35,548 research outputs found
A Longitudinal Study of Identifying and Paying Down Architectural Debt
Architectural debt is a form of technical debt that derives from the gap
between the architectural design of the system as it "should be" compared to
"as it is". We measured architecture debt in two ways: 1) in terms of
system-wide coupling measures, and 2) in terms of the number and severity of
architectural flaws. In recent work it was shown that the amount of
architectural debt has a huge impact on software maintainability and evolution.
Consequently, detecting and reducing the debt is expected to make software more
amenable to change. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of a healthcare
communications product created by Brightsquid Secure Communications Corp. This
start-up company is facing the typical trade-off problem of desiring
responsiveness to change requests, but wanting to avoid the ever-increasing
effort that the accumulation of quick-and-dirty changes eventually incurs. In
the first stage of the study, we analyzed the status of the "before" system,
which indicated the impacts of change requests. This initial study motivated a
more in-depth analysis of architectural debt. The results of this analysis were
used to motivate a comprehensive refactoring of the software system. The third
phase of the study was a follow-on architectural debt analysis which quantified
the improvements made. Using this quantitative evidence, augmented by
qualitative evidence gathered from in-depth interviews with Brightsquid's
architects, we present lessons learned about the costs and benefits of paying
down architecture debt in practice.Comment: Submitted to ICSE-SEIP 201
Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development
Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern
software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user
base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software
development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific
challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from
developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a
program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we
reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems
in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help
guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we
provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference
on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18
Usability and open source software.
Open source communities have successfully developed many pieces of software although most computer users only use proprietary applications. The usability of open source software is often regarded as one reason for this limited distribution. In this paper we review the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discuss how the characteristics of open-source development influence usability. We describe how existing human-computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities, of developers and users, to address issues of usability
The usability of open source software: analysis and prospects
Open source communities have successfully developed many pieces of software although most computer users only use proprietary applications. The usability of open source software is often regarded as one reason for this limited distribution. In this paper we review the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discuss how the characteristics of open-source development influence usability. We describe how existing human-computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities, of developers and users, to address issues of usability
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