Software Engineering Commons^™

The Stakeholder-Profile Framework For Tacit Knowledge Acquisition In Requirements Elicitation Interviews, Rasha Eltigani

Master of Science in Software Engineering Theses

The stakeholder’s tacit knowledge is a key crown jewel of requirements elicitation, and in turn software development at large. This critical element holds significant leverage in determining the outcome and the quality of the requirements, and therefore the development endeavor holistically. Due to its very nature of being tacit, it is innately covert and deeply hidden within the stakeholders’ minds, so it is extremely difficult to articulate and relay, as well as even harder to elicit and utilize. Additionally, the literature reports that there is a scarcity of available theorizations and solutions for addressing this challenge, posing a key and …

Real Time Call-Flagging System To Respond To Suicidal Ideation In Call Centers, Vishnu Menon, Joseph Carrigan, Charles Floeder, Thomas Walton, Devin Mcguire

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

The 2021-2022 Signature Performance Design Studio team developed a live audio call-flagging system that enables faster responses and new response pathways to veteran crises by call service representatives and their management team. Using a custom made deep learning model, live audio streaming server, and Teams broadcasting add-on, the system empowers Signature Performance call service representatives to make quicker and more well informed decisions to provide veteran’s the best care possible.

A Framework Comparison: .Net And Laravel, Guy Richard

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

No abstract provided.

Analysis Of The Effectiveness Of Different Techniques For Creating Cross-Platform Compatible Software, Michael Westberg

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Creating cross-platform compatible software is a major issue in a world where users utilize a variety of devices and platforms. To ensure that a piece of software is accessible to as many users as possible, software must be cross-platform compatible. There are four main approaches that can be done to achieve this state of being cross-platform compatible, each with both advantages and disadvantages. These methods are: creating the software as separate binaries, using a scripting language with a cross-platform interpreter, compiling to an intermediate language, and creating the software as a web application. This paper will discuss how each of …

Privacy Assessment Breakthrough: A Design Science Approach To Creating A Unified Methodology, Lisa Mckee

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

Recent changes have increased the need for and awareness of privacy assessments. Organizations focus primarily on Privacy Impact Assessments (PIA) and Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIA) but rarely take a comprehensive approach to assessments or integrate the results into a privacy risk program. There are numerous industry standards and regulations for privacy assessments, but the industry lacks a simple unified methodology with steps to perform privacy assessments. The objectives of this research project are to create a new privacy assessment methodology model using the design science methodology, update industry standards and present training for conducting privacy assessments that can be …

Canary: An Automated Approach To Security Scanning And Remediation, David Wiles

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Modern software has a smaller attack surface today than in the past. Memory-safe languages, container runtimes, virtual machines, and a mature web stack all contribute to the relative safety of the web and software in general compared to years ago. Despite this, we still see high-profile bugs, hacks, and outages which affect major companies and widely-used technologies. The extensive work that has gone into hardening virtualization, containerization, and commonly used applications such as Nginx still depends on the end-user to configure correctly to prevent a compromised machine.

In this paper, I introduce a tool, which I call Canary, which can …

A Study Of Software Development Methodologies, Kendra Risener

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Software development methodologies are often overlooked by software engineers as aspects of development that are handled by project managers alone. However, if every member of the team better understood the development methodology being used, it increases the likelihood that the method is properly implemented and ultimately used to complete the project more efficiently. Thus, this paper seeks to explore six common methodologies: the Waterfall Model, the Spiral Model, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming. These are discussed in two main sections in the paper. In the first section, the frameworks are isolated and viewed by themselves. The histories, unique features, …

Comparative Study Of Snort 3 And Suricata Intrusion Detection Systems, Cole Hoover

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) are one layer of defense that can be used to protect a network from cyber-attacks. They monitor a network for any malicious activity and send alerts if suspicious traffic is detected. Two of the most common open-source NIDS are Snort and Suricata. Snort was first released in 1999 and became the industry standard. The one major drawback of Snort has been its single-threaded architecture. Because of this, Suricata was released in 2009 and uses a multithreaded architecture. Snort released Snort 3 last year with major improvements from earlier versions, including implementing a new multithreaded architecture …

