Metrics Dashboard Services: A Framework for Analyzing Free/Open Source Team Repositories

Software engineering as practiced today (especially in the industry) is no longer about the stereotypical monolithic life cycle processes (e.g. waterfall, spiral, etc.) found in most software engineering textbooks. These heavyweight methods historically have impeded progress for small/medium sized development teams owing to their inherent complexity and rather limited data collection strategies that predominated the 1980s until relatively recently in the mid-2000s. The discipline and practice of software engineering includes software quality, which has an established theoretical foundation for doing software metrics. Software metrics are a critical tool which provide continuous insight to products and processes and help build reliable software in mission critical environments. Using software metrics we can perform calculations that help assess the effectiveness of the underlying software or process. The type of metrics relevant to our work are in-process metrics. In-process metrics focus on a higher-level view of software quality, measuring information that can provide insight into the underlying software development process. In this thesis, we aim to develop and evaluate a metrics dashboard to support Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) software development projects. This task requires us to perform the following activities: Assess how metrics are used and which general classes/types of metrics will be useful in CSE projects. Develop a metrics dashboard that will work for teams using sites like Github, Bitbucket etc. Assess the effectiveness of the dashboard in terms of project success and developer attitude towards metrics and process. The challenge is to cherry-pick the most-effective practices from a large suite of tools and incorporate them into existing cloud-based workflows. As part of this thesis, we have developed a metrics dashboard based on the currently identified metrics types. The tools we are developing can be incorporated in any existing GitHub-based workflow without requiring the developers to install anything

Software Metrics and Dashboard

Software metrics are a critical tool which provide continuous insight to products and processes and help build reliable software in mission critical environments. Using software metrics we can perform calculations that help assess the effectiveness of the underlying software or process. The two types of metrics relevant to our work is complexity metrics and in-process metrics. Complexity metrics tend to focus on intrinsic code properties like code complexity. In-process metrics focus on a higher-level view of software quality, measuring information that can provide insight into the underlying software development process. Our aim is to develop and evaluate a metrics dashboard to support Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) software development projects. This task requires us to perform the following activities: Assess how metrics are used and which general classes/types of metrics will be useful in CSE projects. Develop a metrics dashboard that will work for teams using sites like Github, Bitbucket etc. Assess the effectiveness of the dashboard in terms of project success and developer attitude towards metrics and process. Our current focus is on identifying requirements for the metrics dashboard which include the types of metrics that will help understand and improve the software quality. We have also started the development on the metrics dashboard based on the currently identified metrics types. We plan to provide a reliable metrics dashboard which could be used by the CSE development teams to improve their software quality, this will be done by instrumenting the metrics dashboard to gather usage statistics. In this way the dashboard evolves continuously

Towards Sustainable Digital Humanities Software

Our work in software quality for digital humanities was borne of an effort to address sustainable practices in scientific software development, where the speaker (Thiruvathukal) co-authored a position paper on the case for software engineering in scientific software development as part of an all-encompassing strategy to create more sustainable scientific software (an example of a well-known scientific software package is LINPACK). In this position paper, we addressed how “progress in scientific research is dependent on the quality and accessibility of software at all levels . This progress depends on embracing the best traditional--and emergent--practices in software engineering, especially agile practices that intersect with the more formal tradition of software engineering. Although this paper was about scientific software development, it could just as easily have been about any interdisciplinary software development community. Our interest in applying what we’ve learned to DH, however, comes from work Thiruvathukal and Hayward have done and/or supervised in DH, especially WoolfOnline and a Richmond Times Dispatch viewer, where more software engineering could have been helpful

Water quality assessment of river Tons, Dehradun (Uttarakhand), India

Water quality of Tons river near Tapkeshwar temple in Dehradun was assessed in terms of their physicochemical parameters. Samples were collected on the monthly basis since January to March, 2011 from three sites viz confluence zone of temple, upstream and downstream river water. Total number of nine samples were analysed and a correlation matrices among parameters was determined. River water was showing alkaline character throughout the study period. pH, alkalinity and chloride were found to be under the acceptable limit of BIS (2009),although turbidity and hardness were exceeding the limits at all three sites but total dissolved solid only on confluence zone and downstream river sites. Water samples from the confluence zone near the temple showed slightly higher concentration of all the parameters than other sites. The present study reveals the slight effects of various religious activities on confluence site of tons river water near the temple which were found to be under the prescribed permissible limits of BIS (2009)

A Visual Analytics Approach for Hardware System Monitoring withStreaming Functional Data Analysis

Many real-world applications involve analyzing time-dependent phenomena, which are intrinsically functional, consisting of curves varying over a continuum (e.g., time). When analyzing continuous data, functional data analysis (FDA) provides substantial benefits, such as the ability to study the derivatives and to restrict the ordering of data. However, continuous data inherently has infinite dimensions, and for a long time series, FDA methods often suffer from high computational costs. The analysis problem becomes even more challenging when we must update the FDA results for continuously arriving data. In this paper, we present a visual analytics approach for monitoring and reviewing time series data streamed from a hardware system with a focus on identifying outliers by using FDA. To perform FDA while addressing the computational problem, we introduce new incremental and progressive algorithms that promptly generate the magnitude-shape (MS) plot, which conveys both the functional magnitude and shape outlyingness of time series data. In addition, by using an MS plot in conjunction with an FDA version of principal component analysis, we enhance the analyst's ability to investigate the visually-identified outliers. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach with two use scenarios using real-world datasets. The resulting tool is evaluated by industry experts using real-world streaming datasets.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure

Isolation and structure elucidation of novel compounds from stem of Dendrophthoe falcata

Dendrophthoe falcata (syn. with Loranthus falcatus) has been widely used in Indian and other traditional medicine systems as a therapeutic herb. Extensive pharmacological studies of leaf and stem extracts of D. falcata have shown significant biological activities. In the present study, an attempt has been made to carry out the phytochemical investigation of the petroleum ether and dichloromethane extract of the stem part of D. falcata, collected from Assam, situated in the eastern part of India, with the purpose of isolating and identifying the possible bioactive phytochemicals of this plant towards the development of new pharmaceutical products. Using repeated coloumn chromatography, preparative TLC and crystallization techniques, ten compounds were isolated in pure form. On the basis of detailed spectral studies they were identified as di-iso-octylphthalate 1, nonadecan-1-ol 2, stigmast-4-en-3-one 3, stigmast-5-en-3β-ol 4, stigmast-5,22-E-dien-3β-ol 5, 3β-hydroxylup-20(29)-en-28-oic acid 6, 3β-hydroxyolean-12-en-28-oic acid 7, 7-hydroxy-4',5,6-trimethoxyflavone 8 , 2,3-dihydro-4-hydroxy-3,6,9-trimethylnaphtho[1,8-bc]pyran-7,8-dione 9 and 4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzoic acid 10. Compounds 1,4,5,7 and 10 have previously been reported from Dendrophthoe species. This is the first report of compounds 2,3,6,8 and 9 from Dendrophthoe species and the first report of 8 from natural source. Further research work is needed on these identified compounds to explore their usefulness in phytopharmaceutical products

Lewis acid promoted synthesis of methylene-bridged α-and γ-bis-benzopyrones

43-50The Lewis acid promoted Fries rearrangement of O-methoxyacetyl derivatives of hydroxy-chromanones, coumarins and chromones under solvent-free condition gives isomeric methylene-bridged bischromanones, biscoumarins and bischromones, respectively, in good yields. The benzopyrone precursors undergo intermolecular rearrangement wherein two benzopyrone moieties are joined through their benzene rings via an un-substituted methylene bridge