Software Engineering Commons^™

Predicting Changes To Source Code, Justin James Roll

Master's Theses

Organizations typically use issue tracking systems (ITS) such as Jira to plan software releases and assign requirements to developers. Organizations typically also use source control management (SCM) repositories such as Git to track historical changes to a code-base. These ITS and SCM repositories contain valuable data that remains largely untapped. As developers churn through an organization, it becomes expensive for developers to spend time determining which software artifact must be modified to implement a requirement. In this work we created, developed, tested and evaluated a tool called Class Change Predictor, otherwise known as CCP, for predicting which class will implement …

Spest – A Tool For Specification-Based Testing, Corrigan Redford Johnson

Master's Theses

This thesis presents a tool for SPEcification based teSTing (SPEST). SPEST is designed to use well known practices for automated black-box testing to reduce the burden of testing on developers. The tool uses a simple formal specification language to generate highly-readable unit tests that embody best practices for thorough software testing. Because the specification language used to generate the assertions about the code can be compiled, it can also be used to ensure that documentation describing the code is maintained during development and refactoring.

The utility and effectiveness of SPEST were validated through several exper- iments conducted with students in …

Geospatial Data Modeling To Support Energy Pipeline Integrity Management, Austin Wylie

Master's Theses

Several hundred thousand miles of energy pipelines span the whole of North America -- responsible for carrying the natural gas and liquid petroleum that power the continent's homes and economies. These pipelines, so crucial to everyday goings-on, are closely monitored by various operating companies to ensure they perform safely and smoothly.

Happenings like earthquakes, erosion, and extreme weather, however -- and human factors like vehicle traffic and construction -- all pose threats to pipeline integrity. As such, there is a tremendous need to measure and indicate useful, actionable data for each region of interest, and operators often use computer-based decision …

A Mathematical Framework Of Human Thought Process: Rectifying Software Construction Inefficiency And Identifying Characteristic Efficiencies Of Networked Systems Via Problem-Solution Cycle, Jonathan Sarbah-Yalley

Master's Theses

Problem

The lack of a theory to explain human thought process latently affects the general perception of problem solving activities. This present study was to theorize human thought process (HTP) to ascertain in general the effect of problem solving inadequacy on efficiency.

Method

To theorize human thought process (HTP), basic human problem solving activities were investigated through the vein of problem-solution cycle (PSC). The scope of PSC investigation was focused on the inefficiency problem in software construction and latent characteristic efficiencies of a similar networked system. In order to analyze said PSC activities, three mathematical quotients and a messaging wavefunction …

A Proof Of Concept For Crowdsourcing Color Perception Experiments, Ryan Nathaniel Mcleod

Master's Theses

Accurately quantifying the human perception of color is an unsolved prob- lem. There are dozens of numerical systems for quantifying colors and how we as humans perceive them, but as a whole, they are far from perfect. The ability to accurately measure color for reproduction and verification is critical to indus- tries that work with textiles, paints, food and beverages, displays, and media compression algorithms. Because the science of color deals with the body, mind, and the subjective study of perception, building models of color requires largely empirical data over pure analytical science. Much of this data is extremely dated, …

Can Clustering Improve Requirements Traceability? A Tracelab-Enabled Study, Brett Taylor Armstrong

Master's Theses

Software permeates every aspect of our modern lives. In many applications, such in the software for airplane flight controls, or nuclear power control systems software failures can have catastrophic consequences. As we place so much trust in software, how can we know if it is trustworthy? Through software assurance, we can attempt to quantify just that.

Building complex, high assurance software is no simple task. The difficult information landscape of a software engineering project can make verification and validation, the process by which the assurance of a software is assessed, very difficult. In order to manage the inevitable information overload …

Misheard Me Oronyminator: Using Oronyms To Validate The Correctness Of Frequency Dictionaries, Jennifer G. Hughes

Master's Theses

In the field of speech recognition, an algorithm must learn to tell the difference between "a nice rock" and "a gneiss rock". These identical-sounding phrases are called oronyms. Word frequency dictionaries are often used by speech recognition systems to help resolve phonetic sequences with more than one possible orthographic phrase interpretation, by looking up which oronym of the root phonetic sequence contains the most-common words.

Our paper demonstrates a technique used to validate word frequency dictionary values. We chose to use frequency values from the UNISYN dictionary, which tallies each word on a per-occurance basis, using a proprietary text corpus, …

Improving Webide Through Delightful Design And Gamification, Michael Hilton

Master's Theses

WebIDE is a web-based online learning environment. WebIDE has been used

successfully to teach CS0 and CS1 students Java and C concepts and software

engineering best practices, specically Test Driven Development. Previous Web-

IDE development has concentrated on developing functionality. The main goal

of this eort is to improve two non-functional aspects of WebIDE. The rst is to

design a more delightful user interface. The second is to add a scoring mecha-

nism that encourages students to develop best practices. The scoring mechanism

rewards students who answer the question correctly on the rst attempt, dis-

couraging them from spamming the …

Cuda Web Api Remote Execution Of Cuda Kernels Using Web Services, Massimo J. Becker

