Knowledge sharing on implementing software process quality model evaluation: Focus group approach

The Extended Software Process Assessment and Certification(SPAC) Model is a model that assesses and certifies the effectiveness and efficiency of software process, which focuses on the agile and secured based software development practices. The proposed model was evaluated using focus group approach.This approach is not often used in the software engineering field even though it has various benefits.Therefore, this paper shares the experiences on the implementation of the focus group for model evaluation to reveal its usefulness.The detailed discussion on the steps taken to implement the approach is discussed. Based on the experience, it is found that this approach is very time effective, can be conducted easily and can get more evaluation done at onc

A process based approach software certification model for agile and secure environment

In today’s business environment, Agile and secure software processes are essential since they bring high quality and secured software to market faster and more cost effectively. Unfortunately, some software practitioners are not following the proper practices of both processes when developing software. There exist various studies which assess the quality of software process; nevertheless, their focus is on the conventional software process. Furthermore, they do not consider weight values in the assessment although each evaluation criterion might have different importance. Consequently, software certification is needed to give conformance on the quality of Agile and secure software processes. Therefore, the objective of this thesis is to propose Extended Software Process Assessment and Certification Model (ESPAC) which addresses both software processes and considers the weight values during the assessment. The study is conducted in four phases: 1) theoretical study to examine the factors and practices that influence the quality of Agile and secure software processes and weight value allocation techniques, 2) an exploratory study which was participated by 114 software practitioners to investigate their current practices, 3) development of an enhanced software process certification model which considers process, people, technology, project constraint and environment, provides certification guideline and utilizes the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for weight values allocation and 4) verification of Agile and secure software processes and AHP through expert reviews followed by validation on satisfaction and practicality of the proposed model through focus group discussion. The validation result shows that ESPAC Model gained software practitioners’ satisfaction and practical to be executed in the real environment. The contributions of this study straddle research perspectives of Software Process Assessment and Certification and Multiple Criteria Decision Making, and practical perspectives by providing software practitioners and assessors a mechanism to reveal the quality of software process and helps investors and customers in making investment decisions

ESPAC model: Extended software process assessment and certification model for agile and secure software processes

In today’s business environment, agile and secure software processes are essential since they bring high quality and secured software to market faster and more cost-effectively.Unfortunately, some software practitioners are not following the proper practices of both processes when developing software.There exist various studies which assess the quality of software process; nevertheless, their focus is on the conventional software process. Furthermore, they do not consider weight values in the assessment although each evaluation criterion might have different importance on the project.Consequently, software certification is needed to give conformance on the quality of agile and secure software processes.Therefore, the objective of this paper is to propose ESPAC (Extended Software Process Assessment and Certification) Model which addresses both software processes and considers the weight values during the assessment.The model has been constructed by using deductive approach, whereby the theoretical and exploratory studies were conducted in order to determine the components of the proposed model. The ESPAC Model consists of six components, which are the target, evaluation criteria, reference standard, data gathering technique, assessment phases and synthesis technique.The proposed model has been validated by seven software practitioners from the practical perspectives through focus group discussion. The validation result shows that the ESPAC Model gained their satisfaction and able to be practically executed in the real environment

Impact Analysis Based on a Global Hierarchical Object Graph

Abstract-During impact analysis on object-oriented code, statically extracting dependencies is often complicated by subclassing, programming to interfaces, aliasing, and collections, among others. When a tool recommends a large number of types or does not rank its recommendations, it may lead developers to explore more irrelevant code. We propose to mine and rank dependencies based on a global, hierarchical points-to graph that is extracted using abstract interpretation. A previous whole-program static analysis interprets a program enriched with annotations that express hierarchy, and over-approximates all the objects that may be created at runtime and how they may communicate. In this paper, an analysis mines the hierarchy and the edges in the graph to extract and rank dependencies such as the most important classes related to a class, or the most important classes behind an interface. An evaluation using two case studies on two systems totaling 10,000 lines of code and five completed code modification tasks shows that following dependencies based on abstract interpretation achieves higher effectiveness compared to following dependencies extracted from the abstract syntax tree. As a result, developers explore less irrelevant code