Structured Review of the Evidence for Effects of Code Duplication on Software Quality

This report presents the detailed steps and results of a structured review of code clone literature. The aim of the review is to investigate the evidence for the claim that code duplication has a negative effect on code changeability. This report contains only the details of the review for which there is not enough place to include them in the companion paper published at a conference (Hordijk, Ponisio et al. 2009 - Harmfulness of Code Duplication - A Structured Review of the Evidence)

Web services composition, execution and visualization.

Visualization; International;

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 Approach for the Empirical Validation of Software Complexity Measures

Software metrics are widely accepted tools to control and assure software quality. A large number of software metrics with a variety of content can be found in the literature; however most of them are not adopted in industry as they are seen as irrelevant to needs, as they are unsupported, and the major reason behind this is due to improper empirical validation. This paper tries to identify possible root causes for the improper empirical validation of the software metrics. A practical model for the empirical validation of software metrics is proposed along with root causes. The model is validated by applying it to recently proposed and well known metrics

Assessment in anatomy

From an educational perspective, a very important problem is that of assessment, for establishing competency and as selection criterion for different professional purposes. Among the issues to be addressed are the methods of assessment and/or the type of tests, the range of scores, or the definition of honour degrees. The methods of assessment comprise such different forms such as the spotter examination, short or long essay questions, short answer questions, true-false questions, single best answer questions, multiple choice questions, extended match questions, or several forms of oral approaches such as viva voce examinations.Knowledge about this is important when assessing different educational objectives; assessing educational objectives from the cognitive domain will need different assessment instruments than assessing educational objectives from the psychomotor domain or even the affective domain.There is no golden rule, which type of assessment instrument or format will be the best in measuring certain educational objectives; but one has to respect that there is no assessment instrument, which is capable to assess educational objectives from all domains of educational objectives.Whereas the first two or three levels of progress can be assessed by well-structured written examinations such as multiple choice questions, or multiple answer questions, other and higher level progresses need other instruments, such as a thesis, or direct observation.This is no issue at all in assessment tools, where the students are required to select the appropriate answer from a given set of choices, as in true false questions, MCQ, EMQ, etc. The standard setting is done in these cases by the selection of the true answer