workflow system tools and frameworks used today for the implementation of application in science and engineering on high-performance computers and distributed systems. In particular, the paper reports on a selection of workflow systems largely used for solving scientific problems and discusses some open issues and research challenges in the area. Domenico Talia Copyright © 2013 Domenico Talia. All rights reserved. Tue, 18 Dec 2012 10:42:12 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2012/670803/ Modeling variability in the context of software product-lines has been around for about 25 years in the research community. It started with Feature Modeling and soon enough was extended to handle many different concerns. Beyond being used for a mere description and documentation of variability, variability models are more and more leveraged to produce other artifacts, such as configurators, code, or test cases. This paper overviews several classification dimensions of variability modeling and explores how do they fit with such artifact production purposes. Jean-Marc Jézéquel Copyright © 2012 Jean-Marc Jézéquel. All rights reserved. Wed, 14 Nov 2012 09:44:30 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2012/413090/ In general, the software-testing time may be measured by two kinds of time scales: calendar time and test execution time. In this paper, we develop two-dimensional software reliability models with two-time measures and incorporate both of them to assess the software reliability with higher accuracy. Since the resulting software defect models are based on the familiar nonhomogeneous Poisson processes with two time scales, which are the natural extensions of one-dimensional software defect models, it is possible to treat the time data both simultaneously and effectively. We investigate the dependence of test-execution time as a testing effort on the software reliability assessment and validate quantitatively the software defect models with two-time scales. We also consider an optimization problem when to stop the software testing in terms of two-time measurements. Tomotaka Ishii and Tadashi Dohi Copyright © 2012 Tomotaka Ishii and Tadashi Dohi. All rights reserved. Mon, 15 Oct 2012 16:05:49 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2012/162305/ In order to achieve high safety standards, avionic software needs to be developed with very high requirements regarding safety, reliability, and determinism as well as real-time constraints, which are often in conflict with the development of maintainable software systems. Nevertheless, the ability to change the software of an airplane is of increasing importance, since it consists of a multitude of partially hardware-specific subsystems which may need replacement during a plane’s lifespan of typically numerous decades. Thus, as a first step towards optimizing maintainability of avionic software we have benchmarked the cabin software of a commercial airliner with common software metrics. Such a benchmarking of avionic software contributes valuable insights into the current practice of developing critical software and the application of software metrics in this context. We conclude from the obtained results that it is important to pay more attention to long-term maintainability of aviation software. Additionally we have derived some initial recommendations for the development of future avionic software systems. Stefan Burger and Oliver Hummel Copyright © 2012 Stefan Burger and Oliver Hummel. All rights reserved. Mon, 15 Oct 2012 15:38:44 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2012/561502/ We present a novel regression test selection approach based on analysis of state and dependence models of components. Our technique targets to select a smaller regression test suite compared to the pure dependence-based RTS approaches while maintaining the fault revealing effectiveness. In our approach, after a modification, control and data dependencies are analyzed to identify the potentially affected statements. Subsequently, the state model of the component is analyzed to compute a precise publishable change information to support efficient regression test selection by the application developers. Tamal Sen and Rajib Mall Copyright © 2012 Tamal Sen and Rajib Mall. All rights reserved. Mon, 17 Sep 2012 18:02:26 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2012/259064/ Two main architectures used to develop software for modern embedded applications are “event triggered” (ET) and “time triggered” (TT). ET designs involve creating systems which handle multiple interrupts; by contrast, only one interrupt is ever enabled in a TT design, and this interrupt is usually linked to a timer “Tick.” Although TT architectures are widely used in safety-related designs, they are less familiar to developers of mainstream embedded systems. The work on this research began from the premise that—for a broad class of systems—the use of a TT architecture would improve reliability. The overall goal of the work presented here was to identify ways in which the effort involved in migrating between existing ET architectures and “equivalent” TT architectures could be reduced. The specific goal of the research was to explore whether the use of an appropriate set of design patterns could assist developers who wished to migrate between ET and TT designs. An empirical evaluation of the efficacy of a newly proposed pattern collection is described in this paper. The results of these trials demonstrate that the proposed collection of patterns has the potential to support developers by helping them to take appropriate decisions during the migration process. Farah Lakhani and Michael J. Pont Copyright © 2012 Farah Lakhani and Michael J. Pont. All rights reserved. Tue, 21 Aug 2012 10:22:33 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2012/516184/ This paper presents a study called collaborative-adversarial pair (CAP) programming which is an alternative to pair programming (PP). Its objective is to exploit the advantages of pair programming while at the same time downplaying its disadvantages. Unlike traditional pairs, where two people work together in all the phases of software development, CAPs start by designing together; splitting into independent test construction and code implementation roles; then joining again for testing. An