Software Measurement Activities in Small and Medium Enterprises: an Empirical Assessment

An empirical study for evaluating the proper implementation of measurement/metric programs in software companies in one area of Turkey is presented. The research questions are discussed and validated with the help of senior software managers (more than 15 years’ experience) and then used for interviewing a variety of medium and small scale software companies in Ankara. Observations show that there is a common reluctance/lack of interest in utilizing measurements/metrics despite the fact that they are well known in the industry. A side product of this research is that internationally recognized standards such as ISO and CMMI are pursued if they are a part of project/job requirements; without these requirements, introducing those standards to the companies remains as a long-term target to increase quality

phenomenological simulators of critical infrastructures

The objective of this chapter is to introduce and discuss the main phenomenological approaches that have been used within the CI M&S area. Phenomenological models are used to analyse the organizational phenomena of the society considering its complexity (finance, mobility, health) and the interactions among its different components. Within CI MA&S, different modelling approaches have been proposed and used as, for example, physical simulators (e.g. power flow simulators for electrical networks). Physical simulators are used to predict the behaviour of the physical system (the technological network) under different conditions. As an example, electrical engineers use different kind of simulators during planning and managing of network activities for different purposes: (1) power flow simulators for the evaluation of electrical network configuration changes (that can be both deliberate changes or results from of the effects of accidents and/or attacks) and contingency analysis, (2) real time simulators for the design of protection devices and new controllers. For the telecommunication domain one mat resort to network traffic simulators as for example ns2/ns3 codes that allow the simulation of telecommunication networks (wired/wireless) at packet switching level and evaluate its performances. Single domains simulators can be federated to analyse the interactions among different domains. In contrast, phenomenological simulators use more abstract data and models for the interaction among the different components of the system. The chapter will describe the main characteristic of some of the main simulation approaches resulting from the ENEA and UBC efforts in the CIP and Complexity Science field

A Pilot Study of Module Interconnectedness

Complexity plays an important role in understanding and working with a program, and has been measured in many different ways for software applications. The use of statistical analysis is one of the ways to predict the pattern of complexity among the modules present in a software application. A random sample of twelve software applications was selected for this study to examine complexity. A single pair of complexity measures was evaluated. This pair of complexity measures was the indegrees and out-degrees for each module of an application. The next step was to try to fit suitable statistical distributions to the in-degrees and to the out-degrees. By using various statistical distributions such as the normal, log-normal, exponential, geometric, uniform, poisson and the chi-square, we try to determine the type of distribution for the in-degrees and the type of distribution for out-degrees of the modules present in the software applications so that the pattern of complexity can be derived. The chi-square goodness of fit test was used to test various null hypotheses about the distributions for the in-degrees and for the out-degrees. Results showed that the pattern of in-degrees and the pattern of out-degrees both followed chi-square distributions