An Empirical Study of a Software Maintenance Process

This paper describes how a process support tool is used to collect metrics about a major upgrade to our own electronic retail system. An incremental prototyping lifecycle is adopted in which each increment is categorised by an effort type and a project component. Effort types are Acquire, Build, Comprehend and Design and span all phases of development. Project components include data models and process models expressed in an OO modelling language and process algebra respectively as well as C++ classes and function templates and build components including source files and data files. This categorisation is independent of incremental prototyping and equally applicable to other software lifecycles. The process support tool (PWI) is responsible for ensuring the consistency between the models and the C++ source. It also supports the interaction between multiple developers and multiple metric-collectors. The first two releases of the retailing software are available for ftp from oracle.ecs.soton.ac.uk in directory pub/peter. Readers are invited to use the software and apply their own metrics as appropriate. We would be interested to correspond with anyone who does so

A document-like software visualization method for effective cognition of c-based software systems

It is clear that maintenance is a crucial and very costly process in a software life cycle. Nowadays there are a lot of software systems particularly legacy systems that are always maintained from time to time as new requirements arise. One important source to understand a software system before it is being maintained is through the documentation, particularly system documentation. Unfortunately, not all software systems developed or maintained are accompanied with their reliable and updated documents. In this case, source codes will be the only reliable source for programmers. A number of studies have been carried out in order to assist cognition based on source codes. One way is through tool automation via reverse engineering technique in which source codes will be parsed and the information extracted will be visualized using certain visualization methods. Most software visualization methods use graph as the main element to represent extracted software artifacts. Nevertheless, current methods tend to produce more complicated graphs and do not grant an explicit, document-like re-documentation environment. Hence, this thesis proposes a document-like software visualization method called DocLike Modularized Graph (DMG). The method is realized in a prototype tool named DocLike Viewer that targets on C-based software systems. The main contribution of the DMG method is to provide an explicit structural re-document mechanism in the software visualization tool. Besides, the DMG method provides more level of information abstractions via less complex graph that include inter-module dependencies, inter-program dependencies, procedural abstraction and also parameter passing. The DMG method was empirically evaluated based on the Goal/Question/Metric (GQM) paradigm and the findings depict that the method can improve productivity and quality in the aspect of cognition or program comprehension. A usability study was also conducted and DocLike Viewer had the most positive responses from the software practitioners

Realization of Semantic Atom Blog

Web blog is used as a collaborative platform to publish and share information. The information accumulated in the blog intrinsically contains the knowledge. The knowledge shared by the community of people has intangible value proposition. The blog is viewed as a multimedia information resource available on the Internet. In a blog, information in the form of text, image, audio and video builds up exponentially. The multimedia information contained in an Atom blog does not have the capability, which is required by the software processes so that Atom blog content can be accessed, processed and reused over the Internet. This shortcoming is addressed by exploring OWL knowledge modeling, semantic annotation and semantic categorization techniques in an Atom blog sphere. By adopting these techniques, futuristic Atom blogs can be created and deployed over the Internet

Knowledge Mapping for Open Sensemaking Communities

By analogy to cartographic representations of spatial worlds, Knowledge Maps provide an ‘aerial view’ of a topic by highlighting key elements and connections. Moreover, just as spatial maps simplify the world and can fuel controversy, maps of conceptual worlds provide vehicles for summarising and negotiating meaning. In conjunction with the UK Open University’s Open Educational Resources OpenLearn project, we are investigating the role of such maps for both learners and educators to share – and debate – interpretations of OERs. In this brief update, we describe how a mapping tool (Compendium) has been integrated with OpenLearn’s elearning platform (Moodle) in order to support tasks such as concept analysis, problem-solving, literature review, learning path planning, argument analysis and OER design