IFSO: A Integrated Framework For Automatic/Semi-automatic Software Refactoring and Analysis

To automatically/semi-automatically improve internal structures of a legacy system, there are several challenges: most available software analysis algorithms focus on only one particular granularity level (e.g., method level, class level) without considering possible side effects on other levels during the process; the quality of a software system cannot be judged by a single algorithm; software analysis is a time-consuming process which typically requires lengthy interactions. In this thesis, we present a framework, IFSO (Integrated Framework for automatic/semi-automatic Software refactoring and analysis), as a foundation for automatic/semi-automatic software refactoring and analysis. Our proposed conceptual model, LSR (Layered Software Representation Model), defines an abstract representation for software using a layered approach. Each layer corresponds to a granularity level. The IFSO framework, which is built upon the LSR model for component-based software, represents software at the system level, component level, class level, method level and logic unit level. Each level can be customized by different algorithms such as cohesion metrics, design heuristics, design problem detection and operations independently. Cooperating between levels together, a global view and an interactive environment for software refactoring and analysis are presented by IFSO. A prototype was implemented for evaluation of our technology. Three case studies were developed based on the prototype: three metrics, dead code removing, low coupled unit detection

The development building maintenance training model of healthcare industry

This thesis deals with investigated the building maintenance aspects in maintenance organization of healthcare industry in Malaysia. The aim is to develop a model for building maintenance training for health care industry. The intention of this qualitative study was to generate a theory, grounded in data.The purpose of this study was to develop a theory, grounded in data that conceptualizes the main concern of building maintenance. The main contribution of the thesis was to generate new model for training in building maintenance for healthcare industry. The study contributes to the body of knowledge for training development in building maintenance for healthcare industry. This research was conducted using Grounded Theory approach. The methods of initial data collection were: face-to-face interviews with the technical managers and technical supervisors. The Grounded Theory requirements, the participants were selected using purposive sampling method taken from the list of workers who have experienced the maintenance works which were held during preliminary study. The study applies Grounded Theory as an holistic methodology to investigate the experience of building maintenance practitioners in this study context. Grounded Theory is a sociological methodology designed to formulate a new (Grounded) theory from a substantive area‘, i.e. a participant group typically comprising a shared technical role or activity. Key elements of Grounded Theory include an emphasis on induction-based conceptualization of theory from descriptive participant indicators and the continuous comparison of data for the emergence of ‗coding categories‘ due to thematic analysis. Using core grounded theory concepts, a methodological framework of data collection and analysis was developed that focused on data centrality and discovering a data- emergent theory grounded within the research field. A core category of selective perception emerged that explained and captured the core phenomenon of sustained barriers to decision-making and selective bias towards information due to the interpretative nature of the socially constructed environment. At the core of the discovered theory is that individuals have a tendency to reject decisions within an informal environment based on external variables not directly related to the decisions. By constructing a theoretical model explained through several propositions, this thesis shows that decision-making efficiency is impacted by selective perception, communication effectiveness, the level of trust, and available resources, with a strong interrelation between each variable. The concept of adaptability was applied and tested for relevance and effectiveness within the research field, with positive results. Grounded Theory by Glaser & Strauss was employed to investigate this phenomenon thus revealing the main concern of the participants and resulting in specific theoretical propositions grounded in the data. The building maintenance practitioner‘s interviews in this study identified building maintenance key points relating to employee experiences of work-life interaction. The research focus was then narrowed to delimit the emerging theory around four main categories in the data. In total, interviews were conducted as part of the dynamic and fluid process of coding, theoretical sampling, literature review and interpretation that is Grounded Theory. This thesis concludes with discussions on the implications for practice, research, and suggestions for future research. As summary, the development of building maintenance model for in-house training of maintenance healthcare industry comprises of integrated component such as architectural, building services and safety and health thus ‗BIMO‘ model as contribution by researcher towards to knowledge and society

Implementation of occupational safety and health management system in reducing ergonomic risk among certified and uncertified automotive industry workers

