An Enhanced Pairwise Search Approach for Generating Optimum Number of Test Data and Reduce Execution Time

In recent days testing considers the most important task for building software that is free from error. Since the resources and time is limited to produce software, hence, it is not possible of performing exhaustive tests (i.e. to test all possible combinations of input data.) An alternative to get ride from this type exhaustive numbers and as well to reduce cost, an approach called Pairwise (2 way) test data generation approach will be effective. Most of the software faults in pairwise approach caused by unusual combination of input data.  Hence, the demand for the optimization of number of generated test-cases and reducing the execution time is growing in software industries. This paper proposes an enhancement in pairwise search approach which generates optimum number of input values for testing purposes.  In this approach it searches the most coverable pairs by pairing parameters and adopts one-test-at-a-time strategy for constructing a final test-suite.  Compared to other existing strategies, Our proposed approach is effective in terms of number of generated test cases and of execution time. Keywords:, Software testing, Pairwise testing, Combinatorial interaction testing, Test case generation

Exploring Automated Code Evaluation Systems and Resources for Code Analysis: A Comprehensive Survey

The automated code evaluation system (AES) is mainly designed to reliably assess user-submitted code. Due to their extensive range of applications and the accumulation of valuable resources, AESs are becoming increasingly popular. Research on the application of AES and their real-world resource exploration for diverse coding tasks is still lacking. In this study, we conducted a comprehensive survey on AESs and their resources. This survey explores the application areas of AESs, available resources, and resource utilization for coding tasks. AESs are categorized into programming contests, programming learning and education, recruitment, online compilers, and additional modules, depending on their application. We explore the available datasets and other resources of these systems for research, analysis, and coding tasks. Moreover, we provide an overview of machine learning-driven coding tasks, such as bug detection, code review, comprehension, refactoring, search, representation, and repair. These tasks are performed using real-life datasets. In addition, we briefly discuss the Aizu Online Judge platform as a real example of an AES from the perspectives of system design (hardware and software), operation (competition and education), and research. This is due to the scalability of the AOJ platform (programming education, competitions, and practice), open internal features (hardware and software), attention from the research community, open source data (e.g., solution codes and submission documents), and transparency. We also analyze the overall performance of this system and the perceived challenges over the years

Achieving Usability: Looking for Connections between User-Centred Design Practices and Resultant Usability Metrics in Agile Software Development

This article searches for correlations between the practices of usability professionals from software development teams and the resulting usability of the system they are working on. After reviewing the literature of the past decade, we can conclude that most researchers try to achieve better usability with process proposals, but measurements focus on perceived usability. The level of involvement of users in the requirements capture phase is unclear. There is a trend to reduce costs of usability engineering, either by choosing more lightweight and informal methods or by trying to substitute user involvement. Looking at decade's worth of 452 articles about "agile AND usability" in Scopus, we selected 133 which deal with the integration of usability, UX and User Centred Design practices and Agile development

Risk-based framework for SLA violation abatement from the cloud service provider's perspective

© The British Computer Society 2018. The constant increase in the growth of the cloud market creates new challenges for cloud service providers. One such challenge is the need to avoid possible service level agreement (SLA) violations and their consequences through good SLA management. Researchers have proposed various frameworks and have made significant advances in managing SLAs from the perspective of both cloud users and providers. However, none of these approaches guides the service provider on the necessary steps to take for SLA violation abatement; that is, the prediction of possible SLA violations, the process to follow when the system identifies the threat of SLA violation, and the recommended action to take to avoid SLA violation. In this paper, we approach this process of SLA violation detection and abatement from a risk management perspective. We propose a Risk Management-based Framework for SLA violation abatement (RMF-SLA) following the formation of an SLA which comprises SLA monitoring, violation prediction and decision recommendation. Through experiments, we validate and demonstrate the suitability of the proposed framework for assisting cloud providers to minimize possible service violations and penalties

A New Concurrent Checkpoint Mechanism for Embeded Multi-Core Systems

his paper presents a new transparent, incremental, concurrent checkpoint mechanism for embedded multi-core systems. It allows the checkpointed process (also called checkpointee) to continue running without stopping while checkpoints are set to a large extent. Through tracing TLB misses to block the accesses to target memory pages first time while dumping memory pages (the most time-consuming step when setting a checkpoint). At that time, a kernel thread, called checkpointer, copies the memory access target pages to the designated memory buffer for constructing a consistent state of the checkpointee, and then resumes the memory accesses. From the experimental results, in contrast to a traditional concurrent checkpoint system, the proposed mechanism reduces the downtime of the checkpointed process by more than 10.1 %. Moreover, the incremental checkpointing functionality has been implemented in this new concurrent checkpoint mechanism as well. Compared with full checkpointing, incremental checkpointing can reduce the checkpoint time more than 95.5 % and 89.2 % while the benchmark is the matrix multiplication at the checkpoint intervals of 10 seconds and 20 seconds, respectively

