Supporting the grow-and-prune model for evolving software product lines

207 p.Software Product Lines (SPLs) aim at supporting the development of a whole family of software products through a systematic reuse of shared assets. To this end, SPL development is separated into two interrelated processes: (1) domain engineering (DE), where the scope and variability of the system is defined and reusable core-assets are developed; and (2) application engineering (AE), where products are derived by selecting core assets and resolving variability. Evolution in SPLs is considered to be more challenging than in traditional systems, as both core-assets and products need to co-evolve. The so-called grow-and-prune model has proven great flexibility to incrementally evolve an SPL by letting the products grow, and later prune the product functionalities deemed useful by refactoring and merging them back to the reusable SPL core-asset base. This Thesis aims at supporting the grow-and-prune model as for initiating and enacting the pruning. Initiating the pruning requires SPL engineers to conduct customization analysis, i.e. analyzing how products have changed the core-assets. Customization analysis aims at identifying interesting product customizations to be ported to the core-asset base. However, existing tools do not fulfill engineers needs to conduct this practice. To address this issue, this Thesis elaborates on the SPL engineers' needs when conducting customization analysis, and proposes a data-warehouse approach to help SPL engineers on the analysis. Once the interesting customizations have been identified, the pruning needs to be enacted. This means that product code needs to be ported to the core-asset realm, while products are upgraded with newer functionalities and bug-fixes available in newer core-asset releases. Herein, synchronizing both parties through sync paths is required. However, the state of-the-art tools are not tailored to SPL sync paths, and this hinders synchronizing core-assets and products. To address this issue, this Thesis proposes to leverage existing Version Control Systems (i.e. git/Github) to provide sync operations as first-class construct

Supporting the grow-and-prune model for evolving software product lines

207 p.Software Product Lines (SPLs) aim at supporting the development of a whole family of software products through a systematic reuse of shared assets. To this end, SPL development is separated into two interrelated processes: (1) domain engineering (DE), where the scope and variability of the system is defined and reusable core-assets are developed; and (2) application engineering (AE), where products are derived by selecting core assets and resolving variability. Evolution in SPLs is considered to be more challenging than in traditional systems, as both core-assets and products need to co-evolve. The so-called grow-and-prune model has proven great flexibility to incrementally evolve an SPL by letting the products grow, and later prune the product functionalities deemed useful by refactoring and merging them back to the reusable SPL core-asset base. This Thesis aims at supporting the grow-and-prune model as for initiating and enacting the pruning. Initiating the pruning requires SPL engineers to conduct customization analysis, i.e. analyzing how products have changed the core-assets. Customization analysis aims at identifying interesting product customizations to be ported to the core-asset base. However, existing tools do not fulfill engineers needs to conduct this practice. To address this issue, this Thesis elaborates on the SPL engineers' needs when conducting customization analysis, and proposes a data-warehouse approach to help SPL engineers on the analysis. Once the interesting customizations have been identified, the pruning needs to be enacted. This means that product code needs to be ported to the core-asset realm, while products are upgraded with newer functionalities and bug-fixes available in newer core-asset releases. Herein, synchronizing both parties through sync paths is required. However, the state of-the-art tools are not tailored to SPL sync paths, and this hinders synchronizing core-assets and products. To address this issue, this Thesis proposes to leverage existing Version Control Systems (i.e. git/Github) to provide sync operations as first-class construct

Protecting Personal Private Information in Collaborative Environments

The ability to collaborate has always been vitally important to businesses and enterprises. With the availability of current networking and computing power, the creation of Collaborative Working Environments (CWEs) has allowed for this process to occur anytime over any geographical distance. Sharing information between individuals through collaborative environments creates new challenges in privacy protection for organizations and the members of organizations. This thesis confronts the problems when attempting to protect the personal private information of collaborating individuals. In this thesis, a privacy-by-policy approach is taken to addressing the issue of protecting private information within collaborative environments. A privacy-by-policy approach to privacy protection provides collaborating individuals with notice and choice surrounding their private information, in order to provide an individual with a level of control over how their information is to be used. To this end, a collaborative privacy architecture for providing privacy within a collaborative environment is presented. This architecture uses ontologies to express the static concept and relation definitions required for privacy and collaboration. The collaborative privacy architecture also contains a Collaborative Privacy Manager (CPM) service which handles changes in dynamic collaborative environments. The goals of this thesis are to provide privacy mechanisms for the non-client centric situation of collaborative working environments. This thesis also strives to provide privacy through technically enforceable and customizable privacy policies. To this end, individual collaborators are provided with access, modification rights, and transparency through the use of ontologies built into the architecture. Finally, individual collaborators are provided these privacy protections in a way that is easy to use and understand and use. A collaborative scenario as a test case is described to present how this architecture would benefit individuals and organizations when they are engaged in collaborative work. In this case study a university and hospital are engaged in collaborative research which involves the use of private information belonging to collaborators and patients from the hospital. This case study also highlights how different organizations can be under different sets of legislative guidelines and how these guidelines can be incorporated into the privacy architecture. Through this collaboration scenario an implementation of the collaborative privacy architecture is provided, along with results from semantic and privacy rule executions, and measurements of how actions carried out by the architecture perform under various conditions

The Stylometric Processing of Sensory Open Source Data

This research project’s end goal is on the Lone Wolf Terrorist. The project uses an exploratory approach to the self-radicalisation problem by creating a stylistic fingerprint of a person's personality, or self, from subtle characteristics hidden in a person's writing style. It separates the identity of one person from another based on their writing style. It also separates the writings of suicide attackers from ‘normal' bloggers by critical slowing down; a dynamical property used to develop early warning signs of tipping points. It identifies changes in a person's moods, or shifts from one state to another, that might indicate a tipping point for self-radicalisation. Research into authorship identity using personality is a relatively new area in the field of neurolinguistics. There are very few methods that model how an individual's cognitive functions present themselves in writing. Here, we develop a novel algorithm, RPAS, which draws on cognitive functions such as aging, sensory processing, abstract or concrete thinking through referential activity emotional experiences, and a person's internal gender for identity. We use well-known techniques such as Principal Component Analysis, Linear Discriminant Analysis, and the Vector Space Method to cluster multiple anonymous-authored works. Here we use a new approach, using seriation with noise to separate subtle features in individuals. We conduct time series analysis using modified variants of 1-lag autocorrelation and the coefficient of skewness, two statistical metrics that change near a tipping point, to track serious life events in an individual through cognitive linguistic markers. In our journey of discovery, we uncover secrets about the Elizabethan playwrights hidden for over 400 years. We uncover markers for depression and anxiety in modern-day writers and identify linguistic cues for Alzheimer's disease much earlier than other studies using sensory processing. In using these techniques on the Lone Wolf, we can separate their writing style used before their attacks that differs from other writing