1,720,986 research outputs found
An empirical study on the software quality evolution trends of open source software projects
No full textObjective evaluation of the quality level of a software product is a relevant aspect for supporting software engineers' work. This is particularly true when an Open Source Software system has to be adopted in an operative context. In this case, the assessment of its quality should be taken into account before choosing to adopted it. In this direction, this paper presents an empirical study aimed at assessing the quality of open source software projects along their life, through the gathering and analysis of relevant information. The analysis of the considered software projects required the evaluation of the software products quality, attractiveness and community trustworthiness, and the related trends are presented as results
Assessing the impact of measurement tools on software mantainability evaluation
No full textA relevant aspect of development and maintenance tasks is the evaluation of the software system quality. Measurement tools facilitate the measurement of software metrics and application of the quality models. However, differences and commonalities exist among the evaluation results obtained by the adoption of different measurement tools. This does not allow an objective and unambiguous evaluation of a software product quality level. In this direction, this paper proposes a preliminary investigation on the impact of measurement tools on the evaluation of the software maintainability metrics. Specifically, metrics values have been computed by using different software analysis tools for three software systems of different size. Measurements show that the considered measurement tools provide different values of metrics evaluated for the same software system
A review of enterprise modelling studies
No full textThis paper aims to provide a basis for the improvement of enterprise modelling research through a review of previous work published in literature. The review identifies 198 enterprise modelling papers in 49 journals and classifies the papers according to: research topic, modelling approach, research approach, study context and type of validation set. A database of these enterprise modelling papers is provided to ease the identification of relevant research results. The review results are combined with other knowledge and provide a support for modelling strategy recommendations for future enterprise modelling research, including: identification of relevant papers within a carefully selected set of journals when completeness is essential; need of conducting more studies on modelling methods commonly used from the software industry; and increase the awareness of how the properties of the case studies impact on the results when evaluating modelling methods
Analysing the reliability of open source software projects
No full textEvaluation of software quality is one of the main challenges of software engineering. Several researches proposed in literature the definition of quality models for evaluating software products. However, in the context of Free/Open Source software, differences in production, distribution and support modality, have to be considered as additional quality characteristics. In particular, software reliability should be taken into account before selecting software components. In this direction, this paper evolves a quality model for Free/Open Source Software projects, called EFFORT - Evaluation Framework for Free/Open souRce projects for including reliability aspects and presents an empirical study aimed at assessing software reliability and its evolution along the software project history
The instability of software projects: The role of private and public components
No full textSoftware architecture expresses how the initial concept of a software system has been actually implemented. However, requirement changes imply the continuous modification of the software system and can impact its architecture. The paper analyses how the architecture instability of a software system evolves during its life cycle and investigates which kind of change, in terms of classes added, removed, and modified, influences more the software system instability. The access control modifiers of the methods and instance variables of the modified classes are then analyzed for understanding which kind of members, among the public or private ones, are most frequently added or removed
Decision-making support tools and scenario analysis for valorising endogenous resources and promoting energy efficiency
Full text linkClimate change represents the greatest environmental challenge humanity has ever faced, whose effects today seem to be irreversible.
In such a context, agriculture is facing four main challenges: (i) becoming more resilient and adapting to climate change, (ii) reducing its impact in terms of GHG emissions and soil degradation, (iii) increasing its carbon sink potential, (iv) providing sufficient and healthy food to meet the growing demand of the population. This requires a transition from current models of intensive production to new models based on sustainable resource management.
The adoption of a holistic approach is therefore essential to effectively represent the main variables (energy, water, environment, food and soil) and their interrelationships, exploit the complex interconnections between them and the associated phenomena, reduce risks identify feasible strategies for sustainable resource management based on integrated policies.
An integration of the Nexus approach with the IEA-TIMES framework has been proposed to develop an innovative land use driven model - the TIMES Land-WEF model, which ensures an optimal management of resources of the entire agricultural system in a circular economy perspective.
The TIMES- Land-WEF model was validated in the Basilicata Region, a selected area of Mediterranean Europe, in order to evaluate the robustness of solutions under different conditions, namely to determine the effects of climate change on agricultural production and performing and assessment of the Farm to Fork strategy of the EU Green Deal
Managing the alignment between business processes and software systems
No full textContext The alignment degree existing between a business process and the supporting software systems strongly affects the performance of the business process execution. Methodologies and tools are needed for detecting the alignment level and keeping a business process aligned with the supporting software systems even when they evolve. Objective This paper aims to provide an adequate support for managing such a kind of alignment and suggesting evolution actions if misalignment is detected. It proposes an approach including modeling and measuring activities for evaluating the alignment level and suggesting evolution activities, if needed. Method The proposed approach is composed of three main phases. The first phase regards the modeling of business process and software systems supporting it by applying a modeling notation based on UML and adequately extended for representing business processes. The second phase concerns the evaluation of the alignment degree through the assessment of a set of metrics codifying the alignment concept. Finally, the last phase analyses the evaluation results for suggesting evolution activities if misalignment is detected. Results The paper analyses the application of the proposed approach to a case study regarding a working business process and related software system. The obtained results provided useful suggestion for evolving the supporting software system and improving the alignment level existing between them and the supported business process. Conclusion The approach contributes in all phases of the process and software system evolution, even if its improvement can be needed for identifying the impact of the changes. The proposed approach facilitates the understanding of business processes, software systems and related models. This favors the interaction of the software and business analysts, as it was possible to better formulate the interviews to be conducted with regard to the objectives and, thus, to collect the required data
Evaluating the quality of the documentation of open source software
No full textSoftware documentation is a basic component of the software development process: from the definition of the functional requirements to the maintenance phase. Software documentation refers to different types of documents that facilitates the software developer's tasks. Then, it includes the textual documentation required by the Software engineering standards, API documentation, Wiki pages and source code comments. Surveys and studies indicate that the documentation is not always available and, if available, only partially addresses the developers' needs, as it is often wrong, incomplete, out-of-date and ambiguous. This paper focuses on the quality assessment of the documentation of open source systems with the aim of understanding the support it can offer for adopting them and executing maintenance activities. Specifically, a quality model is defined and a preliminary investigation of its applicability is performed
Towards reengineering in reuse reengineering processes
No full textReuse of existing software has been regarded in recent years as a feasible solution to software quality and productivity improvement problems. Various reference paradigms for setting up a reuse reengineering process have been proposed. With reference to the RE/sup 2/ (Reverse Engineering and Reuse Reengineering) paradigm, this paper addresses the problems of the election phase. In particular, by describing an approach to the reuse reengineering of COBOL programs, it tackles the transformation of a set of candidate components into a set of actually reusable modules. This involves the identification of a module template that allows the COBOL code components to be easily reused, and the definition of reverse engineering and reengineering techniques to package the components into the template
- …
