Software Engineering Commons^™

Search-Based Fault Localization, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, - Lucia, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many spectrum-based fault localization measures have been proposed in the literature. However, no single fault localization measure completely outperforms others: a measure which is more accurate in localizing some bugs in some programs is less accurate in localizing other bugs in other programs. This paper proposes to compose existing spectrum-based fault localization measures into an improved measure. We model the composition of various measures as an optimization problem and present a search-based approach to explore the space of many possible compositions and output a heuristically near optimal composite measure. We employ two search-based strategies including genetic algorithm and simulated annealing …

Deployment Evaluation Of Accounting Information Systems In Libyan Commercial Banks, Omar Sharkasi, Martin George Wynn

The African Journal of Information Systems

This article reports on the recent implementation and current deployment of accounting information systems in Libyan commercial banks. A case study approach is adopted that moves from an initial screening of the 14 main Libyan banks to a final in-depth study of just three banks. Business process modeling and systems profiling are used to assess the status of the banks in terms of systems use, process change and information systems strategy development. Libyan banks are well advanced in their installation of modern packaged software but could be used to greater effect to optimize business processes and improve efficiencies. Training and …

Coping With Distance: An Empirical Study Of Communication On The Jazz Platform, Renuka Sindhgatta, Bikram Sengupta, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Global software development - which is characterized by teams separated by physical distance and/or time-zone differences - has traditionally posed significant communication challenges. Often these have caused delays in completing tasks, or created misalignment across sites leading to re-work. In recent years, however, a new breed of development environments with rich collaboration features have emerged to facilitate cross-site work in distributed projects. In this paper we revisit the question "does distance matter?" in the context of IBM Jazz Platform -- a state-of-the-art collaborative development environment. We study the ecosystem of a large distributed team of around 300 members across 35 …

Software Process Evaluation: A Machine Learning Approach, Ning Chen, Steven C. H. Hoi, Xiaokui Xiao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software process evaluation is essential to improve software development and the quality of software products in an organization. Conventional approaches based on manual qualitative evaluations (e.g., artifacts inspection) are deficient in the sense that (i) they are time-consuming, (ii) they suffer from the authority constraints, and (iii) they are often subjective. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a novel semi-automated approach to software process evaluation using machine learning techniques. In particular, we formulate the problem as a sequence classification task, which is solved by applying machine learning algorithms. Based on the framework, we define a new quantitative indicator to …

Enabling Gpu Acceleration With Messaging Middleware, Randall E. Duran, Li Zhang, Tom Hayhurst

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graphics processing units (GPUs) offer great potential for accelerating processing for a wide range of scientific and business applications. However, complexities associated with using GPU technology have limited its use in applications. This paper reviews earlier approaches improving GPU accessibility, and explores how integration with middleware messaging technologies can further improve the accessibility and usability of GPU-enabled platforms. The results of a proof-of-concept integration between an open-source messaging middleware platform and a general-purpose GPU platform using the CUDA framework are presented. Additional applications of this technique are identified and discussed as potential areas for further research.

Finding Relevant Answers In Software Forums, Swapna Gottopati, David Lo, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online software forums provide a huge amount of valuable content. Developers and users often ask questions and receive answers from such forums. The availability of a vast amount of thread discussions in forums provides ample opportunities for knowledge acquisition and summarization. For a given search query, current search engines use traditional information retrieval approach to extract webpages containing relevant keywords. However, in software forums, often there are many threads containing similar keywords where each thread could contain a lot of posts as many as 1,000 or more. Manually finding relevant answers from these long threads is a painstaking task to …

Pat 3: An Extensible Architecture For Building Multi-Domain Model Checkers, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checking is emerging as an effective software verification method. Although it is desirable to have a dedicated model checker for each application domain, implementing one is rather challenging. In this work, we develop an extensible and integrated architecture in PAT3 (PAT version 3.*) to support the development of model checkers for wide range application domains. PAT3 adopts a layered design with an intermediate representation layer (IRL), which separates modeling languages from model checking algorithms so that the algorithms can be shared by different languages. IRL contains several common semantic models to support wide application domains, and builds both explicit …

