Model-based integration testing technique using formal finite state behavioral models for component-based software

Many issues and challenges could be identified when considering integration testing of Component-Based Software Systems (CBSS). Consequently, several research have appeared in the literature, aimed at facilitating the integration testing of CBSS. Unfortunately, they suffer from a number of drawbacks and limitations such as difficulty of understanding and describing the behavior of integrated components, lack of effective formalism for test information, difficulty of analyzing and validating the integrated components, and exposing the components implementation by providing semi-formal models. Hence, these problems have made it in effective to test today’s modern complex CBSS. To address these problems, a model-based approach such as Model-Based Testing (MBT) tends to be a suitable mechanism and could be a potential solution to be applied in the context of integration testing of CBSS. Accordingly, this thesis presents a model-based integration testing technique for CBSS. Firstly, a method to extract the formal finite state behavioral models of integrated software components using Mealy machine models was developed. The extracted formal models were used to detect faulty interactions (integration bugs) or compositional problems between integrated components in the system. Based on the experimental results, the proposed method had significant impact in reducing the number of output queries required to extract the formal models of integrated software components and its performance was 50% better compared to the existing methods. Secondly, based on the extracted formal models, an effective model-based integration testing technique (MITT) for CBSS was developed. Finally, the effectiveness of the MITT was demonstrated by employing it in the air gourmet and elevator case studies, using three evaluation parameters. The experimental results showed that the MITT was effective and outperformed Shahbaz technique on the air gourmet and elevator case studies. In terms of learned components for air gourmet and elevator case studies respectively, the MITT results were better by 98.14% and 100%, output queries based on performance were 42.13% and 25.01%, and error detection capabilities were 70.62% and 75% for each of the case study

Automated Testing: Requirements Propagation via Model Transformation in Embedded Software

Testing is the most common activity to validate software systems and plays a key role in the software development process. In general, the software testing phase takes around 40-70% of the effort, time and cost. This area has been well researched over a long period of time. Unfortunately, while many researchers have found methods of reducing time and cost during the testing process, there are still a number of important related issues such as generating test cases from UCM scenarios and validate them need to be researched. As a result, ensuring that an embedded software behaves correctly is non-trivial, especially when testing with limited resources and seeking compliance with safety-critical software standard. It thus becomes imperative to adopt an approach or methodology based on tools and best engineering practices to improve the testing process. This research addresses the problem of testing embedded software with limited resources by the following. First, a reverse-engineering technique is exercised on legacy software tests aims to discover feasible transformation from test layer to test requirement layer. The feasibility of transforming the legacy test cases into an abstract model is shown, along with a forward engineering process to regenerate the test cases in selected test language. Second, a new model-driven testing technique based on different granularity level (MDTGL) to generate test cases is introduced. The new approach uses models in order to manage the complexity of the system under test (SUT). Automatic model transformation is applied to automate test case development which is a tedious, error-prone, and recurrent software development task. Third, the model transformations that automated the development of test cases in the MDTGL methodology are validated in comparison with industrial testing process using embedded software specification. To enable the validation, a set of timed and functional requirement is introduced. Two case studies are run on an embedded system to generate test cases. The effectiveness of two testing approaches are determined and contrasted according to the generation of test cases and the correctness of the generated workflow. Compared to several techniques, our new approach generated useful and effective test cases with much less resources in terms of time and labor work. Finally, to enhance the applicability of MDTGL, the methodology is extended with the creation of a trace model that records traceability links among generated testing artifacts. The traceability links, often mandated by software development standards, enable the support for visualizing traceability, model-based coverage analysis and result evaluation

Solid Waste Management (SWM) at a University Campus (Part 1/10): Comprehensive-Review on Legal Framework and Background to Waste Management, at a Global Context

