Structured Review of Code Clone Literature

This report presents the results of a structured review of code clone literature. The aim of the review is to assemble a conceptual model of clone-related concepts which helps us to reason about clones. This conceptual model unifies clone concepts from a wide range of literature, so that findings about clones can be compared with each other

An adaptive trust based service quality monitoring mechanism for cloud computing

Cloud computing is the newest paradigm in distributed computing that delivers computing resources over the Internet as services. Due to the attractiveness of cloud computing, the market is currently flooded with many service providers. This has necessitated the customers to identify the right one meeting their requirements in terms of service quality. The existing monitoring of service quality has been limited only to quantification in cloud computing. On the other hand, the continuous improvement and distribution of service quality scores have been implemented in other distributed computing paradigms but not specifically for cloud computing. This research investigates the methods and proposes mechanisms for quantifying and ranking the service quality of service providers. The solution proposed in this thesis consists of three mechanisms, namely service quality modeling mechanism, adaptive trust computing mechanism and trust distribution mechanism for cloud computing. The Design Research Methodology (DRM) has been modified by adding phases, means and methods, and probable outcomes. This modified DRM is used throughout this study. The mechanisms were developed and tested gradually until the expected outcome has been achieved. A comprehensive set of experiments were carried out in a simulated environment to validate their effectiveness. The evaluation has been carried out by comparing their performance against the combined trust model and QoS trust model for cloud computing along with the adapted fuzzy theory based trust computing mechanism and super-agent based trust distribution mechanism, which were developed for other distributed systems. The results show that the mechanisms are faster and more stable than the existing solutions in terms of reaching the final trust scores on all three parameters tested. The results presented in this thesis are significant in terms of making cloud computing acceptable to users in verifying the performance of the service providers before making the selection

Telelocomotion—remotely operated legged robots

© 2020 by the authors. Li-censee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Teleoperated systems enable human control of robotic proxies and are particularly amenable to inaccessible environments unsuitable for autonomy. Examples include emergency response, underwater manipulation, and robot assisted minimally invasive surgery. However, teleoperation architectures have been predominantly employed in manipulation tasks, and are thus only useful when the robot is within reach of the task. This work introduces the idea of extending teleoperation to enable online human remote control of legged robots, or telelocomotion, to traverse challenging terrain. Traversing unpredictable terrain remains a challenge for autonomous legged locomotion, as demonstrated by robots commonly falling in high-profile robotics contests. Telelocomotion can reduce the risk of mission failure by leveraging the high-level understanding of human operators to command in real-time the gaits of legged robots. In this work, a haptic telelocomotion interface was developed. Two within-user studies validate the proof-of-concept interface: (i) The first compared basic interfaces with the haptic interface for control of a simulated hexapedal robot in various levels of traversal complexity; (ii) the second presents a physical implementation and investigated the efficacy of the proposed haptic virtual fixtures. Results are promising to the use of haptic feedback for telelocomotion for complex traversal tasks

Techniques for calculating software product metrics threshold values: A systematic mapping study

Several aspects of software product quality can be assessed and measured using product metrics. Without software metric threshold values, it is difficult to evaluate different aspects of quality. To this end, the interest in research studies that focus on identifying and deriving threshold values is growing, given the advantage of applying software metric threshold values to evaluate various software projects during their software development life cycle phases. The aim of this paper is to systematically investigate research on software metric threshold calculation techniques. In this study, electronic databases were systematically searched for relevant papers; 45 publications were selected based on inclusion/exclusion criteria, and research questions were answered. The results demonstrate the following important characteristics of studies: (a) both empirical and theoretical studies were conducted, a majority of which depends on empirical analysis; (b) the majority of papers apply statistical techniques to derive object-oriented metrics threshold values; (c) Chidamber and Kemerer (CK) metrics were studied in most of the papers, and are widely used to assess the quality of software systems; and (d) there is a considerable number of studies that have not validated metric threshold values in terms of quality attributes. From both the academic and practitioner points of view, the results of this review present a catalog and body of knowledge on metric threshold calculation techniques. The results set new research directions, such as conducting mixed studies on statistical and quality-related studies, studying an extensive number of metrics and studying interactions among metrics, studying more quality attributes, and considering multivariate threshold derivation. 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Funding: Authors thanks to the Molde University College-Specialized Univ. in Logistics, Norway for the support of Open access fund.Scopus2-s2.0-8512089773

