Practical Application Of Uml Activity Diagrams For The Generation Of Test Cases

Software testing and debugging represents around one third of total effort in development projects. Different factors which have influence on poor practices of testing have been identified through specific surveys. Amongst several, one of the most important is the lack of efficient methods to exploit development models for generating test cases. This paper presents a new method for automatically generating a complete set of functional test cases from UML activity diagrams complementing specification of use cases. Test cases are prioritized according to software risk information. Results from experiences with more than 70 software professionals/experts validate benefits of the method. Participants also confirm its interest and effectiveness for testing needs of industry

Quality Issues in Global Software Development

The most advantageous features of Global Software Development (GSD) are its cost saving benefits and the easily availability of resources. Also the technological advancement especially in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) makes GSD a common practice in software industry. But GSD is also facing a lot of challenges. Maintaining quality in software development processes and products in GSD environments is one of the major challenges. This paper presents a survey on the challenges and factors which impact on the quality of the\ud products in GSD environments. This report identifies that most of the factors which affect the quality of software product appear as part of two major challenges: requirements and coordination. We further demonstrate that how these two challenges are affected by several factors. Finally, we present the possible solution to reduce the complexity of those various factors

Featuring CIO: Roles, Skills and Soft Skills

This paper describes how the CIO (Chief Information Officer) position appears as a key role in the organizations and the requirements for candidates. The authors compare the requirements presented in different studies to know what are the most important skills for a successful performance as a CIO. They stress the importance of non technical skills as key factors for professional performance. The authors have compared soft skills for CIO or equivalent positions and other professional profiles like programmers or analysts using data taken from thousands of job ads. An overview of the most valuable skills (especially soft skills) for CIOS is presente

Multi-Paradigm Metric and its Applicability on JAVA Projects

JAVA is one of the favorite languages amongst software developers. However, the numbers of specific software metrics to evaluate the JAVA code are limited. In this paper, we evaluate the applicability of a recently developed multi paradigm metric to JAVA projects. The experimentations show that the Multi paradigm metric is an effective measure for estimating the complexity of the JAVA code/projects, and therefore it can be used for controlling the quality of the projects. We have also evaluated the multi-paradigm metric against the principles of measurement theory

“Daily resilience”: sustainable strategies for urban fringe in three medium-sized inner Spanish cities

Urban resilience has evolved in the last time into a wider scope, related not only to facing major challenges or risks but to managing the complexity of urban systems and their “metabolism”, looking for more sustainable strategies. Consequently, it can be a very useful concept for both big and smaller cities, which are facing everyday urban life challenges. In a global context in which the urban phenomenon continues to spread, this paper aims to set a concept of “low regime”, “low intensity” or “daily” resilience as a specific and essential strategy for medium-sized cities in order to fulfil their role in the global concert of cities, through the historical analysis along the last five decades of three medium-sized inner Spanish cities: Vitoria, Zaragoza and Valladolid.These three cities, the most populated and complex among the medium-sized inner Spanish cities, are also capitals of their respective regions (the Basque Country, Aragon and Castile and León), and they represent the transition from an expansive model, in particular in their respective urban fringe, to the “urban resilience agenda”. In the sixties and seventies, they experienced an impressive growth, both physical and demographic. Later, in the eighties and nineties, the moderation in the population growth rates did not also moderate their physical expansion, which moved to the surroundings of the cities, until this growth came to an abrupt end in 2007 due to the economic crisis. Coming from a quite similar and homogenous cultural and urban context, Vitoria, Zaragoza and Valladolid have been developing undifferentiated peripheries, disrespectful with the conditions of the territory, until they started to adopt tailored strategies so as to guarantee a sustainable growth in the future and avoid eventual menaces for their urban territory.These new strategies aim to ensure the resilience of their respective urban fringe, because this is where the urban development tensions concentrate, and consist of composing an own profile of action, learning from the history of the city itself and from the natural values of their surrounding territory, and also keeping in mind the scarcity of economic resources in these medium-sized cities compared to bigger ones. Step by step, the singular history of each city, its “genius loci”, emerges as a solid foundation for these new strategies.This paper concludes that this idea of own identity seems to be resilient, and reveals that it can express itself through different tools (green infrastructure, urban regeneration and territorial planning) which in these three cities have found a useful topic to articulate a new integrated strategy for the “metabolism” of urban fringe in water systems: the Salburua wetlands and Zadorra river in Vitoria, protagonists of its greenbelt; the Ebro river in Zaragoza, recovered for the city after Expo 2008; and the network of rivers, canals and irrigation ditches in Valladolid, which stand as axes of a better relationship with the territory. All of them represent low cost smart and natural strategies that emerge as replicable examples of what “daily resilience” means and offers to these kind of medium-sized cities

