Datasets Used in Fifteen Years of Automated Requirements Traceability Research

Datasets are crucial to advance automated software traceability research. Acquiring such datasets come in a high cost and require expert knowledge to manually collect and validate them. Obtaining such software development datasets has been one of the most frequently reported barrier for researchers in the software engineering domain in general. This problem is even more acute in field of requirement traceability, which plays crucial role in safety critical and highly regulated systems. Therefore, the main motivation behind this work is to analyze the current state of art of datasets used in the field of software traceability. This work presents a first-of-its-kind literature study to review and assess the datasets that have been used in software traceability research over the last fifteen years. It articulates several attributes related to these datasets such as their characteristics, threats and diversity. Firstly, 202 primary studies (refer Appendix A) were identified for purpose of this study, which were used to derive 73 unique datasets. These 73 datasets were studied in-depth and several attributes (size, type, domain, availability, artifacts) were extracted (refer Appendix B). Based on analysis of the primary studies, a threat to validity reference model, tailored to Software traceability datasets was derived (refer to figure 4.4). Furthermore, to put some light upon the dataset diversity trend in the Software traceability community, a metric called Dataset Diversity Ratio was derived for 38 authors (refer to figure 4.5) who have published more than one publication in field of software traceability

Crew procedures development techniques

The study developed requirements, designed, developed, checked out and demonstrated the Procedures Generation Program (PGP). The PGP is a digital computer program which provides a computerized means of developing flight crew procedures based on crew action in the shuttle procedures simulator. In addition, it provides a real time display of procedures, difference procedures, performance data and performance evaluation data. Reconstruction of displays is possible post-run. Data may be copied, stored on magnetic tape and transferred to the document processor for editing and documentation distribution

Recovering from a Decade: A Systematic Mapping of Information Retrieval Approaches to Software Traceability

Engineers in large-scale software development have to manage large amounts of information, spread across many artifacts. Several researchers have proposed expressing retrieval of trace links among artifacts, i.e. trace recovery, as an Information Retrieval (IR) problem. The objective of this study is to produce a map of work on IR-based trace recovery, with a particular focus on previous evaluations and strength of evidence. We conducted a systematic mapping of IR-based trace recovery. Of the 79 publications classified, a majority applied algebraic IR models. While a set of studies on students indicate that IR-based trace recovery tools support certain work tasks, most previous studies do not go beyond reporting precision and recall of candidate trace links from evaluations using datasets containing less than 500 artifacts. Our review identified a need of industrial case studies. Furthermore, we conclude that the overall quality of reporting should be improved regarding both context and tool details, measures reported, and use of IR terminology. Finally, based on our empirical findings, we present suggestions on how to advance research on IR-based trace recovery

Trade-Space Analysis of a Small Unmanned Vehicle System for Radiological Search Missions

Nuclear and radiological terrorism is a persistent threat to United States national security. The research and development of new technological capabilities is vital to bolstering emergency response and prevention capabilities in support of national security initiatives. This research characterized the applicable trade-space for a system of unmanned vehicles deployed for search, detection, and identification of radiological source material. Exploration included the development of a CONOPS, a functional decomposition and physical allocation, design considerations, and an analysis of feasibility and utility. The concept system comprises of a ground control station, ground vehicle, hybrid-electric multirotor, and fixed-wing vehicle with an open architecture permitting the exchange of payload components. Payload options include a Geiger-Müller detector or scintillator for large area search and a scintillator or high purity germanium semiconductor for radioisotope identification. Endurance estimates revealed that a hybrid-electric multirotor is capable of carrying a 6.8-kilogram payload for 58 minutes. Similar estimates indicated that a battery-powered fixed-wing vehicle can provide a minimum of 41 minutes of endurance with a payload mass fraction of 15% (1.36-kilogram payload), whereas a gasoline-powered vehicle with the same payload mass fraction (1.95-kilogram payload) can operate for 12 hours. Electric multirotors are limited to a maximum endurance of 20 minutes, which is insufficient for radiological search missions. The system concept proves effective to the radiological search mission and can be expanded to other mission areas through its open architecture

An example of requirements for Advanced Subsonic Civil Transport (ASCT) flight control system using structured techniques

The requirements are presented for an Advanced Subsonic Civil Transport (ASCT) flight control system generated using structured techniques. The requirements definition starts from initially performing a mission analysis to identify the high level control system requirements and functions necessary to satisfy the mission flight. The result of the study is an example set of control system requirements partially represented using a derivative of Yourdon's structured techniques. Also provided is a research focus for studying structured design methodologies and in particular design-for-validation philosophies

