Software Engineering Commons^™

Solving The Data Deluge Problem, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The paper postulates that the information technology revolution that is commonly referred to as the Information Age is currently in a transition stage between data-processing and knowledge management that should be more aptly referred to as the Data Age. Symptoms of this transition stage are a data deluge problem that is evidenced by the inability of human computer-users to effectively analyze and draw useful conclusions from the overwhelming volume of data that is being collected, the increasing complexity of networked systems, and the acknowledged vulnerability of virtually all existing digital systems to cyber security threats.

The author suggests that the …

An Empirical Study On The Procedure To Derive Software Quality Estimation Models, Jie Xu, Danny Ho, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Software quality assurance has been a heated topic for several decades. If factors that influence software quality can be identified, they may provide more insight for better software development management. More precise quality assurance can be achieved by employing resources according to accurate quality estimation at the early stages of a project. In this paper, a general procedure is proposed to derive software quality estimation models and various techniques are presented to accomplish the tasks in respective steps. Several statistical techniques together with machine learning method are utilized to verify the effectiveness of software metrics. Moreover, a neuro-fuzzy approach is …

Visual Occam: High Level Visualization And Design Of Process Networks, Mikolaj M. Slomka

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

With networks, multiprocessors, and multi-threaded systems becoming more common in our world it is increasingly evident that concurrent programming is not something to be ignored or marginalized even though many takes on concurrency (mainly by means of monitors or shared resources) have proven to be difficult to deal with on large scales. Thankfully, a good deal of work has already been done to combat this, through CSP, occam, and other such derivatives, to produce a scalable process oriented paradigm. Still, it is cumbersome to attempt to deal with the intricacies of such communicating networks down to every minutia; if, instead, …

Design And Implementation Of A Middleware For Easy Development And Provision Of Stream-Based Services, Seungwoo Kang, Youngki Lee, Sunghwan Ihm, Souneil Park, Su-Myeon Kim, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper proposes MISSA, a novel middleware to facilitate the development and provision of stream-based services in emerging pervasive environments. The stream-based services utilize voluminous and continuously updated data streams as their input. The characteristics of data streams bring new requirements on the development and provision of the services. To satisfy the requirements, a unique service model and a runtime system are designed in MISSA. The key concept of our service model is to separate service logic from handling data streams. This significantly mitigates the burden on service developers by allowing them to only concentrate on the service logic. Job …

Auditing The Defense Against Cross Site Scripting In Web Applications, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Majority attacks to web applications today are mainly carried out through input manipulation in order to cause unintended actions of these applications. These attacks exploit the weaknesses of web applications in preventing the manipulation of inputs. Among these attacks, cross site scripting attack -- malicious input is submitted to perform unintended actions on a HTML response page -- is a common type of attacks. This paper proposes an approach for thorough auditing of code to defend against cross site scripting attack. Based on the possible methods of implementing defenses against cross site scripting attack, the approach extracts all such defenses …

Analytics-Modulated Coding Of Surveillance Video, Lai-Tee Cheok, Nikhil Gagvani

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Video surveillance systems increasingly use H.264 coding to achieve 24x7 recording and streaming. However, with the proliferation of security cameras, and the need to store several months of video, bandwidth and storage costs can be significant. We propose a new compression technique to significantly improve the coding efficiency of H.264 for surveillance video. Video content is analyzed and video semantics are extracted using video analytics algorithms such as segmentation, classification and tracking. In contrast to existing approaches, our Analytics-Modulated Compression (AMC) scheme does not require coding of object shape information and produces bitstreams that are standards-compliant and not limited to …

An Organizational Maturity Model Of Software Product Line Engineering, Faheem Ahmed, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Software product line engineering is an inter-disciplinary concept. It spans the dimensions of business, architecture, process, and the organization. Some of the potential benefits of this approach include cost reduction, improvements in product quality and a decrease in product development time. The increasing popularity of software product line engineering in the software industry necessitates a process maturity evaluation methodology. Accordingly, this paper presents an organizational maturity model of software product line engineering for evaluating the maturity of organizational dimension. The model assumes that organizational theories, behavior, and management play a critical role in the institutionalization of software product line engineering …

