1,721,044 research outputs found
Preliminary Results from a State-of-the-Practice Survey on Risk Management in Off-the-Shelf Component-Based Development
No full textSoftware components, both Commercial-Off-The-Shelf and Open Source, are being increasingly used in software development. Previous studies have identified typical risks and related risk management strategies for what we will call OTS-based (Off-the-Shelf) development. However, there are few effective and well-proven guidelines to help project managers to identify and manage these risks. We are performing an international state-of-the-practice survey in three countries - Norway, Italy, and Germany - to investigate the relative frequency of typical risks, and the effect of the corresponding risk management methods. Preliminary results show that risks concerning changing requirements and effort estimation are the most frequent risks. Risks concerning traditional quality attributes such as reliability and security of OTS component seem less frequent. Incremental testing and strict quality evaluation have been used to manage the possible negative impact of poor component quality. Realistic effort estimation on OTS quality evaluation helped to mitigate the possible effort estimation biases in OTS component selection and integration
An empirical study on decision making in off-the-shelf component-based development
No full textComponent-based software development (CBSD) is becoming more and more important since it promotes reuse to higher levels of abstraction. As a consequence, many components are available being either open-source software (OSS) or commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS). However, it is still unclear how the decision for acquiring OSS or COTS components is made in practice. This paper describes an empirical study on why project decision-makers selected COTS instead of OSS components, or vice versa. The study was performed as an international survey in Norway, Italy and Germany. It focused on decision making on using off-the-shelf (OTS) components. We have gathered answers from 83 projects using only COTS components and 44 projects using only OSS components. Results of this study show significant differences and commonalities of integrating OSS or COTS components. Moreover, the study illustrates several research questions that warrant future researc
Personal Software Process: Classroom Experiences from Finland
No full textThe personal software process (PSPsm) method was introduced a little less than a decade ago with high expectations. Still, only a limited number of experience reports have been published. This paper reports results from the University of Oulu in Finland, where PSP is a mandatory course for students majoring in software engineering. The results do not indicate a significant improvement in size or effort estimation skills, but the defects found in the unit test phase were decreased by a factor of 4.2. Students however did not plan on using the PSP skills in industry. It is suggested that course assignments are tailored to local context, and a stronger emphasis is placed on the concept and classification of defects. Software industry should in turn develop capabilities for using the PSP trained engineers. These and other implications are discussed
Validation of New Theses on Off-The-Shelf Component Based Development
No full textUsing OTS (Off-The-Shelf) components in software development has become increasingly popular in the IT industry. OTS components can be either COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf), or OSS (Open-Source-Software) components. A recent study with seven structured interviews concluded with six theses, which contradicted widely accepted (or simply undisputed) insight. Since the sample size of that study was very small, it is necessary to investigate these theses in a larger and randomized sample. A state-of-the-practice survey in three countries — Norway, Italy, and Germany — has been performed to validate these new theses. Data from 133 OTS component-based projects has been collected. Results of this survey support four and contradict two of the initial theses. The supported theses are: OSS components were mainly used without modification in practice; custom code mainly provided additional functionality; formal OTS selection processes were seldom used; OTS component users managed to get required changes from vendors. The unsupported theses are: standard mismatches were more frequent than architecture mismatches; OTS components were mainly selected based on architecture compliance instead of function completeness
A Plugin for Visualizing and Refactoring Structurally Complex Software Architecture
No full textA tool to help developers in refactoring software architecture
A Plugin for Visualizing and Refactoring Structurally Complex Software Architecture
Full text linkA tool to help developers in refactoring software architecture
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
A Rule-based Framework for Enhancing Architectural Decision Guidance
No full textArchitectural decision-making is a non-trivial process for architects in software development
projects. In many cases, such a process starts by identifying architectural issues that
an architect should make decisions about. In the second step, the architects explore available
alternatives to solve the architectural issues. In the final step, the architects choose
one of the candidate alternatives for each issue, based on the decision drivers. Notable
progress has been made to assist practitioners in choosing one alternative among the possible
alternatives. Several methods and tools have been developed for documenting the
rationale and the outcome of the decision-making process. There is, nevertheless, little
research focusing on identifying architectural issues that are eligible for a particular
project. In the absence of systematic methods of identifying architectural issues, practitioners
mainly start their architectural decision-making process based on intuition and
prior experience, which may be insufficient due to cognitive biases.
We have investigated the industrial context to understand the attitudes and challenges
of large-scale enterprises in making and reusing architectural decisions. Then, we have
reviewed the literature to identify the gap in developing architectural knowledge about
the past into architectural decision guidance for the future. Afterwards, we have tackled
the problem of enhancing architectural guidance by developing a framework called Semi
Automated Design Guidance Enhancer (SADGE). SADGE extracts architectural issues
from project documents and domain literature by applying natural language processing
(NLP). This encourages practitioners to identify more architectural issues in the early
phases of their projects, making them more prepared for the later phases, when changing
and/or refactoring the architecture is more costly.
Finally, we have evaluated the framework by conducting a case study on project documents
and running experiments with IT students and expert IT architects. The results
of the evaluation show that SADGE extracts architectural issues with a significant recall
while reducing the manual knowledge processing effort notably. The evaluation also reveals
that the experts believe that the framework can be very helpful for them to either
reduce the amount of text to read, or to identify hot spots in their documents that need
extra attention.
The main contributions of this thesis are:
C1 An overview of the state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice in making and reusing
architectural decisions.
C2 A rule-based framework for developing architectural knowledge in project documents
and domain literature into architectural decision guidance.
C3 Results of empirical evaluation of developing architectural decision guidance by
employing a rule-based framework
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