empirical study was conducted in fall 2008 and in spring 2009 with twenty-six computer science and software engineering senior and graduate students at Auburn University. The subjects were randomly divided into two groups (CAP/experimental group and PP/control group). The subjects used Eclipse and JUnit to perform three programming tasks with different degrees of complexity. The results of this experiment point in favor of CAP development methodology and do not support the claim that pair programming in general reduces the software development duration, overall software development cost or increases the program quality or correctness. Rajendran Swamidurai and David A. Umphress Copyright © 2012 Rajendran Swamidurai and David A. Umphress. All rights reserved. Sun, 01 Jul 2012 10:39:16 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2012/681985/ We present our approach to real-time service-oriented scheduling problems with the objective of maximizing the total system utility. Different from the traditional utility accrual scheduling problems that each task is associated with only a single time utility function (TUF), we associate two different TUFs—a profit TUF and a penalty TUF—with each task, to model the real-time services that not only need to reward the early completions but also need to penalize the abortions or deadline misses. The scheduling heuristics we proposed in this paper judiciously accept, schedule, and abort real-time services when necessary to maximize the accrued utility. Our extensive experimental results show that our proposed algorithms can significantly outperform the traditional scheduling algorithms such as the Earliest Deadline First (EDF), the traditional utility accrual (UA) scheduling algorithms, and an earlier scheduling approach based on a similar model. Shuo Liu, Gang Quan, and Shangping Ren Copyright © 2012 Shuo Liu et al. All rights reserved. Sun, 17 Jun 2012 14:43:57 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2012/324054/ UML 2.0 sequence diagrams are used to synthesize test scenarios. A UML 2.0 sequence diagram usually consists of a large number of different types of fragments and possibly with nesting. As a consequence, arriving at a comprehensive system behavior in the presence of multiple, nested fragment is a complex and challenging task. So far the test scenario synthesis from sequence diagrams is concerned, the major problem is to extract an arbitrary flow of control. In this regard, an approach is presented here to facilitate a simple representation of flow of controls and its subsequent use in the test scenario synthesis. Also, the flow of controls is simplified on the basis of UML 2.0 control primitives and brought to a testable form known as intermediate testable model (ITM). The proposed approach leads to the systematic interpretation of control flows and helps to generate test scenarios satisfying a set of coverage criteria. Moreover, the ability to support UML 2.0 models leads to increased levels of automation than the existing approaches. Ashalatha Nayak and Debasis Samanta Copyright © 2012 Ashalatha Nayak and Debasis Samanta. All rights reserved. Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:27:18 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2012/823437/ In this research, a hybrid cost estimation model is proposed to produce a realistic prediction model that takes into consideration software project, product, process, and environmental elements. A cost estimation dataset is built from a large number of open source projects. Those projects are divided into three domains: communication, finance, and game projects. Several data mining techniques are used to classify software projects in terms of their development complexity. Data mining techniques are also used to study association between different software attributes and their relation to cost estimation. Results showed that finance metrics are usually the most complex in terms of code size and some other complexity metrics. Results showed also that games applications have higher values of the SLOCmath, coupling, cyclomatic complexity, and MCDC metrics. Information gain is used in order to evaluate the ability of object-oriented metrics to predict software complexity. MCDC metric is shown to be the first metric in deciding a software project complexity. A software project effort equation is created based on clustering and based on all software projects’ attributes. According to the software metrics weights values developed in this project, we can notice that MCDC, LOC, and cyclomatic complexity of the traditional metrics are still the dominant metrics that affect our classification process, while number of children and depth of inheritance are the dominant from the object-oriented metrics as a second level. Hassan Najadat, Izzat Alsmadi, and Yazan Shboul Copyright © 2012 Hassan Najadat et al. All rights reserved. Thu, 05 Apr 2012 12:16:15 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2012/324838/ Exploratory testing (ET) is popular, especially among agile development teams. In this paper, we study the team aspect in the ET context and explore how to use ET in team sessions to complement other testing activities. The goal was to define a team exploratory testing (TET) session approach and to provide evidence that the approach is worth using. A TET session approach is defined by means of parameters, roles, and process. Also, instructions for using the approach are given. The team is the key factor that gives the approach its value and distinguishes it from basic ET. The team enables greater access to expertise, experience, and information. The TET session approach enables participants with different professional background to join in the session. The sessions may be focused on different purposes; they can contribute to finding defects or learning the system, for example. With careful parameter definition, the approach’s risks are mitigated. Soili Saukkoriipi and Ilkka Tervonen Copyright © 2012 Soili Saukkoriipi and Ilkka Tervonen. All rights reserved. Sun, 18 Mar 2012 13:20:48 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2012/424230/ Custom tailor-made database management systems (DBMS) are an essential asset, especially for embedded systems. The continuously increasing amount of data in automotive systems and the growing network of embedded devices can profit from DBMS. Restrictions in terms of processors, memory, and storage require customizable DBMS that contain only the needed functionality. We present AUTODAMA, a customizable DBMS designed for automotive systems. With AUTODAMA, it is possible to generate tailor-made DBMS for different scenarios, for example, by restricting the storage size of the DBMS or adding security-related features such as asymmetric and symmetric encryption. