Traceability improvement for software miniaturization

On the one hand, software companies try to reach the maximum number of customers, which often translate into integrating more features into their programs, leading to an increase in size, memory footprint, screen complexity, and so on. On the other hand, hand-held devices are now pervasive and their customers ask for programs similar to those they use everyday on their desktop computers. Companies are left with two options, either to develop new software for hand-held devices or perform manual refactoring to port it on hand-held devices, but both options are expensive and laborious. Software miniaturization can aid companies to port their software to hand-held devices. However, traceability is backbone of software miniaturization, without up-to-date traceability links it becomes diffi cult to recover desired artefacts for miniaturized software. Unfortunately, due to continuous changes, it is a tedious and time-consuming task to keep traceability links up-to-date. Often traceability links become outdated or completely vanish. Several traceability recovery approaches have been developed in the past. Each approach has some benefits and limitations. However, these approaches do not tell which factors can affect traceability recovery process. Our current research proposal is based on the premise that controlling potential quality factors and combining different traceability approaches can improve traceability quality for software miniaturization. In this research proposal, we introduce traceability improvement for software miniaturization (TISM) process. TISM has three sub processes, namely, traceability factor controller (TFC), hybrid traceability (HT), and software miniaturization optimization (SMO). TFC is a semi automatic process, it provides solution for factors, that can affect traceability process. TFC uses a generic format to document trace quality affecting factors. TFC results will help practitioners and researcher to improve their tool, techniques, and approaches. In the HT different traceability, recovery approaches are combined to trace functional and non-functional requirements. HT also works on improving precision and recall with the help of TFC. Finally these links have been used by SMO to identify required artefacts and optimize using scalability, performance, and portability parameters. We will conduct two case studies to aid TISM. The contributions of this research proposal can be summarised as follow: (i) traceability support for software miniaturization and optimization, (ii) a hybrid approach that combines the best of available traceability approaches to trace functional, non-functional requirements, and provides return-on-investment analysis, (iii) traceability quality factor controller that records the quality factors and provide support for avoiding or controlling them

Moving to smaller libraries via clustering and genetic algorithms

There may be several reasons to reduce a software system to its bare bone removing the extra fat introduced during development or evolution. Porting the software system on embedded devices or palmtops are just two examples. This paper presents an approach to re-factoring libraries with the aim of reducing the memory requirements of executables. The approach is organized in two steps. The first step defines an initial solution based on clustering methods, while the subsequent phase refines the initial solution via genetic algorithms. In particular, a novel genetic algorithm approach, considering the initial clusters as the starting population, adopting a knowledge-based mutation function and a multi-objective fitness function, is proposed. The approach has been applied to several medium and large-size open source software systems such as GRASS, KDE-QT, Samba and MySQL, allowing to effectivel