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Basic data-mining skills can be useful for processing domain documents early during requirements engineering. An example from the electronic-healthcare-records domain shows how. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/tHvi3pHEP8c is an audio podcast in which author Jane Cleland-Huang provides an audio recording of the Requirements column, in which she discusses how basic data-mining skills can be useful for processing domain documents early during requirements engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Defect taxonomies collect and organize experts' domain knowledge and project experience and are valuable for requirements-based testing. They provide systematic backup for the test design, support decisions for allocating testing resources, improve the review of requirements, and are suitable for measuring product quality. Researchers have devised requirements-based testing that exploits defect taxonomies' advantages. The taxonomies can be seamlessly integrated into a standard test process; the researchers successfully applied this approach to industrial projects at a public health insurance institution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recently proposed model repositories aim to support specific needs--for example, collaborative modeling, the ability to use different modeling tools in software life-cycle management, tool interoperability, increased model reuse, and the integration of heterogeneous models. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Smart manufacturing networks describe a production chain as a marketplace that delivers products on demand. In this chain, partners collaborate in product work routings that connect dispersed service-enabled systems with resources, materials, human expertise, and operation-equipment combinations. Researchers have developed a reference architecture for developing a highly connected, knowledge-enabled manufacturing network that decentralizes production control. This network will enable collaborative manufacturing of new products and response to product demand, allowing for greater production flexibility and product variability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over its 10-year history, the annual Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) conference has become a barometer for the ever-evolving software architecture climate. This article summarizes some software architecture trends that emerged during SATURN 2014 and gives a glimpse of the future based on the current SATURN 2015 technical program. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Linked data represents each piece of data as a link between two things. It lets software reasoners arrive at conclusions in a human-like way. This column discusses how the EYE reasoner exploits linked data and how industry is employing EYE. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Standard software testing might not catch important defects, and formal methods can be difficult to use. But, there's a middle ground between the two. This middle ground involves adding five steps to standard testing and employing test randomization, model-based testing, and a more aggressive use of assertions (also called self-tests). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Software project management antipatterns can help practitioners identify and avoid practices that will hinder success. This article provides a consolidated list of such antipatterns and discusses their implications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents the state of the art and practice in system and software variability. It describes the trends driving the increasing importance of variability management, proposes a research agenda, and provides an overview of the articles in this special issue. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/80DAUGahNAY is an audio recording of Davide Falessi speaking with Guest Editors Rafael Capilla and Rich Hilliard about the state of the art and practice in system and software variability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An architecture haiku aims to capture software system architecture's most important details on a single piece of paper. An architecture haiku helps development teams focus on the most essential information relevant to the architecture, provides clear guidance for construction, and encourages collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In variant-rich workflow-based systems, a major concern for process variability is the context-aware configuration of the variants. This means that context information, not users, drives process configuration. To support context-aware process configuration in a dynamic environment, in which context information is available only at run time, smart workflows must be customized at run time. The LateVa (Late Variability for Context-Aware Smart Workflows) framework lets developers model and manage process variability by composing base models, fragments, and variability models and by deferring binding to run time. Base models and fragments are reusable, thereby reducing the modeling effort for developing variants. LateVa also includes an automated run-time-variability mechanism for context-aware smart workflows. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Today's large-scale systems couldn't function without the reliable availability of a range of network communications capabilities. Software, hardware, and communications technologies have been advancing throughout the past two decades. However, the methods that industry commonly uses to test large-scale systems that incorporate critical communications interfaces haven't kept pace. The need exists for a specifically tailored framework to achieve effective, precise testing of communications-critical large-scale systems. A proposed test framework offers an alternative to the current generic approaches that lead to inefficient, costly testing in industry. A case study illustrates its benefits, which can also be realized with other comparable systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Exponential data growth from the Internet, low-cost sensors, and high-fidelity instruments have fueled the development of advanced analytics operating on vast data repositories. These analytics bring business benefits ranging from Web content personalization to predictive maintenance of aircraft components. To construct the data repositories underpinning these systems, rapid innovation has occurred in distributed-data-management technologies, employing schemaless data models and relaxing consistency guarantees to satisfy scalability and availability requirements. These big data systems present many challenges to software architects. Distributed-software architecture quality attributes are tightly linked to both the data and deployment architectures. This causes a consolidation of concerns, and designs must be closely harmonized across these three architectures to satisfy quality requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mobile-app quality is becoming an increasingly important issue. These apps are generally delivered through app stores that let users post reviews. These reviews provide a rich data source you can leverage to understand user-reported issues. Researchers qualitatively studied 6,390 low-rated user reviews for 20 free-to-download iOS apps. They uncovered 12 types of user complaints. The most frequent complaints were functional errors, feature requests, and app crashes. Complaints about privacy and ethical issues and hidden app costs most negatively affected ratings. In 11 percent of the reviews, users attributed their complaints to a recent app update. This study provides insight into the user-reported issues of iOS apps, along with their frequency and impact, which can help developers better prioritize their limited quality assurance resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Three release engineers share their perspectives on quality metrics for releases and on continuous delivery's benefits and limitations. They also discuss release-engineering job skills, the required mind-set, the role of education, and cultural change, and they recommend future research areas. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/O3cJQTZXAI8 is an audio recording of Davide Falessi speaking with Guest Editors Bram Adams and Foutse Khomh about release engineering and its value to the software industry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Technical debt refers to maintenance obligations that software teams accumulate as a result of their actions. Empirical research has led researchers to suggest three dimensions along which software development teams should map their technical-debt metrics: customer satisfaction needs, reliability needs, and the probability of technology disruption. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As part of a Finnish research program, researchers interviewed 15 information and communications technology companies to determine the extent to which the companies adopted continuous deployment. They also aimed to find out why continuous deployment is considered beneficial and what the obstacles are to its full adoption. The benefits mentioned the most often were the ability to get faster feedback, the ability to deploy more often to keep customers satisfied, and improved quality and productivity. Despite understanding the benefits, none of the companies adopted a fully automatic deployment pipeline. The companies also had higher continuous-deployment capability than what they practiced. In many cases, they consciously chose to not aim for full continuous deployment. Obstacles to full adoption included domain-imposed restrictions, resistance to change, customer desires, and developers' skill and confidence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mobile systems must cope with continuous context changes, making them an ideal fit with dynamic software product lines (DSPLs), which enable product adaptation at run time. In this DSPL-based process, devices upload only a small reconfiguration plan rather than the entire variability model, and providers manage diversity without disrupting the base model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A proposed approach injects value-thinking into feature prioritization, using story mapping. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/Xm5VqODvVZE is an audio podcast in which author Jane Cleland-Huang provides an audio recording of the Requirements column, in which she discusses an approach that injects value-thinking into feature prioritization by using story mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A refactoring aims to improve a certain quality while preserving others. For example, code refactoring restructures code to make it more maintainable without changing its observable behavior. Given the success of code refactoring, it's surprising that architectural refactoring (AR) hasn't taken off yet. This article examines AR from a new angle: as an evolution technique that revisits architectural decisions and identifies related design, implementation, and documentation tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Traditional release strategies have problems that can be overcome by time-based release management. Interviews with key members of seven prominent volunteer-based open source projects reveal time-based release's advantages. The authors discuss release planning's importance, the numerous challenges that can result from a lack of such planning, and time-based releases' benefits. They also discuss how to adopt time-based release. An online supplement provides additional information on the projects and interview guide discussed in the article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To choose the most appropriate cloud-computing model for your organization, you must analyze your IT infrastructure, usage, and needs. To help with this, this article describes cloud computing's current status. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mozilla's decision to release a new version of its products every six weeks (instead of every year) profoundly affected developers and users and was accompanied by significant changes in the release process. Were such changes enough to allow Mozilla to move faster without breaking things? What lessons can be learned from Mozilla's adoption of rapid releases? To answer these questions, researchers analyzed tens of thousands of commits and bug reports from Firefox and talked to its developers. The results show that, because of integration repositories, build sheriffs, and better testing tools, broken patches were backed out (reverted) earlier, rendering the release process more stable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Continuous delivery (CD) has emerged as an auspicious alternative to traditional release engineering, promising to provide the capability to release valuable software continuously to customers. Paddy Power has been implementing CD for the past two years. This article explains why Paddy Power decided to adopt CD, describes the resulting CD capability, and reports the huge benefits and challenges involved. These experiences can provide fellow practitioners with insights for their adoption of CD, and the identified challenges can provide researchers valuable input for developing their research agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Build processes are too slow. Because most of the build time for Java projects is spent executing tests, researchers have focused on speeding up testing. They've integrated two complementary approaches into a system that seamlessly supports Ant and Maven JUnit build processes. The first approach, unit test virtualization, isolates in-memory dependencies among test cases, which otherwise are isolated inefficiently by restarting the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) before every test. The system supports just-in-time reinitialization of only the small portion of memory needed by the next test, reusing a single JVM. The implementation of this approach is called VMVM (Virtual Machine in the Virtual Machine, pronounced "vroom vroom"). In addition, simple setup and tear-down resource management methods designed for sequential execution lead to conflicts when the resources are accessed concurrently. So, the second approach, virtualized unit test virtualization, isolates external dependencies such as files and network ports while long-running tests execute in parallel. For this, the system distributes testing jobs in round-robin manner among OS-level virtual machines. The result is, on average, a 51 percent speedup of application build times. The implementation of this approach is called VMVMVM (Virtual Machine in a Virtual Machine on a Virtual Machine "vroom vroom vroom"). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An empirical study of the time and effort for release stabilization on Linux and Chrome found that small teams controlled the stabilization effort, few changes were reverted, and the original developer didn't do much of the rework. Despite regular rapid release cycles, a rush period occurred before release stabilization, and stabilization periods could vary up to 10 days. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Continuous delivery and deployment are dramatically shortening release cycles from months to hours. Cloud applications with high-frequency releases often rely heavily on automated tools and cloud infrastructure APIs to deploy new software versions. The authors report on reliability issues and how these tools and APIs contribute to them. They also analyze the trade-offs between using heavily baked and lightly baked virtual-image approaches, on the basis of experiments with Amazon Web Service OpsWorks APIs and the Chef configuration management tool. Finally, they propose error-handling practices for continuous-delivery facilities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

System operations (such as deployment, upgrade, and reconfiguration) for cloud applications are failure prone. These failures occur because these operations are performed through cloud APIs provided by cloud providers and because cloud APIs, in turn, are failure prone. Researchers have explored the characteristics of cloud APIs using Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) as a testbed and have devised mechanisms to improve cloud API performance. Specifically, mining the Amazon EC2 discussion forum revealed that 45 percent of complaints referred to cloud API timing failures. A series of experiments on cloud API timing behavior showed that cloud APIs have a long-tail distribution. A proposed cloud API wrapper implements mechanisms to avoid long tails. In experiments, this wrapper largely removed long tails, compared with the unwrapped APIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many smartphone applications' smart services are realized in a way that wastes energy or degrades performance, seriously affecting the user experience. What's worse, developers lack powerful tools to combat such problems, curbing the growth of Internet-based mobile computing. Research communities and industries have issued a strong call for effective techniques to diagnose energy and performance bugs in smartphone applications. This article describes bug characteristics, discusses diagnostic challenges, and reviews state-of-the-art diagnostic techniques. A case study shows how a representative tool analyzed commercial Android applications and the Samsung Mobile Software Developer's Kit, providing useful diagnostic information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A proposed approach supports the continual construction and evolution of model-based Internetware artifacts by a collective of Internet-connected stakeholders. The key mechanism is incremental graph superimposition (IGS), a refinement of stigmergy, the