A Domain Analysis to Specify Design Defects and Generate Detection Algorithms

Quality experts often need to identify in software systems design defects, which are recurring design problems, that hinder development\ud and maintenance. Consequently, several defect detection approaches\ud and tools have been proposed in the literature. However, we are not\ud aware of any approach that defines and reifies the process of generating\ud detection algorithms from the existing textual descriptions of defects.\ud In this paper, we introduce an approach to automate the generation\ud of detection algorithms from specifications written using a domain-specific\ud language. The domain-specific is defined from a thorough domain analysis.\ud We specify several design defects, generate automatically detection\ud algorithms using templates, and validate the generated detection\ud algorithms in terms of precision and recall on Xerces v2.7.0, an\ud open-source object-oriented system

Cell Segmentation and Tracking using CNN-Based Distance Predictions and a Graph-Based Matching Strategy

The accurate segmentation and tracking of cells in microscopy image sequences is an important task in biomedical research, e.g., for studying the development of tissues, organs or entire organisms. However, the segmentation of touching cells in images with a low signal-to-noise-ratio is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we present a method for the segmentation of touching cells in microscopy images. By using a novel representation of cell borders, inspired by distance maps, our method is capable to utilize not only touching cells but also close cells in the training process. Furthermore, this representation is notably robust to annotation errors and shows promising results for the segmentation of microscopy images containing in the training data underrepresented or not included cell types. For the prediction of the proposed neighbor distances, an adapted U-Net convolutional neural network (CNN) with two decoder paths is used. In addition, we adapt a graph-based cell tracking algorithm to evaluate our proposed method on the task of cell tracking. The adapted tracking algorithm includes a movement estimation in the cost function to re-link tracks with missing segmentation masks over a short sequence of frames. Our combined tracking by detection method has proven its potential in the IEEE ISBI 2020 Cell Tracking Challenge (http://celltrackingchallenge.net/) where we achieved as team KIT-Sch-GE multiple top three rankings including two top performances using a single segmentation model for the diverse data sets.Comment: 25 pages, 14 figures, methods of the team KIT-Sch-GE for the IEEE ISBI 2020 Cell Tracking Challeng

Identifying and improving reusability based on coupling patterns

Open Source Software (OSS) communities have not yet taken full advantage of reuse mechanisms. Typically many OSS projects which share the same application domain and topic, duplicate effort and code, without fully leveraging the vast amounts of available code. This study proposes the empirical evaluation of source code folders of OSS projects in order to determine their actual internal reuse and their potential as shareable, fine-grained and externally reusable software components by future projects. This paper empirically analyzes four OSS systems, identifies which components (in the form of folders) are currently being reused internally and studies their coupling characteristics. Stable components (i.e., those which act as service providers rather than service consumers) are shown to be more likely to be reusable. As a means of supporting replication of these successful instances of OSS reuse, source folders with similar patterns are extracted from the studied systems, and identified as externally reusable components

Cross-Layer Cloud Performance Monitoring, Analysis and Recovery

The basic idea of Cloud computing is to offer software and hardware resources as services. These services are provided at different layers: Software (Software as a Service: SaaS), Platform (Platform as a Service: PaaS) and Infrastructure (Infrastructure as a Service: IaaS). In such a complex environment, performance issues are quite likely and rather the norm than the exception. Consequently, performance-related problems may frequently occur at all layers. Thus, it is necessary to monitor all Cloud layers and analyze their performance parameters to detect and rectify related problems. This thesis presents a novel cross-layer reactive performance monitoring approach for Cloud computing environments, based on the methodology of Complex Event Processing (CEP). The proposed approach is called CEP4Cloud. It analyzes monitored events to detect performance-related problems and performs actions to fix them. The proposal is based on the use of (1) a novel multi-layer monitoring approach, (2) a new cross-layer analysis approach and (3) a novel recovery approach. The proposed monitoring approach operates at all Cloud layers, while collecting related parameters. It makes use of existing monitoring tools and a new monitoring approach for Cloud services at the SaaS layer. The proposed SaaS monitoring approach is called AOP4CSM. It is based on aspect-oriented programming and monitors quality-of-service parameters of the SaaS layer in a non-invasive manner. AOP4CSM neither modifies the server implementation nor the client implementation. The defined cross-layer analysis approach is called D-CEP4CMA. It is based on the methodology of Complex Event Processing (CEP). Instead of having to manually specify continuous queries on monitored event streams, CEP queries are derived from analyzing the correlations between monitored metrics across multiple Cloud layers. The results of the correlation analysis allow us to reduce the number of monitored parameters and enable us to perform a root cause analysis to identify the causes of performance-related problems. The derived analysis rules are implemented as queries in a CEP engine. D-CEP4CMA is designed to dynamically switch between different centralized and distributed CEP architectures depending on the load/memory of the CEP machine and network traffic conditions in the observed Cloud environment. The proposed recovery approach is based on a novel action manager framework. It applies recovery actions at all Cloud layers. The novel action manager framework assigns a set of repair actions to each performance-related problem and checks the success of the applied action. The results of several experiments illustrate the merits of the reactive performance monitoring approach and its main components (i.e., monitoring, analysis and recovery). First, experimental results show the efficiency of AOP4CSM (very low overhead). Second, obtained results demonstrate the benefits of the analysis approach in terms of precision and recall compared to threshold-based methods. They also show the accuracy of the analysis approach in identifying the causes of performance-related problems. Furthermore, experiments illustrate the efficiency of D-CEP4CMA and its performance in terms of precision and recall compared to centralized and distributed CEP architectures. Moreover, experimental results indicate that the time needed to fix a performance-related problem is reasonably short. They also show that the CPU overhead of using CEP4Cloud is negligible. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the merits of CEP4Cloud in terms of speeding up the repair and reducing the number of triggered alarms compared to baseline methods