Using Counts as Heuristics for the Analysis of Static Models

The upstream activities of software development are often viewed as both the most important, in terms of cost, and the yet the least understood, and most problematic, particularly in terms of satisfying customer requirements. Business process modelling is one solution that is being increasingly used in conjunction with traditional software development, often feeding in to requirements and analysis activities. In addition, research in Systems Engineering for Business Process Change, highlights the importance of modelling business processes in evolving and maintaining the legacy systems that support those processes. However, the major use of business process modelling, is to attempt to restructure the business process, in order to improve some given aspect, e.g., cost or time. This restructuring may be seen either as separate activity or as a pre-cursor to the development of systems to support the new or improved process. Hence, the analysis of these business models is vital to the improvement of the process, and as a consequence to the development of supporting software systems. Supporting this analysis is the focus of this paper. Business processes are typically described with static (diagrammatic) models. This paper proposes the use of measures (counts) to aid analysis and comparison of these static process descriptions. The proposition is illustrated by showing how measures can be applied to a commonly used process-modelling notation, Role Activity Diagrams (RADs). Heuristics for RADs are described and measures suggested which support those heuristics. An example process is used to show how a coupling measure can be used to highlight features in RADs useful to the process modeller. To fully illustrate the proposition the paper describes and applies a framework for the theoretical validation of the coupling measure. An empirical evaluation follows. This is illustrated by two case studies; the first based on the bidding process of a large telecommunications systems supplier, and the second a study of ten prototyping processes across a number of organisations. These studies found that roles of the same type exhibited similar levels of coupling across processes. Where roles did not adhere to tentative threshold values, further investigation revealed unusual circumstances or hidden behaviour. Notably, study of the prototyping roles, which exhibited the greatest variation in coupling, found that coupling was highly correlated with the size of the development team. This suggests that prototyping in large projects had a different process to that for small projects, using more mechanisms for communication. Hence, the empirical studies support the view that counts (measures) may be useful in the analysis of static process models

An Approach for the Empirical Validation of Software Complexity Measures

Software metrics are widely accepted tools to control and assure software quality. A large number of software metrics with a variety of content can be found in the literature; however most of them are not adopted in industry as they are seen as irrelevant to needs, as they are unsupported, and the major reason behind this is due to improper empirical validation. This paper tries to identify possible root causes for the improper empirical validation of the software metrics. A practical model for the empirical validation of software metrics is proposed along with root causes. The model is validated by applying it to recently proposed and well known metrics

DISTANCE: a framework for software measure construction.

In this paper we present a framework for software measurement that is specifically suited to satisfy the measurement needs of empirical software engineering research. The framework offers an approach to measurement that builds upon the easily imagined, detected and visualised concepts of similarity and dissimilarity between software entities. These concepts are used both to model the software attributes of interest and to define the corresponding software measures. Central to the framework is a process model that embeds constructive procedures for attribute modelling and measure construction into a goal-oriented approach to empirical software engineering studies. The underlying measurement theoretic principles of our approach ensure the construct validity of the resulting measures. The approach was tested on a popular suite of object-oriented design measures. We further show that our measure construction method compares favourably to related work.Software;

Quantitative assessment of modularity of caesarJ components

Dissertação apresentada no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaOs defensores do paradigma de programação orientada a aspectos afirmam que este paradigma oferece melhor modularidade que a programação orientada a objectos, assim como um melhor suporte para separação de facetas transversais. Embora o AspectJ seja a linguagem de AOP mais conhecida, e alvo de mais estudos, surgiram novas linguagens de programação que propõem diferentes formas de instanciar este paradigma. O CaesarJ é uma destas linguagens. Possui abstracções e mecanismos que o diferenciam do AspectJ, tais como classes virtuais, polimorfismo de família e uma maneira diferente de representar um aspecto. Qualquer alegação de uma linguagem ser melhor, à luz de um critério bem definido (neste caso, a modularidade), tem que ser apoiada por avaliações rigorosas de implementações feitas nessa linguagem. Este trabalho pretende fazer isso com um estudo comparativo entre as duas linguagens em termos da modularidade que se obtém em software por elas implementado. Em particular, vai-se estudar uma faceta da modularidade: a coesão. Este estudo utiliza da estrutura padrão de relatórios experimentais em Engenharia de Software, assim como todos os testes estatísticos apropriados. Para este fim, foi desenvolvida uma métrica de coesão que foi usada, juntamente com várias métricas de tamanho para avaliar 51 exemplos de implementações de padrões de concepção. No contexto desta dissertação a ferramenta de recolha automática de métricas MuLATo foi adaptada para suportar esta nova métrica de coesão. Os resultados do estudo efectuado sugerem que o CaesarJ é mais verboso que Java mas contem componentes menos complexos e mais coesos