Graduation Outliner, Jason Boyle

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Planning a quarterly course schedule is a difficult and laborious process for university students which must be repeated every quarter. Students are expected to determine which courses to take based on a large and complex set of requirement criteria. Most academic scheduling research has focused on faculty availability and desires. This project attempts to address the needs of students for whom no quarterly course schedule planning tool is widely available. A Java Swing-based application is described that allows students to create a graphical quarter-by-quarter visualization of the courses they plan to take. The application also accepts a list of graduation …

Automatic Junit Creation Tool: An Exploration In High Level Process Driven Automatic Test Case Creation, William Whitney

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Many software developers do not enjoy writing unit test code. Often their excuses range from testing is slow to testing is hard. Yet perhaps test derivation has to be neither. The aim of this senior project is to examine the current state of unit test creation for the Java programming language. In particular, inefficiencies with the JUnit test framework regarding test derivation are analyzed. Ultimately, a JUnit test creation tool is created that provides a high-level process for test derivation.

Customer Communicator, Eddie Tavarez

Computer Science and Software Engineering

No abstract provided.

Mining Antagonistic Communities From Social Networks, Kuan Zhang, David Lo, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

During social interactions in a community, there are often sub-communities that behave in opposite manner. These antagonistic sub-communities could represent groups of people with opposite tastes, factions within a community distrusting one another, etc. Taking as input a set of interactions within a community, we develop a novel pattern mining approach that extracts for a set of antagonistic sub-communities. In particular, based on a set of user specified thresholds, we extract a set of pairs of sub-communities that behave in opposite ways with one another. To prevent a blow up in these set of pairs, we focus on extracting a …

Development Of A 3d Game Engine, Nicholas Alexander Woodfield

Honors Scholar Theses

This paper presents the development history and specification of a 3D game engine titled "Spark Engine". The term "engine" is used to describe a complex graphics software suite that streamlines application development and provides efficient rendering functionality. A game engine specifically provides tools to simplify game development. Spark Engine is fully shader driven and is built on top of Microsoft's XNA Framework. It is a reusable and flexible platform that can be used to build any type of graphics application ranging from gaming to simulation. The engine was released as open source software under the New BSD License with an …

Using Ant Colonization Optimization To Control Difficulty In Video Game Ai., Joshua Courtney

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Ant colony optimization (ACO) is an algorithm which simulates ant foraging behavior. When ants search for food they leave pheromone trails to tell other ants which paths to take to find food. ACO has been adapted to many different problems in computer science: mainly variations on shortest path algorithms for graphs and networks.

ACO can be adapted to work as a form of communication between separate agents in a video game AI. By controlling the effectiveness of this communication, the difficulty of the game should be able to be controlled. Experimentation has shown that ACO works effectively as a form …

Personalization By Website Transformation: Theory And Practice, Saverio Perugini

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present an analysis of a progressive series of out-of-turn transformations on a hierarchical website to personalize a user’s interaction with the site. We formalize the transformation in graph-theoretic terms and describe a toolkit we built that enumerates all of the traversals enabled by every possible complete series of these transformations in any site and computes a variety of metrics while simulating each traversal therein to qualify the relationship between a site’s structure and the cumulative effect of support for the transformation in a site. We employed this toolkit in two websites. The results indicate that the transformation enables users …

A Discriminative Model Approach For Accurate Duplicate Bug Report Retrieval, Chengnian Sun, David Lo, Xiaoyin Wang, Siau-Cheng Khoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bug repositories are usually maintained in software projects. Testers or users submit bug reports to identify various issues with systems. Sometimes two or more bug reports correspond to the same defect. To address the problem with duplicate bug reports, a person called a triager needs to manually label these bug reports as duplicates, and link them to their "master" reports for subsequent maintenance work. However, in practice there are considerable duplicate bug reports sent daily; requesting triagers to manually label these bugs could be highly time consuming. To address this issue, recently, several techniques have be proposed using various similarity …

