Two studies of factors affecting the programming performance of first- and second year Computer Science students were conducted. In one study students used GIL, a simple application framework, for their programming assignments in a second-semester programming course. Improvements in student performance were realized. In the other study, students submitted detailed logs of how time was spent on projects, along with their programs. Software metrics were computed on the students' source code. Correlations between student performance and the log data and software metric data were sought. No significant indicators of performance were found, even with factors that are commonly expected to indicate performance. However, results from previous research concerning variations in individual programmer performance and relationships between software metrics were obtained. / Master of Science

Uncovering the metrics and procedures employed by an autonomous networking system is an important problem with applications in instrumentation, traffic engineering, and game-theoretic studies of multi-agent environments. This thesis presents a method for utilizing inverse reinforcement learning (IRL)techniques for the purpose of discovering a composite metric used by a dynamic routing algorithm on an Internet Protocol (IP) network. The network and routing algorithm are modeled as a reinforcement learning (RL) agent and a Markov decision process (MDP). The problem of routing metric discovery is then posed as a problem of recovering the reward function, given observed optimal behavior. We show that this approach is empirically suited for determining the relative contributions of factors that constitute a composite metric. Experimental results for many classes of randomly generated networks are presented. / Master of Science

This study conducted a series of road tests in the regular fleet operations of a revenue service to better understand the relationship between vehicle seat design and driver fatigue, improve two newly proposed objective methods for evaluating driver fatigue, and provide design guidelines for evaluating and improving vehicle seat characteristics in terms of driver fatigue. Each driver completed a test session on two seat cushions - one a polyurethane foam cushion and one an air-inflated cushion. Objective measurements of pressure distribution were taken throughout each test session, while subjective measurements were collected using surveys taken at one-hour intervals. Based on these results, we find that the air-inflated seat cushion has advantages in terms of subjective measures of comfort, support, and fatigue. We show that the objective measure aPcrms highlights characteristic differences between seat cushions, as the air-inflated seat cushion provides less area in high pressure regions, thus occluding less blood flow to tissue in the seated area. While we were unable to effectively assess the validity of the proposed measures or improve them further, the characteristic difference between seat cushions is not highlighted by using previously existing objective measures. This implies that aPcrms is a more useful measure and should be considered when evaluating the subjective quality of seat cushion designs under dynamic conditions, such as those existing in commercial truck driving. / Master of Science

Authors: Mikaela Andersson & Louise Petersson Suporvisor: Dan Halvarsson Examiner: Åsa Devine Title: Lost in translation - A qualitative study regarding the translation process of social media activities Keywords: Social media, Translation process, KPIs, Qualitative metrics, Quantitative metrics, Data collection, Data analysis Background: Social media as marketing tools have created many opportunities for marketers and companies that want to increase the social media use. However, the vast amount of data has generated many question marks, so there is a great need to understand how the translation process of social media activities is proceeding to have the ability to understand the effectiveness of the activities. Purpose: The purpose is to describe the translation process regarding the evaluation of social media activities. Research Question: How is the translation process described concerning social media activities? Methodology: The research is founded upon a qualitative approach with a descriptive purpose. It includes multiple-case studies and the data was collected through six semi-structured interviews. The result was derived by descriptions, categorizations and combination of the data. Conclusion: Despite having a fairly stable process including KPIs, metrics, data collection and analysis, there is no general way of translating social media indicators. Every translation process is dependent upon whom the client is, and what the objectives are, so it is difficult to describe the process in detail. However, the above-mentioned process can be viewed as an overall approach.

Our project presents the research on visualization of statistical contents. Here wewill introduce the concepts of visualization, software quality metrics andproposed visualization technique (line chart). Our aim to study the existingvisualization techniques for visualization of software metrics and then proposedthe visualization approach that is more time efficient and easy to perceive byviewer.In this project, we focus on the practical aspects of visualization of multipleprojects with respect to the versions and metrics. This project also gives animplementation of proposed visualization techniques of software metrics. In thisresearch based work, we have to compare practically the proposed visualizationapproaches. We will discuss the software development life cycle of our proposedvisualization system, and we will also describe the complete softwareimplementation of implemented software.

A measurement framework is presented for component oriented (CO) software systems. Fundamental concepts in component orientation are defined. The factors that influence CO systems&rsquo / structural complexity are identified. Metrics quantifying and characterizing these factors are defined. A set of properties that a CO complexity metric must satisfy are defined. Metrics are evaluated first using the set of properties defined in this thesis and also using the set of properties defined by Tian and Zelkowitz in [84]. Evaluation results revealed that metrics satisfy all properties in both sets. Empirical validation of metrics is performed using data collected from graduate students&rsquo / projects. Validation results revealed that CO complexity metrics can be used as predictors of development effort, Design effort, integration effort (characterizing system integrabiltiy), correction effort (characterizing system maintainability), function points count (characterizing system functionality), and programmer productivity. An Automated metrics collection tool is implemented and integrated with a dedicated CO modeling tool. The metrics collection tool automatically collects complexity metrics from system models and performs prediction estimations accordingly.

