Software Engineering Commons^™

Poster: Towards Safe Refactoring For Intelligent Parallelization Of Java 8 Streams, Yiming Tang, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Syed Ahmed

Publications and Research

The Java 8 Stream API sets forth a promising new programming model that incorporates functional-like, MapReduce-style features into a mainstream programming language. However, using streams correctly and efficiently may involve subtle considerations. In this poster, we present our ongoing work and preliminary results to- wards an automated refactoring approach that assists developers in writing optimal stream code. The approach, based on ordering and typestate analysis, determines when it is safe and advantageous to convert streams to parallel and optimize a parallel streams.

Progressive Network Deployment, Performance, And Control With Software-Defined Networking, Daniel J. Casey

Theses and Dissertations

The inflexible nature of traditional computer networks has led to tightly-integrated systems that are inherently difficult to manage and secure. New designs move low-level network control into software creating software-defined networks (SDN). Augmenting an existing network with these enhancements can be expensive and complex. This research investigates solutions to these problems. It is hypothesized that an add-on device, or "shim" could be used to make a traditional switch behave as an OpenFlow SDN switch while maintaining reasonable performance. A design prototype is found to cause approximately 1.5% reduction in throughput for one ow and less than double increase in ...

An Analysis Of Multi-Domain Command And Control And The Development Of Software Solutions Through Devops Toolsets And Practices, Mason R. Bruza

Theses and Dissertations

Multi-Domain Command and Control (MDC2) is the exercise of command and control over forces in multiple operational domains (namely air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace) in order to produce synergistic effects in the battlespace, and enhancing this capability has become a major focus area for the United States Air Force (USAF). In order to meet demands for MDC2 software, solutions need to be acquired and/or developed in a timely manner, information technology infrastructure needs to be adaptable to new software requirements, and user feedback needs to drive iterative updates to fielded software. In commercial organizations, agile software development methodologies ...

Quality Of Service Impacts Of A Moving Target Defense With Software-Defined Networking, Samuel A. Mayer

Theses and Dissertations

An analysis of the impact a defensive network technique implemented with software-defined networking has upon quality of service experienced by legitimate users. The research validates previous work conducted at AFIT to verify claims of defensive efficacy and then tests network protocols in common use (FTP, HTTP, IMAP, POP, RTP, SMTP, and SSH) on a network that uses this technique. Metrics that indicate the performance of the protocols under test are reported with respect to data gathered in a control network. The conclusions of these experiments enable network engineers to determine if this defensive technique is appropriate for the quality of ...

Cora: Commingled Remains And Analytics – An Open Community Ecosystem, Nicole Mcelroy, Ryan Ernst

Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Anthropologists at organizations such as the DPAA (Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency) have the tough job of sorting through commingled remains of fallen soldiers. Under the direction of Professor Pawaskar at the College of IS&T, Ryan Ernst and I are currently developing a web application for the DPAA that will help them inventory the bones and record all the appropriate associations. After the inventory web application is built we will begin the analysis process using graph theory and other mathematical algorithms. This will ultimately help organizations like the DPAA get closer to the end goal of identifying fallen soldiers ...

Visualize To Realize: Improving Safety Of First Responders, Vikas Sahu

Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

The goal of this study is to improve the safety of first responders during an emergency hazardous material (hazmat) incident.

• A first responder (FR) is an individual who arrives first during a hazmat incident and takes the initiative to act in order to minimize the risk to public health and property from such incidents. Often first responders are firefighters.
• The reports of National Fire Protection Association recorded a national average of more than 30,000 firefighter injuries between 2010-16 (National Fire Protection Association, 2017).
• According to the US Fire Administration, an average fatality of 120 firefighters were recorded between 2010-16 ...