Towards Trajectory-Based Experience Sharing In A City, Byoungjip Kim, Youngki Lee, Sangjeong Lee, Yunseok Rhee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As location-aware mobile devices such as smartphones have now become prevalent, people are able to easily record their trajectories in daily lives. Such personal trajectories are a very promising means to share their daily life experiences, since important contextual information such as significant locations and activities can be extracted from the raw trajectories. In this paper, we propose MetroScope, a trajectory-based real-time and on-the-go experience sharing system in a metropolitan city. MetroScope allows people to share their daily life experiences through trajectories, and enables them to refer to other people's diverse and interesting experiences in a city. Eventually, MetroScope aims …

Designing Low-Cost Mobile Websites For Libraries, Tiffini Travis, Chee Hsien Aaron (Zheng Zhixian) Tay

Research Collection Library

As smartphone ownership rises, usage patterns are expanding. Libraries face an increasing demand for online content delivered in a mobile compatible format while being constrained by financial and staffing limitations. Solutions are readily available through free and low-cost products to create mobile web pages and existing design models from which to draw inspiration. Platform-specific apps can easily support the kinds of content most commonly delivered on library mobile pages: basic contact information and outbound links to the catalog, databases, and other resources. Two software platforms for creating simple pages were tested, the free software from WordPress with mobile detection formatting …

A Business Maturity Model Of Software Product Line Engineering, Faheem Ahmed, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

In the recent past, software product line engineering has become one of the most promising practices in software industry with the potential to substantially increase the software development productivity. Software product line engineering approach spans the dimensions of business, architecture, software engineering process and organization. The increasing popularity of software product line engineering in the software industry necessitates a process maturity evaluation methodology. Accordingly, this paper presents a business maturity model of software product line, which is a methodology to evaluate the current maturity of the business dimension of a software product line in an organization. This model examines the …

Api And Method Call Selection In An Automated Mashup Composer, Joseph Durham

Senior Seminars

With internet technologies expanding at a very rapid rate, the need for immediate data acquisition from many different sources is higher than ever before. While web mashups have helped bring this information to the user in a quick and desirable manner, the development of these mash ups is still a time consuming, programming intensive process. Currently there is no true automatic environment that will allow the user to create a new mash up without requiring any knowledge of programming.

This paper introduces a module that will help solve a portion of this automatic mash up composer by determining which sources …

Houdini's Wxpython, Michael Moore

Senior Seminars

This paper shows the importance of Python in Houdini. It goes into how and why Python is so important in Houdini. We see how we can build tools in Python that can be invaluable in the making of 3d animations in Houdini. Through building tools that help Houdini the programmer needs a way to build a GUI application. In building a GUI application we used wxWidget. Showing what wxWidget and how it can be used in Python. Then showing the strengths of wxWidget we compared it to Python's built in GUI application builder Tkinter, and from there showed how wxPython …

An Efficient Algorithm For Learning Event-Recording Automata, Shang-Wei Lin, Étienne André, Jin Song Dong, Jun Sun, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In inference of untimed regular languages, given an unknown language to be inferred, an automaton is constructed to accept the unknown language from answers to a set of membership queries each of which asks whether a string is contained in the unknown language. One of the most well-known regular inference algorithms is the L* algorithm, proposed by Angluin in 1987, which can learn a minimal deterministic finite automaton (DFA) to accept the unknown language. In this work, we propose an efficient polynomial time learning algorithm, TL*, for timed regular language accepted by event-recording automata. Given an unknown timed regular language, …