<p>Our project presents the research on visualization of statistical contents. Here wewill introduce the concepts of visualization, software quality metrics andproposed visualization technique (line chart). Our aim to study the existingvisualization techniques for visualization of software metrics and then proposedthe visualization approach that is more time efficient and easy to perceive byviewer.In this project, we focus on the practical aspects of visualization of multipleprojects with respect to the versions and metrics. This project also gives animplementation of proposed visualization techniques of software metrics. In thisresearch based work, we have to compare practically the proposed visualizationapproaches. We will discuss the software development life cycle of our proposedvisualization system, and we will also describe the complete softwareimplementation of implemented software.</p>

Software tends to decline in quality over time, causing development and maintenance costs to rise. However, by measuring, tracking, and controlling quality during the lifetime of a software product, its technical debt can be held in check, reducing total cost of ownership. The measurement of quality faces challenges due to disagreement in the meaning of software quality, the inability to directly measure quality factors, and the lack of measurement practice in the software industry. This report addresses these challenges through both a literature survey, a metrics derivation process, and a survey of professional software developers. Definitions of software quality from the literature are presented and evaluated with responses from software professionals. A goal, question, metric process is used to derive quality-targeted metrics tracing back to a set of seven code-quality subgoals, while a survey to software professionals shows that despite agreement that metrics and metric visualizations would be useful for improving software quality, the techniques are underutilized in practice. / text

Software security failures are common and the problem is growing. A vulnerability is a weakness in the software that, when exploited, causes a security failure. It is difficult to detect vulnerabilities until they manifest themselves as security failures in the operational stage of the software, because security concerns are often not addressed or known sufficiently early during the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Complexity, coupling, and cohesion (CCC) related software metrics can be measured during the early phases of software development such as design or coding. Although these metrics have been successfully employed to indicate software faults in general, the relationships between CCC metrics and vulnerabilities have not been extensively investigated yet. If empirical relationships can be discovered between CCC metrics and vulnerabilities, these metrics could aid software developers to take proactive actions against potential vulnerabilities in software. In this thesis, we investigate whether CCC metrics can be utilized as early indicators of software vulnerabilities. We conduct an extensive case study on several releases of Mozilla Firefox to provide empirical evidence on how vulnerabilities are related to complexity, coupling, and cohesion. We mine the vulnerability databases, bug databases, and version archives of Mozilla Firefox to map vulnerabilities to software entities. It is found that some of the CCC metrics are correlated to vulnerabilities at a statistically significant level. Since different metrics are available at different development phases, we further examine the correlations to determine which level (design or code) of CCC metrics are better indicators of vulnerabilities. We also observe that the correlation patterns are stable across multiple releases. These observations imply that the metrics can be dependably used as early indicators of vulnerabilities in software. We then present a framework to automatically predict vulnerabilities based on CCC metrics. To build vulnerability predictors, we consider four alternative data mining and statistical techniques – C4.5 Decision Tree, Random Forests, Logistic Regression, and Naïve-Bayes – and compare their prediction performances. We are able to predict majority of the vulnerability-prone files in Mozilla Firefox, with tolerable false positive rates. Moreover, the predictors built from the past releases can reliably predict the likelihood of having vulnerabilities in future releases. The experimental results indicate that structural information from the non-security realm such as complexity, coupling, and cohesion are useful in vulnerability prediction. / Thesis (Master, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-24 17:31:36.581

Made available in DSpace on 2016-12-01T19:18:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 124437.pdf: 5106566 bytes, checksum: 2ff36894d054fda53bcad8db5cdda922 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-09-22 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / O cliente é uma peça cada vez mais central na vida das organizações. Em mercados maduros, a retenção de clientes é claramente o objetivo mais importante, no entanto, a aquisição de clientes continua sendo fundamental para empresas como startups ou aquelas que estão entrando em um novo ambiente geográfico. Em casos onde se depende da captação de clientes, falhar neste processo pode custar a perda do momento do mercado ou até mesmo a extinção do negócio. Este trabalho visa apoiar a evolução deste tipo de organização, orientando o uso de métricas de venda rumo a melhoraria constante do processo de captação de clientes. Para chegar a estas conclusões, este trabalho inicia com uma revisão dos construtos relacionados ao marketing e a importância de sua avaliação, métricas de marketing, métricas de venda e captação de clientes. Foram perseguidos objetivos específicos que tratam de mapeamento, identificação de necessidades, elaboração de um conjunto de métricas e orientação de uso. O resultado foi a definição e a compreensão do uso de cinco métricas que melhoram da captação de clientes. O trabalho contribui como uma referência para que as empresas captem mais e melhores clientes, através da estruturação de métricas e uso mais qualificado das informações coletadas.