ODYSSEY: Software development life cycle ontology

With the omnipresence of softwares in our Society from Information Technology (IT) services to autonomous agents, their systematic and efficient development is crucial for software developers. Hence, in this paper, we present an approach to assist intelligent agents (IA), whatever human beings or artificial systems, in theirs task to develop and configure softwares. The proposed method is an ontological, developer-centred approach aiding a software developer in decision making and interoperable information sharing through the use of the ODYSSEY ontology we developed for the software development life cycle (SDLC) domain. This ODYSSEY ontology has been designed following the Enterprise Ontology (EO) methodology and coded in Descriptive Logic (DL). Its implementation in OWL has been evaluated for case studies, showing promising results

Measurement of Ada Throughout the Software Development Life Cycle

Quality enhancement has now become a major factor in software production. Software metrics have demonstrated their ability to predict source code complexity at design time and to predict maintainability of a software system from source code. Obviously metrics can assist software developers in the enhancement of quality. Tools which automatically generate metrics for Ada are increasing in popularity. This paper describes an existing tool which produces software metrics for Ada that may be used throughout the software development life cycle. This tool, while calculating established metrics, also calculates a new structure metric that is designed to capture communication interface complexity. Measuring designs written using Ada as a PDL allows designers early feedback on possible problem areas in addition to giving direction on testing strategies

Analysis of requirements volatility during software development life cycle

Investigating the factors that drive requirements change is an important prerequisite for understanding the nature of requirements volatility. This increased understanding will improve the process of requirements change management. This paper mainly focuses on change analysis to identify and characterize the causes of requirements volatility. We apply a causal analysis method on change request data to develop a taxonomy of change. This taxonomy allows us to identify and trace the problems, reasons and sources of changes. Adopting an industrial case study approach, our findings reveal that the main causes of requirements volatility were changes in customer needs (or market demands), developers' increased understanding of the products, and changes in the organization policy. During the development process, we also examined the extent of requirements volatility and discovered that the rate of volatility was high at the time of requirements specification completion and while functional specification reviews were conducted

Mesmerizer: A Effective Tool for a Complete Peer-to-Peer Software Development Life-cycle

In this paper we present what are, in our experience, the best practices in Peer-To-Peer(P2P) application development and how we combined them in a middleware platform called Mesmerizer. We explain how simulation is an integral part of the development process and not just an assessment tool. We then present our component-based event-driven framework for P2P application development, which can be used to execute multiple instances of the same application in a strictly controlled manner over an emulated network layer for simulation/testing, or a single application in a concurrent environment for deployment purpose. We highlight modeling aspects that are of critical importance for designing and testing P2P applications, e.g. the emulation of Network Address Translation and bandwidth dynamics. We show how our simulator scales when emulating low-level bandwidth characteristics of thousands of concurrent peers while preserving a good degree of accuracy compared to a packet-level simulator

Decision support system for choosing a model for a software development life cycle

The aim of this paper is to present selected models of a Software Development Life Cycle as a set of possible alternatives. The article also includes the characteristics of IT projects which are used as the basis for selection criteria, according to which an appropriate model should be chosen. These characteristics are divided into two groups; one of them deals with the product, the other one deals with the project. Based on both a literature study and statistical surveys, a list of criteria is derived, to be later applied in the process of developing a knowledge-based system. The rules and search algorithms for selecting the best models are described by a flowchart. Finally, the method of presentation and the interpretation of the results are discussed.algorithm, knowledge base, sequential model, evolutionary model, IT project, selection criteria, risk, project complexity