Using Bluetooth Low Energy And E-Ink Displays For Inventory Tracking, David Whelan

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The combination of Bluetooth Low energy and E-Ink displays allow for a low energy wire-less display. The application of this technology is far reaching especially given how the Bluetooth Low Energy specification can be extended. This paper proposes an extension to this specification specifically for inventory tracking. This extension combined with the low energy E-Ink display results in a smart label that can keep track of additional meta data and inventory counts for physical inventory. This label helps track the physical inventory and can help mitigate any errors in the logical organization of inventory.

Improving Intelligent Transportation Safety And Reliability Through Lowering Costs, Integrating Machine Learning, And Studying Model Sensitivity, Cavender Holt

All Theses

As intelligent transportation becomes increasingly prevalent in the domain of transportation, it is essential to understand the safety, reliability, and performance of these systems. We investigate two primary areas in the problem domain. The first area concerns increasing the feasibility and reducing the cost of deploying pedestrian detection systems to intersections in order to increase safety. By allowing pedestrian detection to be placed in intersections, the data can be better utilized to create systems to prevent accidents from occurring. By employing a dynamic compression scheme for pedestrian detection, we show the reduction of network bandwidth improved by 2.12× over the …

An Exploratory Study On Refactoring Documentation In Issues Handling, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Anthony Peruma, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Christian D. Newman, Ali Ouni

Articles

Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit feature requests and other tasks such as bug fixing and code review. Although recent studies explored how to document refactoring in commit messages, little is known about how developers describe their refactoring needs in issues. In this study, we aim at exploring developer-reported refactoring changes in issues to better understand what developers consider to be problematic in their code and how they handle it. Our approach relies on …

Code Review Practices For Refactoring Changes: An Empirical Study On Openstack, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Moatz Chouchen, Ali Ouni

Articles

Modern code review is a widely used technique employed in both industrial and open-source projects to improve software quality, share knowledge, and ensure adherence to coding standards and guidelines. During code review, developers may discuss refactoring activities before merging code changes in the code base. To date, code review has been extensively studied to explore its general challenges, best practices and outcomes, and socio-technical aspects. However, little is known about how refactoring is being reviewed and what developers care about when they review refactored code. Hence, in this work, we present a quantitative and qualitative study to understand what are …

Adaptive Task Planning For Large-Scale Robotized Warehouses, Dingyuan Shi, Yongxin Tong, Zimu Zhou, Ke Xu, Wenzhe Tan, Hongbo Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Robotized warehouses are deployed to automatically distribute millions of items brought by the massive logistic orders from e-commerce. A key to automated item distribution is to plan paths for robots, also known as task planning, where each task is to deliver racks with items to pickers for processing and then return the rack back. Prior solutions are unfit for large-scale robotized warehouses due to the inflexibility to time-varying item arrivals and the low efficiency for high throughput. In this paper, we propose a new task planning problem called TPRW, which aims to minimize the end-to-end makespan that incorporates the entire …

Does This Apply To Me? An Empirical Study Of Technical Context In Stack Overflow, Akalanka Galappaththi, Sarah Nadi, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow has become an essential technical resource for developers. However, given the vast amount of knowledge available on Stack Overflow, finding the right information that is relevant for a given task is still challenging, especially when a developer is looking for a solution that applies to their specific requirements or technology stack. Clearly marking answers with their technical context, i.e., the information that characterizes the technologies and assumptions needed for this answer, is potentially one way to improve navigation. However, there is no information about how often such context is mentioned, and what kind of information it might offer. …