This-work, being the-first, in-a-series of 10, was intended to-provide a-sufficient-introductory to SWM; yet, it can also-be-treated-as an-independent and a-complete-piece. This-article starts-with a-concentrated-digest (synthesized from over 400 published-reference-documents), providing a-starting point, for readers, interested in-advanced-investigation on the-topic. As-such, the-following-issues were presented and analyzed: SWM history; Global and regional-generation-rates; WM-‘value-chain’; SWM-technologies; Impacts of uncontrolled-SW; International-Conventions, Protocols, Agreements, and commitments, addressing SWM, and their-analysis; as-well-as Global-SWM-practices (including municipal-waste management) and current-challenges, incorporating POPs. It was concluded, that waste is completely-unavoidable in-any, and every-human-activity; however, the-way the-waste is handled, stored, collected, and disposed-off, will-determine the-quality of our-surrounding-environment, to-be-either; clean, pleasant, healthy, and sustainable, or filthy, disgusting, harmful, and wasteful. The-way each-individual, company/organization, government, and society, at-large, deal with their-waste, will-eventually-determine our-own-future, as-humans. The-study also justified, that the-waste should-be-treated as a-resource, as it still-contains many-valuable-materials. The-study also-offered a-new-analogy; the-sustainable SWM-system should-be analogous to-a-digestive-system, extracting all-the-recyclables from the-waste, and only then discarding, the-small-remainder/waste. The-author, also-believes that Recycling (with a-capital R) is the-future of human-civilization; however, it must be done in the-environmentally sound-sustainable-manner, to-protect health of workers, and also to-extract the-optimum-amount of valuable-materials, from the-waste. This-study also-exposed, that despite the-existence of International, regional, and multilateral-agreements, illegal-trafficking of hazardous, toxic, radioactive, and e-waste, is still widely-practiced. Such-practices can-be regarded-as Environmental-racism, conducted by, or with the-help of, an-international-‘eco-mafia’. Environmental-racism was analyzed against human-rights; in-the-context of both; the-Universal-Declaration of Human-Rights and the-generation-approach. The-author also-justified, that Environmental-racism is real, alive, and widespread-global-trend, affecting many, if not all-countries. Environmental-racism is a-sin, against humanity; logically, as any-sin, it should-be exposed, condemned, and fought against, with every-fibre, of impartiality, left in-us. The-study also-exposed an-increasing-interest of majority of African-countries in inherently-dangerous nuclear-energy (with its-by-product--radioactive-waste); the-recommendation was offered, to-shift their-interest to clean/green/renewable-energy-sector, particularly solar-energy. There is also a-common-prejudiced stereotyped-misconception, that, in-the-developed-countries almost-everything (including WM) is: superior, brainy, flawless, highly-organized, and tidy; in-contrast, in-developing countries, and particularly in-the-‘dark’-continent of Africa, almost-everything (including WM) is substandard, mediocre, unsound, ad-hoc, and filthy. The-selected-examples, provided in-this-paper, will, possibly, demonstrate, that the-current-situation, at-least, with-regard-to WM, is not so ‘black and white’. This-paper has also-offered several-recommendations for further-research. Lastly, this-article does not claim to-be fully comprehensive, as it-is physically-impossible ‘to-fill an-ocean into a-small-cup’, and even the-most-comprehensive-review, have to-stop, at a-certain-point. Nevertheless, the-cohesive-theoretical-background, alongside-with author’s analytical-scholarly-input, hopefully provides a-credible-contribution to-the-body of knowledge, on-the-subject-matter, as-well-as a ‘food-for-thought’. With anticipation, this-work will not only attract, but also hold, considerable-attention, from SWM stakeholders, and other-interested-parties, both; locally and internationally. Keywords: Environmental racism, Convention, human rights, ‘eco’ mafia, POPs, e-waste, toxic, hazardous, radioactive, nuclear plants, solar energy, Africa.

Application of a POS Tagger to a Novel Chronological Division of Early Modern German Text

This paper describes the application of a part-of-speech tagger to a particular configuration of historical German documents. Most natural language processing (NLP) is done on contemporary documents, and historical documents can present difficulties for these tools. I compared the performance of a single high-quality tagger on two stages of historical German (Early Modern German) materials. I used the TnT (Trigrams 'n' Tags) tagger, a probabilistic tagger developed by Thorsten Brants in a 2000 paper. I applied this tagger to two subcorpora which I derived from the University of Manchester's GerManC corpus, divided by date of creation of the original document, with each one used for both training and testing. I found that the earlier half, from a period with greater variability in the language, was significantly more difficult to tag correctly. The broader tag categories of punctuation and "other" were overrepresented in the errors.Master of Science in Information Scienc

ICSEA 2022: the seventeenth international conference on software engineering advances

