Software Engineering Commons^™

Unifying Framework For Building Social Computing Applications, Renato Costa, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

There have been a number of frameworks and models developed to

support different aspects of social computing. Some were developed to deal

with online interaction through the application of computer-mediated communications

tools, whereas others such as social network analyses and reputation

systems were more specific in their focus. While these methodologies are interrelated,

current social computing research has dealt with them as separate aspects.

This paper presents a comprehensive framework for social computing

that aims at integrating all these three aspects into a unified model so that discovery

and exploration of community members are not only made possible, but

also …

Rejuvenate Pointcut: A Tool For Pointcut Expression Recovery In Evolving Aspect-Oriented Software, Raffi Khatchadourian, Awais Rashid

Publications and Research

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) strives to localize the scattered and tangled implementations of crosscutting concerns (CCCs) by allowing developers to declare that certain actions (advice) should be taken at specific points (join points) during the execution of software where a CCC (an aspect) is applicable. However, it is non-trivial to construct optimal pointcut expressions (a collection of join points) that capture the true intentions of the programmer and, upon evolution, maintain these intentions. We demonstrate an AspectJ source-level inferencing tool called rejuvenate pointcut which helps developers maintain pointcut expressions over the lifetime of a software product. A key insight into the …

Software Nightmares, Manoj Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To err is human, but to really foul things up, you need a computer. So states the remarkably insightful Murphy’s Law. And nowhere else does this ring truer than in our financial workplace. After all, it is the financial sector that drove the rapid progress in the computing industry – which is why the first computing giant had the word “business” in its name. The financial industry keeps up with the developments in the computer industry for one simple reason. Stronger computers and smarter programs mean more money — a concept we readily grasp. As we use the latest and …

A Generic Approach And Framework For Managing Complex Information, Essam Mansour

Doctoral

Several application domains, such as healthcare, incorporate domain knowledge into their day-to-day activities to standardise and enhance their performance. Such incorporation produces complex information, which contains two main clusters (active and passive) of information that have internal connections between them. The active cluster determines the recommended procedure that should be taken as a reaction to specific situations. The passive cluster determines the information that describes these situations and other descriptive information plus the execution history of the complex information. In the healthcare domain, a medical patient plan is an example for complex information produced during the disease management activity from …

Hierarchical Inter-Object Traces For Specification Mining, David Lo, Shahar Maoz

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Major challenges of dynamic analysis approaches to specification mining include scalability over long traces as well as comprehensibility and expressivity of results. We present a novel use of object hierarchies over inter-object traces as an abstraction/refinement mechanism enabling scalable, incremental, top-down mining of scenario-based specifications.

Pointcut Rejuvenation: Recovering Pointcut Expressions In Evolving Aspect-Oriented Software, Raffi Khatchadourian, Phil Greenwood, Awais Rashid, Guoqing 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 which 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, we first …

Impacts Of Social Network Structure On Knowledge Sharing In Open Source Software Development Teams, Y. Long, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The study examines the relationship between social network structure and knowledge sharing in Open Source Software (OSS) development teams. One hundred and fifty projects were selected from SourceForge.net using stratified sampling. Social network structure was measured by two indices: degree of centralization and core/periphery fitness. Knowledge sharing was measured from two aspects: the quality of knowledge sharing that is indicated by the helpfulness of messages and the quantity of knowledge sharing that is indicated by the number of messages. The results show that social network structure significantly affects the quantity of knowledge sharing. However, social network structure does not influence …

Mining Patterns And Rules For Software Specification Discovery, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software specifications are often lacking, incomplete and outdated in the industry. Lack and incomplete specifications cause various software engineering problems. Studies have shown that program comprehension takes up to 45% of software development costs. One of the root causes of the high cost is the lack-of documented specification. Also, outdated and incomplete specification might potentially cause bugs and compatibility issues. In this paper, we describe novel data mining techniques to mine or reverse engineer these specifications from the pool of software engineering data. A large amount of software data is available for analysis. One form of software data is program …

