Empirical studies of open source evolution

Copyright @ 2008 Springer-VerlagThis chapter presents a sample of empirical studies of Open Source Software (OSS) evolution. According to these studies, the classical results from the studies of proprietary software evoltion, such as Lehman’s laws of software evolution, might need to be revised, if not fully, at least in part, to account for the OSS observations. The book chapter also summarises what appears to be the empirical status of each of Lehman’s laws with respect to OSS and highlights the threads to validity that frequently emerge in these empirical studies. The chapter also discusses related topics for further research

Applying Software Product Lines to Build Autonomic Pervasive Systems

In this Master Thesis, we have proposed a model-driven Software Product Line (SPL) for developing autonomic pervasive systems. The work focusses on reusing the Variability knowledge from the SPL design to the SPL products. This Variability knowledge enables SPL products to deal with adaptation scenarios (evolution and involution) in an autonomic way.Cetina Englada, C. (2008). Applying Software Product Lines to Build Autonomic Pervasive Systems. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/12447Archivo delegad

A framework for the simulation of structural software evolution

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 ACM.As functionality is added to an aging piece of software, its original design and structure will tend to erode. This can lead to high coupling, low cohesion and other undesirable effects associated with spaghetti architectures. The underlying forces that cause such degradation have been the subject of much research. However, progress in this field is slow, as its complexity makes it difficult to isolate the causal flows leading to these effects. This is further complicated by the difficulty of generating enough empirical data, in sufficient quantity, and attributing such data to specific points in the causal chain. This article describes a framework for simulating the structural evolution of software. A complete simulation model is built by incrementally adding modules to the framework, each of which contributes an individual evolutionary effect. These effects are then combined to form a multifaceted simulation that evolves a fictitious code base in a manner approximating real-world behavior. We describe the underlying principles and structures of our framework from a theoretical and user perspective; a validation of a simple set of evolutionary parameters is then provided and three empirical software studies generated from open-source software (OSS) are used to support claims and generated results. The research illustrates how simulation can be used to investigate a complex and under-researched area of the development cycle. It also shows the value of incorporating certain human traits into a simulation—factors that, in real-world system development, can significantly influence evolutionary structures

New venture internationalisation and the cluster life cycle: insights from Ireland’s indigenous software industry

The internationalization of new and small firms has been a long-standing concern of researchers in international business (Coviello and McAuley, 1999; Ruzzier et al., 2006). This topic has been re-invigorated over the last decade by the burgeoning literature on so-called ‘born globals’ (BG) or ‘international new ventures’ (INV) – businesses that confound the expectations of traditional theory by being active internationally at, or soon after, inception (Aspelund et al., 2007; Bell, 1995; Rialp et al., 2005). Until quite recently, this literature had not really considered how the home regional environment of a new venture might influence its internationalization behaviour. However, a handful of recent studies have shown that being founded in a geographic industry ‘cluster’ can positively influence the likelihood of a new venture internationalizing (e.g., Fernhaber et al., 2008; Libaers and Meyer, 2011). This chapter seeks to build on these recent contributions by further probing the relationship between clusters and new venture internationalization. Specifically, taking inspiration from recent work in the thematic research stream on clusters (which spans the fields of economic geography, regional studies and industrial dynamics), the chapter explores how the emergence and internationalization of new ventures might be affected by the ‘cluster life cycle’ context within which they are founded. This issue is examined through a revelatory longitudinal case study of Ireland’s indigenous software cluster. The study investigates the origins and internationalization behaviour of ‘leading’ Irish software ventures but, in contrast to many existing studies, it seeks to understand these firms within the context of the Irish software cluster’s emergence and evolution through a number of ‘life-cycle’ stages

Regulations and software evolution: An example from the military domain

AbstractIn this article, the impact of regulatory changes on software development is assessed in the context of military standards. A previously conducted experiment incorporating three standards is further investigated for this purpose, outlining the characteristics of the evolution in standards and its effects. In addition to this experiment that was designed with projects conducted as graduate class work, a real project from the industry is utilized, to demonstrate the similar effects of the evolution as discovered in the earlier experiment. Finally, the results of the assessment are generalized and a forecast is presented for the next potential regulation change, the IEEE Std 12207-2008

