Collaborative Global Software Development and Education

In this position paper, challenges and issues with collaborative global software development and education are discussed. Suggestions are made to improve and strengthen software engineering education to adapt to it

Software Quality Function Deployment

Any product development involves projecting its potential success in achieving its functional and commercial goals. Better quality designs that match customer needs and preferences and integrate other lifecycle issues early in the software development process are more likely to be competitive. Thus, there is significant concern in industry about quality product design, which is addressed by quality function deployment (QFD). QFD uses matrices to organize and relate pieces of data to each other. These matrices are often combined to form a basic tool of QFD, called a House of Quality (HoQ). QFD was developed in the Kobe shipyards as a way to expand and implement the view of quality as taught by W. Edwards Deming and others. It has been widely applied in many industries worldwide, such as automobile, electronics, food processing, computer hardware and software ever since. Software quality function deployment (SQFD) focuses on improving the quality of both the software development process and the product. The improvement in software quality leads to fewer changes in requirements specification, design, and code, a reduction in the number of defects and less rework, and therefore, higher productivity

A Change Impact Dependency Measure for Predicting the Maintainability of Source Code

We first articulate the theoretic difficulties with the existing metrics designed for predicting software maintainability. To overcome the difficulties, we propose to measure a purely internal and objective attribute of code, namely change impact dependency, and show how it can be modeled to predict real change impact. The proposed base measure can be further elaborated for evaluating software maintainability

BIUP3: Boundary Topological Invariant of 3D Objects Through Front Propagation at a Constant Speed

Topological features constitute the highest abstraction in object representation. Euler characteristic is one of the most widely used topological invariants. The computation of the Euler characteristic is mainly based on three well-known mathematical formulae, which calculate either on the boundary of object or on the whole object. However, as digital objects are often non-manifolds, none of the known formulae can correctly compute the genus of digital surfaces. In this paper, we show that a new topological surface invariant of 3D digital objects, called BIUP/sup 3/, can be obtained through a special homeomorphic transform: front propagation at a constant speed. BIUP/sup 3/ overcomes the theoretic weakness of the Euler characteristic and it applies to both manifolds and non-manifolds. The computation of BIUP/sup 3/ can be done efficiently through a virtual front propagation, leaving the images unaffected

Fuzzy Requirements

Requirement analysis and specification is the first major step in software development. The goal is to develop a requirements specification that contains all the customers\u27 true needs. The analysis describes quality requirements and their constraints, such as cost and resources. Functional requirements are analyzed in terms of inputs, outputs and their relationships. Hence, requirements analysis enables software engineers to specify software function and establish software design and implementation constraints. The paper discusses the specification of individual fuzzy requirements using fuzzy sets

A Generic OO Architecture Language for Semantics Analysis of OO Specification

Formal specification enables a rigorous analysis and model checking for ensuring the correctness of specification. Formal OO specification methods are of mathematical nature and the semantics of specification is purposely defined such that it is not related to the semantics of code. We propose a new language, which will lay a common semantics ground for both specification and code

A WWW Based Software Metrics Environment for Software Process Management and Software Product Quality Improvement

The software process needs to be continuously improved to develop high quality software. However, with increasing specialization in the workforce and decentralization in the workplace, software process planning, monitoring, analysis and dynamic tuning in a heterogeneous distributed environment becomes a challenge. We describe a tool which takes advantage of emerging Internet technology to implement a software metrics environment for software process management and software quality improvement. The tool uses a dimensional analytic model to visualize the software development process. The system offers facilities to monitor the status and quality attributes of projects being developed at multiple sites and on multiple platforms based on Internet, Java, JDBC and a database system

Technical Target Setting in QFD for Web Service Systems using an Artificial Neural Network

There are at least two challenges with quality management of service-oriented architecture based web service systems: 1) how to link its technical capabilities with customer\u27s needs explicitly to satisfy customers\u27 functional and nonfunctional requirements; and 2) how to determine targets of web service design attributes. Currently, the first issue is not addressed and the second one is dealt with subjectively. Quality Function Deployment (QFD), a quality management system, has found its success in improving quality of complex products although it has not been used for developing web service systems. In this paper, we analyze requirements for web services and their design attributes, and apply the QFD for developing web service systems by linking quality of service requirements to web service design attributes. A new method for technical target setting in QFD, based on an artificial neural network, is also presented. Compared with the conventional methods for technical target setting in QFD, such as benchmarking and the linear regression method, which fail to incorporate nonlinear relationships between design attributes and quality of service requirements, it sets up technical targets consistent with relationships between quality of web service requirements and design attributes, no matter whether they are linear or nonlinear

A Fuzzy Logic-Based Foundation for Analyzing Imprecise Conflicting Requirements

Imprecise requirements are represented by the canonical form in test-score semantics. The concepts of feasibility, satisfiability, and specificity are formalized based on the fuzzy sets. The relationships between requirements are classified to be conflicting and cooperative. A feasible overall requirement can thus be formulated based on the tradeoff analysis of the conflicting requirements by using fuzzy multi-criteria optimization techniqu

High-Order Object Model Based Software Analysis

The integration of object oriented modeling and structured analysis (SA) for developing a well structured object oriented software system is a challenge for requirements analysts and software designers. Some of the existing object oriented modeling techniques adopt approaches that are very different from SA, and others have clumsily stayed with SA after a few modifications. Our High Order Object Modeling Technique (HOOMT) however, attempts to strike a mean between both extremes while at the same time provides an effective modeling method. HOOMT consists of two models, the High Order Object Model and the Object Information Flow Model. By using the familiar divide and conquer concept and functional decomposition, our approach also ensures a less stressful migration of SA analysts to object oriented platforms. The paper introduces HOOMT, its concepts, and notations