Perspective Models: A Mechanism For Achieving Interoperability Among Expressive, Personalized Domain Views, Kym J. Pohl, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Accurate and expressive representation of the subject matter over which a context-oriented, decision-support system operates is fundamental to the effectiveness and longevity of the resulting solution. Often taking the form of an ontology, such extensive representational models, by their very nature, are rich in relationships and both coarse and fine-grained objects. It is, however, these qualities enabling rich expression that can significantly increase both the complexity of developing against these models as well as the potential for incurring undesirable performance issues. Further, due to the typically detail-oriented usage inherent in the software-based users (i.e., reasoning agents, etc.) of these models, …

Similarity Assessment Techniques, Michael A. Zang, Adam Gray, Michael Hobbs, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

This paper serves as a layman’s introduction to similarity assessment techniques, their distinction from contemporary computing paradigms, and their real-world applications. The following content derives from the experience gained by the authors in applying similarity assessment techniques to resolve the real-world problems of CDM customers, in particular those faced by the United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM).

Pre-Conference Proceedings Of The Focus Symposium On Intelligent Software Tools And Services, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

No abstract provided.

Icodes: A Multi-Agent System In Practice, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

This paper describes the Integrated Computerized Deployment System (ICODES) from both an architectural and evolutionary vantage point.

First, ICODES is a logistic software application of ship load-planning tools that utilizes intelligent software agents in a human-computer collaborative mode. As an example of a new generation of intelligent military decision-support systems, ICODES includes expert agents with automatic reasoning and analysis capabilities. This is made possible by an internal virtual representation of the load-planning environment, in terms of conveyance and cargo characteristics and the complex relationships that constitute the context within which load-planning operations are performed. ICODES agents monitor the principal determinants …

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 …

A Model Of Open Source Software-Based Product Line Development, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed, Mohammad Ali Babar

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Software Product Line (SPL) and Open Source Software (OSS) have emerged as successful modes of developing software. There is an increased interest in developing suitable approaches for combining the promised advantages of SPL andOSS. Researchers and practitioners have been emphasizing the need of exploiting the ever growing repositories ofOSScomponents for developing SPLs. However, there is no conceptual model for guiding the process of developing OSS-based SPLs. In this paper, we propose a model for developing software product line using open source software. This paper identifies and elaborates the essential phases and activities of the proposed model of developing OSS-based SPLs. …

Fuzzy Inference System For Software Product Family Process Evaluation, Faheem Ahmed, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Jagath Samarabandu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

When developing multiple products within a common application domain, systematic use of a software product family process can yield increased productivity in cost, quality, effort and schedule. Such a process provides the means for the reuse of software assets which can considerably reduce the development time and the cost of software products. A comprehensive strategy for the evaluating the maturity of a software product family process is needed due to growing popularity of this concept in the software industry. In this paper, we propose a five-level maturity scale for software product family process. We also present a fuzzy inference system …

Mining Past-Time Temporal Rules From Execution Traces, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo, Chao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Specification mining is a process of extracting specifications, often from program execution traces. These specifications can in turn be used to aid program understanding, monitoring and verification. There are a number of dynamic-analysis-based specification mining tools in the literature, however none so far extract past time temporal expressions in the form of rules stating: whenever a series of events occurs, previously another series of events has happened. Rules of this format are commonly found in practice and useful for various purposes. Most rule-based specification mining tools only mine future-time temporal expression. Many past-time temporal rules like whenever a resource is …

Searching Correlated Objects In A Long Sequence, Ken C. K. Lee, Wang-Chien Lee, Donna Peuquet, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sequence, widely appearing in various applications (e.g. event logs, text documents, etc) is an ordered list of objects. Exploring correlated objects in a sequence can provide useful knowledge among the objects, e.g., event causality in event log and word phrases in documents. In this paper, we introduce correlation query that finds correlated pairs of objects often appearing closely to each other in a given sequence. A correlation query is specified by two control parameters, distance bound, the requirement of object closeness, and correlation threshold, the minimum requirement of correlation strength of result pairs. Instead of processing the query by scanning …