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2009

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems and Engineering Management, Operational Sciences, Mathematics, Statistics and Engineering Physics

Unleashing the secure potential of the wireless physical layer: Secret key generation methods

AbstractWithin the paradigm of physical layer security, a physical layer characteristic is used as a common source of randomness to generate the secret key. This key is then used to encrypt the data to hide information from eavesdroppers. In this paper, we survey the most recent common sources of randomness used to generate the secret key. We present the steps used to extract the secret key from the estimated common source of randomness. We describe the metrics used to evaluate the strength of the generated key. We follow that with a qualitative comparison between different common sources of randomness along with a proposed new direction which capitalizes on hybridization of sources of randomness. We conclude by a discussion about current open research problems in secret key generation

Harmonizing CMMI-DEV 1.2 and XP Method to Improve The Software Development Processes in Small Software Development Firms

Most software development organizations are small firms, and they have realized the need to manage and improve their software development and management activities. Traditional Software Process Improvement (SPI) models and standards are not realistic for these firms because of high cost, limited resources and strict project deadlines. Therefore, these firms need a lightweight software development method and an appropriate SPI model to manage and improve their software development and management processes. This study aims to construct a suitable software development process improvement framework for Small Software Development Firms (SSDFs) based on eXtreme Programming (XP) method and Capability Maturity Model Integration for Development Version 1.2 (CMMI-Dev1.2) model. Four stages are involved in developing the framework: (1) aligning XP practices to the specific goals of CMMI-Dev1.2 Key Process Areas (KPAs); (2) developing the proposed software development process improvement framework based on extending XP method by adapting the Extension-Based Approach (EBA), CMMI-Dev1.2, and generic elements of the SPI framework; (3) verifying the compatibility of the proposed framework to the KPAs of CMMI-Dev1.2 by using focus group method coupled with Delphi technique; and (4) validating the modified framework by using CMMI-Dev1.2 questionnaire as a main item to validate the suitability of the modified framework for SSDFs, and conducting two case studies to validate the applicability and effectiveness of this framework for these firms. The result of aligning XP practices to the KPAs of CMMI-Dev1.2 shows that twelve KPAs are largely supported by XP practices, eight KPAs are partially supported by XP practices, and two KPAs are not-supported by XP practices. The main contributions of this study are: software development process improvement framework for SSDFs, elicit better understanding of how to construct the framework, and quality improvement of the software development processes. There are possible avenues for extending this research to fulfil the missing specific practices of several KPAs, examining other agile practices and using CMMI-Dev1.3 to improve the framework, and conducting more case studie

Comparing Static and Dynamic Weighted Software Coupling Metrics

Coupling metrics that count the number of inter-module connections in a software system are an established way to measure internal software quality with respect to modularity. In addition to static metrics, which are obtained from the source or compiled code of a program, dynamic metrics use runtime data gathered, e.g., by monitoring a system in production. Dynamic metrics have been used to improve the accuracy of static metrics for object-oriented software. We study weighted dynamic coupling that takes into account how often a connection (e.g., a method call) is executed during a system’s run. We investigate the correlation between dynamic weighted metrics and their static counterparts. To compare the different metrics, we use data collected from four different experiments, each monitoring production use of a commercial software system over a period of four weeks. We observe an unexpected level of correlation between the static and the weighted dynamic case as well as revealing differences between class- and package-level analyses

Scenario-based verification and validation of dynamic UML specifications

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the result of the unification process of earlier object oriented models and notations. Verification and validation (V&V) tasks, as applied to UML specifications, enable early detection of analysis and design flaws prior to implementation. In this work, we address four V&V analysis methods for UML dynamic specifications, namely: Timing analysis and automatic V&V of timing constraints, automated Architectural-level Risk assessment, Performance Modeling and Fault Injection analysis. For each we present: approaches, methods and/or automated techniques. We use two case studies: a Cardiac Pacemaker and a simplified Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) banking subsystem, for illustrating the developed techniques