On the Presence of Green and Sustainable Software Engineering in Higher Education Curricula

Nowadays, software is pervasive in our everyday lives. Its sustainability and environmental impact have become major factors to be considered in the development of software systems. Millennials-the newer generation of university students-are particularly keen to learn about and contribute to a more sustainable and green society. The need for training on green and sustainable topics in software engineering has been reflected in a number of recent studies. The goal of this paper is to get a first understanding of what is the current state of teaching sustainability in the software engineering community, what are the motivations behind the current state of teaching, and what can be done to improve it. To this end, we report the findings from a targeted survey of 33 academics on the presence of green and sustainable software engineering in higher education. The major findings from the collected data suggest that sustainability is under-represented in the curricula, while the current focus of teaching is on energy efficiency delivered through a fact-based approach. The reasons vary from lack of awareness, teaching material and suitable technologies, to the high effort required to teach sustainability. Finally, we provide recommendations for educators willing to teach sustainability in software engineering that can help to suit millennial students needs.Comment: The paper will be presented at the 1st International Workshop on Software Engineering Curricula for Millennials (SECM2017

Using the GPU to Green an Intensive and Massive Computation System

In this paper, we present the early results of an ongoing project aimed at giving an existing software system a more eco-sustainable lease of life. We defined a strategy and a process for migrating a subject system that performs intensive and massive computation to a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) based architecture. We validated our solutions on a software system for path finding robot simulations. An initial comparison on the energy consumption of the original system and the greened one has been also executed. The obtained results suggested that the application of our solution produced more eco-sustainable software

On the effect of exploiting gpus for a more Eco-sustainable lease of life

It has been estimated that about 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions can be attributed to IT systems. Green (or sustainable) computing refers to supporting business critical computing needs with the least possible amount of power. This phenomenon changes the priorities in the design of new software systems and in the way companies handle existing ones. In this paper, we present the results of a research project aimed to develop a migration strategy to give an existing software system a new and more eco-sustainable lease of life. We applied a strategy for migrating a subject system that performs intensive and massive computation to a target architecture based on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). We validated our solution on a system for path finding robot simulations. An analysis on execution time and energy consumption indicated that: (i) the execution time of the migrated system is less than the execution time of the original system; and (ii) the migrated system reduces energy waste, so suggesting that it is more eco-sustainable than its original version. Our findings improve the body of knowledge on the effect of using the GPU in green computing. © 2015 World Scientific Publishing Company

Exploring the effectiveness of an augmented reality dressing room

In this paper, we describe our experience with the design of an augmented reality dressing room in which 3D models of a dress are overlaid with a color image from a camera to provide the function of a sort of virtual mirror. In such a way, the customer can move around to understand if a dress suits and fits them well. The project is implemented in Unity 4 Pro in combination with the Microsoft Kinect 2 for the tracking process. Design issues and technical implementation as well as the prospects for further development of the techniques are discussed. To assess the validity of our proposal, we have conducted a user study using 47 participants with different levels of experience with video games and devices used to play them. The empirical method used is qualitative. To this end, we used questionnaire-based surveys. The obtained results suggest that our solution represents a viable means to simulate dressing rooms, and participants in the study found the interaction with our 3D models to be natural for understanding if a dress suits and fits them well. Overall, the participants found our application very useful from a practical point of view

An Approach and an Eclipse Based Environment for Enhancing the Navigation Structure of Web Sites

This paper presents an approach based on information retrieval and clustering techniques for automatically enhancing the navigation structure of a Web site for improving navigability. The approach increments the set of navigation links provided in each page of the site with a semantic navigation map, i.e., a set of links enabling navigating from a given page to other pages of the site showing similar or related content. The approach uses Latent Semantic Indexing to compute a dissimilarity measure between the pages of the site and a graph-theoretic clustering algorithm to group pages showing similar or related content according to the calculated dissimilarity measure. AJAX code is finally used to extend each Web page with an associated semantic navigation map. The paper also presents a prototype of a tool developed to support the approach and the results from a case study conducted to assess the validity and feasibility of the proposal