The Seventeenth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances (ICSEA 2022), held between October 16th and October 20th, 2022, continued a series of events covering a broad spectrum of software-related topics. The conference covered fundamentals on designing, implementing, testing, validating and maintaining various kinds of software. Several tracks were proposed to treat the topics from theory to practice, in terms of methodologies, design, implementation, testing, use cases, tools, and lessons learned. The conference topics covered classical and advanced methodologies, open source, agile software, as well as software deployment and software economics and education. Other advanced aspects are related to on-time practical aspects, such as run-time vulnerability checking, rejuvenation process, updates partial or temporary feature deprecation, software deployment and configuration, and on-line software updates. These aspects trigger implications related to patenting, licensing, engineering education, new ways for software adoption and improvement, and ultimately, to software knowledge management. There are many advanced applications requiring robust, safe, and secure software: disaster recovery applications, vehicular systems, biomedical-related software, biometrics related software, mission critical software, E-health related software, crisis-situation software. These applications require appropriate software engineering techniques, metrics and formalisms, such as, software reuse, appropriate software quality metrics, composition and integration, consistency checking, model checking, provers and reasoning. The nature of research in software varies slightly with the specific discipline researchers work in, yet there is much common ground and room for a sharing of best practice, frameworks, tools, languages and methodologies. Despite the number of experts we have available, little work is done at the meta level, that is examining how we go about our research, and how this process can be improved. There are questions related to the choice of programming language, IDEs and documentation styles and standard. Reuse can be of great benefit to research projects yet reuse of prior research projects introduces special problems that need to be mitigated. The research environment is a mix of creativity and systematic approach which leads to a creative tension that needs to be managed or at least monitored. Much of the coding in any university is undertaken by research students or young researchers. Issues of skills training, development and quality control can have significant effects on an entire department. In an industrial research setting, the environment is not quite that of industry as a whole, nor does it follow the pattern set by the university. The unique approaches and issues of industrial research may hold lessons for researchers in other domains. We take here the opportunity to warmly thank all the members of the ICSEA 2022 technical program committee, as well as all the reviewers. The creation of such a high-quality conference program would not have been possible without their involvement. We also kindly thank all the authors who dedicated much of their time and effort to contribute to ICSEA 2022. We truly believe that, thanks to all these efforts, the final conference program consisted of top-quality contributions. We also thank the members of the ICSEA 2022 organizing committee for their help in handling the logistics of this event. We hope that ICSEA 2022 was a successful international forum for the exchange of ideas and results between academia and industry and for the promotion of progress in software engineering advances

Towards A Practical High-Assurance Systems Programming Language

Writing correct and performant low-level systems code is a notoriously demanding job, even for experienced developers. To make the matter worse, formally reasoning about their correctness properties introduces yet another level of complexity to the task. It requires considerable expertise in both systems programming and formal verification. The development can be extremely costly due to the sheer complexity of the systems and the nuances in them, if not assisted with appropriate tools that provide abstraction and automation. Cogent is designed to alleviate the burden on developers when writing and verifying systems code. It is a high-level functional language with a certifying compiler, which automatically proves the correctness of the compiled code and also provides a purely functional abstraction of the low-level program to the developer. Equational reasoning techniques can then be used to prove functional correctness properties of the program on top of this abstract semantics, which is notably less laborious than directly verifying the C code. To make Cogent a more approachable and effective tool for developing real-world systems, we further strengthen the framework by extending the core language and its ecosystem. Specifically, we enrich the language to allow users to control the memory representation of algebraic data types, while retaining the automatic proof with a data layout refinement calculus. We repurpose existing tools in a novel way and develop an intuitive foreign function interface, which provides users a seamless experience when using Cogent in conjunction with native C. We augment the Cogent ecosystem with a property-based testing framework, which helps developers better understand the impact formal verification has on their programs and enables a progressive approach to producing high-assurance systems. Finally we explore refinement type systems, which we plan to incorporate into Cogent for more expressiveness and better integration of systems programmers with the verification process

British defence planning and Britain’s NATO commitment, 1979 – 1985

In 1979 Britain committed almost 120,000 ground troops and almost the entire Royal Navy and Royal Air Force to NATO’s defence of Western Europe. 100,000 troops were assigned to Home Defence, and Britain would acts as a staging post for foreign troops on their way to the front. Did Britain really have the means to mobilise, transport and supply these forces, and defend itself, in the event of war? This is an analysis of the conventional defence planning of the UK, its relationship to the policy, and their possible and actual execution. Deterrent plans were aimed at the perceived threat: planning for the manifestation of that threat, and implementing those plans, is analysed in detail. These plans relate intimately to NATO's "Flexible Response" strategy and the desire to raise the nuclear threshold enabling NATO to stop a WTO attack by conventional means. Analysing the plans for mobilisation, and comparing them to the forces and facilities available, this thesis seeks to understand if the UK fulfilled its obligation, not only to NATO, but also to the Armed Forces and British public. Following the end of the Cold War, the idea the ‘teeth’ could be sharpened at the expense of the ‘tail’ persisted, and has now grown to dangerous proportions. Pursuing the ‘efficiency’ thread the Armed Forces have been cut to the smallest level for 100 years, yet asked to do more. There is a large group, both military and political, who believe the policy worked and caused the fall of the Soviet Union. This thinking persists in policy even after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. With the increasing tensions in Eastern Europe and the Pacific, and the British Armed Forces at their smallest for over a century, this post hoc analysis is dangerous