User Guidance Of Resource-Adaptive Systems, João Pedro Sousa, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Vahe Poladian, David Garlan, Mahadev Satyanarayanan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a framework for engineering resource-adaptive software systems targeted at small mobile devices. The proposed framework empowers users to control tradeoffs among a rich set of ervicespecific aspects of quality of service. After motivating the problem, the paper proposes a model for capturing user preferences with respect to quality of service, and illustrates prototype user interfaces to elicit such models. The paper then describes the extensions and integration work made to accommodate the proposed framework on top of an existing software infrastructure for ubiquitous computing. The research question addressed here is the feasibility of coordinating resource allocation and …

Bounded Model Checking Of Compositional Processes, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong, Jing Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Verification techniques like SAT-based bounded model checking have been successfully applied to a variety of system models. Applying bounded model checking to compositional process algebras is, however, not a trivial task. One challenge is that the number of system states for process algebra models is not statically known, whereas exploring the full state space is computationally expensive. This paper presents a compositional encoding of hierarchical processes as SAT problems and then applies state-of-the-art SAT solvers for bounded model checking. The encoding avoids exploring the full state space for complex systems so as to deal with state space explosion. We developed …

Timeline Prediction Framework For Iterative Software Engineering Projects With Changes, Kay Berkling, Georgios Kiragiannis, Armin Zundel, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Even today, software projects still suffer from delays and budget overspending. The causes for this problem are compounded when the project team is distributed across different locations and generally attributed to the decreasing ability to communicate well (due to cultural, linguistic, and physical distance). Many projects, especially those with off-shoring component, consist of small iterations with changes, deletions and additions, yet there is no formal model of the flow of iterations available. A number of commercially available project prediction tools for projects as a whole exist, but the model adaptation process by iteration, if it exists, is unclear. Furthermore, no …

Mining Temporal Rules For Software Maintenance, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo, Chao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software evolution incurs difficulties in program comprehension and software verification, and hence it increases the cost of software maintenance. In this study, we propose a novel technique to mine from program execution traces a sound and complete set of statistically significant temporal rules of arbitrary lengths. The extracted temporal rules reveal invariants that the program observes, and will consequently guide developers to understand the program behaviors, and facilitate all downstream applications such as verification and debugging. Different from previous studies that were restricted to mining two-event rules (e.g., (lock) →(unlock)), our algorithm discovers rules of arbitrary lengths. In order to …

Hardware, Software And Data Analysis Techniques For Sram-Based Field Programmable Gate Array Circuits, Eugene B. Hockenberry

Theses and Dissertations

This work presents a built, tested, and demonstrated test structure that is low-cost, flexible, and re-usable for robust radiation experimentation, primarily to investigate memory, in this case SRAMs and SRAM-based FPGAs. The space environment can induce many kinds of failures due to radiation effects. These failures result in a loss of money, time, intelligence, and information. In order to evaluate technologies for potential failures, a detailed test methodology and associated structure are required. In this solution, an FPGA board was used as the controller platform, with multiple VHDL circuit controllers, data collection and reporting modules. The structure was demonstrated by …

Timed Automata Patterns, Jin Song Dong, Ping Hao, Shengchao Qin, Jun Sun, Wang Yi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Timed Automata have proven to be useful for specification and verification of real-time systems. System design using Timed Automata relies on explicit manipulation of clock variables. A number of automated analyzers for Timed Automata have been developed. However, Timed Automata lack composable patterns for high-level system design. Specification languages like Timed Communicating Sequential Process (CSP) and Timed Communicating Object-Z (TCOZ) are well suited for presenting compositional models of complex real-time systems. In this work, we define a set of composable Timed Automata patterns based on hierarchical constructs in time-enriched process algebras. The patterns facilitate the hierarchical design of complex systems …

A New Calibration For Function Point Complexity Weights, Wei Xia, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Danny Ho, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Function Point (FP) is a useful software metric that was first proposed twenty-five years ago, since then, it has steadily evolved into a functional size metric consolidated in the well-accepted Standardized International Function Point Users Group (IFPUG) Counting Practices Manual - version 4.2. While software development industry has grown rapidly, the weight values assigned to count standard FP still remain same, which raise critical questions about the validity of the weight values. In this paper, we discuss the concepts of calibrating Function Point, whose aims are to estimate a more accurate software size that fits for specific software application, to …