Risk management in an integrated way, using organization’s operations has become highly important in recent years, since it not only cuts accident rates but can also improve the firm’s productivity, economic and financial results. Work-related injuries and occupational diseases have become an increasing concern to employees, employers, and governments because of its big impacts on workers’ health and productivity. Occupational Safety and Health Management System (OSHMS) is a planned, documented and verifiable method of managing hazards and associated risks in work place. OSHMS provides a set of tools that enhance safety, risk management efficiency related to all organization’s activity, it is a systematic means for employers to handle challenges and reduce haphazard attitudes to risk and problems in the work environment. In Malaysia, there is paucity of reports on risk factors among automotive factory workers because comprehensive studies in determining the risk factors have not been done in manufacturing industries. Therefore the aim of this research was to compare the implementation of occupational safety and health management system in reducing ergonomics risk among workers at a certified and uncertified automotive manufacturing industry. Data was collected by using a questionnaire survey, which was adopted from MSOSH and was integrated with the Nordic Questionnaire for MSD and the workers were also observed using the Quick Exposure Check (QEC) guidelines among 400 workers in both OSHMS certified and uncertified automotive industries located in Klang Valley, Malaysia. The data generated was statistically analyzed using SPSS version 21.0 and the finding revealed that workers in OSH certified company had a significant lower score for back posture of 14.07±1.584 compared to the workers in uncertified company 15.49±1.566, also mean values of shoulder/arm posture,wrist/hand postures and neck posture among the workers of the OSH certified company were 15.95±2.219, 15.48±1.190 and 7.13±1.053 respectively, which was significantly lower compared to the workers of the uncertified automotive company, who scored 18.94±1.943, 16.29±1.123 and 7.82±0.574, respectively. Also the ergonomics risk, occupational hazards, environmental management and OSH mean score value of workers in occupational safety and health certified company was significantly higher (p < 0.05)at 70.48±6.56, 55.77±8.72, 54.54±7.43 and 67.53±7.00 compared to the mean value scored by workers in OSH uncertified company, which was 64.66±4.11, 50.26±9.26, 51.35±4.52, 55.11±3.98. Chi square (χ2) test also showed that the studied variables (ergonomics risk factors management, occupational hazard management, environmental management and occupational safety and health procedures) were significantly (p < 0.05) associated with workers working in OSHMS certified company. Logistic regression test indicated that there is significant negative relationship between the ergonomics risk factors with the workers working in OSH certified and uncertified automotive industry. Also linear regression test revealed that there is a significant relationship between ergonomics risk and demographic factors. Therefore certification fosters the implementation of OSHMS among workers

Higher Order Mutation Testing

Mutation testing is a fault-based software testing technique that has been studied widely for over three decades. To date, work in this field has focused largely on first order mutants because it is believed that higher order mutation testing is too computationally expensive to be practical. This thesis argues that some higher order mutants are potentially better able to simulate real world faults and to reveal insights into programming bugs than the restricted class of first order mutants. This thesis proposes a higher order mutation testing paradigm which combines valuable higher order mutants and non-trivial first order mutants together for mutation testing. To overcome the exponential increase in the number of higher order mutants a search process that seeks fit mutants (both first and higher order) from the space of all possible mutants is proposed. A fault-based higher order mutant classification scheme is introduced. Based on different types of fault interactions, this approach classifies higher order mutants into four categories: expected, worsening, fault masking and fault shifting. A search-based approach is then proposed for locating subsuming and strongly subsuming higher order mutants. These mutants are a subset of fault mask and fault shift classes of higher order mutants that are more difficult to kill than their constituent first order mutants. Finally, a hybrid test data generation approach is introduced, which combines the dynamic symbolic execution and search based software testing approaches to generate strongly adequate test data to kill first and higher order mutants

