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 …

Detecting Broken Pointcuts Using Structural Commonality And Degree Of Interest, Raffi Khatchadourian, Awais Rashd, Hidehiko Masuhara, Takuya Watanabe

Publications and Research

Pointcut fragility is a well-documented problem in Aspect-Oriented Programming; changes to the base code can lead to join points incorrectly falling in or out of the scope of pointcuts. Deciding which pointcuts have broken due to base-code changes is daunting, especially in large and complex systems. We present an automated approach that recommends pointcuts that are likely to require modification due to a certain base-code change and ones that do not. Our hypothesis is that join points selected by a pointcut exhibit common structural characteristics. Patterns describing such commonalities recommend pointcuts that have potentially broken to the developer. The approach …

Ban ‘Naked’ Braces!, A. Frank Ackerman, Ph.D.

Computer Science & Software Engineering

No abstract provided.

Choosing Your Weapons: On Sentiment Analysis Tools For Software Engineering Research, Robbert Jongeling, Subhajit Datta, Alexander Serebrenik

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent years have seen an increasing attention to social aspects of software engineering, including studies of emotions and sentiments experienced and expressed by the software developers. Most of these studies reuse existing sentiment analysis tools such as SentiStrength and NLTK. However, these tools have been trained on product reviews and movie reviews and, therefore, their results might not be applicable in the software engineering domain. In this paper we study whether the sentiment analysis tools agree with the sentiment recognized by human evaluators (as reported in an earlier study) as well as with each other. Furthermore, we evaluate the impact …

The Importance Of Being Isolated: An Empirical Study On Chromium Reviews, Subhajit Datta, Devarshi Bhatt, Manish Jain, Proshanta Sarkar, Santonu Sarkar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As large scale software development has become more collaborative, and software teams more globally distributed, several studies have explored how developer interaction influences software development outcomes. The emphasis so far has been largely on outcomes like defect count, the time to close modification requests etc. In the paper, we examine data from the Chromium project to understand how different aspects of developer discussion relate to the closure time of reviews. On the basis of analyzing reviews discussed by 2000+ developers, our results indicate that quicker closure of reviews owned by a developer relates to higher reception of information and insights …

Exploring Discriminative Features For Anomaly Detection In Public Spaces, Shriguru Nayak, Archan Misra, Kasthuri Jeyarajah, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context data, collected either from mobile devices or from user-generated social media content, can help identify abnormal behavioural patterns in public spaces (e.g., shopping malls, college campuses or downtown city areas). Spatiotemporal analysis of such data streams provides a compelling new approach towards automatically creating real-time urban situational awareness, especially about events that are unanticipated or that evolve very rapidly. In this work, we use real-life datasets collected via SMU's LiveLabs testbed or via SMU's Palanteer software, to explore various discriminative features (both spatial and temporal - e.g., occupancy volumes, rate of change in topic{specific tweets or probabilistic distribution of …

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 …

Developing Microsoft Word 2007 Add-On Applications, Peter L. Sonnek

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

In 2007, Microsoft released a new version of MS Office that changed the file platform to a universal data format called Extensible Markup Language or XML. XML is meant to be simple, meaningful, and understood by all computer programs. Since Microsoft has moved its file format to XML, tremendous extendibility can be built by software professionals to link MS Office 2007 documents to data not held within the saved documents. This project tested the levels of interactive data between MS Word 2007 and several other XML data sources.

Blogging Developer Knowledge: Motivations, Challenges, And Future Directions, Chris Parnin, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Why do software developers place so much effort into writing public blog posts about their knowledge, experiences, and opinions on software development? What are the benefits, problems, and tools needed-what can the research community do to help? In this paper, we describe a research agenda aimed at understanding the motivations and issues of software development blogging. We interviewed developers as well as mined and analyzed their blog posts. For this initial study, we selected developers from various backgrounds: IDE plugin development, mobile development, and web development. We found that developers used blogging for a variety of functions such as documentation, …

Interactive Ambient Visualizations For Soft Advice, Emerson Murphy-Hill, Titus Barik, Andrew P. Black

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Some software packages offer the user soft advice: recommendations that are intended to help the user create high quality artifacts, but which may turn out to be bad advice. It is left to the user to determine whether the soft advice really will improve quality, and to decide whether or not to adopt it. Visualizations can help the user in making this decision, but we believe that conventional visualizations are less than ideal. In this paper, we describe an interactive ambient visualization to help users identify, understand and interpret soft advice.

