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This paper presents a methodology for Mining Association Rules from Code (MARC), aiming at capturing program structure, facilitating system understanding and supporting software management. MARC groups program entities (paragraphs or statements) based on similarities, such as variable use, data types and procedure calls. It comprises three stages: code parsing/analysis, association rule mining and rule grouping. Code is parsed to populate a database with records and respective attributes. Association rules are then extracted from this database and subsequently processed to abstract programs into groups containing interrelated entities. Entities are then grouped together if their attributes participate to common rules. This abstraction is performed at the program level or even the paragraph level, in contrast to other approaches that work at the system level. Groups can then be visualised as collections of interrelated entities. The methodology was evaluated using real-life COBOL programs. Results showed that the methodology facilitates program comprehension by using source code only, where domain knowledge and documentation are either unavailable or unreliable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Code clones are created when a developer duplicates a code fragment to reuse existing functionalities. Mitigating clones by refactoring them helps ease the long-term maintenance of large software systems. However, refactoring can introduce an additional cost. Prior work also suggest that refactoring all clones can be counterproductive since clones may live in a system for a short duration. Hence, it is beneficial to determine in advance whether a newly-introduced clone will be short-lived or long-lived to plan the most effective use of resources. In this work, we perform an empirical study on six open source Java systems to better understand the life expectancy of clones. We find that a large number of clones (i.e., 30% to 87%) lived in the systems for a short duration. Moreover, we find that although short-lived clones were changed more frequently than long-lived clones throughout their lifetime, short-lived clones were consistently changed with their siblings less often than long-lived clones. Furthermore, we build random forest classifiers in order to determine the life expectancy of a newly-introduced clone (i.e., whether a clone will be short-lived or long-lived). Our empirical results show that our random forest classifiers can determine the life expectancy of a newly-introduced clone with an average AUC of 0.63 to 0.92. We also find that the churn made to the methods containing a newly-introduced clone, the complexity and size of the methods containing the newly-introduced clone are highly influential in determining whether the newly-introduced clone will be short-lived. Furthermore, the size of a newly-introduced clone shares a positive relationship with the likelihood that the newly-introduced clone will be short-lived. Our results suggest that, to improve the efficiency of clone management efforts, practitioners can leverage our classifiers and insights in order to determine whether a newly-introduced clone will be short-lived or long-lived to plan the most effective use of their clone management resources in advance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the achievements of the H2020 project INDIGO-DataCloud. The project has provided e-infrastructures with tools, applications and cloud framework enhancements to manage the demanding requirements of scientific communities, either locally or through enhanced interfaces. The middleware developed allows to federate hybrid resources, to easily write, port and run scientific applications to the cloud. In particular, we have extended existing PaaS (Platform as a Service) solutions, allowing public and private e-infrastructures, including those provided by EGI, EUDAT, and Helix Nebula, to integrate their existing services and make them available through AAI services compliant with GEANT interfederation policies, thus guaranteeing transparency and trust in the provisioning of such services. Our middleware facilitates the execution of applications using containers on Cloud and Grid based infrastructures, as well as on HPC clusters. Our developments are freely downloadable as open source components, and are already being integrated into many scientific applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thinking about improving the management of software development in software firms has been dominated by one approach: the capability maturity model (CMM) devised and administered at Carnegie Mellon University. Although widely known and used, there are a number of well-understood difficulties and limitations with this approach. This article examines, through the lens of modern management theory, the governing assumptions about management and organizational improvement behind the CMM approach. It characterizes this assumption set as the industry model of software management improvement. We take a dialectic approach to propose antithetical assumptions and a configuration approach to weave these different assumptions into alternative assumption platforms: the knowledge model and the network model. These two models, we suggest, might be better foundations for some types of software managements in a world responding to globalization and rapid technology change. If these assumption platforms were used to underpin improvements in software management, we ask, what kinds of approaches would they lead to? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, many companies have realized that collaboration with a thriving user or developer community is a major factor in creating innovative technology driven by market demand. As a result, businesses have sought ways to stimulate contributions from developers outside their corporate walls, and integrate external developers into their development process. To support software companies in this process, this paper presents an empirical study on the contribution management processes of two major, successful, open source software ecosystems. We contrast a for-profit ( ANDROID) system having a hybrid contribution style, with a not-for-profit ( LINUX kernel) system having an open contribution style. To guide our comparisons, we base our analysis on a conceptual model of contribution management that we derived from a total of seven major open-source software systems. A quantitative comparison based on data mined from the ANDROID code review system and the LINUX kernel code review mailing lists shows that both projects have significantly different contribution management styles, suited to their respective market goals, but with individual advantages and disadvantages that are important for practitioners. Contribution management is a real-world problem that has received very little attention from the research community so far. Both studied systems ( LINUX and ANDROID) employ different strategies and techniques for managing contributions, and