process that produces collective intelligence in social insects. Employing IGS, a collective of individuals collaboratively and continually construct a collective-level graph by incrementally aggregating the individuals' working results. Each individual can work independently without direct interaction with others, facilitating mass collaboration among a large number of individuals. A conceptual model illustrates the effects of IGS. A Web environment supports IGS-based conceptual-model construction and ongoing case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the huge number of architectural languages that have been proposed in the last two decades, evidence today shows that industry-ready, well-accepted, and recognized languages for producing architecture descriptions are still lacking. This article explores the usability requirements of architectural languages from the perspectives of language definition, language mechanisms, and tool support. With a better understanding of architectural-language requirements, the authors explore the use of model-driven engineering to realize next-generation architectural languages, as well as its limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the Ready-Set-Transfer panel at the 2014 IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, researchers presented their projects to a team of industrial judges, explaining the industrial motivation and describing how they had evaluated their idea's adoption readiness. The projects included FlexiSketch, a collaborative-whiteboard sketching tool; the Collaborative Creativity Canvas, which replaces requirements negotiation with a lively cocreation process; and Archie, which detects and visualizes architectural decisions in code. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/6RNYVVWrJAQ is an audio podcast in which author Jane Cleland-Huang provides an audio recording of the Requirements column,in which she discusses the Ready-Set-Transfer panel at the 2014 IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A meta-analysis indicated that some areas of computer science research are subject to researcher bias. However, rather than mistrust all scientific research, researchers should examine research to determine its validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Programmers have found creative ways around programming rules. However, such tactics have a cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software has enabled the use of mobile money by farmers and significantly benefited Tanzanian agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seven research leaders in software engineering for Internet computing present their viewpoints on important issues that will shape this field's future. They discuss opportunities and challenges for the shifting software paradigm; stepping outside the comfort zone to revisit issues such as software correctness; improving Internet software dependability and programmability; addressing software engineering issues for the Internet of Things; exploring relationships among the Internet of Things, people, and software services; supporting a participatory culture of software development; and rethinking logging in online services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web application development benefits massively from modular architectures and reuse. This excellent software engineering practice is also the source of a new form of monoculture in application-level code, which creates a potential risk for dependability. Researchers propose using software diversification in multiple components of Web applications to reconcile the tension between reuse and dependability. This article identifies key enablers for the effective diversification of software, especially at the application-code level. It's possible to combine different software diversification strategies, from deploying different vendor solutions to fine-grained code transformations, to provide different forms of protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Future Internet research promotes the production of a distributed-computing environment that will be increasingly surrounded by a virtually infinite number of software services that can be composed to meet user needs. Services will be increasingly active entities that, communicating peer-to-peer, can proactively make decisions and autonomously perform tasks. Service choreography is a form of decentralized service composition that describes peer-to-peer message exchanges among participant services from a global perspective. In a distributed setting, obtaining the coordination logic required to realize a choreography is nontrivial and error prone. So, automatic support for realizing choreographies is needed. For this purpose, researchers developed a choreography synthesis tool. The Web extra at http://www.di.univaq.it/marco.autili/synthesis/shortdemo/demo.htm is a short demonstration of CHOReOSynt, a choreography synthesis tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) has the strong potential to support a human society interacting more symbiotically with its physical environment. Indeed, the emergence of tiny devices that sense environmental cues and trigger actuators after consulting logic and human preferences promises a more environmentally aware and less wasteful society. However, the IoT inherently challenges software development processes, particularly techniques for ensuring software reliability. Researchers have developed debugging tools for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which can be viewed as the enablers of perception in the IoT. These tools gather run-time information on individual sensor node executions and node interactions and then compress that information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author considers what it takes to develop truly reliable software systems, and what the role is of program verification in all this. One problem he focuses on is the difficulty of writing good specifications, particularly in making sure that those specifications are complete. Reality can be surprisingly good in showing that our painfully constructed software design requirements are incomplete or even incorrect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This column discusses architectural descriptions and the process of representing and communicating designs and how UML is useful when creating architectural descriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forrest Shull writes his final column as IEEE Software editor in chief; outlining the magazine's accomplishments during his four-year tenure; introducing his successor, Diomidis Spinellis; and discussing the success of Software Experts Summit 2014 in Bangalore, India. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/yhBsX8OHqhY is a video overview of the multimedia content from past issues of IEEE Software and Computer magazines showing the endless possibilites that IEEE Computer Society multimedia affords. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating functional software size is the key input for building software models. Unlike direct effort estimates, software size estimation gives a measure of the software product itself and can be used to build objective estimation models for predicting project effort and duration, estimating defects for quality and service cost predictions, and obtaining software development productivity ratios. Although maintenance dominates software projects, the underlying technologies for estimation have been rather poorly described to date. Here, the authors examine estimation technologies based on the COSMIC (Common Software Measurement International Consortium) method as it's applied to maintenance projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying the concept of crosscutting concerns to dataflow modeling can help software practitioners better deal with the complexity of business applications and produce more complete and compact dataflow diagrams in the form of a concept lattice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenges of eliciting requirements in global projects can be addressed through deliberate up-front planning processes that take into consideration, people, technology, meeting locations, communication, workflow processes, and documentation needs. The authors present a practical approach to support this planning process. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/eLk66zSFS6c is an audio podcast in which author Jane Cleland-Huang provides an audio recording of the Requirements column, coauthored with Paula Laurent, in which she discusses how the challenges of eliciting requirements in global projects can be addressed through deliberate upfront planning processes that take into consideration people, technology, meeting locations, communication, workflow processes, and documentation needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decades, today, and in the future, business contexts in software organizations and the common ways of developing software are changing dramatically. Formation of teams in distributed environments, virtual or not, calls for new ways of working across geographic, temporal, and cultural boundaries. This, however, also requires effective leadership approaches enabled through systems, processes, technology, and people. The authors pulled together this special issue to provide some ideas and strategies for practitioners and open questions for researchers. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/YxE6S6MM3Ws is an audio recording in which author IEEE Software Multimedia Editor Davide Falessi interviews Laurence Tratt and Adam Welc, guest editors of the magazine's September/October 2014 issue, about the field of programming languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software quality management (SQM) must effectively deploy resources for quality assurance activities to reflect the achieved product quality. So, quality managers should exploit their creative freedom to direct their courses of action within the economic constraints. Effective Quality Management can increase SQM effectiveness. This value- and risk-based method is applicable for software developers, their customers, and users. This is due to its product function orientation and the independence of the software development procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International software firms face particular software process challenges in terms of competing interests and process variations across organizational units and geographical sites. To address this, Ericsson developers applied a general industrial approach to mass customization that focused on four key tactics: adaptive, cosmetic, transparent, and collaborative mass customization. On the basis of this experience, they discovered the strengths, weaknesses, and best deployment conditions for each tactic, and learned several lessons along the way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Credit Suisse has been an adopter of service oriented architecture (SOA) principles and patterns since the beginnings of this architectural style, even before the term appeared. The authors reflect on the financial institution's journey from using tightly integrated mainframe programs to open SOA services, emphasizing the importance of interface contracts and service governance in corporate IT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's world, many companies turn to open source projects as a method to increase productivity and innovation. A major challenge with managing this kind of development is the onboarding of new developers into the virtual teams that drive such projects. There's little guidance on how to initiate new members into such teams and how to overcome the learning curve. This case study on open source software projects shows that mentoring can have a significant impact on onboarding new members into virtual software development teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]