Software Engineering Commons^™

From Glossaries To Ontologies: Disaster Management Domain, Katarina Grolinger, Kevin P. Brown, Miriam A.M. Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Our society’s reliance on a variety of critical infrastructures (CI) presents significant challenges for disaster preparedness, response and recovery. Experts from different domains including police, paramedics, firefighters and various other CI teams are involved in the fast paced response to a disaster, increasing the risk of miscommunication. To ensure clear communication, as well as to facilitate CI software interoperability, a common disaster ontology is needed. We propose using the knowledge stored in domain glossaries, vocabularies and dictionaries for the creation of a lightweight disaster management domain ontology. Glossaries, vocabularies and dictionaries are semi structured representations of domain knowledge, where significant …

A Unit Test Approach For Database Schema Evolution, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam A M Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Context: The constant changes in today’s business requirements demand continuous database revisions. Hence, database structures, not unlike software applications, deteriorate during their lifespan and thus require refactoring in order to achieve a longer life span. Although unit tests support changes to application programs and refactoring, there is currently a lack of testing strategies for database schema evolution.

Objective: This work examines the challenges for database schema evolution and explores the possibility of using various testing strategies to assist with schema evolution. Specifically, the work proposes a novel unit test approach for the application code that accesses databases with the objective …

An Empirical Study Of Open Source Software Usability – The Industrial Perspective, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the use of open source projects by common novice users; Open Source Software (OSS) is thus no longer a reserved arena for software developers and computer gurus. Although user-centered designs are gaining popularity in OSS, usability is still not considered one of the prime objectives in many design scenarios. This paper analyzes industry users’ perception of usability factors, including understandability, learnability, operability, and attractiveness on OSS usability. The research model of this empirical study establishes the relationship between the key usability factors and OSS usability from industrial perspective. In order to conduct …

An Empirical Study Of Open Source Software Usability: The Industrial Perspective, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the use of open source projects by common novice users; Open Source Software (OSS) is thus no longer a reserved arena for software developers and computer gurus. Although user-centered designs are gaining popularity in OSS, usability is still not considered as one of the prime objectives in many design scenarios. In this paper, we analyze industry users’ perception of usability factors, including understandability, learnability, operability and attractiveness, on OSS usability. The research model of this empirical study establishes the relationship between the key usability factors and OSS usability from industrial perspective. In …

A Secure Behavior Modification Sensor System For Physical Activity Improvement, Alan Price

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Today, advances in wireless sensor networks are making it possible to capture large amounts of information about a person and their interaction within their home environment. However, what is missing is how to ensure the security of the collected data and its use to alter human behavior for positive benefit.

In this research, exploration was conducted involving the "infrastructure" and "intelligence" aspects of a wireless sensor network through a Behavior Modification Sensor System. First was to understand how a secure wireless sensor network could be established through the symmetric distribution of keys (the securing of the infrastructure), and it involves …

Parallel-Sparse Symmetrical/Unsymmetrical Finite Element Domain Decomposition Solver With Multi-Point Constraints For Structural/Acoustic Analysis, Siroj Tungkahotara, Willie R. Watson, Duc T. Nguyen, Subramaniam D. Rajan

Civil & Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Details of parallel-sparse Domain Decomposition (DD) with multi-point constraints (MPC) formulation are explained. Major computational components of the DD formulation are identified. Critical roles of parallel (direct) sparse and iterative solvers with MPC are discussed within the framework of DD formulation. Both symmetrical and unsymmetrical system of simultaneous linear equations (SLE) can be handled by the developed DD formulation. For symmetrical SLE, option for imposing MPC equations is also provided.

Large-scale (up to 25 million unknowns involving complex numbers) structural and acoustic Finite Element (FE) analysis are used to evaluate the parallel computational performance of the proposed DD implementation using …

Workshop Report From Web2se 2011: 2nd International Workshop On Web 2.0 For Software Engineering, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne Storey, Arie Van Deursen, Andrew Begel, Sue Black

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis, blogs, tags and feeds, have been adopted and adapted by software engineers. With the annual Web2SE workshop, we provide a venue for research on Web 2.0 for software engineering by highlighting state-of-the-art work, identifying current research areas, discussing implications of Web 2.0 on software engineering, and outlining the risks and challenges for researchers. This report highlights the paper and tool presentations, and the discussions among participants at Web2SE 2011 in Honolulu, as well as future directions of the Web2SE workshop community.

In-Degree Dynamics Of Large-Scale P2p Systems, Zhongmei Yao, Daren B. H. Cline, Dmitri Loguinov

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper builds a complete modeling framework for understanding user churn and in-degree dynamics in unstructured P2P systems in which each user can be viewed as a stationary alternating renewal process. While the classical Poisson result on the superposition of n stationary renewal processes for n→∞ requires that each point process become sparser as n increases, it is often difficult to rigorously show this condition in practice. In this paper, we first prove that despite user heterogeneity and non-Poisson arrival dynamics, a superposition of edge-arrival processes to a live user under uniform selection converges to a Poisson process when …

Teaching Software Engineering Project Management-A Novel Approach For Software Engineering Programs, Craig Caulfield, David Veal, Stanislaw Maj

Research outputs 2011

In response to real and perceived short-comings in the quality and productivity of software engineering practices and projects, professionally-endorsed graduate and post-graduate curriculum guides have been developed to meet technical developments and evolving industry demands. Each of these curriculum guidelines identifies better software project management skills as critical for all graduating students, but they provide little guidance on how to achieve this. One possible way is to use a serious game - a game designed to teach and educate players about some of the dynamic complexities of the field in a safe and inexpensive environment. This paper presents the results …