Information-Theory Based Optimal Location Management Schemes For Integrated Multi-System Wireless Networks, Archan Misra, Abhishek Roy, Sajal K. Das

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a multisystem environment where a mobile node can utilize multiple interfaces and simultaneously connect to multiple providers, new opportunities exist for efficient location management strategies spanning heterogeneous cellular wireless networks. In this paper, an integrated framework is developed for location management in such a multi-system, fourth generation (4 G) wireless networks. This information-theoretic framework allows each individual sub-system to operate fairly independently, and does not require the knowledge of individual sub-network topologies. An efficient location management in such a loosely coupled network is designed by having a mobile node view its movement as a vector-valued sequence, and then transmit …

Utility-Based Adaptation In Mission-Oriented Wireless Sensor Networks, Sharanya Eswaran, Archan Misra, Thomas La Porta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper extends the distributed network utility maximization (NUM) framework to consider the case of resource sharing by multiple competing missions in a military-centric wireless sensor network (WSN) environment. Prior work on NUM-based optimization has considered unicast flows with sender-based utilities in either wireline or wireless networks. We extend the NUM framework to consider three key new features observed in mission-centric WSN environments: i) the definition of an individual mission's utility as a joint function of data from multiple sensor sources ii) the consumption of each senders (sensor) data by multiple receivers (missions) and iii) the multicast-tree based dissemination of …

Localized Minimum-Latency Broadcasting In Multi-Radio Multi-Rate Wireless Mesh Networks, Junaid Qadir, Chun Tung Chou, Archan Misra, Joo Ghee Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We address the problem of minimizing the worst-case broadcast delay in ldquomulti-radio multi-channel multi-rate wireless mesh networksrdquo (MR2-MC WMN) in a distributed and localized fashion. Efficient broadcasting in such networks is especially challenging due to the desirability of exploiting the ldquowireless broadcast advantagerdquo (WBA), the interface-diversity, the channel-diversity and the rate-diversity offered by these networks. We propose a framework that calculates a set of forwarding nodes and transmission rate at these forwarding nodes irrespective of the broadcast source. Thereafter, a forwarding tree is constructed taking into consideration the source of broadcast. Our broadcasting algorithms are distributed and utilize locally available …

Probabilistically Reliable On-Demand Multicast In Wireless Mesh Networks, Xin Zhao, Chun Tung Chou, Jun Guo, Sanjay Jha, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper studies probabilistically reliable multicast in wireless mesh networks (WMNs), utilizing MAC layer re-transmission and wireless broadcast advantage to improve both the multicast throughput and the delivery rate. We first present a new multicast routing metric which we call the expected multicast transmissions (EMT). EMT captures the effect of link packet delivery ratio, MAC layer retransmission and wireless broadcast advantage at the same time. The EMT of a MAC layer multicast transmission is the expected number of data transmissions (including retransmissions) required for a packet to reach all the recipients. The EMT of a multicast tree is the sum …

Seemon: Scalable And Energy-Efficient Context Monitoring Framework For Sensor-Rich Mobile Environments, Seungwoo Kang, Jinwon Lee, Hyukjae Jang, Hyonik Lee, Youngki Lee, Souneil Park, Taiwoo Park, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Proactively providing services to mobile individuals is essential for emerging ubiquitous applications. The major challenge in providing users with proactive services lies in continuously monitoring their contexts based on numerous sensors. The context monitoring with rich sensors imposes heavy workloads on mobile devices 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 device can proactively understand users' contexts and react appropriately. This paper proposes …

Advances And Challenges For Scalable Provenance In Stream Processing Systems, Archan Misra, Marion Blount, Anastasios Kementsietsidis, Daby Sow, Min Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While data provenance is a well-studied topic in both database and workflow systems, its support within stream processing systems presents a new set of challenges. Part of the challenge is the high stream event rate and the low processing latency requirements imposed by many streaming applications. For example, emerging streaming applications in healthcare or finance call for data provenance, as illustrated in the Century stream processing infrastructure that we are building for supporting online healthcare analytics. At anytime, given an output data element (e.g., a medical alert) generated by Century, the system must be able to retrieve the input and …