Revisiting The Software Industry In Costa Rica: Achievements And Challenges

Costa Rica's economy like that of many developing and developed nations is largely service-based. The information and communication technologies (ICT) sector plays an increasingly key role in strengthening the service aspect of the economy.  A large part of the ICT sector is the software sector. This study is an update of a review of that sector’s contributions conducted in 2008.  In that effort, software producers’ characteristics and needs were investigated. The current article investigates the evolution of the sector and its competitive position in the business sector. The study is national in scope and represents a random sample of firms in the industry. The findings highlight the achievements and remaining challenges for the industry and provide public policy recommendations

A systematic review of quality attributes and measures for software product lines

[EN] It is widely accepted that software measures provide an appropriate mechanism for understanding, monitoring, controlling, and predicting the quality of software development projects. In software product lines (SPL), quality is even more important than in a single software product since, owing to systematic reuse, a fault or an inadequate design decision could be propagated to several products in the family. Over the last few years, a great number of quality attributes and measures for assessing the quality of SPL have been reported in literature. However, no studies summarizing the current knowledge about them exist. This paper presents a systematic literature review with the objective of identifying and interpreting all the available studies from 1996 to 2010 that present quality attributes and/or measures for SPL. These attributes and measures have been classified using a set of criteria that includes the life cycle phase in which the measures are applied; the corresponding quality characteristics; their support for specific SPL characteristics (e. g., variability, compositionality); the procedure used to validate the measures, etc. We found 165 measures related to 97 different quality attributes. The results of the review indicated that 92% of the measures evaluate attributes that are related to maintainability. In addition, 67% of the measures are used during the design phase of Domain Engineering, and 56% are applied to evaluate the product line architecture. However, only 25% of them have been empirically validated. In conclusion, the results provide a global vision of the state of the research within this area in order to help researchers in detecting weaknesses, directing research efforts, and identifying new research lines. In particular, there is a need for new measures with which to evaluate both the quality of the artifacts produced during the entire SPL life cycle and other quality characteristics. There is also a need for more validation (both theoretical and empirical) of existing measures. In addition, our results may be useful as a reference guide for practitioners to assist them in the selection or the adaptation of existing measures for evaluating their software product lines. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.This research has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the MULTIPLE (Multimodeling Approach For Quality-Aware Software Product Lines) project with ref. TIN2009-13838.Montagud Gregori, S.; Abrahao Gonzales, SM.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE. (2012). A systematic review of quality attributes and measures for software product lines. Software Quality Journal. 20(3-4):425-486. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-011-9146-7S425486203-4Abdelmoez, W., Nassar, D. M., Shereschevsky, M., Gradetsky, N., Gunnalan, R., Ammar, H. H., et al. (2004). Error propagation in software architectures. In 10th international symposium on software metrics (METRICS), Chicago, Illinois, USA.Ajila, S. A., & Dumitrescu, R. T. (2007). Experimental use of code delta, code churn, and rate of change to understand software product line evolution. Journal of Systems and Software, 80, 74–91.Aldekoa, G., Trujillo, S., Sagardui, G., & Díaz, O. (2006). Experience measuring maintainability in software product lines. In XV Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos (JISBD). Barcelona.Aldekoa, G., Trujillo, S., Sagardui, G., & Díaz, O. (2008). Quantifying maintanibility in feature oriented product lines, Athens, Greece, pp. 243–247.Alves de Oliveira Junior, E., Gimenes, I. M. S., & Maldonado, J. C. (2008). A metric suite to support software