A Quality Model for Actionable Analytics in Rapid Software Development

Background: Accessing relevant data on the product, process, and usage perspectives of software as well as integrating and analyzing such data is crucial for getting reliable and timely actionable insights aimed at continuously managing software quality in Rapid Software Development (RSD). In this context, several software analytics tools have been developed in recent years. However, there is a lack of explainable software analytics that software practitioners trust. Aims: We aimed at creating a quality model (called Q-Rapids quality model) for actionable analytics in RSD, implementing it, and evaluating its understandability and relevance. Method: We performed workshops at four companies in order to determine relevant metrics as well as product and process factors. We also elicited how these metrics and factors are used and interpreted by practitioners when making decisions in RSD. We specified the Q-Rapids quality model by comparing and integrating the results of the four workshops. Then we implemented the Q-Rapids tool to support the usage of the Q-Rapids quality model as well as the gathering, integration, and analysis of the required data. Afterwards we installed the Q-Rapids tool in the four companies and performed semi-structured interviews with eight product owners to evaluate the understandability and relevance of the Q-Rapids quality model. Results: The participants of the evaluation perceived the metrics as well as the product and process factors of the Q-Rapids quality model as understandable. Also, they considered the Q-Rapids quality model relevant for identifying product and process deficiencies (e.g., blocking code situations). Conclusions: By means of heterogeneous data sources, the Q-Rapids quality model enables detecting problems that take more time to find manually and adds transparency among the perspectives of system, process, and usage.Comment: This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of a paper to be published by IEEE in the 44th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA) 2018. The final authenticated version will be available onlin

A Platform-Based Software Design Methodology for Embedded Control Systems: An Agile Toolkit

A discrete control system, with stringent hardware constraints, is effectively an embedded real-time system and hence requires a rigorous methodology to develop the software involved. The development methodology proposed in this paper adapts agile principles and patterns to support the building of embedded control systems, focusing on the issues relating to a system's constraints and safety. Strong unit testing, to ensure correctness, including the satisfaction of timing constraints, is the foundation of the proposed methodology. A platform-based design approach is used to balance costs and time-to-market in relation to performance and functionality constraints. It is concluded that the proposed methodology significantly reduces design time and costs, as well as leading to better software modularity and reliability

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Modern software metrics : design and implementation

As software becomes more complex, new measurements methods are needed to leverage quality, improve user's experience and reduce energy consumption. This dissertation introduces the Inspector, a software tool for framework-level dynamic software analysis and the Thermal Painting, a new software metric for measuring the performance of the graphical subsystem of a program. The Inspector breaks many of the constraints that aected traditional tools like debuggers and function-level prolers, like the need to alter the source or binary code and the impossibility to prole already running code that exhibits bad behavior, and provides a unique work environment for conducting the tests. The Thermal Painting is the new software metric that measures the per-pixel energy required to paint a graphical user interface, allowing to prole and improve the graphical performance of a program

Development of a Novel Media-independent Communication Theology for Accessing Local & Web-based Data: Case Study with Robotic Subsystems

Realizing media independence in today’s communication system remains an open problem by and large. Information retrieval, mostly through the Internet, is becoming the most demanding feature in technological progress and this web-based data access should ideally be in user-selective form. While blind-folded access of data through the World Wide Web is quite streamlined, the counter-half of the facet, namely, seamless access of information database pertaining to a specific end-device, e.g. robotic systems, is still in a formative stage. This paradigm of access as well as systematic query-based retrieval of data, related to the physical enddevice is very crucial in designing the Internet-based network control of the same in real-time. Moreover, this control of the end-device is directly linked up to the characteristics of three coupled metrics, namely, ‘multiple databases’, ‘multiple servers’ and ‘multiple inputs’ (to each server). This triad, viz. database-input-server (DIS) plays a significant role in overall performance of the system, the background details of which is still very sketchy in global research community. This work addresses the technical issues associated with this theology, with specific reference to formalism of a customized DIS considering real-time delay analysis. The present paper delineates the developmental paradigms of novel multi-input multioutput communication semantics for retrieving web-based information from physical devices, namely, two representative robotic sub-systems in a coherent and homogeneous mode. The developed protocol can be entrusted for use in real-time in a complete user-friendly manner

A Systemic Approach to Evaluating the Organizational Agility in Large-Scale Companies

This paper presents action research to analyze an approach for assessment of the alleged agile transformation. This approach was implemented at AK Bars Digital Technologies, an IT spin-off of one of the largest banks in Russia using the Scaled Agile Framework. The approach is based on the Goal-Question-Metric approach, non-invasive measurement collection, and systemic analysis. It uses data from several different sources, including interviews, code repositories, user ratings in the play stores, and templates for agile assessment. The effectiveness of the approach is subjectively validated by the adoption of the proposed recommendations by the banks’ senior management. Details are provided on the approach, the required effort from the side of both those assessing and of the people being assessed and the results. The final part of the paper is devoted to the discussion of its generalizability and the plan for future experimentation and refinement