Software Engineering Commons^™

Work Item Tagging: Communicating Concerns In Collaborative Software Development, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In collaborative software development projects, work items are used as a mechanism to coordinate tasks and track shared development work. In this paper, we explore how “tagging,” a lightweight social computing mechanism, is used to communicate matters of concern in the management of development tasks. We present the results from two empirical studies over 36 and 12 months, respectively, on how tagging has been adopted and what role it plays in the development processes of several professional development projects with more than 1,000 developers in total. Our research shows that the tagging mechanism was eagerly adopted by the teams, and …

Mitigating The True Cost Of Advertisement-Supported "Free" Mobile Applications, Azeem J. Khan, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Archan Misra, Srinivasan Seshan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The dominant, "ad-supported free application" model for consumer-oriented mobile computing is seemingly imperiled by the growing global adoption of metered data pricing plans by mobile operators. In this paper, we explore the opportunities for addressing this emerging conflict by enabling more intelligent ad delivery to such mobile devices. One especially promising path is leveraging the increasing availability of heterogeneous wireless access technologies (e.g., WiFi, femtocells) that offer less restrictive and more energy-efficient transport substrates for such data traffic. To understand the possibilities that exist, we first profile the advertisement traffic characteristics for some of the most popular advertisement-supported consumer applications, …

Formal Modeling And Validation Of Stateflow Diagrams, Chunqing Chen, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong, Manchun Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stateflow is an industrial tool for modeling and simulating control systems in model-based development. In this paper, we present our latest work on automatic verification of Stateflow using model-checking techniques. We propose an approach to systematically translate Stateflow diagrams to a formal modeling language called CSP# by precisely following Stateflow’s execution semantics, which is described by examples. A translator is developed inside the Process Analysis Toolkit (PAT) model checker to automate this process with the support of various Stateflow advanced modeling features. Formal analysis can be conducted on the transformed CSP# with PAT’s simulation and model-checking power. Using our approach, …

New Open Source Software For Building Molecular Dynamics Systems, Bruce Michael Allen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The context of this work is the development of open source software to support researchers to quickly build systems of molecules for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The goal is achieved through the integration of three open source programs by judicious modifications and creation of new source code, which allows the creation of molecular models, MD cells and the LAMMPS geometry input files. The software changes work together supporting an easy and intuitive process for simulation system creation. Creation of multiple MD cells for research simulations becomes quicker and provides needed standardization to the simulation process. The researcher can select from …

A Global Positioning System On The Lunar Sphere Utilizing Cubesats, Armani Giann Batista

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this thesis was to research the viability and feasibility of a new Lunar GPS that would utilize the CubeSat platform, newly emerging technology, and the consideration of satellites without the large, currently employed, chemically atomic clocks.

Autonomic Database Management: State Of The Art And Future Trends, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam Am Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

In recent years, Database Management Systems (DBMS) have increased significantly in size and complexity, increasing the extent to which database administration is a time-consuming and expensive task. Database Administrator (DBA) expenses have become a significant part of the total cost of ownership. This results in the need to develop Autonomous Database Management systems (ADBMS) that would manage themselves without human intervention. Accordingly, this paper evaluates the current state of autonomous database systems and identifies gaps and challenges in the achievement of fully autonomic databases. In addition to highlighting technical challenges and gaps, we identify one human factor, gaining the trust …

Ontology–Based Representation Of Simulation Models, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam A.M. Capretz, José R. Marti, Krishan D. Srivastava

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Ontologies have been used in a variety of domains for multiple purposes such as establishing common terminology, organizing domain knowledge and describing domain in a machine-readable form. Moreover, ontologies are the foundation of the Semantic Web and often semantic integration is achieved using ontology. Even though simulation demonstrates a number of similar characteristics to Semantic Web or semantic integration, including heterogeneity in the simulation domain, representation and semantics, the application of ontology in the simulation domain is still in its infancy. This paper proposes an ontology-based representation of simulation models. The goal of this research is to facilitate comparison among …

An Iterative Association Rule Mining Framework To K-Anonymize A Dataset, Michael Hayes, Miriam A M Capretz, Jefferey Reed, Cheryl Forchuk

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Preserving and maintaining client privacy and anonymity is of utmost importance in any domain and specially so in healthcare, as loss of either of these can result in legal and ethical implications. Further, it is sometimes important to extract meaningful and useful information from existing data for research or management purposes. In this case it is necessary for the organization who manages the dataset to be certain that no attributes can identify individuals or group of individuals. This paper proposes an extendable and generalized framework to anonymize a dataset using an iterative association rule mining approach. The proposed framework also …

Evolution Of Software Engineers’ Personality Profile, Daniel Varona, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Arif Raza

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has been applied to several studies that explore various dimensions of human factors in software engineering. Accordingly, this work reviews the results of these studies to explore existing trends. In order to attain a greater understanding of human resources in the software industry, we have reviewed sixteen studies that had been performed between 1985 and 2011. This review concludes that the changes in the complexity of software processes and products have created new roles and demanded new skills for software engineers.

