eXRUP: a hybrid software development model for small to medium scale projects

The conventional and agile software development process models are proposed and used nowadays in software industry to meet emergent requirements of the customers. Conventional software development models such as Waterfall, V model and RUP have been predominant in industry until mid 1990s, but these models are mainly focused on extensive planning, heavy documentation and team expertise which suit only to medium and large scale projects. The Rational Unified Process is one of the widely used conventional models. Agile process models got attention of the software industry in last decade due to limitations of conventional models such as slow adaptation to rapidly changing business requirements and they overcome problems of schedule and cost. Extreme Programming is one of the most useful agile methods that provide best engineering practices for a good quality product at small scale. XP follows the iterative and incremental approach, but its key focus is on programming, and reusability becomes arduous. In this paper, we present characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses of RUP and XP process models, and propose a new hybrid software development model eXRUP (eXtreme Programming and Rational Unified Process), which integrates the strengths of RUP and XP while suppressing their weaknesses. The proposed process model is validated through a controlled case study

Software Defect Prediction Using Artificial Neural Networks: A Systematic Literature Review

The demand for automated online software systems is increasing day by day, which triggered the need for high-quality and maintainable softwares at lower cost. Software defect prediction is one of the crucial tasks of the quality assurance process which improves the quality at lower cost by reducing the overall testing and maintenance efforts. Early detection of defects in the software development life cycle (SDLC) leads to the early corrections and ultimately timely delivery of maintainable software, which satisfies the customer and makes him confident towards the development team. In the last decade, many machine learning-based approaches for software defect prediction have been proposed to achieve the higher accuracy. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is considered as one of the widely used machine learning techniques, which is included in most of the proposed defect prediction frameworks and models. This research provides a critical analysis of the latest literature, published from year 2015 to 2018 on the use of Artificial Neural Networks for software defect prediction. In this study, a systematic research process is followed to extract the literature from three widely used digital libraries including IEEE, Elsevier, and Springer, and then after following a thorough process, 8 most relevant research publications are selected for critical review. This study will serve the researchers by exploring the current trends in software defect prediction with the focus on ANNs and will also provide a baseline for future innovations, comparisons, and reviews

Rainfall Prediction System Using Machine Learning Fusion for Smart Cities

Precipitation in any form—such as rain, snow, and hail—can affect day-to-day outdoor activities. Rainfall prediction is one of the challenging tasks in weather forecasting process. Accurate rainfall prediction is now more difficult than before due to the extreme climate variations. Machine learning techniques can predict rainfall by extracting hidden patterns from historical weather data. Selection of an appropriate classification technique for prediction is a difficult job. This research proposes a novel real-time rainfall prediction system for smart cities using a machine learning fusion technique. The proposed framework uses four widely used supervised machine learning techniques, i.e., decision tree, Naïve Bayes, K-nearest neighbors, and support vector machines. For effective prediction of rainfall, the technique of fuzzy logic is incorporated in the framework to integrate the predictive accuracies of the machine learning techniques, also known as fusion. For prediction, 12 years of historical weather data (2005 to 2017) for the city of Lahore is considered. Pre-processing tasks such as cleaning and normalization were performed on the dataset before the classification process. The results reflect that the proposed machine learning fusion-based framework outperforms other models

A Cloud-Based Software Defect Prediction System Using Data and Decision-Level Machine Learning Fusion

This research contributes an intelligent cloud-based software defect prediction system using data and decision-level machine learning fusion techniques. The proposed system detects the defective modules using a two-step prediction method. In the first step, the prediction is performed using three supervised machine learning techniques, including naïve Bayes, artificial neural network, and decision tree. These classification techniques are iteratively tuned until the maximum accuracy is achieved. In the second step, the final prediction is performed by fusing the accuracy of the used classifiers with a fuzzy logic-based system. The proposed fuzzy logic technique integrates the predictive accuracy of the used classifiers using eight if–then fuzzy rules in order to achieve a higher performance. In the study, to implement the proposed fusion-based defect prediction system, five datasets were fused, which were collected from the NASA repository, including CM1, MW1, PC1, PC3, and PC4. It was observed that the proposed intelligent system achieved a 91.05% accuracy for the fused dataset and outperformed other defect prediction techniques, including base classifiers and state-of-the-art ensemble techniques

