Using formal concept analysis for the verification of process-data matrices in conceptual domain models.

One of the first steps in a software engineering process is the elaboration of the conceptual domain model. In this paper, we investigate how Formal Concept Analysis can be used to formally underpin the construction of a conceptual domain model. In particular, we demonstrate that intuitive verification rules for process-data matrices can be formally grounded in FCA theory. As a case study, we show that the well-formedness rules from MERODE are isomorphic to the clustering rules in Formal Concept Analysis, and that the relationships in the class diagram are isomorphic to the subconcept-superconcept relationship in FCA.Formal concept analysis; MERODE; Conceptual domain modeling; OOSSADM; CRUD;

Formalising responsibility modelling for automatic analysis

Modelling the structure of social-technical systems as a basis for informing software system design is a difficult compromise. Formal methods struggle to capture the scale and complexity of the heterogeneous organisations that use technical systems. Conversely, informal approaches lack the rigour needed to inform the software design and construction process or enable automated analysis. We revisit the concept of responsibility modelling, which models social technical systems as a collection of actors who discharge their responsibilities, whilst using and producing resources in the process. Responsibility modelling is formalised as a structured approach for socio-technical system requirements specification and modelling, with well-defined semantics and support for automated structure and validity analysis. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated by two case studies of software engineering methodologies

Refactorings of Design Defects using Relational Concept Analysis

Software engineers often need to identify and correct design defects, ıe} recurring design problems that hinder development and maintenance\ud by making programs harder to comprehend and--or evolve. While detection\ud of design defects is an actively researched area, their correction---mainly\ud a manual and time-consuming activity --- is yet to be extensively\ud investigated for automation. In this paper, we propose an automated\ud approach for suggesting defect-correcting refactorings using relational\ud concept analysis (RCA). The added value of RCA consists in exploiting\ud the links between formal objects which abound in a software re-engineering\ud context. We validated our approach on instances of the <span class='textit'></span>Blob\ud design defect taken from four different open-source programs

Citation Analysis using Formal Concept Analysis: A case study in Software Engineering

El suelo ejidal en México presenta, a lo largo de su historia, vaguedad en su origen, ambigüedad en su implementación, indefinición en su propiedad y confusión en su utilización. En este último aspecto, sobre todo a partir de la segunda mitad del siglo XX, de su original e histórico sentido agrario comunal, se consolida como una mercancía, ahora para uso urbano, y que aporta cualquier tipo de ganancias tanto privadas como públicas. Las peculiares situaciones que rodean el acceso a este tipo de propiedad, tales como la práctica de un derecho consuetudinario, la sustitución de autoridades, la autonomía en la toma de decisiones, su gran extensión en el país (principalmente en las periferias de las ciudades) la existencia de Leyes y Autoridades paralelas, así como su no unicidad en su comportamiento, fomentan además, el surgimiento de múltiples modos de acceso (principalmente para uso urbano), en la mayoría de los casos, al margen de cualquier marco jurídico; ello implica sus consecuentes mecanismos de regularización. Todo esto, ha hecho imprescindible al suelo ejidal en la urbanización de la ciudad mexicana, de tal forma que no es posible entenderla, sin comprender a su vez, a este tipo de suelo y las relaciones de negociación que guardan los grupos que inciden en este. Abstract: The ejidal ground in Mexico presents, throughout its history, vagueness in its origin, ambiguity in its implementation, lack of definition in its property and confusion in its use. In the latter aspect, mostly from second half of century XX, of its original and historical communal agrarian sense, one consolidates like merchandise, now for urban use, and that contributes any type of both private and public earnings. The peculiar situations that surround the access to this type of property, such as the practice of common law, the substitution of authorities, the autonomy in the decision making, their great extension in the country (especially in the peripheries of the cities) the existence of Laws and parallel Authorities, as well as its not uniqueness in its behavior, foments in addition, the emergence of multiple ways of access (mainly for urban use), in most of the cases, to the margin of any legal frame; it implies its consequent mechanisms of regularization. All this, has made indispensable to the ejidal ground in the urbanization of the Mexican city, in such a way that it is not possible to understand it, without understanding in turn, to this type of ground and the relations of negotiation that keep the groups that affect in this one