Identifying Similar Pages in Web Applications using a Competitive Clustering Algorithm

We present an approach based on Winner Takes All (WTA), a competitive clustering algorithm, to support the comprehension of static and dynamic Web applications during Web application reengineering. This approach adopts a process that first computes the distance between Web pages and then identifies and groups similar pages using the considered clustering algorithm. We present an instance of application of the clustering process to identify similar pages at the structural level. The page structure is encoded into a string of HTML tags and then the distance between Web pages at the structural level is computed using the Levenshtein string edit distance algorithm. A prototype to automate the clustering process has been implemented that can be extended to other instances of the process, such as the identification of groups of similar pages at content level. The approach and the tool have been evaluated in two case studies. The results have shown that the WTA clustering algorithm suggests heuristics to easily identify the best partition of Web pages into clusters among the possible partitions

Architectural Layer Recovery for Software System Understanding and Evolution

This paper presents an approach to identify software layers for the understanding and evolution of software systems implemented with any object-oriented programming language. The approach first identifies relations between the classes of a software system and then uses a link analysis algorithm (i.e. the Kleinberg algorithm) to group them into layers. Additionally to assess the approach and the underlying techniques, the paper also presents a prototype of a supporting tool and the results from a case study

A System For Visual Role-Based Policy Modelling

The definition of security policies in information systems and programming applications is often accomplished through traditional low level languages that are difficult to use. This is a remarkable drawback if we consider that security policies are often specified and maintained by top level enterprise managers who would probably prefer to use simplified, metaphor oriented policy management tools. To support all the different kinds of users we propose a suite of visual languages to specify access and security policies according to the role based access control (RBAC) model. Moreover, a system implementing the proposed visual languages is proposed. The system provides a set of tools to enable a user to visually edit security policies and to successively translate them into (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) code, which can be managed by a Policy Based Management System supporting such policy language. The system and the visual approach have been assessed by means of usability studies and of several case studies. The one presented in this paper regards the configuration of access policies for a multimedia content management platform providing video streaming services also accessible through mobile devices

An Investigation of Clustering Algorithms in the Identification of Similar Web Pages

In this paper we investigate the effect of using clustering algorithms in the reverse engineering field to identify pages that are similar either at the structural level or at the content level. To this end, we have used two instances of a general process that only differ for the measure used to compare web pages. In particular, two web pages at the structural level and at the content level are compared by using the Levenshtein edit distances and Latent Semantic Indexing, respectively. The static pages of two web applications and one static web site have been used to compare the results achieved by using the considered clustering algorithms both at the structural and content level. On these applications we generally achieved comparable results. However, the investigation has also suggested some heuristics to quickly identify the best partition of web pages into clusters among the possible partitions both at the structural and at the content level

Identifying Cloned Navigational Patterns in Web Applications

Web Applications are subject to continuous and rapid evolution. Often programmers indiscriminately duplicate Web pages without considering systematic development and maintenance methods. This practice creates code clones that make Web Applications hard to maintain and reuse. We present an approach to identify duplicated functionalities in Web Applications through cloned navigational pattern analysis. Cloned patterns can be generalized in a reengineering process, thus to simplify the structure and future maintenance of the Web Applications. The proposed method first identifies pairs of cloned pages by analyzing similarity at structure, content, and scripting code. Two pages are considered clones if their similarity is greater than a given threshold. Cloned pages are then grouped into clusters and the links connecting pages of two clusters are grouped too. An interconnection metric has been defined on the links between two clusters to express the effort required to reengineer them as well as to select the patterns of interest. To further reduce the comprehension effort, we filter out links and nodes of the clustered navigational schema that do not contribute to the identification of cloned navigational patterns. A tool supporting the proposed approach has been developed and validated in a case study