Master's Theses

Massively parallel programming is an increasingly growing field with the recent introduction of general purpose GPU computing. Modern graphics processors from NVIDIA and AMD have massively parallel architectures that can be used for such applications as 3D rendering, financial analysis, physics simulations, and biomedical analysis. These massively parallel systems are exposed to programmers through in- terfaces such as NVIDIAs CUDA, OpenCL, and Microsofts C++ AMP. These frame- works expose functionality using primarily either C or C++. In order to use these massively parallel frameworks, programs being implemented must be run on machines equipped with massively parallel hardware. These requirements limit …

A Study Of Semi-Automated Tracing, Jeffrey Holden

Master's Theses

Requirements tracing is crucial for software engineering practices including change analysis, regression testing, and reverse engineering. The requirements tracing process produces a requirements traceability matrix(TM) which links high- and low-level document elements. Manually generating a TM is laborious, time consuming, and error-prone. Due to these challenges TMs are often neglected. Automated information retrieval(IR) techniques are used with some efficiency. However, in mission- or safety-critical systems a human analyst is required to vet the candidate TM. This introduces semi-automated requirements tracing, where IR methods present a candidate TM and a human analyst validates it, producing a final TM. In semi-automated tracing …

Developing Digital Field Guides For Plants: A Study From The Perspective Of Users, Emily Roseanne Schwarz

Master's Theses

A field guide is a tool to identify an object of natural history. Field guides
cover a wide range of topics from plants to fungi, birds to mammals, and shells to minerals. Traditionally, field guides are books, usually small enough to be carried outdoors . They enjoy wide popularity in modern life; almost every American home and library owns at least one field guide, and the same is also true for other areas of the world.

At this time, companies, non-profits, and universities are developing computer
technologies to replace printed field guides for identifying plants. This thesis
examines the state …

Animation And Visualization Of 3d Underwater Sensor Networks, Matthew T. Tran

Master's Theses

Simulation and visualization are critical for the development of new systems and protocols in the area of computer networking. As real-world field testing is expensive and time-consuming, simulations are often preferred as they can be performed repeatedly and inexpensively while still reflecting the outcome of field tests to an extent. Visualizations of the simulation and field test results often follow to provide researchers with a vivid animation of the events, allowing for a much more intuitive understanding of the system than tediously reading through trace files. While there are currently a multitude of simulators and animators for land-based networks, few …

Supporting Introductory Test-Driven Labs With Webide, Thomas C. Dvornik

Master's Theses

WebIDE is a new web-based development environment for entry-level programmers with two primary goals: minimize tool barriers to writing computer programs and introduce software engineering best practices early in a student's educational career. Currently, WebIDE focuses on Test-Driven Learning (TDL) by using small iterative examples and introducing lock-step labs, which prevent the student from moving forward until they finish the current step. An initial set of labs and evaluators were created as examples of how to use WebIDE and were used in a pilot study in a CS0 course where students were split into two groups, one that used WebIDE …

Software Internationalization: A Framework Validated Against Industry Requirements For Computer Science And Software Engineering Programs, John Huân Vũ

Master's Theses

View John Huân Vũ's thesis presentation at http://youtu.be/y3bzNmkTr-c.

In 2001, the ACM and IEEE Computing Curriculum stated that it was necessary to address "the need to develop implementation models that are international in scope and could be practiced in universities around the world." With increasing connectivity through the internet, the move towards a global economy and growing use of technology places software internationalization as a more important concern for developers. However, there has been a "clear shortage in terms of numbers of trained persons applying for entry-level positions" in this area. Eric Brechner, Director of Microsoft Development Training, suggested …

Incremental Validation Of Formal Specifications, Paul S. Corwin

Master's Theses

This thesis presents a tool for the mechanical validation of formal software specifications. The tool is based on a novel approach to incremental validation. In this approach, small-scale aspects of a specification are validated, as part of the stepwise refinement of a formal model.

The incremental validation technique can be considered a form of "lightweight" model checking. This is in contrast to a "heavyweight" approach, wherein an entire large-scale model is validated en masse.

The validation tool is part of a formal modeling and specification language (FMSL), used in software engineering instruction. A lightweight, incremental approach to validation is beneficial …

Pipelined Apache Http Server, Kevin Le

Master's Theses

Web servers often become overloaded with irregular surges in web traffic. Several techniques have been explored to cope with these overloads such as distributing load throughout different servers. This thesis presents Pipelined Apache HTTP Server, a modified version of the Apache Software Foundation’s HTTP Server that utilizes a pipelined execution of Apache’s request cycle. We discuss Apache’s original architecture, the modifications necessary for implementation of pipelined execution, and analyze its run time. Ultimately, we hoped to increase throughput of Apache but fall short because of unbalanced request phases and pipelining overhead.

Software Reverse Engineering Education, Teodoro Cipresso

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.