Differencing Labeled Transition Systems, Zhenchang Xing, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Concurrent programs often use Labeled Transition Systems (LTSs) as their operational semantic models, which provide the basis for automatic system analysis and verification. System behaviors (generated from the operational semantics) evolve as programs evolve for fixing bugs or implementing new user requirements. Even when a program remains unchanged, its LTS models explored by a model checker or analyzer may be different due to the application of different exploration methods. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach (named SpecDiff) to computing the differences between two LTSs, representing the evolving behaviors of a concurrent program. SpecDiff considers LTSs as Typed Attributed …

Recommending People In Developers' Collaboration Network, Didi Surian, Nian Liu, David Lo, Hanghang Tong, Ee Peng Lim, Christos Faloutsos

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many software developments involve collaborations of developers across the globe. This is true for both open-source and closed-source development efforts. Developers collaborate on different projects of various types. As with any other teamwork endeavors, finding compatibility among members in a development team is helpful towards the realization of the team’s goal. Compatible members tend to share similar programming style and naming strategy, communicate well with one another, etc. However, finding the right person to work with is not an easy task. In this work, we extract information available from Sourceforge.Net, the largest database of open source software, and build developer …

An Exploratory Study Of Software Reverse Engineering In A Security Context, Christoph Treude, Fernando Figueira Filho, Margaret-Anne Storey, Martin Salois

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Illegal cyberspace activities are increasing rapidly and many software engineers are using reverse engineering methods to respond to attacks. The security-sensitive nature of these tasks, such as the understanding of malware or the decryption of encrypted content, brings unique challenges to reverse engineering: work has to be done offline, files can rarely be shared, time pressure is immense, and there is a lack of tool and process support for capturing and sharing the knowledge obtained while trying to understand plain assembly code. To help us gain an understanding of this reverse engineering work, we report on an exploratory study done …

Code Search Via Topic-Enriched Dependence Graph Matching, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Source code contains textual, structural, and semantic information, which can all be leveraged for effective search. Some studies have proposed semantic code search where users can specify query topics in a natural language. Other studies can search through system dependence graphs. In this paper, we propose a semantic dependence search engine that integrates both kinds of techniques and can retrieve code snippets based on expressive user queries describing both topics and dependencies. Users can specify their search targets in a free form format describing desired topics (i.e., high-level semantic or functionality of the target code); a specialized graph query language …

Cooperative Reinforcement Learning In Topology-Based Multi-Agent Systems, Dan Xiao, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Topology-based multi-agent systems (TMAS), wherein agents interact with one another according to their spatial relationship in a network, are well suited for problems with topological constraints. In a TMAS system, however, each agent may have a different state space, which can be rather large. Consequently, traditional approaches to multi-agent cooperative learning may not be able to scale up with the complexity of the network topology. In this paper, we propose a cooperative learning strategy, under which autonomous agents are assembled in a binary tree formation (BTF). By constraining the interaction between agents, we effectively unify the state space of individual …

Concern Localization Using Information Retrieval: An Empirical Study On Linux Kernel, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Zhenchang Xing, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many software maintenance activities need to find code units (functions, files, etc.) that implement a certain concern (features, bugs, etc.). To facilitate such activities, many approaches have been proposed to automatically link code units with concerns described in natural languages, which are termed as concern localization and often employ Information Retrieval (IR) techniques. There has not been a study that evaluates and compares the effectiveness of latest IR techniques on a large dataset. This study fills this gap by investigating ten IR techniques, some of which are new and have not been used for concern localization, on a Linux kernel …

A Survey Of Techniques And Challenges In Underwater Localization, Hwee-Pink Tan, Roee Diamant, Winston K. G. Seah, Marc Waldmeyer

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are expected to support a variety of civilian and military applications. Sensed data can only be interpreted meaningfully when referenced to the location of the sensor, making localization an important problem. While global positioning system (GPS) receivers are commonly used in terrestrial WSNs to achieve this, this is infeasible in UWSNs as GPS signals do not propagate through water. Acoustic communications is the most promising mode of communication underwater. However, underwater acoustic channels are characterized by harsh physical layer conditions with low bandwidth, high propagation delay and high bit error rate. Moreover, the variable speed …