Collected software engineering papers, volume 12

This document is a collection of selected technical papers produced by participants in the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) from November 1993 through October 1994. The purpose of the document is to make available, in one reference, some results of SEL research that originally appeared in a number of different forums. This is the 12th such volume of technical papers produced by the SEL. Although these papers cover several topics related to software engineering, they do not encompass the entire scope of SEL activities and interests. Additional information about the SEL and its research efforts may be obtained from the sources listed in the bibliography at the end of this document

Annotated bibliography of software engineering laboratory literature

This document is an annotated bibliography of technical papers, documents, and memorandums produced by or related to the Software Engineering Laboratory. Nearly 200 publications are summarized. These publications cover many areas of software engineering and range from research reports to software documentation. This document has been updated and reorganized substantially since the original version (SEL-82-006, November 1982). All materials have been grouped into eight general subject areas for easy reference: (1) The Software Engineering Laboratory; (2) The Software Engineering Laboratory: Software Development Documents; (3) Software Tools; (4) Software Models; (5) Software Measurement; (6) Technology Evaluations; (7) Ada Technology; and (8) Data Collection. This document contains an index of these publications classified by individual author

Software Engineering Laboratory Series: Collected Software Engineering Papers

The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) is an organization sponsored by NASA/GSFC and created to investigate the effectiveness of software engineering technologies when applied to the development of application software. The activities, findings, and recommendations of the SEL are recorded in the Software Engineering Laboratory Series, a continuing series of reports that includes this document

Impact of Ada and object-oriented design in the flight dynamics division at Goddard Space Flight Center

The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) is an organization sponsored by NASA/GSFC and created to investigate the effectiveness of software engineering technologies when applied to the development of applications software. The goals of the SEL are (1) to understand the software development process in the GSFC environment; (2) to measure the effects of various methodologies, tools, and models on this process; and (3) to identify and then to apply successful development practices. The activities, findings, and recommendations of the SEL are recorded in the Software Engineering Laboratory Series, a continuing series of reports that includes this document

Software Engineering Laboratory Series: Collected Software Engineering Papers

The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) is an organization sponsored by NASA/GSFC and created to investigate the effectiveness of software engineering technologies when applied to the development of application software. The activities, findings, and recommendations of the SEL are recorded in the Software Engineering Laboratory Series, a continuing series of reports that includes this document

An empirical investigation of issues relating to software immigrants

This thesis focuses on the issue of people in software maintenance and, in particular, on software immigrants – developers who are joining maintenance teams to work with large unfamiliar software systems. By means of a structured literature review this thesis identifies a lack of empirical literature in Software Maintenance in general and an even more distinct lack of papers examining the role of People in Software Maintenance. Whilst there is existing work examining what maintenance programmers do the vast majority of it is from a managerial perspective, looking at the goals of maintenance programers rather than their day-to-day activities. To help remedy this gap in the research a series of interviews with maintenance programmers were undertaken across a variety of different companies. Four key results were identified: maintainers specialise; companies do not provide adequate system training; external sources of information about the system are not guaranteed to be available; even when they are available they are not considered trustworthy. These results combine together to form a very challenging picture for software immigrants. Software immigrants are maintainers who are new to working with a system, although they are not normally new to programming. Although there is literature on software immigrants and the activities they undertake, there is no comparative literature. That is, literature that examines and compares different ways for software immigrants to learn about the system they have to maintain. Furthermore, a common feature of software immigrants learning patterns is the existence and use of mentors to impart system knowledge. However, as the interviews show, often mentors are not available which makes examining alternative ways of building a software immigrants level-of-understanding about the system they must maintain all the more important. As a result the final piece of work in this thesis is the design, running and results of a controlled laboratory experiment comparing different, work based, approaches to developing a level-of-understanding about a system. Two approaches were compared, one where subjects actively worked and altered the code while a second group took a passive ‘hands-off’ approach. The end result showed no difference in the level-of-understanding gained between the subjects who performed the active task and those that performed the passive task. This means that there is no benefit to taking a hands-off approach to building a level-of-understanding about new code in the hostile environment identified from the literature and interviews and software immigrants should start working with the code, fulfilling maintenance requests as soon as possible

Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Software Engineering Workshop

The Twenty-third Annual Software Engineering Workshop (SEW) provided 20 presentations designed to further the goals of the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) of the NASA-GSFC. The presentations were selected on their creativity. The sessions which were held on 2-3 of December 1998, centered on the SEL, Experimentation, Inspections, Fault Prediction, Verification and Validation, and Embedded Systems and Safety-Critical Systems

Proceedings of the 19th Annual Software Engineering Workshop

The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) is an organization sponsored by NASA/GSFC and created to investigate the effectiveness of software engineering technologies when applied to the development of applications software. The goals of the SEL are: (1) to understand the software development process in the GSFC environment; (2) to measure the effects of various methodologies, tools, and models on this process; and (3) to identify and then to apply successful development practices. The activities, findings, and recommendations of the SEL are recorded in the Software Engineering Laboratory Series, a continuing series of reports that include this document

Software Engineering Laboratory Series: Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Software Engineering Workshop

The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) is an organization sponsored by NASA/GSFC and created to investigate the effectiveness of software engineering technologies when applied to the development of application software. The activities, findings, and recommendations of the SEL are recorded in the Software Engineering Laboratory Series, a continuing series of reports that includes this document