A Decade of Code Comment Quality Assessment: A Systematic Literature Review

Code comments are important artifacts in software systems and play a paramount role in many software engineering (SE) tasks related to maintenance and program comprehension. However, while it is widely accepted that high quality matters in code comments just as it matters in source code, assessing comment quality in practice is still an open problem. First and foremost, there is no unique definition of quality when it comes to evaluating code comments. The few existing studies on this topic rather focus on specific attributes of quality that can be easily quantified and measured. Existing techniques and corresponding tools may also focus on comments bound to a specific programming language, and may only deal with comments with specific scopes and clear goals (e.g., Javadoc comments at the method level, or in-body comments describing TODOs to be addressed). In this paper, we present a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of the last decade of research in SE to answer the following research questions: (i) What types of comments do researchers focus on when assessing comment quality? (ii) What quality attributes (QAs) do they consider? (iii) Which tools and techniques do they use to assess comment quality?, and (iv) How do they evaluate their studies on comment quality assessment in general? Our evaluation, based on the analysis of 2353 papers and the actual review of 47 relevant ones, shows that (i) most studies and techniques focus on comments in Java code, thus may not be generalizable to other languages, and (ii) the analyzed studies focus on four main QAs of a total of 21 QAs identified in the literature, with a clear predominance of checking consistency between comments and the code. We observe that researchers rely on manual assessment and specific heuristics rather than the automated assessment of the comment quality attributes

A document based traceability model for test management

Software testing has became more complicated in the emergence of distributed network, real-time environment, third party software enablers and the need to test system at multiple integration levels. These scenarios have created more concern over the quality of software testing. The quality of software has been deteriorating due to inefficient and ineffective testing activities. One of the main flaws is due to ineffective use of test management to manage software documentations. In documentations, it is difficult to detect and trace bugs in some related documents of which traceability is the major concern. Currently, various studies have been conducted on test management, however very few have focused on document traceability in particular to support the error propagation with respect to documentation. The objective of this thesis is to develop a new traceability model that integrates software engineering documents to support test management. The artefacts refer to requirements, design, source code, test description and test result. The proposed model managed to tackle software traceability in both forward and backward propagations by implementing multi-bidirectional pointer. This platform enabled the test manager to navigate and capture a set of related artefacts to support test management process. A new prototype was developed to facilitate observation of software traceability on all related artefacts across the entire documentation lifecycle. The proposed model was then applied to a case study of a finished software development project with a complete set of software documents called the On-Board Automobile (OBA). The proposed model was evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively using the feature analysis, precision and recall, and expert validation. The evaluation results proved that the proposed model and its prototype were justified and significant to support test management

Model-driven engineering techniques and tools for machine learning-enabled IoT applications: A scoping review

This paper reviews the literature on model-driven engineering (MDE) tools and languages for the internet of things (IoT). Due to the abundance of big data in the IoT, data analytics and machine learning (DAML) techniques play a key role in providing smart IoT applications. In particular, since a significant portion of the IoT data is sequential time series data, such as sensor data, time series analysis techniques are required. Therefore, IoT modeling languages and tools are expected to support DAML methods, including time series analysis techniques, out of the box. In this paper, we study and classify prior work in the literature through the mentioned lens and following the scoping review approach. Hence, the key underlying research questions are what MDE approaches, tools, and languages have been proposed and which ones have supported DAML techniques at the modeling level and in the scope of smart IoT services.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

UML consistency rules: a systematic mapping study

Context: The Unified Modeling Language (UML), with its 14 different diagram types, is the de-facto standard tool for objectoriented modeling and documentation. Since the various UML diagrams describe different aspects of one, and only one, software under development, they are not independent but strongly depend on each other in many ways. In other words, the UML diagrams describing a software must be consistent. Inconsistencies between these diagrams may be a source of the considerable increase of faults in software systems. It is therefore paramount that these inconsistencies be detected, ana