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach through applying different tailor-made DBMS versions derived from AUTODAMA in an automotive testing environment. Our experience is that AUTODAMA can dramatically reduce the development effort and can increase reliability using efficient reuse mechanisms. Thomas Thüm, Sandro Schulze, Mario Pukall, Gunter Saake, and Sebastian Günther Copyright © 2012 Thomas Thüm et al. All rights reserved. Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:14:23 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2012/265235/ For automation of many software engineering tasks such as program analysis, testing, and coverage analysis, it is necessary to construct a control flow graph. With the advancement of UML, software practitioners advocate to construct control flow graph from some of the UML design artifacts. UML 2.x supports the modeling of control flow information in interaction diagram by means of message sequences and different types of fragments like alt, opt, break, loop, and so forth. Leading UML modeling tools, namely MagicDraw, IBM's Rational, and so forth export models in XMI format. Construction of control flow graph from the XMI representation of an interaction diagram is not straightforward as model elements of interaction diagram are captured in XMI by means of values of attributes of multiple tagged elements and correlations among these tagged elements is not explicitly specified. This paper proposes an approach for construction of control flow graph from XMI representation of UML 2.x interaction diagram. A prototype tool based on our approach has been developed which can be plugged in any computer-aided software engineering tool. Debasish Kundu, Debasis Samanta, and Rajib Mall Copyright © 2012 Debasish Kundu et al. All rights reserved. Thu, 01 Mar 2012 09:20:31 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2012/598150/ Improving the efficiency of a testing process is a challenging task. Prior work has shown that often, a small number of bugs account for the majority of the reported software failures; and often, most bugs are found in a small portion of the source code of a program. First, prioritizing the code elements according to their criticality and then conducting testing, will promote to reveal the important bugs at the early phase of testing. Keeping it in view, we propose an efficient test effort prioritization method that give a chance to the tester to focus more on the parts of the source code that are highly influenced towards the system failures or in which, the failures have high impact on the system. We consider five important factors such as influence towards system failures, average execution time, structural complexity, severity, and business value associated with a component and estimates the criticality of the component within a system. We have experimentally proved that our proposed test effort prioritization approach is effective in revealing important bugs at the early phase of testing as it is linked to external measure of defect severity and business value, internal measure of frequency, complexity, and coupling. Mitrabinda Ray and Durga Prasad Mohapatra Copyright © 2012 Mitrabinda Ray and Durga Prasad Mohapatra. All rights reserved. Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:10:37 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2012/202980/ Quality has always been one of the major issues responsible for the success of software. Maintainability is one of the characteristics of software quality. A large number of techniques were developed for the assess and predication of this characteristic. Most of these techniques do not decompose it to an actual assessment level and thus fail to give a detailed account of the impact of specific criteria. These techniques thus constrain their use as the basis for analysis quantitatively. In this paper, we develop a system based on fuzzy inference approach to assess and predict maintainability in a quantitative manner. This system is an enhancement of Bayesian approach which is using activity-based quality model to deal with maintainability. We also compare the proposed fuzzy technique with an existing Bayesian approach to depict the improvement achieved due to the advantageous accuracy of fuzzy over crisp approach. Kawal Jeet and Renu Dhir Copyright © 2012 Kawal Jeet and Renu Dhir. All rights reserved. Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:16:09 +0000 http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/se/2012/795282/ Requirements taxonomies have been found useful in software requirements elicitation and specification, both for educational purposes and in practical usage, for instance, as checklists to ensure that important categories of requirements are not forgotten, and for guidance on how to write various types of requirements. While mobile information systems are becoming increasingly important, traditional requirements taxonomies do not have any category for mobility requirements. This paper reports on a controlled experiment where two groups of students both got the same excerpts of the well-known Volere requirements taxonomy, but for one treatment group the tutorial material was also extended with additional material on mobility requirements as a requirements category in its own right. Using the provided taxonomy material for guidance, the students were asked to write requirements for a system presented in a natural language case description; afterwards their output was analyzed to score the number and quality of requirements found by each student. The main finding was that the students using the extended taxonomy also found more requirements, but there was no significant difference in the quality of requirements between the two groups. Sundar Gopalakrishnan, Peter Karpati, and Guttorm Sindre Copyright © 2012 Sundar Gopalakrishnan et al. All rights reserved.