Soft Skills Requirements In Software Development Jobs: A Cross-Cultural Empirical Study, Faheem Amed, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Salah Bouktif, Piers Campbell

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Purpose: Most of the studies carried out on human factor in software development concentrate primarily on personality traits. However, soft skills which largely help in determining personality traits have been given comparatively little attention by researchers. The purpose of this paper is to find out whether employers’ soft skills requirements, as advertised in job postings, within different roles of software development, are similar across different cultures.

Design/methodology/approach: The authors review the literature relating to soft skills before describing a study based on 500 job advertisements posted on well-known recruitment sites from a range of geographical locations, including North America, Europe, …

Evaluating The Demand For Soft Skills In Software Development, Faheem Ahmed, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Piers Campbell

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

An analysis of 500 advertisements for IT positions focuses on the soft skills mentioned in the ads, revealing which soft skills are in high demand for software development and which ones are neglected despite their importance.

A Web Application In Rest: The Design, Implementation, And Evaluation Of A Web Application Based On RePresentational STate TRansfer, William O’Brien

Honors Theses

It is no secret the Internet has evolved at an alarming rate since its public debut in the early 90s. What began as a simple way for users to publish files has evolved into a platform for impressively complex interactive applications. Now, applications once restricted to a single operating system are made available to all through advancements in browser technology and libraries. For a long time, Adobe has offered Photoshop as a far from trivial image editing program for around $100 to the Windows and Mac platforms. Recently, a web application emulating Photoshop’s features has been made freely available to …

Significantly Reducing The Processing Times Of High-Speed Photometry Data Sets Using A Distributed Computing Model, Paul Doyle, Fredrick Mtenzi, Niall Smith, Adrian Collins, Brendan O'Shea

Other

The scientific community is in the midst of a data analysis crisis. The increasing capacity of scientific CCD instrumentation and their falling costs is contributing to an explosive generation of raw photometric data. This data must go through a process of cleaning and reduction before it can be used for high precision photometric analysis. Many existing data processing pipelines either assume a relatively small dataset or are batch processed by a High Performance Computing centre. A radical overhaul of these processing pipelines is required to allow reduction and cleaning rates to process terabyte sized datasets at near capture rates using …

Improving The Knowledge-Based Expert System Lifecycle, Lucien Millette

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Knowledge-based expert systems are used to enhance and automate manual processes through the use of a knowledge base and modern computing power. The traditional methodology for creating knowledge-based expert systems has many commonly encountered issues that can prevent successful implementations. Complications during the knowledge acquisition phase can prevent a knowledge-based expert system from functioning properly. Furthermore, the time and resources required to maintain a knowledge-based expert system once implemented can become problematic. There are several concepts that can be integrated into a proposed methodology to improve the knowledge-based expert system lifecycle to create a more efficient process. These methods are …

A Hybridized Lagrangian Relaxation And Simulated Annealing Method For The Course Timetabling Problem, Aldy Gunawan, Kim Leng Poh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper describes a timetabling problem at universities, where a master course timetable is given extrinsically and conflicts due to students' course enrollment do not need to be considered. A solver for the problem, which integrates both teacher assignment and course scheduling, is described. An initial solution is obtained by a mathematical programming approach based on Lagrangian relaxation. This solution is further improved by a simulated annealing algorithm. The proposed method has been tested on instances from a university in Indonesia, as well as on several randomly generated datasets, and the corresponding computational results are reported.

Crowd Documentation: Exploring The Coverage And The Dynamics Of Api Discussions On Stack Overflow, Chris Parnin, Christoph Treude, Lars Grammel, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditionally, many types of software documentation, such as API documentation, require a process where a few people write for many potential users. The resulting documentation, when it exists, is often of poor quality and lacks sufficient examples and explanations. In this paper, we report on an empirical study to investigate how Question and Answer (Q&A) websites, such as Stack Overflow, facilitate crowd documentation — knowledge that is written by many and read by many. We examine the crowd documentation for three popular APIs: Android, GWT, and the Java programming language. We collect usage data using Google Code Search, and analyze …