Awareness 2.0: Staying Aware Of Projects, Developers And Tasks Using Dashboards And Feeds, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software development teams need to maintain awareness of various different aspects ranging from overall project status and process bottlenecks to current tasks and incoming artifacts. Currently, there is a lack of theoretical foundations to guide tool selection and tool design to best support awareness tasks. In this paper, we explore how the combination of highly configurable project, team and contributor dashboards along with individual event feeds is used to accomplish extensive awareness. Our results stem from an empirical study of several large development teams, with a detailed study of a team of 150 developers and additional data from another four …

Bridging Lightweight And Heavyweight Task Organization: The Role Of Tags In Adopting New Task Categories, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In collaborative software development projects, tasks are often used as a mechanism to coordinate and track shared development work. Modern development environments provide explicit support for task management where tasks are typically organized and managed through predefined categories. Although there have been many studies that analyze data available from task management systems, there has been relatively little work on the design of task management tools. In this paper we explore how tagging with freely assigned keywords provides developers with a lightweight mechanism to further categorize and annotate development tasks. We investigate how tags that are frequently used over a long …

Web2se: First Workshop On Web 2.0 For Software Engineering, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey, Kate Ehrlich, Arie Van Deursen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social software is built around an "architecture of participation" where user data is aggregated as a side-effect of using Web 2.0 applications. Web 2.0 implies that processes and tools are socially open, and that content can be used in several different contexts. Web 2.0 tools and technologies support interactive information sharing, data interoperability and user centered design. For instance, wikis, blogs, tags and feeds help us organize, manage and categorize content in an informal and collaborative way. One goal of this workshop is to investigate how these technologies can improve software development practices. Some of these technologies have made their …

A Comparative Exploration Of Freebsd Bug Lifetimes, Gargi Bougie, Christoph Treude, Daniel M. Germán, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we explore the viability of mining the basic data provided in bug repositories to predict bug lifetimes. We follow the method of Lucas D. Panjer as described in his paper, Predicting Eclipse Bug Lifetimes. However, in place of Eclipse data, the FreeBSD bug repository is used. We compare the predictive accuracy of five different classification algorithms applied to the two data sets. In addition, we propose future work on whether there is a more informative way of classifying bugs than is considered by current bug tracking systems.

The Role Of Emergent Knowledge Structures In Collaborative Software Development, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many collaboration features in software development tools draw on lightweight technologies such as tagging and wikis. We propose to study the role of emergent knowledge structures created through these features. Using a mixed-methods approach, we investigate which processes emergent knowledge structures support and how tool support can leverage them.

A Scalable And Energy-Efficient Context Monitoring Framework For Mobile Personal Sensor Networks, Seungwoo Kang, Jinwon Lee, Hyukjae Jang, Youngki Lee, Souneil Park, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The key feature of many emerging pervasive computing applications is to proactively provide services to mobile individuals. One major challenge in providing users with proactive services lies in continuously monitoring users’ context based on numerous sensors in their PAN/BAN environments. The context monitoring in such environments imposes heavy workloads on mobile devices and sensor nodes with limited computing and battery power. We present SeeMon, a scalable and energy-efficient context monitoring framework for sensor-rich, resource-limited mobile environments. Running on a personal mobile device, SeeMon effectively performs context monitoring involving numerous sensors and applications. On top of SeeMon, multiple applications on the …

Testing And Maintenance In The Video Game Industry Today, Anthony A. Jarman

Senior Honors Theses

Testing and maintenance are important when designing any type of software, especially video games. Since the gaming industry began, testing and maintenance techniques have evolved and changed. In order to understand how testing and maintenance techniques are practiced in the gaming industry, several key elements must be examined. First, specific testing and maintenance techniques that are most useful for video games must be analyzed to understand their effectiveness. Second, the processes used for testing and maintaining video games at the beginning of the industry must be reviewed in order to see how far testing and maintenance techniques have progressed. Third, …

Contributors’ Preference In Open Source Software Usability: An Empirical Study, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The fact that the number of users of open source software (OSS) is practically un-limited and that ultimately the software quality is determined by end user’s experience, makes the usability an even more critical quality attribute than it is for proprietary software. With the sharp increase in use of open source projects by both individuals and organizations, the level of usability and related issues must be addressed more seriously. The research model of this empirical investigation studies and establishes the relationship between the key usability factors from contributors’ perspective and OSS usability. A data set of 78 OSS contributors that …