Using formal concept analysis to construct and visualise hierarchies of socio-technical relations

Interest in the human aspects of software engineering has grown in the past years. For example, based on activity logs in software artefact repositories, researchers are recommending who should fix a bug for a certain component. However, existing work largely follows ad-hoc approaches to relate software artefacts to developers and rarely makes those socio-technical relations explicit in a single structure. In this paper we propose a novel application of formal concept analysis, in order to overcome those deficiencies. As a case study, we construct and visualise different views of the developers who fix and discuss bugs in the Eclipse project

Tool Support for Inspecting the Code Quality of HPC Applications

The nature of HPC application development encourages ad hoc design and implementation, rather than formal requirements analysis and design specification as is typical in software engineering. However, we cannot simply expect HPC developers to adopt formal software engineering processes wholesale, even while there is a need to improve software structure and quality to ensure future maintainability. Therefore, we propose tools that HPC developers can use at their discretion to obtain feedback on the structure and quality of their codes. This feedback would come in the form of code quality metrics and analyses, presented when necessary in intuitive and interactive visualizations. This paper summarizes our implementation of just such a tool, which we apply to a standard HPC benchmark as ''proof-of-concept.'

Scalability and Performance of Microservices Architectures.

Annotation- The inevitability of continuous evolution and seamless integration of dynamic alterations remains a paramount consideration in the realm of software engineering This concern is particularly pronounced within the context of contemporary microservices architectures embedded in heterogeneous and decentralized systems composed of numerous interdependent components A pivotal focal point within such a software design paradigm is to sustain optimal performance quality by ensuring harmonious collaboration among autonomous facets within an intricate framework The challenge of microservices evolution has predominantly revolved around upholding the harmonization of diverse microservices versions during updates all while curbing the computational overhead associated with such validation This study leverages previous research outcomes and tackles the evolution predicament by introducing an innovative formal model coupled with a fresh exposition of microservices RESTful APIs The amalgamation of Formal Concept Analysis and the Liskov Substitution Principle plays a pivotal role in this proposed solution A series of compatibility constraints is delineated and subjected to validation through a controlled experiment employing a representative microservices syste

Formalising non-functional requirements embedded in user requirements notation (URN) models

The growing need for computer software in different sectors of activity, (health, agriculture, industries, education, aeronautic, science and telecommunication) together with the increasing reliance of the society as a whole on information technology, is placing a heavy and fast growing demand on complex and high quality software systems. In this regard, the anticipation has been on non-functional requirements (NFRs) engineering and formal methods. Despite their common objective, these techniques have in most cases evolved separately. NFRs engineering proceeds firstly, by deriving measures to evaluate the quality of the constructed software (product-oriented approach), and secondarily by improving the engineering process (process-oriented approach). With the ability to combine the analysis of both functional and non-functional requirements, Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) approaches have become de facto leading requirements engineering methods. They propose through refinement/operationalisation, means to satisfy NFRs encoded in softgoals at an early phase of software development. On the other side, formal methods have kept, so far, their promise to eliminate errors in software artefacts to produce high quality software products and are therefore particularly solicited for safety and mission critical systems for which a single error may cause great loss including human life. This thesis introduces the concept of Complementary Non-functional action (CNF-action) to extend the analysis and development of NFRs beyond the traditional goals/softgoals analysis, based on refinement/operationalisation, and to propagate the influence of NFRs to other software construction phases. Mechanisms are also developed to integrate the formal technique Z/Object-Z into the standardised User Requirements Notation (URN) to formalise GRL models describing functional and non-functional requirements, to propagate CNF-actions of the formalised NFRs to UCMs maps, to facilitate URN construction process and the quality of URN models.School of ComputingD. Phil (Computer Science