80,623 research outputs found
Continuity and Change in World Bank Development Discourses and the Rhetoric Role of Accounting
Purpose ? The paper traces how the World Bank has utilised accounting rhetoric/languages in articulating development discourses at different stages of global capitalism through the case study of development projects in Sri Lanka and published development reports. Design/methodology/approach ? Multiple methods are employed including archival research and interviews. In-depth interviews were organised with village level development project participants. Development reports published by the World Bank (1978-2006) are closely examined. Findings ? Development projects in Sri Lanka and development reports show that ideological shifts brought about the changes in accounting rhetoric in development discourses. The paper further shows that the articulations and re-articulations of development discourse have yet to grasp the real complexity of the local problems in those villages in Sri Lanka. The mere focus on management styles (albeit important) driven by the ideology of the aid agencies seems to bring little reward to villagers and, indeed, the policy makers. Research limitations/implications ? This study focuses on the effectiveness of development projects and shows how culture and values in a traditional local setting are in conflict with rational ideas imported from a different setting. This finding has policy implications for the economic development programmes often prescribed by the aid agencies without considering the local context. Originality/value ? The paper adds to the literature on the use of accounting languages in development discourses, especially in the context of Less Developed Countries (LDCs). It will be of great value to researchers and practitioners seeking to gain a better understanding of reforms driven by a particular set of accounting technology in distant places
Too Trivial To Test? An Inverse View on Defect Prediction to Identify Methods with Low Fault Risk
Background. Test resources are usually limited and therefore it is often not
possible to completely test an application before a release. To cope with the
problem of scarce resources, development teams can apply defect prediction to
identify fault-prone code regions. However, defect prediction tends to low
precision in cross-project prediction scenarios.
Aims. We take an inverse view on defect prediction and aim to identify
methods that can be deferred when testing because they contain hardly any
faults due to their code being "trivial". We expect that characteristics of
such methods might be project-independent, so that our approach could improve
cross-project predictions.
Method. We compute code metrics and apply association rule mining to create
rules for identifying methods with low fault risk. We conduct an empirical
study to assess our approach with six Java open-source projects containing
precise fault data at the method level.
Results. Our results show that inverse defect prediction can identify approx.
32-44% of the methods of a project to have a low fault risk; on average, they
are about six times less likely to contain a fault than other methods. In
cross-project predictions with larger, more diversified training sets,
identified methods are even eleven times less likely to contain a fault.
Conclusions. Inverse defect prediction supports the efficient allocation of
test resources by identifying methods that can be treated with less priority in
testing activities and is well applicable in cross-project prediction
scenarios.Comment: Submitted to PeerJ C
Flexible constrained sampling with guarantees for pattern mining
Pattern sampling has been proposed as a potential solution to the infamous
pattern explosion. Instead of enumerating all patterns that satisfy the
constraints, individual patterns are sampled proportional to a given quality
measure. Several sampling algorithms have been proposed, but each of them has
its limitations when it comes to 1) flexibility in terms of quality measures
and constraints that can be used, and/or 2) guarantees with respect to sampling
accuracy. We therefore present Flexics, the first flexible pattern sampler that
supports a broad class of quality measures and constraints, while providing
strong guarantees regarding sampling accuracy. To achieve this, we leverage the
perspective on pattern mining as a constraint satisfaction problem and build
upon the latest advances in sampling solutions in SAT as well as existing
pattern mining algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is applicable to
a variety of pattern languages, which allows us to introduce and tackle the
novel task of sampling sets of patterns. We introduce and empirically evaluate
two variants of Flexics: 1) a generic variant that addresses the well-known
itemset sampling task and the novel pattern set sampling task as well as a wide
range of expressive constraints within these tasks, and 2) a specialized
variant that exploits existing frequent itemset techniques to achieve
substantial speed-ups. Experiments show that Flexics is both accurate and
efficient, making it a useful tool for pattern-based data exploration.Comment: Accepted for publication in Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery journal
(ECML/PKDD 2017 journal track
A Web Smart Space Framework for Intelligent Search Engines
A web smart space is an intelligent environment which has additional capability of searching the information smartly and efficiently. New advancements like dynamic web contents generation has increased the size of web repositories. Among so many modern software analysis requirements, one is to search information from the given repository. But useful information extraction is a troublesome hitch due to the multi-lingual; base of the web data collection. The issue of semantic based information searching has become a standoff due to the inconsistencies and variations in the characteristics of the data. In the accomplished research, a web smart space framework has been proposed which introduces front end processing for a search engine to make the information retrieval process more intelligent and accurate. In orthodox searching anatomies, searching is performed only by using pattern matching technique and consequently a large number of irrelevant results are generated. The projected framework has insightful ability to improve this drawback and returns efficient outcomes. Designed framework gets text input from the user in the form complete question, understands the input and generates the meanings. Search engine searches on the basis of the information provided
- …