A Review on Software Quality Forensics: Techniques, Challenges, and Limitations

Software quality forensics plays a vibrant role related to software quality, security, and integrity. The paper aims to derive a software quality forensics model through existing software quality models and their factors. The papers explore quality models, factors, approaches, tools, techniques, and standards regarding software quality investigation and confine the research area for software quality integrity breach forensics. The explore the deviations of quality attributes, standards, factors, and artifacts, it leads to further investigation of root-cause followed by digital evidence procedure for alleged software quality issues. Therefore, there is a need for a software quality forensics model and dedicated standards to fulfill the digital evidence procedure validation, satisfiable, and prosecution in the court of law in the context of alleged or illegal activity investigation quality of software. The paper has  derived the techniques, challenges, and limitations of software quality forensics based on the review of research questions

Towards the measurement of Enterprise Information Systems agility to support EIS improving projects

International audienceEnterprise information systems (EIS) are directly implied in the global performance of an organisation. Nevertheless, their potential rigidity in comparison with the required fast evolution of the supported organisation remains an important open research question. The proposed research work aims to define and evaluate the agility of an EIS, in order to assist both software engineers and business managers in EIS improvement projects. In particular, a framework is proposed to structure the different existing metrics on agility according to the improvements needs and the intrinsic characteristics of an information system

A social and technical sustainability requirements catalogue

Isabel Sofia Brito is a Coordinator Professor at Polytechnic Institute of Beja, Portugal, and a member of the Centre of Technology and Systems (CTS-UNINOVA). Her main research interests are Requirements Engineering and Sustainability Requirements, Model and Data-Driven Development, Multi-Criteria Decision Making and, Big Data. She has published several papers on these topics. She has been involved in several national and international research projects (e.g., COMPETISOF, Petri-Rig, U-Bike Project). Currently, she is involved in the international applied research project HIBA—Hub Iberia Agrotech, an initiative funded by Digital Innovation Hub (DIH) and “Portugal INCoDe.2030”. She is or was involved as organiser, conference chair and program committee member in several international conferences (e.g., IEEE RE, ACM SAC, CISTI, QUATIC, CIbSE, ICT4S) and in several smaller and regional ones. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s)Climate change calls for action from all sectors of our global economy, including ICT. Therefore, it is important to change the way we develop software to address the challenges posed by sustainability. Our goal is to contribute with a reusable sustainability requirements catalogue that helps developers be aware of sustainability-related properties worth considering during software development. The information for this catalogue was gathered via a systematic mapping study, whose results were synthesised in feature models and then modelled using iStar for a more expressive and configurable representation. A qualitative evaluation of the catalogue's readability, interest, utility, and usefulness by 50 participants from the domain, showed that around 79% of the respondents found the catalogue “Good” or “Very Good”. However, more than 5% of the expert participants found weaknesses regarding most of the evaluated questions and around 25% are neutral in their overall evaluation. This led us to evolve the initial version of the catalogue for the social and technical dimensions of sustainability to improve its completeness and usefulness. This is achieved by aligning the information gathered in the systematic mapping study with the well-established quality model of the ISO/IEC 25010:2011, as we expect most of the experts are familiar with those qualities and respective hierarchies. During this process, we found information that led us to propose two additional qualities that were not covered by the ISO standard: fairness and legislation. We applied this evolved version of the catalogue to the U-Bike project comparing the requirements elicited without the catalogue with those identified using the catalogue. The result suggests that new sustainability requirements were worth considering from a sustainability point of view, supporting the usefulness of the catalogue.publishersversionpublishe