A Suite of Object Oriented Cognitive Complexity Metrics

Object orientation has gained a wide adoption in the software development community. To this end, different metrics that can be utilized in measuring and improving the quality of object-oriented (OO) software have been proposed, by providing insight into the maintainability and reliability of the system. Some of these software metrics are based on cognitive weight and are referred to as cognitive complexity metrics. It is our objective in this paper to present a suite of cognitive complexity metrics that can be used to evaluate OO software projects. The present suite of metrics includes method complexity, message complexity, attribute complexity, weighted class complexity, and code complexity. The metrics suite was evaluated theoretically using measurement theory and Weyuker’s properties, practically using Kaner’s framework and empirically using thirty projects

Tool Support for Cascading Style Sheets’ Complexity Metrics

Tools are the fundamental requirement for acceptability of any metrics programme in the software industry. It is observed that majority of the metrics proposed and are available in the literature lack tool support. This is one of the reasons why they are not widely accepted by the practitioners. In order to improve the acceptability of proposed metrics among software engineers that develop Web applications, there is need to automate the process. In this paper, we have developed a tool for computing metrics for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and named it as CSS Analyzer (CSSA). The tool is capable of measuring different metrics, which are the representation of different quality attributes: which include understandability, reliability and maintainability based on some previously proposed metrics. The tool was evaluated by comparing its result on 40 cascading style sheets with results gotten by the manual process of computing the complexities. The results show that the tool computes in far less time when compared to the manual process and is 51.25% accurate

Analysis of cultural and gender influences on teamwork performance for software requirements analysis in multinational environments

Software development is mainly a social activity where teams of developers should work as a coordinated unit to fulfill the needs of customers. Studies have shown the importance of teamwork ability as the main skill for software professionals both in local settings and in global software development. Teamwork performance can be evaluated according to different approaches but we need deeper analysis within software teams of differences in individuals' performance related to culture, nationality or even gender. We applied a simple evaluation experience named teamwork benefits awareness (TBA) to groups of last-year students of computing degrees with experience as junior IT professionals during intensive multinational workshops based on international software projects. TBA allowed to measure individual and team performance during a requirements analysis session based on a real project. Results segmented by nationality and gender are presented and analysed in comparison with the data collected from computing professionals in local settings. In general, no significant differences have been found out although interesting relations are suggested with two Hofstede's country indicators. TBA is also perceived as a good technique for highlighting both teamwork benefits as well as the nature of real situations of software requirements analysis and orientation to customer needs

Quantitative Quality Model for Evaluating Open Source Web Applications: Case Study of Repository Software

Many open source web applications exist today and universities also find them useful. For instance, universities now manage most of their research output by storing them in their respective institutional repositories. These repositories are often built as open source web applications and known as repository software. Several of these exist but three popular ones include: DSpace, EPrints and Greenstone (DEG). These three are open source and built by different institutions. Considering their increasing adoption and usage by universities today, it would be useful to have a model that can compare between the quality of two or more web applications and suggest the better option to an institution intending to adopt one. This paper therefore proposes a model for measuring quality in open source web applications (focusing on repository software) by adapting existing quality models. The proposed model is used to measure quality in DEG. The proposed model is validated through real data and the results presented and discussed. Overall, the model rated DSpace as the better option

Study of the Yahoo-Yahoo Hash-Tag Tweets Using Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining Algorithms

Mining opinion on social media microblogs presents opportunities to extract meaningful insight from the public from trending issues like the “yahoo-yahoo” which in Nigeria, is synonymous to cybercrime. In this study, content analysis of selected historical tweets from “yahoo-yahoo” hash-tag was conducted for sentiment and topic modelling. A corpus of 5500 tweets was obtained and pre-processed using a pre-trained tweet tokenizer while Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning (VADER), Liu Hu method, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) graphs were used for sentiment analysis, topic modelling and topic visualization. Results showed the corpus had 173 unique tweet clusters, 5327 duplicates tweets and a frequency of 9555 for “yahoo”. Further validation using the mean sentiment scores of ten volunteers returned R and R2 of 0.8038 and 0.6402; 0.5994 and 0.3463; 0.5999 and 0.3586 for Human and VADER; Human and Liu Hu; Liu Hu and VADER sentiment scores, respectively. While VADER outperforms Liu Hu in sentiment analysis, LDA and LSI returned similar results in the topic modelling. The study confirms VADER’s performance on unstructured social media data containing non-English slangs, conjunctions, emoticons, etc. and proved that emojis are more representative of sentiments in tweets than the texts.publishedVersio