Solving The Teacher Assignment Problem By Two Metaheuristics, Aldy Gunawan, Kien Ming Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The timetabling problem arising from a university in Indonesia is addressed in this paper.It involves the assignment of teachers to the courses and course sections. We formulate theproblem as a mathematical programming model. Two different algorithms, mainly basedon simulated annealing (SA) and tabu search (TS) algorithms, are proposed for solving theproblem. The proposed algorithms consist of two phases. The first phase involves allocatingthe teachers to the courses and determining the number of courses to be assigned to eachteacher. The second phase involves assigning the teachers to the course sections in order tobalance the teachers’ load. The performance of the proposed …

Solving The Quadratic Assignment Problem By A Hybrid Algorithm, Aldy Gunawan, Kien Ming Ng, Kim Leng Poh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a hybrid algorithm to solve the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP). The proposed algorithminvolves using the Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) to obtain an initial solution, and then using a combinedSimulated Annealing (SA) and Tabu Search (TS) algorithm to improve the solution. Experimental results indicate that the hybridalgorithm is able to obtain good quality solutions for QAPLIB test problems within reasonable computation time.

Supporting Introductory Test-Driven Labs With Webide, Thomas C. Dvornik

Master's Theses

WebIDE is a new web-based development environment for entry-level programmers with two primary goals: minimize tool barriers to writing computer programs and introduce software engineering best practices early in a student's educational career. Currently, WebIDE focuses on Test-Driven Learning (TDL) by using small iterative examples and introducing lock-step labs, which prevent the student from moving forward until they finish the current step. An initial set of labs and evaluators were created as examples of how to use WebIDE and were used in a pilot study in a CS0 course where students were split into two groups, one that used WebIDE …

Instance-Based Parameter Tuning Via Search Trajectory Similarity Clustering, Linda Lindawati, Hoong Chuin Lau, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper is concerned with automated tuning of parameters in local-search based meta-heuristics. Several generic approaches have been introduced in the literature that returns a ”one-size-fits-all” parameter configuration for all instances. This is unsatisfactory since different instances may require the algorithm to use very different parameter configurations in order to find good solutions. There have been approaches that perform instance-based automated tuning, but they are usually problem-specific. In this paper, we propose CluPaTra, a generic (problem-independent) approach to perform parameter tuning, based on CLUstering instances with similar PAtterns according to their search TRAjectories. We propose representing a search trajectory as …

Fine-Tuning Algorithm Parameters Using The Design Of Experiments Approach, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Linda Lindawati

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Optimizing parameter settings is an important task in algorithm design. Several automated parameter tuning procedures/configurators have been proposed in the literature, most of which work effectively when given a good initial range for the parameter values. In the Design of Experiments (DOE), a good initial range is known to lead to an optimum parameter setting. In this paper, we present a framework based on DOE to find a good initial range of parameter values for automated tuning. We use a factorial experiment design to first screen and rank all the parameters thereby allowing us to then focus on the parameter …

Haskell For The Cloud, Andrew P. Black

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present Cloud Haskell, a domain specific language for developing programs for a distributed-memory computing environment. Implemented as a shallow embedding in Haskell, it provides a message-passing communication model, inspired by Erlang, without introducing incompatibility with Haskell's established sharedmemory concurrency. A key contribution is a method for serializing function closures for transmission across the network. Cloud Haskell has been implemented; we present example code and some preliminary performance measurements.

Determinants Of Knowledge Mapping Adoption In Software Maintenance, Joseph K. Lee

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Knowledge Maps (KMaps) could be ideally suited for resolving many of the traceability problems in computer software maintenance. This thesis provides an understanding of the various factors that will encourage or impede the software maintenance community to adopt KMaps as part of their process. ABC Company in Perth, Western Australia, was chosen as the research site because it is a multinational software development company with customers in many major cities around the world. Since Knowledge Mapping (KMapping) is relatively new to most software staffers, it was necessary to develop a Software Maintenance KMap prototype. A literature review of KMapping, innovation …

Web-Based Ide To Create Model And Controller Components For Mvc-Based Web Applications On Cakephp, Sugiharto Widjaja

Master's Projects

A Web-based IDE that allows users to easily manage Model and Controller components of a CakePHP web application was developed. With this IDE, users are able to manage the model and controller components without having to write very much PHP code. They are able to create new model components without having to worry about creating the database tables for the models as the IDE creates them automatically. The IDE offers a simple interface for users to edit the schema of their models. Users can add or delete data from their models without dealing with the SQL insert/delete statements. The IDE …

Global Dimension Of Ci: Compete Or Collaborate, Arden L. Bement Jr.

PPRI Digital Library

No abstract provided.

Technology Capacity Development Through Oss Implementation: The Case Of Public Higher Education Institutions In Ethiopia, Nigussie Tadesse Mengesha

The African Journal of Information Systems

The Open Source Software (OSS) literature gives little attention to the study and practice of domain specific end-user OSS implementation in general and in the public sector of developing countries (DCs) in particular. This paper, however, investigates the trajectories of two OSS-based information systems (IS) implementation projects in a developing country (DC) context with the aim to uncover the practice-based learning and resource sharing evident among locally situated and globally dispersed developers and users. The result of the interpretative case study research shows that the OSS philosophy and practice of software development, implementation and ownership, facilitates for the emergence of …

One Social, Sowmya Sampath

Master's Projects

Facebook streams and Twitter tweets represent user content in two common social media systems. Users often have accounts on both these systems and to keep their content current for both of them they must update each separately. It is thus difficult to manage and maintain both of these social networks together. The goal of this project is to build a social website called One Social, where users can view their Facebook streams and Twitter tweets in one single view and thereby easily organize and maintain their updates. In One Social, users can enter a status message and can share it …