An Empirical Study of a Repeatable Method for Reengineering Procedural Software Systems to Object- Oriented Systems

This paper describes a repeatable method for reengineering a procedural system to an object-oriented system. The method uses coupling metrics to assist a domain expert in identifying candidate objects. An application of the method to a simple program is given, and the effectiveness of the various coupling metrics are discussed. We perform a detailed comparison of our repeatable method with an ad hoc, manual reengineering effort based on the same procedural program. The repeatable method was found to be effective for identifying objects. It produced code that was much smaller, more efficient, and passed more regression tests than the ad hoc method. Analysis of object-oriented metrics indicated both simpler code and less variability among classes for the repeatable method

The Economics of Healthcare Rationing

This article examines the economics of healthcare rationing. We begin with an overview of the various dimensions across which healthcare rationing operates, or at least has the potential to operate, in the first place. We then describe the types of economic analyses used in healthcare rationing decision-making, with particular reference to cost-benefit analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis. We also discuss healthcare rationing in practice, such as how economic analyses inform decisions regarding which services to cover, and conclude by discussing various practical and conceptual challenges that may arise with economic analyses and that span both economics and ethics

Re-engineering with reuse: a case study

This paper describes a case study in reuse and reengineering. A C based metrics system was re-engineered to C++ using standard reusable components and a design pattern

Does Medical Malpractice Law Improve Health Care Quality?

Despite the fundamental role of deterrence in justifying a system of medical malpractice law, surprisingly little evidence has been put forth to date bearing on the relationship between medical liability forces on the one hand and medical errors and health care quality on the other. In this paper, we estimate this relationship using clinically validated measures of health care treatment quality constructed using data from the 1979 to 2005 National Hospital Discharge Surveys and the 1987 to 2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System records. Drawing upon traditional, remedy-centric tort reforms — e.g., damage caps — we estimate that the current liability system plays at most a modest role in inducing higher levels of health care quality. We contend that this limited independent role for medical liability may be a reflection upon the structural nature of the present system of liability rules, which largely hold physicians to standards determined according to industry customs. We find evidence suggesting, however, that physician practices may respond more significantly upon a substantive alteration of this system altogether — i.e., upon a change in the clinical standards to which physicians are held in the first instance. The literature to date has largely failed to appreciate the substantive nature of liability rules and may thus be drawing limited inferences based solely on our experiences to date with damage-caps and related reforms

The 5th International Workshop on Software Reuse and Safety

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A Requirement-centric Approach to Web Service Modeling, Discovery, and Selection

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has gained considerable popularity for implementing Service-Based Applications (SBAs) in a flexible\ud and effective manner. The basic idea of SOC is to understand users'\ud requirements for SBAs first, and then discover and select relevant\ud services (i.e., that fit closely functional requirements) and offer\ud a high Quality of Service (QoS). Understanding users’ requirements\ud is already achieved by existing requirement engineering approaches\ud (e.g., TROPOS, KAOS, and MAP) which model SBAs in a requirement-driven\ud manner. However, discovering and selecting relevant and high QoS\ud services are still challenging tasks that require time and effort\ud due to the increasing number of available Web services. In this paper,\ud we propose a requirement-centric approach which allows: (i) modeling\ud users’ requirements for SBAs with the MAP formalism and specifying\ud required services using an Intentional Service Model (ISM); (ii)\ud discovering services by querying the Web service search engine Service-Finder\ud and using keywords extracted from the specifications provided by\ud the ISM; and(iii) selecting automatically relevant and high QoS services\ud by applying Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). We validate our approach\ud by performing experiments on an e-books application. The experimental\ud results show that our approach allows the selection of relevant and\ud high QoS services with a high accuracy (the average precision is\ud 89.41%) and efficiency (the average recall is 95.43%)

On opportunistic software reuse

The availability of open source assets for almost all imaginable domains has led the software industry toopportunistic design-an approach in which people develop new software systems in an ad hoc fashion by reusing and combining components that were not designed to be used together. In this paper we investigate this emerging approach. We demonstrate the approach with an industrial example in whichNode.jsmodules and various subsystems are used in an opportunistic way. Furthermore, to study opportunistic reuse as a phenomenon, we present the results of three contextual interviews and a survey with reuse practitioners to understand to what extent opportunistic reuse offers improvements over traditional systematic reuse approaches.Peer reviewe