Structured Review of the Evidence for Effects of Code Duplication on Software Quality

This report presents the detailed steps and results of a structured review of code clone literature. The aim of the review is to investigate the evidence for the claim that code duplication has a negative effect on code changeability. This report contains only the details of the review for which there is not enough place to include them in the companion paper published at a conference (Hordijk, Ponisio et al. 2009 - Harmfulness of Code Duplication - A Structured Review of the Evidence)

Ambient Air Toxic Releases and Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania

Previous studies have shown that women exposed to certain air pollutants are at an increased risk for preterm delivery and/or delivering a low birth weight newborn. Preterm delivery and low birth weight are associated with an increased risk for morbidity and mortality. In an effort to better understand the impact of local environmental factors on pregnancy health, duration and outcomes, this study investigated the relationship of hazardous air pollutant chemicals released by local industries and the adverse pregnancy outcomes of preterm delivery and term low birth weight in Allegheny County, PA.This study included 2,798 singleton birth records for deliveries that occurred in Allegheny County in January through March of 2004. The Toxic Release Inventory provided data for 2003 fugitive and stack air releases of all facilities in Allegheny County reporting air releases of lead and toluene. This data was used for determining proxy maternal exposure measurements. ArcGIS software was used to calculate the distance from each maternal residence to each TRI facility. The distances and reported total pounds of release from each facility were then used to calculate a total lead and toluene exposure value for every birth record. Binary logistic regression was used to assess maternal characteristics' effects on birth outcomes. Chi square tests were used to assess maternal characteristics and levels of exposure to lead and toluene. Chi square tests and binary logistic regression were then used to assess pregnancy outcomes in relation to quartiles of exposure.This study found that mothers with certain age, race, education, and marital characteristics were significantly associated with lower exposure levels of lead and toluene. However, exposure to higher levels of lead or toluene, as measured in this study, was not significantly associated with an increased risk for preterm delivery or term low birth weight.Adverse pregnancy outcomes negatively impact an individual's immediate and lifelong health. Decreasing the incidence of preterm delivery and low birth weight are of great importance to public health. Research that helps to identify environmental determinants of adverse pregnancy outcomes is of vital public health significance

Investigating Automatic Static Analysis Results to Identify Quality Problems: an Inductive Study

Background: Automatic static analysis (ASA) tools examine source code to discover "issues", i.e. code patterns that are symptoms of bad programming practices and that can lead to defective behavior. Studies in the literature have shown that these tools find defects earlier than other verification activities, but they produce a substantial number of false positive warnings. For this reason, an alternative approach is to use the set of ASA issues to identify defect prone files and components rather than focusing on the individual issues. Aim: We conducted an exploratory study to investigate whether ASA issues can be used as early indicators of faulty files and components and, for the first time, whether they point to a decay of specific software quality attributes, such as maintainability or functionality. Our aim is to understand the critical parameters and feasibility of such an approach to feed into future research on more specific quality and defect prediction models. Method: We analyzed an industrial C# web application using the Resharper ASA tool and explored if significant correlations exist in such a data set. Results: We found promising results when predicting defect-prone files. A set of specific Resharper categories are better indicators of faulty files than common software metrics or the collection of issues of all issue categories, and these categories correlate to different software quality attributes. Conclusions: Our advice for future research is to perform analysis on file rather component level and to evaluate the generalizability of categories. We also recommend using larger datasets as we learned that data sparseness can lead to challenges in the proposed analysis proces

Evaluating Maintainability Prejudices with a Large-Scale Study of Open-Source Projects

Exaggeration or context changes can render maintainability experience into prejudice. For example, JavaScript is often seen as least elegant language and hence of lowest maintainability. Such prejudice should not guide decisions without prior empirical validation. We formulated 10 hypotheses about maintainability based on prejudices and test them in a large set of open-source projects (6,897 GitHub repositories, 402 million lines, 5 programming languages). We operationalize maintainability with five static analysis metrics. We found that JavaScript code is not worse than other code, Java code shows higher maintainability than C# code and C code has longer methods than other code. The quality of interface documentation is better in Java code than in other code. Code developed by teams is not of higher and large code bases not of lower maintainability. Projects with high maintainability are not more popular or more often forked. Overall, most hypotheses are not supported by open-source data.Comment: 20 page

Eye tracking in translation process research: methodological challenges and solutions

Eye tracking has been eagerly adopted as a technique in translation process research in recent years and, with it, comes a long list of methodological challenges, some of which are specific to translation process research, some of which are more general. This paper represents an attempt by a recent convert to eye tracking to document the various challenges and to offer suggestions for how some of them might be addressed by others who are interested in embracing this very interesting mode of investigation. It is difficult to comment only on those challenges related to eye tracking without mentioning issues that pertain to the more general questions of research design in the domain of translation process research as the two are inevitably linked. By highlighting challenges, one is inevitably exposing research design weaknesses. However, this should not be viewed negatively but should rather be seen as a means of improving the quality of combined research outputs with the aim of maturing the domain. This paper is broadly divided into two parts: the first discusses the methodological challenges, which in turn are divided into the categories of research environment, research participants, ethics, data explosion and validity. Each section is then repeated in the second part of the paper, which offers suggestions on how the challenges might be addressed

Virtual testing environment tools for railway vehicle certification

This paper describes the work performed in Work Package 6 of the European project DynoTRAIN. Its task was to investigate the effects that uncertainties present within the track and running conditions have on the simulated behaviour of a railway vehicle. Methodologies and frameworks for using virtual simulation and statistical tools, in order to reduce both the cost and time required for the certification of new or modified railway vehicles, were proposed. In particular, the project developed a virtual test track (VTT) toolkit that is capable of both generating a series of test tracks based on measurements, which can be used in vehicle virtual testing using computer simulation models, and also automatically handling the output results. The toolkit is compliant with prEN14363: 2013. The VTT was used as an experimental tool to analyse cross-correlations between track data (input) and matching vehicle response (output) based on data recorded using a test train. This paper discusses the issues encountered in the process and suggests avenues for future developments and potential use in the context of European cross-acceptance. The VTT offers benefits to the areas of design development and regulatory certification

A Conceptual UX-aware Model of Requirements

User eXperience (UX) is becoming increasingly important for success of software products. Yet, many companies still face various challenges in their work with UX. Part of these challenges relate to inadequate knowledge and awareness of UX and that current UX models are commonly not practical nor well integrated into existing Software Engineering (SE) models and concepts. Therefore, we present a conceptual UX-aware model of requirements for software development practitioners. This layered model shows the interrelation between UX and functional and quality requirements. The model is developed based on current models of UX and software quality characteristics. Through the model we highlight the main differences between various requirement types in particular essentially subjective and accidentally subjective quality requirements. We also present the result of an initial validation of the model through interviews with 12 practitioners and researchers. Our results show that the model can raise practitioners' knowledge and awareness of UX in particular in relation to requirement and testing activities. It can also facilitate UX-related communication among stakeholders with different backgrounds.Comment: 6th International Working Conference on Human-Centred Software Engineerin