53 research outputs found
Evaluation of Software Product Quality Metrics
Computing devices and associated software govern everyday life, and form the
backbone of safety critical systems in banking, healthcare, automotive and
other fields. Increasing system complexity, quickly evolving technologies and
paradigm shifts have kept software quality research at the forefront. Standards
such as ISO's 25010 express it in terms of sub-characteristics such as
maintainability, reliability and security. A significant body of literature
attempts to link these subcharacteristics with software metric values, with the
end goal of creating a metric-based model of software product quality. However,
research also identifies the most important existing barriers. Among them we
mention the diversity of software application types, development platforms and
languages. Additionally, unified definitions to make software metrics truly
language-agnostic do not exist, and would be difficult to implement given
programming language levels of variety. This is compounded by the fact that
many existing studies do not detail their methodology and tooling, which
precludes researchers from creating surveys to enable data analysis on a larger
scale. In our paper, we propose a comprehensive study of metric values in the
context of three complex, open-source applications. We align our methodology
and tooling with that of existing research, and present it in detail in order
to facilitate comparative evaluation. We study metric values during the entire
18-year development history of our target applications, in order to capture the
longitudinal view that we found lacking in existing literature. We identify
metric dependencies and check their consistency across applications and their
versions. At each step, we carry out comparative evaluation with existing
research and present our results.Comment: Published in: Molnar AJ., Neam\c{t}u A., Motogna S. (2020) Evaluation
of Software Product Quality Metrics. In: Damiani E., Spanoudakis G.,
Maciaszek L. (eds) Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering.
ENASE 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1172.
Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40223-5_
Assessing architectural evolution: A case study
This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 SpringerThis paper proposes to use a historical perspective on generic laws, principles,
and guidelines, like Lehman’s software evolution laws and Martin’s design principles, in order to achieve a multi-faceted process and structural assessment of a system’s architectural evolution. We present a simple structural model with associated historical metrics and
visualizations that could form part of an architect’s dashboard. We perform such an assessment for the Eclipse SDK, as a case study of a large, complex, and long-lived system for which sustained effective architectural evolution is paramount. The twofold aim of checking generic principles on a well-know system is, on the one hand,
to see whether there are certain lessons that could be learned for best practice of architectural evolution, and on the other hand to get more insights about the applicability of such principles. We find that while the Eclipse SDK does follow several of the laws and principles, there are some deviations, and we discuss areas of architectural improvement and limitations of the assessment approach
Functional Impairment of Human Myeloid Dendritic Cells during Schistosoma haematobium Infection
Chronic Schistosoma infection is often characterized by a state of T cell hyporesponsiveness of the host. Suppression of dendritic cell (DC) function could be one of the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, since Schistosoma antigens are potent modulators of dendritic cell function in vitro. Yet, it remains to be established whether DC function is modulated during chronic human Schistosoma infection in vivo. To address this question, the effect of Schistosoma haematobium infection on the function of human blood DC was evaluated. We found that plasmacytoid (pDC) and myeloid DC (mDC) from infected subjects were present at lower frequencies in peripheral blood and that mDC displayed lower expression levels of HLA-DR compared to those from uninfected individuals. Furthermore, mDC from infected subjects, but not pDC, were found to have a reduced capacity to respond to TLR ligands, as determined by MAPK signaling, cytokine production and expression of maturation markers. Moreover, the T cell activating capacity of TLR-matured mDC from infected subjects was lower, likely as a result of reduced HLA-DR expression. Collectively these data show that S. haematobium infection is associated with functional impairment of human DC function in vivo and provide new insights into the underlying mechanisms of T cell hyporesponsiveness during chronic schistosomiasis
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