Machine learning empowered software defect prediction system

Production of high-quality software at lower cost has always been the main concern of developers. However, due to exponential increases in size and complexity, the development of qualitative software with lower costs is almost impossible. This issue can be resolved by identifying defects at the early stages of the development lifecycle. As a significant amount of resources are consumed in testing activities, if only those software modules are shortlisted for testing that is identified as defective, then the overall cost of development can be reduced with the assurance of high quality. An artificial neural network is considered as one of the extensively used machine-learning techniques for predicting defect-prone software modules. In this paper, a cloud-based framework for real-time software-defect prediction is presented. In the proposed framework, empirical analysis is performed to compare the performance of four training algorithms of the back-propagation technique on software-defect prediction: Bayesian regularization (BR), Scaled Conjugate Gradient, Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno Quasi-Newton, and Levenberg-Marquardt algorithms. The proposed framework also includes a fuzzy layer to identify the best training function based on performance. Publicly available cleaned versions of NASA datasets are used in this study. Various measures are used for performance evaluation including specificity, preci-sion, recall, F-measure, an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, accuracy, R2, and mean-square error. Two graphical user interface tools are developed in MatLab software to implement the proposed framework. The first tool is developed for comparing training functions as well as for extracting the results; the second tool is developed for the selection of the best training function using fuzzy logic. A BR training algorithm is selected by the fuzzy layer as it outperformed the others in most of the performance measures. The accuracy of the BR training function is also compared with other widely used machine-learn-ing techniques, from which it was found that the BR performed better among all training functions

A Cloud-Based Software Defect Prediction System Using Data and Decision-Level Machine Learning Fusion

This research contributes an intelligent cloud-based software defect prediction system using data and decision-level machine learning fusion techniques. The proposed system detects the defective modules using a two-step prediction method. In the first step, the prediction is performed using three supervised machine learning techniques, including naïve Bayes, artificial neural network, and decision tree. These classification techniques are iteratively tuned until the maximum accuracy is achieved. In the second step, the final prediction is performed by fusing the accuracy of the used classifiers with a fuzzy logic-based system. The proposed fuzzy logic technique integrates the predictive accuracy of the used classifiers using eight if–then fuzzy rules in order to achieve a higher performance. In the study, to implement the proposed fusion-based defect prediction system, five datasets were fused, which were collected from the NASA repository, including CM1, MW1, PC1, PC3, and PC4. It was observed that the proposed intelligent system achieved a 91.05% accuracy for the fused dataset and outperformed other defect prediction techniques, including base classifiers and state-of-the-art ensemble techniques

Presenting and Evaluating Scaled Extreme Programming Process Model

Extreme programming (XP) is one of the widely used software process model for the development of small scale projects from agile family. XP is widely accepted by software industry due to various features it provides such as: handling frequent changing requirements, customer satisfaction, rapid feedback, iterative structure, team collaboration, and small releases. On the other hand, XP also holds some drawbacks, including: less documentation, less focus on design, and poor architecture. Due to all of these limitations, XP is only suitable for small scale projects and doesn’t work well for medium and large scale projects. To resolve this issue many researchers have proposed its customized versions, particularly for medium and large scale projects. The real issue arises when XP is selected for the development of small scale and low risk project but gradually due to requirement change, the scope of the project changes from small scale to medium or large scale project. At that stage its structure and practices which works well for small project cannot handle the extended scope. To resolve this issue, this paper contributes by proposing a scaled version of XP process model called SXP. The proposed model can effectively handle such situation and can be used for small as well as for medium and large scale project with same efficiency. Furthermore, this paper also evaluates the proposed model empirically in order to reflect its effectiveness and efficiency. A small scale client oriented project is developed by using proposed SXP and empirical results are collected. For an effective evaluation, the collected results are compared with a published case study of XP process model. It is reflected by detailed empirical analysis that the proposed SXP performed well as compared to traditional XP

Joint channel and multi-user detection empowered with machine learning

The numbers of multimedia applications and their users increase with each passing day. Different multi-carrier systems have been developed along with varying techniques of space-time coding to address the demand of the future generation of network systems. In this article, a fuzzy logic empowered adaptive backpropagation neural network (FLeABPNN) algorithm is proposed for joint channel and multi-user detection (CMD). FLeABPNN has two stages. The first stage estimates the channel parameters, and the second performs multi-user detection. The proposed approach capitalizes on a neuro-fuzzy hybrid system that combines the competencies of both fuzzy logic and neural networks. This study analyzes the results of using FLeABPNN based on a multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) receiver with conventional partial opposite mutant particle swarm optimization (POMPSO), totalOMPSO (TOMPSO), fuzzy logic empowered POMPSO (FL-POMPSO), and FL-TOMPSO-based MIMO receivers. The FLeABPNN-based receiver renders better results than other techniques in terms of minimum mean square error, minimum mean channel error, and bit error rate