One Ubiquitous Digital, But Social, Identity, Byron Moore

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Creating a digital identity in the Solana ecosystem is composed of creating accounts across multiple platforms with similar pseudo-names. Using public ledger technology (blockchain), digital identities can be developed so they are seamlessly applied across applications. Creating one such identity enables the individual to express themselves and build their personal brand. Blockchain technology automates this process by creating snapshots of an individual’s digital footprint within the scope of the ecosystem and enables a user to create a digital profile inspired by facets of self-sovereign identity principles. A digital identity should be controlled by the individual, but also allow for the …

Risk Gameplay Analysis Using Stochastic Beam Search, Jacob Gillenwater

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Hasbro’s RISK, first published in 1959, is a complex multiplayer strategy game that has received little attention from the scientific community. Training artificial intelligence (AI) agents using stochastic beam search gives insight into effective strategy when playing RISK. A comprehensive analysis of the systems of play challenges preconceptions about good strategy in some areas of the game while reinforcing those preconceptions in others. This study applies stochastic beam search to discover optimal strategies in RISK. Results of the search show both support for and challenges to traditionally held positions about RISK gameplay. While stochastic beam search competently investigates gameplay on …

Probabilistic Path Prioritization For Hybrid Fuzzing, Lei Zhao, Pengcheng Cao, Yue Duan, Heng Yin, Jifeng Xuan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hybrid fuzzing that combines fuzzing and concolic execution has become an advanced technique for software vulnerability detection. Based on the observation that fuzzing and concolic execution are complementary in nature, state-of-the-art hybrid fuzzing systems deploy “optimal concolic testing” and “demand launch” strategies. Although these ideas sound intriguing, we point out several fundamental limitations in them, due to unrealistic or oversimplified assumptions. Further, we propose a novel “discriminative dispatch” strategy and design a probabilistic hybrid fuzzing system to better utilize the capability of concolic execution. Specifically, we design a Monte Carlo-based probabilistic path prioritization model to quantify each path’s difficulty, and …

Graphcode2vec: Generic Code Embedding Via Lexical And Program Dependence Analyses, Wei Ma, Mengjie Zhao, Ezekiel Soremekun, Qiang Hu, Jie M. Zhang, Mike Papadakis, Maxime Cordy, Xiaofei Xie, Yves Le Traon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code embedding is a keystone in the application of machine learning on several Software Engineering (SE) tasks. To effectively support a plethora of SE tasks, the embedding needs to capture program syntax and semantics in a way that is generic. To this end, we propose the first self-supervised pre-training approach (called Graphcode2vec) which produces task-agnostic embedding of lexical and program dependence features. Graphcode2vec achieves this via a synergistic combination of code analysis and Graph Neural Networks. Graphcode2vec is generic, it allows pre-training, and it is applicable to several SE downstream tasks. We evaluate the effectiveness of Graphcode2vec on four (4) …

Causality-Based Neural Network Repair, Bing Sun, Jun Sun, Long H. Pham, Jie Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Neural networks have had discernible achievements in a wide range of applications. The wide-spread adoption also raises the concern of their dependability and reliability. Similar to traditional decision-making programs, neural networks can have defects that need to be repaired. The defects may cause unsafe behaviors, raise security concerns or unjust societal impacts. In this work, we address the problem of repairing a neural network for desirable properties such as fairness and the absence of backdoor. The goal is to construct a neural network that satisfies the property by (minimally) adjusting the given neural network's parameters (i.e., weights). Specifically, we propose …

Uipdroid: Unrooted Dynamic Monitor Of Android App Uis For Fine-Grained Permission Control, Mulin Duan, Lingxiao Jiang, Lwin Khin Shar, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Proper permission controls in Android systems are important for protecting users' private data when running applications installed on the devices. Currently Android systems require apps to obtain authorization from users at the first time when they try to access users' sensitive data, but every permission is only managed at the application level, allowing apps to (mis)use permissions granted by users at the beginning for different purposes subsequently without informing users. Based on privacy-by-design principles, this paper develops a new permission manager, named UIPDroid, that (1) enforces the users' basic right-to-know through user interfaces whenever an app uses permissions, and (2) …