An Empirical Study Of Css Code Smells In Web Frameworks, Tobias Paul Bleisch

Master's Theses and Project Reports

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has become essential to front-end web development for the specification of style. But despite its simple syntax and the theoretical advantages attained through the separation of style from content and behavior, CSS authoring today is regarded as a complex task. As a result, developers are increasingly turning to CSS preprocessor languages and web frameworks to aid in development. However, previous studies show that even highly popular websites which are known to be developed with web frameworks contain CSS code smells such as duplicated rules and hard-coded values. Such code smells have the potential to cause adverse ...

Overfitting In Semantics-Based Automated Program Repair, Dinh Xuan Bach Le, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Claire Le Goues

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

The primary goal of Automated Program Repair (APR) is to automatically fix buggy software, to reduce the manual bug-fix burden that presently rests on human developers. Existing APR techniques can be generally divided into two families: semantics- vs. heuristics-based. Semantics-based APR uses symbolic execution and test suites to extract semantic constraints, and uses program synthesis to synthesize repairs that satisfy the extracted constraints. Heuristic-based APR generates large populations of repair candidates via source manipulation, and searches for the best among them. Both families largely rely on a primary assumption that a program is correctly patched if the generated patch leads ...

Early Prediction Of Merged Code Changes To Prioritize Reviewing Tasks, Yuanrui Fan, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

Modern Code Review (MCR) has been widely used by open source and proprietary software projects. Inspecting code changes consumes reviewers much time and effort since they need to comprehend patches, and many reviewers are often assigned to review many code changes. Note that a code change might be eventually abandoned, which causes waste of time and effort. Thus, a tool that predicts early on whether a code change will be merged can help developers prioritize changes to inspect, accomplish more things given tight schedule, and not waste reviewing effort on low quality changes. In this paper, motivated by the above ...

Engagemon: Multi-Modal Engagement Sensing For Mobile Games, Nguyen Phan Sinh Huynh, Seungmin Kim, Jeonggil Ko, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

Understanding the engagement levels players have with a game is a useful proxy for evaluating the game design and user experience. This is particularly important for mobile games as an alternative game is always just an easy download away. However, engagement is a subjective concept and usually requires fine-grained highly disruptive interviews or surveys to determine accurately. In this paper, we present EngageMon, a first-of-its-kind system that uses a combination of sensors from the smartphone (touch events), a wristband (photoplethysmography and electrodermal activity sensor readings), and an external depth camera (skeletal motion information) to accurately determine the engagement level of ...

A Call To Promote Soft Skills In Software Engineering, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Fahem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

We have been thinking about other aspects of software engineering for many years; the missing link in engineering software is the soft skills set, essential in the software development process. Although soft skills are among the most important aspects in the creation of software, they are often overlooked by educators and practitioners. One of the main reasons for the oversight is that soft skills are usually related to social and personality factors, i.e., teamwork, motivation, commitment, leadership, multi-culturalism, emotions, interpersonal skills, etc. This editorial is a manifesto declaring the importance of soft skills in software engineering with the intention ...

Rule-Based Specification Mining Leveraging Learning To Rank, Zherui Cao, Yuan Tian, Bui Tien Duy Le, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

Software systems are often released without formal specifications. To deal with the problem of lack of and outdated specifications, rule-based specification mining approaches have been proposed. These approaches analyze execution traces of a system to infer the rules that characterize the protocols, typically of a library, that its clients must obey. Rule-based specification mining approaches work by exploring the search space of all possible rules and use interestingness measures to differentiate specifications from false positives. Previous rule-based specification mining approaches often rely on one or two interestingness measures, while the potential benefit of combining multiple available interestingness measures is not ...

Long Term Key Management Architecture For Scada Systems, Hendra Saputra, Zhigang Zhao

Research Collection School Of Information Systems

A SCADA key management is required to provide a key management protocol that will be used to secure the communication channel of the SCADA entities. The SCADA key management scheme often uses symmetric cryptography due to resource constraints of the SCADA entities. Normally the use of symmetric cryptography mechanism is in the form of pre-shared keys, which are installed manually and are fixed. Then, these pre-shared keys or long term keys are used to generate session keys. However, it is important that these long term keys can be updated and refreshed dynamically. With the nature of SCADA systems which may ...