Towards an Intelligent System for Software Traceability Datasets Generation

Software datasets and artifacts play a crucial role in advancing automated software traceability research. They can be used by researchers in different ways to develop or validate new automated approaches. Software artifacts, other than source code and issue tracking entities, can also provide a great deal of insight into a software system and facilitate knowledge sharing and information reuse. The diversity and quality of the datasets and artifacts within a research community have a significant impact on the accuracy, generalizability, and reproducibility of the results and consequently on the usefulness and practicality of the techniques under study. Collecting and assessing the quality of such datasets are not trivial tasks and have been reported as an obstacle by many researchers in the domain of software engineering. In this dissertation, we report our empirical work that aims to automatically generate and assess the quality of such datasets. Our goal is to introduce an intelligent system that can help researchers in the domain of software traceability in obtaining high-quality “training sets”, “testing sets” or appropriate “case studies” from open source repositories based on their needs. In the first project, we present a first-of-its-kind study to review and assess the datasets that have been used in software traceability research over the last fifteen years. It presents and articulates the current status of these datasets, their characteristics, and their threats to validity. Second, this dissertation introduces a Traceability-Dataset Quality Assessment (T-DQA) framework to categorize software traceability datasets and assist researchers to select appropriate datasets for their research based on different characteristics of the datasets and the context in which those datasets will be used. Third, we present the results of an empirical study with limited scope to generate datasets using three baseline approaches for the creation of training data. These approaches are (i) Expert-Based, (ii) Automated Web-Mining, which generates training sets by automatically mining tactic\u27s APIs from technical programming websites, and lastly, (iii) Automated Big-Data Analysis, which mines ultra-large-scale code repositories to generate training sets. We compare the trace-link creation accuracy achieved using each of these three baseline approaches and discuss the costs and benefits associated with them. Additionally, in a separate study, we investigate the impact of training set size on the accuracy of recovering trace links. Finally, we conduct a large-scale study to identify which types of software artifacts are produced by a wide variety of open-source projects at different levels of granularity. Then we propose an automated approach based on Machine Learning techniques to identify various types of software artifacts. Through a set of experiments, we report and compare the performance of these algorithms when applied to software artifacts. Finally, we conducted a study to understand how software traceability experts and practitioners evaluate the quality of their datasets. In addition, we aim at gathering experts’ opinions on all quality attributes and metrics proposed by T-DQA

Rastreabilidade Metrológica das Medições de Massa Volúmica e das Determinações Reológicas de Líquidos

A massa volúmica é um dos principais elementos impulsionadores de transações económicas dos mais variados produtos, desde combustíveis até produtos alimentícios. O consumo real de líquidos de elevado valor comercial, tal como o vinho, o azeite e os combustíveis, pode e deve ser encarado de elevada importância no seio da economia europeia. As propriedades físicas destes líquidos, tais como: a massa volúmica, tensão superficial, viscosidade e elasticidade, entre outras, cobrem um amplo espectro de variação. Além disso, esses líquidos são frequentemente manipulados num amplo intervalo de temperaturas e pressões, durante as etapas de processamento, controlo e transporte. Dado que os métodos de medição de massa volúmica atualmente disponíveis são influenciados por uma ou mais destas propriedades inerentes aos líquidos, bem como pela temperatura e pela pressão, a sua robustez deve ser cuidadosamente avaliada. Sendo ainda premente, o estabelecimento de uma cadeia de rastreabilidade metrológica de massa volúmica adequada, não só em Portugal, como no espaço europeu, e em todo o mundo. Assim, o objetivo principal deste trabalho prendeu-se com o estudo da influência de tais propriedades dos líquidos no resultado das medições efetuadas por densímetros de tubo vibrante, a pressão ambiente e altas pressões (até 600 bar). A influência da viscosidade, em líquidos Newtonianos, e da viscoelasticidade, em fluidos não-Newtonianos, na exatidão e na precisão dos resultados de medição da massa volúmica foi investigada usando como métodos comparativos a pesagem hidrostática e a picnometria, respetivamente. A caracterização mecânica das amostras viscoelásticas foi realizada por recurso a reometria rotacional. Os conhecimentos adquiridos durante este trabalho serão disseminados em guias e normas internacionais de metrologia científica e aplicada (guias EURAMET e normas ISO) e de metrologia legal (documentos OIML e WELMEC), com intuito de colmatar a falta de documentação existente nesta área de conhecimento. Outro aspeto de elevada importância e impacto, no meio científico, prende-se no desenvolvimento dos métodos de determinação da salinidade da água do mar. Parâmetro que permite descrever as correntes oceânicas que serão utilizadas como base para a modelação climática. Neste sentido, as investigações realizadas conseguiram comprovar a compatibilidade das determinações de salinidade por meio da medição da massa volúmica e do índice de refração