Our visualization was developed to help programmers interpret code …

Design And Practical Application Of An Innovative, Pneumatically Latched Valve, Cheng Y. Lin, Jennifer G. Michaeli, Nathan J. Luetke

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

This article explains the design and fabrication of an innovative five-port, two-position (5/2), pneumatically latched valve. The initial application to repeatedly and automatically lift a mechanical cover or gate was presented as part of an undergraduate student project in the Mechanical Engineering Technology Program's Automation and Controls course in the Department of Engineering Technology at Old Dominion University. Valve operation, including self-latching, utilizes mechanical means only. The valve does not require any electrical power, electronic sensors, or controller, which makes it an energy-saving device. For light-duty operation, a bellows foot-air pump is used for air supply. A single activation of …

Pointcut Rejuvenation: Recovering Pointcut Expressions In Evolving Aspect-Oriented Software, Raffi Khatchadourian, Phil Greenwood, Awais Rashid, Harry Xu

Publications and Research

Pointcut fragility is a well-documented problem in Aspect-Oriented Programming; changes to the base code can lead to join points incorrectly falling in or out of the scope of pointcuts. In this paper, we present an automated approach that limits fragility problems by providing mechanical assistance in pointcut maintenance. The approach is based on harnessing arbitrarily deep structural commonalities between program elements corresponding to join points selected by a pointcut. The extracted patterns are then applied to later versions to offer suggestions of new join points that may require inclusion. To illustrate that the motivation behind our proposal is well founded, …

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 …

Challenging Computer Software Frontiers And The Human Resistance To Change, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

This paper examines the driving and opposing forces that are governing the current paradigm shift from a data-processing information technology environment without software intelligence to an information-centric environment in which data changes are automatically interpreted within the context of the application domain. The driving forces are related to the large quantity of data and the complexity of networked systems that both call for software intelligence. The opposing forces are non-technical and due to the natural human resistance to change.

Based on this background the paper describes current information-centric technology, proposes a vision of intelligent software system capabilities, and identifies four …

The Effect Of A New Version Of Software On Its Use: A Case Study Of A Course Management System, John Beckett

Faculty Works

Course Management Systems (CMS) are used to support the growing trend of colleges and universities to offer classes at a distance, and to use technology to provide resources and communication with and for students in traditional classroom settings. Actual use and success of these systems has been mixed in practice, however, for reasons which are not entirely clear.

The theory of Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) described and codified by Everett M. Rogers in 1962 is used to describe how innovations are selected, adopted, and brought to bear on the needs of people with jobs to do. Gary C. Moore and …

Knowledge Management Enterprise Services (Kmes): Concepts And Implementation Principles, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The purpose of this paper is to present concepts and implementation principles related to the design and development of reusable software services that are capable of assisting users at the operational level. Knowledge Management Enterprise Services (KMES) are an implementation of the service-oriented architecture paradigm, with a focus on the exchange of data within the meaningful context of a particular application (i.e., knowledge) domain. This requires a KMES service to incorporate a high level representation of this knowledge domain in the form of an ontology that is shared among all collaborating services within the application environment and at the same …

Entrepreneurial Opportunities And Market Analysis Of The Information Technology And Software Development Sector Of Pakistan, Toshio Fujita, Hassan Tajuddin

Business Review

This study investigates the Information Technology and the Software Development sector of Pakistan. It discusses the reasons for the lack of trust in Pakistani IT companies and different problems faced by an entrepreneur starting an IT company in Pakistan. The data was analyzed by qualitative content analysis. The findings are discussed with reference to previous research, and implications for entrepreneurial setups are noted.

Interdependency Of Pharmacokinetic Parameters: A Chicken-And-Egg Problem? Not!, Reza Mehvar

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

Pharmacokinetic (PK) software packages are widely used by scientists in different disciplines to estimate PK parameters. However, their use without a clear understanding of physiological parameters affecting the PK parameters and how different PK parameters are related to each other may result in erroneous interpretation of data. Often, mathematical relationships used for the estimation of PK parameters obscure the true physiological relationships among these parameters, prompting a discussion of which parameter came first and giving the appearance of the-chicken-and-the-egg dilemma. In this article, the author attempts to show how different PK parameters are related to physiological parameters and each other …

Hide It Or Unbundle It: A Comparison Of The Antitrust Investigations Against Microsoft In The U.S. And The E.U., Sue Ann Mota

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] "Microsoft Corporation, the world’s largest software company, has been facing antitrust scrutiny globally. In the U.S., after what’s been called the antitrust trial of the century, a consent decree was reached between Microsoft, the United States government, and several states, that closely resembled the litigated remedy that the remaining states received. Only Massachusetts appealed the litigated remedy, which was approved by the appeals court on June 30, 2004. In the United States, Microsoft was required to hide, but not remove, the Internet Explorer browser on the Windows Operating System. While antitrust litigation was ongoing in the United States against …

Jade Software: Getting Ready To Tackle America, Sir Gilbert Simpson, Laurence Weinstein

New England Journal of Entrepreneurship

Interview by Laurence Weinstein of Sir Gilbert Simpson, founder and CEO of Jade Software in New Zealand.

Sir Gil Simpson is one of New Zealand’s pioneers in software development, having started in the field in 1967. He holds steadfast to his dream that one day his approach to software programming will take hold around the world. Simpson has just opened up the company’s first office in the United States; he expects his first significant foray into this country will be a successful one.

The Extreme Software Development Series: An Open Curricular Framework For Applied Capstone Courses, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

We describe an open, flexible curricular framework for offering a collection of advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in software development. The courses offered within this framework are further unified by combining solid foundations with current technology and play the role of capstone courses in a modern software development track. Our initiative has been very successful with all stakeholders involved.

Ua8 Wku Administrative Software Project, Wku Information Technology

WKU Administration Documents

Outline of project to upgrade software in WKU's administrative offices and brief overview of Information Technology history.

Six Copyright Theories For The Protection Of Computer Object Programs, I. Trotter Hardy

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.