Search

Productivity is a key element in organizational management. Although it can be measured at different levels (country, sector, organization ...) this research focuses on productivity at the job level. The aim of this paper is to obtain an overview of the state of the art in productivity measurement in software engineering, including the inputs and outputs of the production process used for this measurement at the job level in the workplace. To do so, a systematic literature review protocol was adapted from literature review protocol standards, and subsequently carried out. The objective is to assess the current inputs and outputs present in the literature in order to create new productivity measures for software practitioners. This paper reveals that two different measures are used to assess software engineering professionals: traditional SLOC/Time and planning projects units per time unit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Testing is necessary to ensure the quality of web services that are loosely coupled, dynamic bound and integrated through standard protocols. Exhaustive testing of web services is usually impossible due to unavailable source code, diversified user requirements and large number of possible service combinations delivered by the open platform. This paper proposes a risk-based approach for selecting and prioritizing test cases for testing service-based systems. We specially address the problem in the context of semantic web services. Semantic web services introduce semantics to service integration and interoperation using ontology models and specifications. Semantic errors are considered more difficult to detect than syntactic errors. Due to the complexity of conceptual uniformity, it is hard to ensure the completeness, consistency and unified quality of ontology model. A failure of the semantic service-based software may result from many factors such as misused data, unsuccessful service binding, and unexpected usage scenarios. This work analyzes the two factors of risk estimation: failure probability and importance, from three aspects: ontology data, service and composite service. With this approach, test cases are associated to semantic features, and are scheduled based on the risks of their target features. Risk assessment is used to control the process of Web Services progressive group testing, including test case ranking, test case selection and service ruling out. This paper discusses the control architecture and adaptive measurement mechanism for adaptive group testing. As a statistical testing technique, the proposed approach aims to detect, as early as possible, the problems with highest impact on the users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing and maintaining reliable object-oriented software requires a precise understanding of how individual classes must be used. Unfortunately, for many systems, especially those that are large, the available documentation is inadequate. Developers are left with incomplete information concerning the allowable set of call sequences that each class can accommodate. Techniques for reverse engineering this information and presenting it to developers in an intellectually scalable manner are critical. In this paper, we present four contributions to address this challenge. First, we describe a runtime trace collection system for large C++ applications. Second, we present a methodology for reverse engineering interface protocols from collected trace data. Third, we present a scalable, tunable algorithm for generating compact specifications of these protocols. Finally, we present a detailed case study involving the Mozilla Necko library. We consider popular applications in common use constructed using this library. The results are promising both in terms of the performance of the approach and the utility of the identified protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Services as abstractions of functionality have enabled the engineering of systems that support well-defined processes with relative ease. This success leads to aspirations for achieving greater complexity with the service-oriented paradigm. In particular, we address the case where the process definition is tailored differently in each instantiation based on negotiations among stakeholders of a socio-technical context. For such cases the process definition invariably crosscuts the architecture of a process-support system that composes available services. However, use of pre-defined process variations may bias the tailoring effort and thus, act against the original motivation of having a flexible definition. On the other hand, the characteristics of process complexity and tailorability introduce differences between stakeholder understanding of the process activities and their manifestation in tool support. We encounter these issues while developing a service-oriented process-support system for a security Certification and Accreditation (C&A) process. In this paper, we present our approach to effectively separate the C&A process definition from the architecture of its process-support system. We employ ontological modeling techniques to explicitly model the process definition and later expose it as a service to provide weaving rules for dynamically composing the process-support system architecture at runtime. The feasibility of our approach has been demonstrated in the design of a service-oriented architecture for a prototype workbench that supports the Department of Defense Certification and Accreditation Process (DITSCAP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service-Orientated Computing (SOC) has become a main trend in software engineering that promotes the construction of applications based on the notion of services. SOC has recently attracted the researchers' attention and has been adopted industry-wide. However, service composition that enables one to aggregate existing services into a new