product line architecture evaluation. In XXXIV Conferencia Latinamericana de Informática (CLEI), Santa Fé, Argentina, pp. 489–498.Alves, V., Niu, N., Alves, C., & Valença, G. (2010). Requirements engineering for software product lines: A systematic literature review. Information & Software Technology, 52(8), 806–820.Bosch, J. (2000). Design and use of software architectures: Adopting and evolving a product line approach. USA: ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.Briand, L. C., Differing, C. M., & Rombach, D. (1996a). Practical guidelines for measurement-based process improvement. Software Process-Improvement and Practice, 2, 253–280.Briand, L. C., Morasca, S., & Basili, V. R. (1996b). Property based software engineering measurement. IEEE Transactions on Software Eng., 22(1), 68–86.Calero, C., Ruiz, J., & Piattini, M. (2005). Classifying web metrics using the web quality model. Online Information Review, 29(3): 227–248.Chen, L., Ali Babar, M., & Ali, N. (2009). Variability management in software product lines: A systematic review. In 13th international software product lines conferences (SPLC), San Francisco, USA.Clements, P., & Northrop, L. (2002). Software product lines. 2003. Software product lines practices and patterns. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.Crnkovic, I., & Larsson, M. (2004). Classification of quality attributes for predictability in component-based systems. Journal of Econometrics, pp. 231–250.Conference Rankings of Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE). (2010). Available in http://core.edu.au/index.php/categories/conference%20rankings/1 .Davis, A., Dieste, Ó., Hickey, A., Juristo, N., & Moreno, A. M. (2006). Effectiveness of requirements elicitation techniques: Empirical results derived from a systematic review. In 14th IEEE international conference requirements engineering, pp. 179–188.de Souza Filho, E. D., de Oliveira Cavalcanti, R., Neiva, D. F. S., Oliveira, T. H. B., Barachisio Lisboa, L., de Almeida E. S., & de Lemos Meira, S. R. (2008). Evaluating domain design approaches using systematic review. In 2nd European conference on software architecture, Cyprus, pp. 50–65.Ejiogu, L. (1991). Software engineering with formal metrics. QED Publishing.Engström, E., & Runeson, P. (2011). Software product line testing—A systematic mapping study. Information & Software Technology, 53(1), 2–13.Etxeberria, L., Sagarui, G., & Belategi, L. (2008). Quality aware software product line engineering. Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society, 14(1), Campinas Mar.Ganesan, D., Knodel, J., Kolb, R., Haury, U., & Meier, G. (2007). Comparing costs and benefits of different test strategies for a software product line: A study from Testo AG. In 11th international software product line conference, Kyoto, Japan, pp. 74–83, September 2007.Gómez, O., Oktaba, H., Piattini, M., & García, F. (2006). A systematic review measurement in software engineering: State-of-the-art in measures. In First international conference on software and data technologies (ICSOFT), Setúbal, Portugal, pp. 11–14.IEEE standard for a software quality metrics methodology, IEEE Std 1061-1998, 1998.Inoki, M., & Fukazawa, Y. (2007). Software product line evolution method based on Kaizen approach. In 22nd annual ACM symposium on applied computing, Korea.Insfran, E., & Fernandez, A. (2008). A systematic review of usability evaluation in Web development. 2nd international workshop on web usability and accessibility (IWWUA’08), New Zealand, LNCS 5176, Springer, pp. 81–91.ISO/IEC 25010. (2008). Systems and software engineering. Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE). System and software quality models.ISO/IEC 9126. (2000). Software engineering. Product Quality.Johansson, E., & Höst, R. (2002). Tracking degradation in software product lines through measurement of design rule violations. In 14th International conference on software engineering and knowledge engineering, Ischia, Italy, pp. 249–254.Journal Citation Reports of Thomson Reuters. (2010). Available in http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/journal_citation_reports/ .Khurum, M., & Gorschek, T. (2009). A systematic review of domain analysis solutions for product lines. The Journal of Systems and Software.Kim, T., Ko, I. Y., Kang, S. W., & Lee, D. H. (2008). Extending ATAM to assess product line architecture. In 8th IEEE international conference on computer and information technology, pp. 790–797.Kitchenham, B. (2007). Guidelines for performing systematic literature reviews in software engineering. Version 2.3, EBSE Technical Report, Keele University, UK.Kitchenham, B., Pfleeger, S., & Fenton, N. (1995). Towards a framework for software measurement validation. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 21(12).Landis, J. R., & Koch, G. G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics, 33, 159–174.Mendes, E. (2005). A systematic review of Web engineering research. International symposium on empirical software engineering. Noosa Heads, Australia.Meyer, M. H., & Dalal, D. (2002). Managing platform architectures and manufacturing processes for non assembled products. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 19(4), 277–293.Montagud, S., & Abrahão, S. (2009). Gathering Current knowledge about quality evaluation in software product lines. In 13th international software product lines conferences (SPLC), San Francisco, USA.Montagud, S., & Abrahão, S. (2009). A SQuaRE-bassed quality evaluation method for software product lines. Master’s thesis, December 2009 (in Spanish).Needham, D., & Jones, S. (2006). A software fault tree metric. In 22nd international conference on software maintenance (ICSM), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.Niemelä, E., & Immonen, A. (2007). Capturing quality requirements of product family architecture. Information and Software Technology, 49(11–12), 1107–1120.Odia, O. E. (2007). Testing in software product lines. Master Thesis Software Engineering of School of Engineering, Bleking Institute of Technology. Thesis no. MSE-2007:16, Sweden.Olumofin, F. G., & Mišić, V. B. (2007). A holistic architecture assessment method for software product lines. Information and Software Technology, 49, 309–323.Pérez Lamancha, B., Polo Usaola, M., & Piattini Velthius, M. (2009). Software product line testing—a systematic review. ICSOFT, (1), 23–30.Poels, G., & Dedene, G. (2000). Distance-based software measurement: necessary and sufficient properties for software measures. Information and Software Technology, 42(I), 35–46.Prehofer, C., van Gurp, J., & Bosch, J. (2008). Compositionality in software platforms. In Emerging methods, technologies and process management in software engineering. Wiley.Rahman, A. (2004). Metrics for the structural assessment of product line architecture. Master Thesis on Software Engineering, Thesis no. MSE-2004:24. School of Engineering, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden.Sethi, K., Cai, Y., Wong, S., Garcia, A., & Sant’Anna, C. (2009). From retrospect to prospect: Assessing modularity and stability from software architecture. Joint working IEEE/IFIP conference on software architecture, 2009 & European conference on software architecture. WICSA/ECSA.Shaik, I., Abdelmoez, W,. Gunnalan, R., Shereshevsky, M., Zeid, A., Ammar, H. H., et al. (2005). Change propagation for assessing design quality of software architectures. 5th working IEEE/IFIP conference on software architecture (WICSA’05).Siegmund, N., Rosenmüller, M., Kuhlemann, M., Kästner, C., & Saake, G. (2008). Measuring non-functional properties in software product lines for product derivation. In 15th Asia-Pacific software engineering conference, Beijing, China.Sun Her, J., Hyeok Kim, J., Hun Oh, S., Yul Rhew, S., & Dong Kim, S. (2007). A framework for evaluating reusability of core asset in product line engineering. Information and Software Technology, 49, 740–760.Svahnberg, M., & Bosch, J. (2000). Evolution in software product lines. In 3rd international workshop on software architectures for products families (IWSAPF-3). Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.Van der Hoek, A., Dincel, E., & Medidović, N. (2003). Using services utilization metrics to assess the structure of product line architectures. In 9th international software metrics symposium (METRICS), Sydney, Australia.Van der Linden, F., Schmid, K., & Rommes, E. (2007). Software product lines in action. Springer.Whitmire, S. (1997). Object oriented design measurement. John Wiley & Sons.Wnuk, K., Regnell, B., & Karlsson, L. (2009). What happened to our features? Visualization and understanding of scope change dynamics in a large-scale industrial setting. In 17th IEEE international requirements engineering conference.Yoshimura, K., Ganesan, D., & Muthig, D. (2006). Assessing merge potential of existing engine control systems into a product line. In International workshop on software engineering for automative systems, Shangai, China, pp. 61–67.Zhang, T., Deng, L., Wu, J., Zhou, Q., & Ma, C. (2008). Some metrics for accessing quality of product line architecture. In International conference on computer science and software engineering (CSSE), Wuhan, China, pp. 500–503