1,721,103 research outputs found
Investigating maintenance processes in a framework-based environment
No full textThe empirical study described in this paper focuses on the effectiveness of maintenance processes in an environment in which a repository of potential sources of reuse exists, e.g. a context in which applications are built using an object-oriented framework. Such a repository might contain current and previous releases of the system under maintenance, as well as other applications that are built on a similar structure or contain similar functionality. This paper presents an observational study of 15 student projects in a framework-based environment. We used a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to identify and evaluate the effectiveness of the maintenance processes
Measuring and assessing maintainability at the end of high level design
No full textSoftware architecture appears to be one of the main factors affecting software maintainability. Therefore, in order to be able to predict and assess maintainability early in the development process one needs to be able to measure the high-level design characteristics that affect the change process. To this end, a measurement approach based on precise assumptions derived from the change process is proposed. The change process is based on object-oriented design principles and is partially language independent. Metrics for cohesion, coupling, and visibility are defined in order to capture the difficulty of isolating, understanding, designing and validating changes
Building Knowledge through Families of Experiments
No full textExperimentation in software engineering is necessary but difficult. One reason is that there are a large number of context variables and, so, creating a cohesive understanding of experimental results requires a mechanism for motivating studies and integrating results. It requires a community of researchers that can replicate studies, vary context variables, and build models that represent the common observations about the discipline. This paper discusses the experience of the authors, based upon a collection of experiments, in terms of a framework for organizing sets of related studies. With such a framework, experiments can be viewed as part of common families of studies, rather than being isolated events. Common families of studies can contribute to important and relevant hypotheses that may not be suggested by individual experiments. A framework also facilitates building knowledge in an incremental manner through the replication of experiments within families of studies. To support the framework, this paper discusses the experiences of the authors in carrying out empirical studies, with specific emphasis on persistent problems encountered in experimental design, threats to validity, criteria for evaluation, and execution of experiments in the domain of software engineering
Property-based software engineering measurement
No full textLittle theory exists in the field of software system measurement. Concepts such as complexity, coupling, cohesion or even size are very often subject to interpretation and appear to have inconsistent definitions in the literature. As a consequence, there is little guidance provided to the analyst attempting to define proper measures for specific problems. Many controversies in the literature are simply misunderstandings and stem from the fact that some people talk about different measurement concepts under the same label (complexity is the most common case). There is a need to define unambiguously the most important measurement concepts used in the measurement of software products. One way of doing so is to define precisely what mathematical properties characterize these concepts, regardless of the specific software artifacts to which these concepts are applied. Such a mathematical framework could generate a consensus in the software engineering community and provide a means for better communication among researchers, better guidelines for analysts, and better evaluation methods for commercial static analyzers for practitioners. We propose a mathematical framework which is generic, because it is not specific to any particular software artifact, and rigorous, because it is based on precise mathematical concepts. We use this framework to propose definitions of several important measurement concepts (size, length, complexity, cohesion, coupling). It does not intend to be complete or fully objective; other frameworks could have been proposed and different choices could have been made. However, we believe that the formalisms and properties we introduce are convenient and intuitive. This framework contributes constructively to a firmer theoretical ground of software measurement
Response to: Comments on "Property-based software engineering measurement: refining the additivity properties"
No full textExperimenting with error abstraction in requirements documents
No full textIn previous experiments we showed that the Perspective-Based Reading (PBR) family of defect detection techniques was effective at detecting faults in requirements documents in some contexts. Experiences from these studies indicate that requirements faults are very difficult to define, classify and quantify. In order to address these difficulties, we present an empirical study whose main purpose is to investigate whether defect detection in requirements documents can be improved by focusing on the errors (i.e., underlying human misconceptions) in a document rather than the individual faults that they cause. In the context of a controlled experiment, we assess both benefits and costs of the process of abstracting errors from faults in requirements documents
A reference architecture for the component factory
Full text linkSoftware reuse can be achieved through an organization that focuses on utilization of life cycle products from previous developments. The component factory is both an example of the more general concepts of experience and domain factory and an organizational unit worth being considered independently. The critical features of such an organization are flexibility and continuous improvement. In order to achieve these features we can represent the architecture of the factory at different levels of abstraction and define a reference architecture from which specific architectures can be derived by instantiation. A reference architecture is an implementation and organization independent representation of the component factory and its environment. The paper outlines this reference architecture, discusses the instantiation process, and presents some examples of specific architectures by comparing them in the framework of the reference model
Comments on "Towards a framework for software measurement validation"
No full textA view of software measurement that disagrees with the model presented by Kitchenham, Pfleeger, and Fenton (1995), is given. Whereas Kitchenham et al. argue that properties used to define measures should not constrain the scale type of measures, the authors contend that that is an inappropriate restriction. In addition, a misinterpretation of Weyuker's (1988) properties is noted
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