Pretty Lights, Nicholas (Nick) Delmas, Matthew (Matt) Maniaci

Computer Engineering

Digital media players often include a visualization component that allows a user to watch a visualization synchronized to their music or videos. This project uses the visualization plugin API of an existing media playback program (WinAmp) but it displays its visuals using physical LED lights. Instead of outputting visuals to the computer screen, data is sent over USB to a micro controller that runs the LED lights. This project aims to give users a more visceral visual experience than traditional visualizations on the computer screen.

Mashup Environments In Software Engineering, Lars Grammel, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Too often, software engineering (SE) tool research is focused on creating small, stand-alone tools that address rarely understood developer needs. We believe that research should instead provide developers with flexible environments and interoperable tools, and then study how developers appropriate and tailor these tools in practice. Although there has been some prior work on this, we feel that flexible tool environments for SE have not yet been fully explored. In particular, we propose adopting the Web 2.0 idea of mashups and mashup environments to support SE practitioners in analytic activities involving multiple information sources.

The Implications Of How We Tag Software Artifacts: Exploring Different Schemata And Metadata For Tags, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social tagging has been adopted by software developers in various contexts from source code to work items and build definitions. While the success of tagging is usually attributed to the simplicity of tags, the implementation details of tagging systems vary significantly in terms of metadata, schemata and semantics. In this position paper, we argue that academia and industry should be aware of these differences and that we should start to examine their implications.

A Social Network Based Study Of Software Team Dynamics, Subhajit Datta, Vikrant S. Kaulgoud, Vibhu Saujanya Sharma, Nishant Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Members of software project teams have specific roles and responsibilities which are formally defined during project inception or at the start of a life cycle activity. Often, the team structure undergoes spontaneous changes as delivery deadlines draw near and critical tasks have to be completed. Some members -- depending on their skill or seniority -- need to take on more responsibilities, while others end up being peripheral to the project's execution. We posit that this kind of ad hoc reorganization of a team's structure can be discerned from the project's bug tracker. In this paper, we extract a social network …

A Verification System For Interval-Based Specification Languages, Chunqing Chen, Jin Song Dong, Jun Sun, Andrew P. Martin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Interval-based specification languages have been used to formally model and rigorously reason about real-time computing systems. This usually involves logical reasoning and mathematical computation with respect to continuous or discrete time. When these systems are complex, analyzing their models by hand becomes error-prone and difficult. In this article, we develop a verification system to facilitate the formal analysis of interval-based specification languages with machine-assisted proof support. The verification system is developed using a generic theorem prover, Prototype Verification System (PVS). Our system elaborately encodes a highly expressive set-based notation, Timed Interval Calculus (TIC), and can rigorously carry out the verification …

Policy-Driven Distributed And Collaborative Demand Response In Multi-Domain Commercial Buildings, Archan Misra, Henning Schulzrinne

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Enabling a sophisticated Demand Response (DR) framework, whereby individual consumers adapt their electricity consumption in response to price variations, is a major objective of the emerging Smart Grid. We first point out why the current model, of EMS-based centralized control of a static repository of high load appliances, is inappropriate for supporting DR in future commercial buildings and campuses, where the consuming appliances are controlled by multiple users. To enable DR in such multi-domain environments, we envision a more collaborative and autonomous model, where a large set of heterogeneous smart electrical devices autonomously self-organize and negotiate their collective DR. Enabling …

Playing With Recognizers: A Call For An Extensible Editor, Richard C. Davis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The sketch recognition interface community has not produced a -killer‖ application, because access to sketch recognition technology has been too restricted. If recognition technologies were more freely available for experimentation, powerful new applications would evolve. This paper proposes a rough architecture for an extensible graphical editor that facilitates collaboration between recognition technology developers, user interface designers, and early adopters of sketch recognition interfaces. Only by serving all three communities will we reach the critical mass necessary for killer applications to emerge.