Assessing Comment Quality in Object-Oriented Languages

Previous studies have shown that high-quality code comments support developers in software maintenance and program comprehension tasks. However, the semi-structured nature of comments, several conventions to write comments, and the lack of quality assessment tools for all aspects of comments make comment evaluation and maintenance a non-trivial problem. To understand the specification of high-quality comments to build effective assessment tools, our thesis emphasizes acquiring a multi-perspective view of the comments, which can be approached by analyzing (1) the academic support for comment quality assessment, (2) developer commenting practices across languages, and (3) developer concerns about comments. Our findings regarding the academic support for assessing comment quality showed that researchers primarily focus on Java in the last decade even though the trend of using polyglot environments in software projects is increasing. Similarly, the trend of analyzing specific types of code comments (method comments, or inline comments) is increasing, but the studies rarely analyze class comments. We found 21 quality attributes that researchers consider to assess comment quality, and manual assessment is still the most commonly used technique to assess various quality attributes. Our analysis of developer commenting practices showed that developers embed a mixed level of details in class comments, ranging from high-level class overviews to low-level implementation details across programming languages. They follow style guidelines regarding what information to write in class comments but violate the structure and syntax guidelines. They primarily face problems locating relevant guidelines to write consistent and informative comments, verifying the adherence of their comments to the guidelines, and evaluating the overall state of comment quality. To help researchers and developers in building comment quality assessment tools, we contribute: (i) a systematic literature review (SLR) of ten years (2010–2020) of research on assessing comment quality, (ii) a taxonomy of quality attributes used to assess comment quality, (iii) an empirically validated taxonomy of class comment information types from three programming languages, (iv) a multi-programming-language approach to automatically identify the comment information types, (v) an empirically validated taxonomy of comment convention-related questions and recommendation from various Q&A forums, and (vi) a tool to gather discussions from multiple developer sources, such as Stack Overflow, and mailing lists. Our contributions provide various kinds of empirical evidence of the developer’s interest in reducing efforts in the software documentation process, of the limited support developers get in automatically assessing comment quality, and of the challenges they face in writing high-quality comments. This work lays the foundation for future effective comment quality assessment tools and techniques

Assessing Comment Quality in Object-Oriented Languages

Previous studies have shown that high-quality code comments support developers in software maintenance and program comprehension tasks. However, the semi-structured nature of comments, several conventions to write comments, and the lack of quality assessment tools for all aspects of comments make comment evaluation and maintenance a non-trivial problem. To understand the specification of high-quality comments to build effective assessment tools, our thesis emphasizes acquiring a multi-perspective view of the comments, which can be approached by analyzing (1) the academic support for comment quality assessment, (2) developer commenting practices across languages, and (3) developer concerns about comments. Our findings regarding the academic support for assessing comment quality showed that researchers primarily focus on Java in the last decade even though the trend of using polyglot environments in software projects is increasing. Similarly, the trend of analyzing specific types of code comments (method comments, or inline comments) is increasing, but the studies rarely analyze class comments. We found 21 quality attributes that researchers consider to assess comment quality, and manual assessment is still the most commonly used technique to assess various quality attributes. Our analysis of developer commenting practices showed that developers embed a mixed level of details in class comments, ranging from high-level class overviews to low-level implementation details across programming languages. They follow style guidelines regarding what information to write in class comments but violate the structure and syntax guidelines. They primarily face problems locating relevant guidelines to write consistent and informative comments, verifying the adherence of their comments to the guidelines, and evaluating the overall state of comment quality. To help researchers and developers in building comment quality assessment tools, we contribute: (i) a systematic literature review (SLR) of ten years (2010–2020) of research on assessing comment quality, (ii) a taxonomy of quality attributes used to assess comment quality, (iii) an empirically validated taxonomy of class comment information types from three programming languages, (iv) a multi-programming-language approach to automatically identify the comment information types, (v) an empirically validated taxonomy of comment convention-related questions and recommendation from various Q&A forums, and (vi) a tool to gather discussions from multiple developer sources, such as Stack Overflow, and mailing lists. Our contributions provide various kinds of empirical evidence of the developer’s interest in reducing efforts in the software documentation process, of the limited support developers get in automatically assessing comment quality, and of the challenges they face in writing high-quality comments. This work lays the foundation for future effective comment quality assessment tools and techniques

