213,499 research outputs found
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
Assessing architectural evolution: A case study
This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 SpringerThis paper proposes to use a historical perspective on generic laws, principles,
and guidelines, like Lehman’s software evolution laws and Martin’s design principles, in order to achieve a multi-faceted process and structural assessment of a system’s architectural evolution. We present a simple structural model with associated historical metrics and
visualizations that could form part of an architect’s dashboard. We perform such an assessment for the Eclipse SDK, as a case study of a large, complex, and long-lived system for which sustained effective architectural evolution is paramount. The twofold aim of checking generic principles on a well-know system is, on the one hand,
to see whether there are certain lessons that could be learned for best practice of architectural evolution, and on the other hand to get more insights about the applicability of such principles. We find that while the Eclipse SDK does follow several of the laws and principles, there are some deviations, and we discuss areas of architectural improvement and limitations of the assessment approach
Applying ArchOptions to value the payoff of refactoring
ArchOptions is a real-options based model that we have pro-posed to value the flexibility of software architectures in response to future changes in requirements. In this paper, we build on ArchOptions to devise an options-based model, which values the architectural flexibility that results from a refactoring exercise. This value assists in understanding the payoff of investing in refactoring: if the refactored system results in an architecture that is more flexible, such that the expected added value (in the form of options) due to the en-hanced flexibility outweighs the cost of investing in this exer-cise, then refactoring is said to payoff. We apply our model to a refactoring case study from the literature
Recommended from our members
Avoiding structural collapses in refurbishment - a decision support system (HSE research report)
Integrating security and usability into the requirements and design process
According to Ross Anderson, 'Many systems fail because their designers protect the wrong things or protect the right things in the wrong way'. Surveys also show that security incidents in industry are rising, which highlights the difficulty of designing good security. Some recent approaches have targeted security from the technological perspective, others from the human–computer interaction angle, offering better User Interfaces (UIs) for improved usability of security mechanisms. However, usability issues also extend beyond the user interface and should be considered during system requirements and design. In this paper, we describe Appropriate and Effective Guidance for Information Security (AEGIS), a methodology for the development of secure and usable systems. AEGIS defines a development process and a UML meta-model of the definition and the reasoning over the system's assets. AEGIS has been applied to case studies in the area of Grid computing and we report on one of these
Recommended from our members
An empirical study of evolution of inheritance in Java OSS
Previous studies of Object-Oriented (OO) software have reported avoidance of the inheritance mechanism and cast doubt on the wisdom of ‘deep’ inheritance levels. From an evolutionary perspective, the picture is unclear - we still know relatively little about how, over time, changes tend to be applied by developers. Our conjecture is that an inheritance hierarchy will tend to grow ‘breadth-wise’ rather than ‘depth-wise’. This claim is made on the basis that developers will avoid extending depth in favour of breadth because of the inherent complexity of having to understand the functionality of superclasses. Thus the goal of our study is to investigate this empirically. We conduct an empirical study of seven Java Open-Source Systems (OSSs) over a series of releases to observe the nature and location of changes within the inheritance hierarchies. Results show a strong tendency for classes to be added at levels one and two of the hierarchy (rather than anywhere else). Over 96% of classes added over the course of the versions of all systems were at level 1 or level 2. The results suggest that changes cluster in the shallow levels of a hierarchy; this is relevant for developers since it indicates where remedial activities such as refactoring should be focused
Global-Scale Resource Survey and Performance Monitoring of Public OGC Web Map Services
One of the most widely-implemented service standards provided by the Open
Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to the user community is the Web Map Service (WMS).
WMS is widely employed globally, but there is limited knowledge of the global
distribution, adoption status or the service quality of these online WMS
resources. To fill this void, we investigated global WMSs resources and
performed distributed performance monitoring of these services. This paper
explicates a distributed monitoring framework that was used to monitor 46,296
WMSs continuously for over one year and a crawling method to discover these
WMSs. We analyzed server locations, provider types, themes, the spatiotemporal
coverage of map layers and the service versions for 41,703 valid WMSs.
Furthermore, we appraised the stability and performance of basic operations for
1210 selected WMSs (i.e., GetCapabilities and GetMap). We discuss the major
reasons for request errors and performance issues, as well as the relationship
between service response times and the spatiotemporal distribution of client
monitoring sites. This paper will help service providers, end users and
developers of standards to grasp the status of global WMS resources, as well as
to understand the adoption status of OGC standards. The conclusions drawn in
this paper can benefit geospatial resource discovery, service performance
evaluation and guide service performance improvements.Comment: 24 pages; 15 figure
Determination and evaluation of web accessibility
The Web is the most pervasive collaborative
technology in widespread use today; however,
access to the web and its many applications cannot
be taken for granted. Web accessibility encompasses
a variety of concerns ranging from societal,
political, and economic to individual, physical, and
intellectual through to the purely technical. Thus,
there are many perspectives from which web
accessibility can be understood and evaluated. In
order to discuss these concerns and to gain a better
understanding of web accessibility, an accessibility
framework is proposed using as its base a layered
evaluation framework from Computer Supported
Co-operative Work research and the ISO standard,
ISO/IEC 9126 on software quality. The former is
employed in recognition of the collaborative nature
of the web and its importance in facilitating
communication. The latter is employed to refine and
extend the technical issues and to highlight the need
for considering accessibility from the viewpoint of
the web developer and maintainer as well as the web
user. A technically inaccessible web is unlikely to be
evolved over time. A final goal of the accessibility
framework is to provide web developers and
maintainers with a practical basis for considering
web accessibility through the development of a set of
accessibility factors associated with each identified
layer
- …