Design and Development of Software Tools for Bio-PEPA

This paper surveys the design of software tools for the Bio-PEPA process algebra. Bio-PEPA is a high-level language for modelling biological systems such as metabolic pathways and other biochemical reaction networks. Through providing tools for this modelling language we hope to allow easier use of a range of simulators and model-checkers thereby freeing the modeller from the responsibility of developing a custom simulator for the problem of interest. Further, by providing mappings to a range of different analysis tools the Bio-PEPA language allows modellers to compare analysis results which have been computed using independent numerical analysers, which enhances the reliability and robustness of the results computed.

A Service based Development Environment on Web 2.0 Platforms

Governments are investing on the IT adoption and promoting the socalled e-economies as a way to improve competitive advantages. One of the main government’s actions is to provide internet access to the most part of the population, people and organisations. Internet provides the required support for connecting organizations, people and geographically distributed developments teams. Software developments are tightly related to the availability of tools and platforms needed for products developments. Internet is becoming the most widely used platform. Software forges such as SourceForge provide an integrated tools environment gathering a set of tools that are suited for each development with a low cost. In this paper we propose an innovating approach based on Web2.0, services and a method engineering approach for software developments. This approach represents one of the possible usages of the internet of the future

Evaluation of an awareness distribution mechanism: a simulation approach

In distributed software engineering, the role of informal communication is frequently overlooked. Participants simply employ their own ad-hoc methods of informal communication. Consequently such communication is haphazard, irregular, and rarely recorded as part of the project documentation. Thus, a need for tool support to facilitate more systematic informal communication via awareness has been identified. The tool proposed is based on the provision of awareness support that recognises the complete context of the evolution of software artefacts rather than single events. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking has been successfully employed to develop various distributed software engineering support tools. However, there are scalability problems inherent in naive P2P networks. To this end a semantic overlay network organisation algorithm has been developed and tested in simulation prior to deployment as part of a forthcoming awareness extension to the Eclipse environment. The simulation verified that the self-organisation algorithm was suitable for arranging a P2P network, but several unexpected behaviours were observed. These included wandering nodes, starved nodes, and local maxima. Each of these problems required modification of the original algorithm design to solve or ameliorate them

A heuristic-based approach to code-smell detection

Encapsulation and data hiding are central tenets of the object oriented paradigm. Deciding what data and behaviour to form into a class and where to draw the line between its public and private details can make the difference between a class that is an understandable, flexible and reusable abstraction and one which is not. This decision is a difficult one and may easily result in poor encapsulation which can then have serious implications for a number of system qualities. It is often hard to identify such encapsulation problems within large software systems until they cause a maintenance problem (which is usually too late) and attempting to perform such analysis manually can also be tedious and error prone. Two of the common encapsulation problems that can arise as a consequence of this decomposition process are data classes and god classes. Typically, these two problems occur together – data classes are lacking in functionality that has typically been sucked into an over-complicated and domineering god class. This paper describes the architecture of a tool which automatically detects data and god classes that has been developed as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. The technique has been evaluated in a controlled study on two large open source systems which compare the tool results to similar work by Marinescu, who employs a metrics-based approach to detecting such features. The study provides some valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the two approache