Improving Reuse of Distributed Transaction Software with Transaction-Aware Aspects

Implementing crosscutting concerns for transactions is difficult, even using Aspect-Oriented Programming Languages (AOPLs) such as AspectJ. Many of these challenges arise because the context of a transaction-related crosscutting concern consists of loosely-coupled abstractions like dynamically-generated identifiers, timestamps, and tentative value sets of distributed resources. Current AOPLs do not provide joinpoints and pointcuts for weaving advice into high-level abstractions or contexts, like transaction contexts. Other challenges stem from the essential complexity in the nature of the data, operations on the data, or the volume of data, and accidental complexity comes from the way that the problem is being solved, even using common transaction frameworks. This dissertation describes an extension to AspectJ, called TransJ, with which developers can implement transaction-related crosscutting concerns in cohesive and loosely-coupled aspects. It also presents a preliminary experiment that provides evidence of improvement in reusability without sacrificing the performance of applications requiring essential transactions. This empirical study is conducted using the extended-quality model for transactional application to define measurements on the transaction software systems. This quality model defines three goals: the first relates to code quality (in terms of its reusability); the second to software performance; and the third concerns software development efficiency. Results from this study show that TransJ can improve the reusability while maintaining performance of TransJ applications requiring transaction for all eight areas addressed by the hypotheses: better encapsulation and separation of concern; loose Coupling, higher-cohesion and less tangling; improving obliviousness; preserving the software efficiency; improving extensibility; and hasten the development process

A survey on software coupling relations and tools

Context Coupling relations reflect the dependencies between software entities and can be used to assess the quality of a program. For this reason, a vast amount of them has been developed, together with tools to compute their related metrics. However, this makes the coupling measures suitable for a given application challenging to find. Goals The first objective of this work is to provide a classification of the different kinds of coupling relations, together with the metrics to measure them. The second consists in presenting an overview of the tools proposed until now by the software engineering academic community to extract these metrics. Method This work constitutes a systematic literature review in software engineering. To retrieve the referenced publications, publicly available scientific research databases were used. These sources were queried using keywords inherent to software coupling. We included publications from the period 2002 to 2017 and highly cited earlier publications. A snowballing technique was used to retrieve further related material. Results Four groups of coupling relations were found: structural, dynamic, semantic and logical. A fifth set of coupling relations includes approaches too recent to be considered an independent group and measures developed for specific environments. The investigation also retrieved tools that extract the metrics belonging to each coupling group. Conclusion This study shows the directions followed by the research on software coupling: e.g., developing metrics for specific environments. Concerning the metric tools, three trends have emerged in recent years: use of visualization techniques, extensibility and scalability. Finally, some coupling metrics applications were presented (e.g., code smell detection), indicating possible future research directions. Public preprint [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2002001]

A COUPLING AND COHESION METRICS SUITE FOR

The increasing need for software quality measurements has led to extensive research into software metrics and the development of software metric tools. To maintain high quality software, developers need to strive for a low-coupled and highly cohesive design. One of many properties considered when measuring coupling and cohesion is the type of relationships that made up coupling and cohesion. What these specific relationships are is widely understood and accepted by researchers and practitioners. However, different researchers base their metrics on a different subset of these relationships. Studies have shown that because of the inclusion of multiple subsets of relationships in one measure of coupling and cohesion metrics, the measures tend to correlate among each other. Validation of these metrics against maintainability index of a Java program suggested that there is high multicollinearity among coupling and cohesion metrics. This research introduces an approach of implementing coupling and cohesion metrics. Every possible relationship is considered and, for each, addressed the issue of whether or not it has significant effect on maintainability index prediction. Validation of orthogonality of the selected metrics is assessed by means of principal component analysis. The investigation suggested that some of the metrics are independent set of metrics, while some are measuring similar dimension