The Accuracy, Fairness, And Limits Of Predicting Recidivism, Julie Dressel, Hany Farid

Open Dartmouth: Faculty Open Access Articles

Algorithms for predicting recidivism are commonly used to assess a criminal defendant’s likelihood of committing a crime. These predictions are used in pretrial, parole, and sentencing decisions. Proponents of these systems argue that big data and advanced machine learning make these analyses more accurate and less biased than humans. We show, however, that the widely used commercial risk assessment software COMPAS is no more accurate or fair than predictions made by people with little or no criminal justice expertise. We further show that a simple linear predictor provided with only two features is nearly equivalent to COMPAS with its ...

Software Engineering Lecture Notes (Student Version), Kyle Burke

Open Educational Resources

Lecture notes for an upper-level undergraduate software engineering course, with a strong focus on software design. Students taking this course should have already completed a data structures course. These notes are designed to be used with Dale Skrien’s text Object Oriented Design using Java.

Reproducible Research For Computing In Science & Engineering, Lorena A. Barba, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

The editors of the new track for reproducible research outline the parameters for future peer review, submission, and access, highlighting the magazine’s previous work in this field and some of the challenges still to come.

Universality Of Egoless Behavior Of Software Engineering Students, Pradeep Waychal, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Software organizations have relied on process and technology initiatives to compete in a highly globalized world. Unfortunately, that has led to little or no success. We propose that the organizations start working on people initiatives, such as inspiring egoless behavior among software developers. This paper proposes a multi-stage approach to develop egoless behavior and discusses the universality of the egoless behavior by studying cohorts from three different countries, i.e., Japan, India, and Canada. The three stages in the approach are self-assessment, peer validation, and action plan development. The paper covers the first stage of self-assssment using an instrument based ...

Energy Slices: Benchmarking With Time Slicing, Katarina Grolinger, Hany F. Elyamany, Wilson Higashino, Miriam Am Capretz, Luke Seewald

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Benchmarking makes it possible to identify low-performing buildings, establishes a baseline for measuring performance improvements, enables setting of energy conservation targets, and encourages energy savings by creating a competitive environment. Statistical approaches evaluate building energy efficiency by comparing measured energy consumption to other similar buildings typically using annual measurements. However, it is important to consider different time periods in benchmarking because of differences in their consumption patterns. For example, an office can be efficient during the night, but inefficient during operating hours due to occupants’ wasteful behavior. Moreover, benchmarking studies often use a single regression model for different building categories ...

Moving Toward The Automation Of The Systematic Review Process: A Summary Of Discussions At The Second Meeting Of International Collaboration For The Automation Of Systematic Reviews (Icasr), Annette M. O'Connor, Guy Tsafnat, Stephen B. Gilbert, Kristina A. Thayer, Mary S. Wolfe

Veterinary Diagnostic and Production Animal Medicine Conference Proceedings and Presentations

The second meeting of the International Collaboration for Automation of Systematic Reviews (ICASR) was held 3–4 October 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. ICASR is an interdisciplinary group whose aim is to maximize the use of technology for conducting rapid, accurate, and efficient systematic reviews of scientific evidence. Having automated tools for systematic review should enable more transparent and timely review, maximizing the potential for identifying and translating research findings to practical application. The meeting brought together multiple stakeholder groups including users of summarized research, methodologists who explore production processes and systematic review quality, and technologists such as software developers ...

Consuming Digital Debris In The Plasticene, Stephen R. Parks

Theses and Dissertations

Claims of customization and control by socio-technical industries are altering the role of consumer and producer. These narratives are often misleading attempts to engage consumers with new forms of technology. By addressing capitalist intent, material, and the reproduction limits of 3-D printed objects’, I observe the aspirational promise of becoming a producer of my own belongings through new networks of production. I am interested in gaining a better understanding of the data consumed that perpetuates hyper-consumptive tendencies for new technological apparatuses. My role as a designer focuses on the resolution of not only the surface of the object through 3-D ...