Low Energy Ground Cooling System for Buildings in Hot and Humid Malaysia

This thesis presents an investigation into the viability of Low Energy Earth Pipe Cooling Technology in providing thermal comfort in Malaysia. The demand for air-conditioning in buildings in Malaysia affects the country escalating energy consumption. Therefore, this investigation was intended to seek for a passive cooling alternative to air-conditioning. By reducing the air-conditioning demand, there would be a higher chance of Malaysia government to achieve their aim in reducing CO2 emissions to 40 per cent by the year 2020, compared to 2005 levels. The passive technology, where the ground was used as a heat sink to produce cooler air, has not been investigated systematically in hot and humid countries. In this work, air and soil temperatures were measured on a test site in Kuala Lumpur. At 1m underground, the result is most significant, where the soil temperature are 6oC and 9oC lower than the maximum ambient temperature during wet and dry season, respectively. Polyethylene pipes were buried around 0.5m, 1.0m and 1.5m underground and temperature drop between inlet and outlet were compared. A significant temperature drop was found in these pipes: up to 6.4oC and 6.9oC depending on the season of the year. The results have shown the potential of Earth Pipe in providing low energy cooling in Malaysia. A parametric study on the same experiment was carried out using Energy Plus programme. Energy Plus data agreed with the field work data and therefore, this confirms Energy Plus is reliable to investigate Earth Pipe Cooling in Malaysia. Furthermore, thermal comfort of air at the Earth Pipe outlet was analyzed and the result has shown that the outlet air is within the envelope of thermal comfort conditions for hot/humid countrie

Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER) 2019 Annual Report

Prepared for: Dr. Brian Bingham, CRUSER DirectorThe Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER) provides a collaborative environment and community of interest for the advancement of unmanned systems (UxS) education and research endeavors across the Navy (USN), Marine Corps (USMC) and Department of Defense (DoD). CRUSER is a Secretary of the Navy (SECNAV) initiative to build an inclusive community of interest on the application of unmanned systems (UxS) in military and naval operations. This 2019 annual report summarizes CRUSER activities in its eighth year of operations and highlights future plans.Deputy Undersecretary of the Navy PPOIOffice of Naval Research (ONR)Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER) 2019 Annual Report

Prepared for: Dr. Brian Bingham, CRUSER DirectorThe Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER) provides a collaborative environment and community of interest for the advancement of unmanned systems (UxS) education and research endeavors across the Navy (USN), Marine Corps (USMC) and Department of Defense (DoD). CRUSER is a Secretary of the Navy (SECNAV) initiative to build an inclusive community of interest on the application of unmanned systems (UxS) in military and naval operations. This 2019 annual report summarizes CRUSER activities in its eighth year of operations and highlights future plans.Deputy Undersecretary of the Navy PPOIOffice of Naval Research (ONR)Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

A review of software change impact analysis

Change impact analysis is required for constantly evolving systems to support the comprehension, implementation, and evaluation of changes. A lot of research effort has been spent on this subject over the last twenty years, and many approaches were published likewise. However, there has not been an extensive attempt made to summarize and review published approaches as a base for further research in the area. Therefore, we present the results of a comprehensive investigation of software change impact analysis, which is based on a literature review and a taxonomy for impact analysis. The contribution of this review is threefold. First, approaches proposed for impact analysis are explained regarding their motivation and methodology. They are further classified according to the criteria of the taxonomy to enable the comparison and evaluation of approaches proposed in literature. We perform an evaluation of our taxonomy regarding the coverage of its classification criteria in studied literature, which is the second contribution. Last, we address and discuss yet unsolved problems, research areas, and challenges of impact analysis, which were discovered by our review to illustrate possible directions for further research