A Domain Specific Graphical User Interface Framework

Since the early days of software development, there has been an ongoing trend towards higher-order or higher level abstractions in programming languages, software libraries and application frameworks. Some of the arguments for software development tools with higher levels of abstraction include simpler software development, improved portability and better maintainability. Higher level abstractions can however lead to reduced performance. This thesis presents an innovative graphical user interface software solution that mixes high-level and low-level approaches to achieve acceptable performance while retaining good maintainability. The solution is an extension to a graphical application framework called JavaFX. The scope of this thesis is defined by a software development project which goal is to create a graphical user interface framework. The framework is used in the creation of customer specific user interfaces for an accompanying intralogistics system. The resulting user interfaces must be able to visualize possibly thousands of objects moving on a factory floor. The views must simultaneously support user-initiated zooming, panning, and tilting of the two-dimensional view. Meeting these requirements while maintaining acceptable performance, requires an unconventional solution and a deviation from idiomatic JavaFX. The user interface framework in question is developed using a high-level graphical user interface application framework called JavaFX. JavaFX is the most recent graphical user interface toolkit included in the official Java Development Kit. It has many reactive traits and other modern high-level properties. Overcoming performance challenges with JavaFX when producing views with thousands of animated items was the key research challenge in this research. Some attention is also given to replacing JavaFX built-in dependency injection system with Spring framework to improve JavaFX suitability to the task at hand. This thesis presents a hybrid solution that overcomes JavaFX’s performance challenges in the problem domain, while retaining as much as possible of the usefulness of the high-level features present in the JavaFX framework. The key innovation is a mechanism that enables automated rendering of sprite-bitmaps from JavaFX scene-graph nodes. The solution includes a system that draws the automatically generated bitmaps to a lower-level JavaFX component called Canvas. The solution enables layered mixing of regular JavaFX views with the custom high-performance views, including seamless resizing and event handling between the two types of views. The solution enables the developers of customer specific user interfaces to choose an appropriate graphics rendering type, such that only objects that cause performance issues, typically items which number exceeds dozens, need to use the more complex high-performance system

Automated data collection and dashboard development:enhancing quality monitoring and analysis

Abstract. This master thesis focuses on optimizing software quality analysis at target projects in Elektrobit, a key player in the automotive software industry. In the light of continuous technological advancements in the industry, maintaining high-quality software is imperative. Current verification procedures, though effective, are time-consuming and often entail a significant amount of manual work. Additionally, the absence of efficient visualization tools leads to missed opportunities for improvement. I proposed an automated quality data collection process and a user-friendly visualization system, designed to streamline the process of software quality analysis. The solution is delivered in the form of an interactive dashboard, offering a centralized view of all pertinent quality metrics data, thereby saving time, reducing manual work, and improving user experience. The study employs a design science research (DSR) methodology, focusing on iterative design, implementation, and evaluation. The findings from the evaluation confirm the dashboard’s efficacy and relevance, illustrating its value in enhancing efficiency, productivity, and team collaboration. The user-centered design approach and regular user engagement during development proved to be instrumental in achieving these results. The research acknowledges certain limitations, such as the proof-of-concept stage of the dashboard and the relatively small user feedback group and suggests potential areas for future work. In conclusion, this research serves as a testament to the transformative potential of automated data collection and effective visualization systems in the software quality analysis domain, contributing to both theory and practice

Ukrainian E-Learning Platforms for Schools: Evaluation of Their Functionality

This article defines 27 criteria for evaluating the functionality of e-learning platforms, grouped into three macro groups: (a) learning management, (b) learning content management, and (c) communications and collaboration tools. The proposed criteria can be used to evaluate any e-learning platform’s functionality. They allow teachers and administrators to make conscious choices about the highest-quality e-learning platform for their schools and developers to improve e-learning platforms’ functionality. The developed criteria became the basis for rating the functionality of Ukrainian developers’ eight e-learning platforms' and determining the degree of support (in whole or partly) of e-learning components, categorized on the cognitive, social constructivist, motivation, and e-learning theories (CT, SCT, MT, and E-LT). The results indicate that the lack of communication and collaboration tools necessary to ensure quality distance learning is the main problem of Ukrainian e-leaning platforms. Comparative analysis of the functionality of e-learning platforms and components categorized on the learning theories helped determine that only three of the eight Ukrainian e-learning platforms (Accent [Mobischool], Class Assessment, My Class) fully follow the CT, SCT, and MT, but these platforms are all commercial products; therefore, they only partially support the E-LT. Solving this problem will be facilitated by developing e-learning platforms with open access, financed by the state budget in the context of the development of open and distance learning for Ukrainian students, as well as improving communication and collaboration tools in the context of conforming e-learning components to the social constructivist learning theory