both approaches are valuable examples for practitioners. Each approach has specific advantages and disadvantages that need to be carefully evaluated by practitioners when adopting a contribution management process in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method of preparation of the test data that provides a specified level of coverage of the requirements for functional testing is proposed. The application of the method simplifies the maintenance of the project life cycle data configuration, which includes the requirements, source code, and generated tests, in a consistent state. A classification of software defects is introduced. An approach to formalization of the analysis requirement and implementation of the tested system based on the presentation of a partition into classes of equivalency in the form of a logic equation system is proposed. An approximate method of solving the acquired equations is proposed. The applicability of the method in real processes of industrial projects is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The environment in which software projects are managed has evolved dramatically in recent years. This evolution has been driven by an extraordinary increase in network connectivity and extensive use of contractors for system development, raising issues of interoperability, security, ownership, and intellectual property rights. Project managers face the ongoing challenge of creating an orderly incremental development process, which often proceeds for years, in this complex environment. At the same time, the dependency of organizations, their suppliers, and their customers on complex, large-scale information systems is increasing at an astonishing rate, to the point that conduct of business operations is virtually impossible if these systems are compromised. As a result, survivability is receiving increasing attention as a key property of critical systems. Survivability is the capability of a system to fulfill its mission, in a timely manner, in the presence of attacks, failures, or accidents. Given the severe consequences of system failure, it is clear that many more organizations should be, and at present are not, concerned with survivability issues. However, when survivability is added to the project management equation, software life cycles can look rather different from the traditional life-cycle model. In this paper we discuss this changing software project management environment, the impact of system survivability, and life-cycle activities that are tailored to development and evolution of survivable systems. Achieving survivable systems requires that survivability be integrated into project life cycles, and not treated as an add-on property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses that in order to achieve systematic reuse, the technical and non-technical issues must be considered in parallel, and a set of component models should be built from different perspectives. Each of these models gives a specific view of the components so as to satisfy different needs of different persons involved in the enterprise reuse program. Especially, we present a reusable component model - FLP model for reusable component, which describes components from three dimensions (form, level, and presentation) and views components and their relationships from the perspective of process and management. This model determines the sphere of reusable components, the time points of reusing components in the development process, and the needed means to present components in terms of the abstraction level, logic granularity and presentation media. It is the basis on which the management and technical decisions are made. It will be used as the kernel model to initialize and normalize a systematic enterprise reuse program. After the FLP model, the relationships among these different models are discussed. Furthermore, the usage of these models to facilitate the perspective management of enterprise software reuse is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When first formulated in the early seventies, the laws of software evolution were, for a number of reasons, not widely accepted as relevant to software engineering practice. Over the years, however, they have gradually become recognised as providing useful inputs to understanding of the software process. Now eight in number, they have been supplemented by the software uncertainty principle and the FEAST (Feedback, Evolution And Software Technology) hypothesis. Based on all these and on the further results of the FEAST research projects this paper develops and presents some fifty rules for application in software system process planning and management and indicates tools available or that could usefully be developed to support their application. The listing is structured according to the laws that encapsulate the observed phenomena and that lead to the recommendations. Each sublist is preceded by a textual discussion providing at least some of the reasoning that has led to the recommended procedures. The references direct the interested reader to the literature that records observed behaviours, interpretations, models and metrics obtained from industrially evolved systems, and from which the recommendations were derived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a widely accepted paradigm of successful software development, called process oriented software quality management (PSQM). The proponents of PSQM claim that it has a significant impact on some essential parameters of a software producer's competitiveness. However, case studies of some well known software producers reveal a rather different management style. Since the management style is a means to influence the essential parameters of a company's competitiveness, which are influenced by the competitive conditions, two questions arise. 1. Do the investigated software producers employ a different management style by accident or is their management style an appropriate answer to their specific competitive conditions? 2. If their management style is an appropriate answer to their competitive conditions, what is specific about these conditions and about the appropriate management style? It is argued, that their management style is a form of concurrent engineering, which rather conforms the needs of a software producer in a turbulent environment, while PSQM on the other hand rather conforms the needs of a software producer in a placid environment. This means, there is no universal process management and environmental dynamics is a contingency factor to be considered in the configuration of process management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a brief account of contemporary statistical activity in software engineering measurement, with particular reference to the CEC ESPRIT, programme. The report is intended to be of interest to technical and non-technical managerials staff and assumes little prior knowledge of statistics. It is based on work done for the COSMOS project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]