The cleanroom case study in the Software Engineering Laboratory: Project description and early analysis

This case study analyzes the application of the cleanroom software development methodology to the development of production software at the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. The cleanroom methodology emphasizes human discipline in program verification to produce reliable software products that are right the first time. Preliminary analysis of the cleanroom case study shows that the method can be applied successfully in the FDD environment and may increase staff productivity and product quality. Compared to typical Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) activities, there is evidence of lower failure rates, a more complete and consistent set of inline code documentation, a different distribution of phase effort activity, and a different growth profile in terms of lines of code developed. The major goals of the study were to: (1) assess the process used in the SEL cleanroom model with respect to team structure, team activities, and effort distribution; (2) analyze the products of the SEL cleanroom model and determine the impact on measures of interest, including reliability, productivity, overall life-cycle cost, and software quality; and (3) analyze the residual products in the application of the SEL cleanroom model, such as fault distribution, error characteristics, system growth, and computer usage

Experimental Evaluation of the Cleanroom Software Development Method

The field of software engineering is evolving as various new techniques, languages, paradigms, process models, methodologies, metrics etc., are constantly being developed, used and improved. In the past, several empirical studies were conducted to experiment with various new ideas in software engineering in order to help us better understand, evaluate, predict, control and improve these ideas. Basiii et al. review several of these studies and present a general framework for analyzing these experiments[2.5]. They emphasize the need of such experiments for advancement of software engineering discipline. They recommend that the experimental planning process should include a series of experiments for exploration, verification, and application of new ideas. They also implied that the results of empirical experiments in software engineering should be verified by a series of other related experiments. Cleanroom methodology for software development is a relatively new concept. Currently researchers are attempting to study the benefits and implications of using the Cleanroom methodology. One such attempt was made at the University of Maryland (UM) a few years ago which empirically characterized various aspects of Cleanroom methodologyj211. The fact that this study was empirical motivates the need for verifying its results. Also, the fact that the methodology is new motivates the need for further experimentation. Therefore, this experiment has been replicated recently at Miami University (MU). The goal of this project is to analyze the data collected in this experiment to verify the results of the previous study

Foundations of Empirical Software Engineering: The Legacy of Victor R. Basili

This book captures the main scientific contributions of Victor R. Basili, who has significantly shaped the field of empirical software engineering from its very start. He was the first to claim that software engineering needed to follow the model of other physical sciences and develop an experimental paradigm. By working on this postulate, he developed concepts that today are well known and widely used, including the Goal-Question-Metric method, the Quality-Improvement paradigm, and the Experience Factory. He is one of the few software pioneers who can aver that their research results are not just scientifically acclaimed but are also used as industry standards. On the occasion of his 65th birthday, celebrated with a symposium in his honor at the International Conference on Software Engineering in St. Louis, MO, USA in May 2005, Barry Boehm, Hans Dieter Rombach, and Marvin V. Zelkowitz, each a long-time collaborator of Victor R. Basili, selected the 20 most important research papers of their friend, and arranged these according to subject field. They then invited renowned researchers to write topical introductions. The result is this commented collection of timeless cornerstones of software engineering, hitherto available only in scattered publications