composite service is still a highly complex and critical task in service-oriented technology. To enhance availability of composite services, we propose a discovery-based service composition framework to better integrate component services in both static and dynamic manner, including (1) to devise a notion of service availability especially for composition; (2) to develop a dynamic service composition (DSC) pattern for addressing the issues of service availability; and (3) to extend Contract Net Protocol (ECNP) to coordinate service discovery, composition and invocation based on the composite pattern. The main benefit of the proposed approach is better availability through attaching multiple candidate services for future binding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a method of automating invariant verification of behavioral specifications, which are algebraic specifications of abstract machines. The proposed method is based on fixed-point computation, which is one of the standard techniques for automatic (invariant) verification. The proposed method has some notable features. Among them are as follow: (1) the method finds and uses as lemmas state predicates whose invariant proofs may (even mutually) depend on other state predicates whose invariant proofs may not be completed, and (2) the method finds a counterexample showing that an abstract machine does not satisfy an invariant property if any, which does not need to make the (reachable) state space of the abstract machine finite. Crème is a tool based on the proposed method. We also report on two case studies in which (1) Crème proves fully automatically that the NSLPK authentication protocol satisfies the secrecy property and (2) Crème finds a counterexample showing that the NSPK authentication protocol does not satisfy the secrecy property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current desktop environments provide weak support for carrying out complex user-oriented tasks. Although individual applications are becoming increasingly sophisticated and feature-rich, users must map their high-level goals to the low-level operational vocabulary of applications, and deal with a myriad of routine tasks (such as keeping up with email, keeping calendars and websites up-to-date, etc.). An alternative vision is that of a personal cognitive assistant. Like a good secretary, such an assistant would help users accomplish their high-level goals, coordinating the use of multiple applications, automatically handling routine tasks, and, most importantly, adapting to the individual needs of a user over time. In this paper we describe the architecture and its implementation for a personal cognitive assistant called RADAR. Key features include. (a) extensibility through the use of a plug-in agent architecture. (b) transparent integration with legacy applications and data of today's desktop environments, and. (c) extensive use of learning so that the environment adapts to the individual user over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ISO and IEC have jointly developed two Formal Description Techniques (FDTs) for specifying distributed real time systems such as computer/telecommunications protocols. These are Lotos and Estelle. In this paper, a formal method for automated transformation of a Lotos specification to an Estelle specification is presented. The method is applicable to various Lotos specification styles and to various communications protocols of ISO OSI layers. Our method has applications in conformance testing of such systems and building common semantic model for the various FDTs. In this paper, we develop an algorithm for constructing a 'Data Oriented'-Restricted Behavior Tree T that represent both the control flow aspects and the data flow aspects of the system. Then, we develop an algorithm for constructing the Estelle specifications from T. A minimization rule is also developed to optimize the size of the Estelle specification by reducing both the number of states and the number of transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ubiquitous Bio-Information Computing (UBIC2) project aims to disseminate protocols and software packages to facilitate the development of heterogeneous bio-information computing units that are interoperable and may run distributedly. UBIC2 specifies biological data in XML formats and queries data using XQuery. The UBIC2 programming library provides interfaces for integrating, retrieving, and manipulating heterogeneous biological data. Interoperability is achieved via Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) based web services. The documents and software packages of UBIC2 are available at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a method for modeling of communication protocols using G-Nets — an object-based Petri net formalism. Our approach focuses on specification of one entity in one node at one time, with the analysis that allows consideration of other layers and nodes in addition to module analysis. We extend G-Nets by the notion of timers, which aids the construction of protocol software models. Our method prevents some types of potential deadlocks and livelocks from being introduced into the produced net models. We present certain net synthesis rules to prevent some potential design errors by including error cases in the model. Thus, our node (site) interplay modeling includes cases in which a message may arrive corrupted or can be lost entirely before it would get to its destination node. Also, since our models have deadlock-preserving skeletons, the verification of global deadlock non-existence can be performed on the less complex skeleton rather than on the full G-Net model. Our analysis method discovers some deadlocks plus other unacceptable markings, which do not allow restoration of the initial state. Finding potential livelocks or overspecification is also a part of the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]