From Monolithic Systems to Microservices: An Assessment Framework

Context. Re-architecting monolithic systems with Microservices-based architecture is a common trend. Various companies are migrating to Microservices for different reasons. However, making such an important decision like re-architecting an entire system must be based on real facts and not only on gut feelings. Objective. The goal of this work is to propose an evidence-based decision support framework for companies that need to migrate to Microservices, based on the analysis of a set of characteristics and metrics they should collect before re-architecting their monolithic system. Method. We designed this study with a mixed-methods approach combining a Systematic Mapping Study with a survey done in the form of interviews with professionals to derive the assessment framework based on Grounded Theory. Results. We identified a set consisting of information and metrics that companies can use to decide whether to migrate to Microservices or not. The proposed assessment framework, based on the aforementioned metrics, could be useful for companies if they need to migrate to Microservices and do not want to run the risk of failing to consider some important information

Mejora de la mantenibilidad con un modelo de medición de la calidad: resultados en una gran empresa

Ante un mercado cada vez más competitivo y en constante desarrollo, la calidad del software está tomando mayor importancia en las organizaciones, y con ello, la calidad del producto software, medida directamente en el código fuente. En un conjunto de artículos que el autor ha publicado anteriormente se presentó una recopilación de herramientas abiertas para el análisis del código fuente y la correspondencia entre las métricas proporcionadas con la mantenibilidad. Junto con ello se ha trabajado en un modelo de medición de la mantenibilidad del código fuente en base a las mediciones de las herramientas de análisis estático. En este artículo se presentan los resultados de la utilización del modelo de medición y de las herramientas durante diez meses en una gran empresa española. Se detalla la evolución de las mediciones, la satisfacción de los desarrolladores y como han ido evolucionandolas incidencias encontradas en las pruebas de aceptación.XII Workshop Ingeniería de Software (WIS)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Mejora de la mantenibilidad con un modelo de medición de la calidad: resultados en una gran empresa

Ante un mercado cada vez más competitivo y en constante desarrollo, la calidad del software está tomando mayor importancia en las organizaciones, y con ello, la calidad del producto software, medida directamente en el código fuente. En un conjunto de artículos que el autor ha publicado anteriormente se presentó una recopilación de herramientas abiertas para el análisis del código fuente y la correspondencia entre las métricas proporcionadas con la mantenibilidad. Junto con ello se ha trabajado en un modelo de medición de la mantenibilidad del código fuente en base a las mediciones de las herramientas de análisis estático. En este artículo se presentan los resultados de la utilización del modelo de medición y de las herramientas durante diez meses en una gran empresa española. Se detalla la evolución de las mediciones, la satisfacción de los desarrolladores y como han ido evolucionandolas incidencias encontradas en las pruebas de aceptación.XII Workshop Ingeniería de Software (WIS)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Mejora de la mantenibilidad con un modelo de medición de la calidad: resultados en una gran empresa

Ante un mercado cada vez más competitivo y en constante desarrollo, la calidad del software está tomando mayor importancia en las organizaciones, y con ello, la calidad del producto software, medida directamente en el código fuente. En un conjunto de artículos que el autor ha publicado anteriormente se presentó una recopilación de herramientas abiertas para el análisis del código fuente y la correspondencia entre las métricas proporcionadas con la mantenibilidad. Junto con ello se ha trabajado en un modelo de medición de la mantenibilidad del código fuente en base a las mediciones de las herramientas de análisis estático. En este artículo se presentan los resultados de la utilización del modelo de medición y de las herramientas durante diez meses en una gran empresa española. Se detalla la evolución de las mediciones, la satisfacción de los desarrolladores y como han ido evolucionandolas incidencias encontradas en las pruebas de aceptación.XII Workshop Ingeniería de Software (WIS)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI