Introductory programming: a systematic literature review

As computing becomes a mainstream discipline embedded in the school curriculum and acts as an enabler for an increasing range of academic disciplines in higher education, the literature on introductory programming is growing. Although there have been several reviews that focus on specific aspects of introductory programming, there has been no broad overview of the literature exploring recent trends across the breadth of introductory programming. This paper is the report of an ITiCSE working group that conducted a systematic review in order to gain an overview of the introductory programming literature. Partitioning the literature into papers addressing the student, teaching, the curriculum, and assessment, we explore trends, highlight advances in knowledge over the past 15 years, and indicate possible directions for future research

SOFTWARE REUSE: SURVEY AND RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

Software reuse is the use of software resources from all stages of the software development process in new applications. Given the high cost and difficulty of developing high quality software, the idea of capitalizing on previous software investments is appealing. However, software reuse has not been as effective as expected and has not been very broadly or systematically used in industry. This paper surveys recent software reuse research using a framework that helps identify and organize the many factors that must be considered to achieve the benefits of software reuse in practice. We argue that software reuse needs to be viewed in the context of a total systems approach that addresses a broad range of technical, economic, managerial, organizational and legal issues and conclude with a summary of the major research issues in each of these areas.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Software redundancy: what, where, how

Software systems have become pervasive in everyday life and are the core component of many crucial activities. An inadequate level of reliability may determine the commercial failure of a software product. Still, despite the commitment and the rigorous verification processes employed by developers, software is deployed with faults. To increase the reliability of software systems, researchers have investigated the use of various form of redundancy. Informally, a software system is redundant when it performs the same functionality through the execution of different elements. Redundancy has been extensively exploited in many software engineering techniques, for example for fault-tolerance and reliability engineering, and in self-adaptive and self- healing programs. Despite the many uses, though, there is no formalization or study of software redundancy to support a proper and effective design of software. Our intuition is that a systematic and formal investigation of software redundancy will lead to more, and more effective uses of redundancy. This thesis develops this intuition and proposes a set of ways to characterize qualitatively as well as quantitatively redundancy. We first formalize the intuitive notion of redundancy whereby two code fragments are considered redundant when they perform the same functionality through different executions. On the basis of this abstract and general notion, we then develop a practical method to obtain a measure of software redundancy. We prove the effectiveness of our measure by showing that it distinguishes between shallow differences, where apparently different code fragments reduce to the same underlying code, and deep code differences, where the algorithmic nature of the computations differs. We also demonstrate that our measure is useful for developers, since it is a good predictor of the effectiveness of techniques that exploit redundancy. Besides formalizing the notion of redundancy, we investigate the pervasiveness of redundancy intrinsically found in modern software systems. Intrinsic redundancy is a form of redundancy that occurs as a by-product of modern design and development practices. We have observed that intrinsic redundancy is indeed present in software systems, and that it can be successfully exploited for good purposes. This thesis proposes a technique to automatically identify equivalent method sequences in software systems to help developers assess the presence of intrinsic redundancy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique by showing that it identifies the majority of equivalent method sequences in a system with good precision and performance

Software similarity measurements using UML diagrams: A systematic literature review

Every piece of software uses a model to derive its operational, auxiliary, and functional procedures. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standard displaying language for determining, recording, and building a software product. Several algorithms have been used by researchers to measure similarities between UML artifacts. However, there no literature studies have considered measurements of UML diagram similarities. This paper presents the results of a systematic literature review concerning similarity measurements between the UML diagrams of different software products. The study reviews and identifies similarity measurements of UML artifacts, with class diagram, sequence diagram, statechart diagram, and use case diagram being UML diagrams that are widely used as research objects for measuring similarity. Measuring similarity enables resolution of the problem domains of software reuse, similarity measurement, and clone detection. The instruments used to measure similarity are semantic and structural similarity. The findings indicate opportunities for future research regarding calculating other UML diagrams, compiling calculation information for each diagram, adapting semantic and structural similarity calculation methods, determining the best weight for each item in the diagram, testing novel proposed methods, and building or finding good datasets for use as testing material