<p>Researchers have developed framework for diagnosis analysis that are called “Model Based Diagnosis Systems”. These systems are very general in scope, covers a wide range of malfunctions uncovering and identifying repair measures. This thesis is an effort to diagnose complex and lengthy static source code. Without executing source code discrepancies can only be identified by finding procedural dependencies.</p><p>With respect to modern programming languages, many software bugs arise due to logical erroneous calculations or miss handling of data structures. Modern Integrated Development Environments (IDE) like Visual Studio, J-Builder and Eclipse etc are strong enough to analyze and parse static text code to identify syntactical and type conversion errors. Some of IDE’s can automatically fix such kind of errors or provide different possible suggestions to developer.</p><p>In this thesis we have analyzed and extracted functional dependencies of source code. This extracted information can increase programmer’s understanding about code when they are extremely large or complex. By modeling this information into a model system, reduces time to debug the code in case of any failure. This increases productivity in terms of software development and in debugger skills as well. The main contribution of this thesis is the use of model based diagnosis techniques on software functional dependency graphs and charts.</p><p>Keywords: Model Based Diagnosis Systems, Integrated Development Environments, Procedural Dependencies, Erroneous calculations, Call graphs, Directed graph markup language.</p>

Test case prioritization techniques schedule test cases for regression testing in an order that increases their ability to meet some performance goal. One performance goal, rate of fault detection, measures how quickly faults are detected within the testing process. The APFD metric had been proposed for measuring the rate of fault detection. This metric applies, however, only in cases in which test costs and fault costs are uniform. In practice, fault costs and test costs are not uniform. For example, some faults which lead to system failures might be more costly than faults which lead to minor errors. Similarly, a test case that runs for several hours is much more costly than a test case that runs for a few seconds. Previous work has thus provided a second, metric APFD[subscript c], for measuring rate of fault detection, that incorporates test costs and fault costs. However, studies of this metric thus far have been limited to abstract distribution models of costs. These distribution models did not represent actual fault costs and test costs for software systems. In this thesis, we describe some practical ways to estimate real fault costs and test costs for software systems, based on operational profiles and test execution timings. Further we define some new cost-cognizant prioritization techniques which focus on the APFD[subscript c] metric. We report results of an empirical study investigating the rate of "units-of-fault-cost-detected-per-unit-test-cost" across various cost-cognizant prioritization techniques and tradeoffs between techniques. The results of our empirical study indicate that cost-cognizant test case prioritization techniques can substantially improve the rate of fault detection of test suites. The results also provide insights into the tradeoffs among various prioritization techniques. For example: (1) techniques incorporating feedback information (information from previous tests) outperformed those without any feedback information; (2) technique effectiveness differed most when faults are relatively difficult to detect; (3) in most cases, technique performance was similar at function and statement level; (4) surprisingly, techniques considering change location did not perform as well as expected. The study also reveals several practical issues that might arise in applying test case prioritization, as well as opportunities for future work. / Graduation date: 2003

Prioritization techniques are used to schedule test cases to execute in a specific order to maximize some objective function. There are a variety of possible objective functions, such as a function that measures how quickly faults can be detected within the testing process, or a function that measures how fast coverage of the program can be increased. In this paper, we describe several test case prioritization techniques, and empirical studies performed to investigate their relative abilities to improve how quickly faults can be detected by test suites. An improved rate of fault detection during regression testing can provide faster feedback about a system under regression test and let debuggers begin their work earlier than might otherwise be possible. The results of our studies indicate that test case prioritization techniques can substantially improve the rate of fault detection of test suites. The results also provide insights into the tradeoff's among various prioritization techniques. / Graduation date: 2000

In March 1991 the World Intellectual Property Organization held an international symposium attended primarily by lawyers, to discuss the questions that artificial intelligence poses for intellectual property law (i.e., copyright and patents). This is an edited version of a talk presented there, which argues that AI poses few problems in the near term and that almost all the truly challenging issues arise instead from software in general. The talk was an attempt to bridge the gap between the legal community and the software community, to explain why existing concepts and categories in intellectual property law present such difficult problems for software, and why software as a technology breaks several important assumptions underlying intellectual property law.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--West Virginia University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 133 p. : ill. (some col.). Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-90).

Project Management is the primary key to successful software development. In 1995 Caper Jones stated that the failure or cancellation rate of large software systems was over 20% in his article on patterns of large software systems. More than two thirds of the projects fail due to improper management of skills, activities, and personnel. One main reason is that software is not a tangible entity and is hard to visualize and hence to monitor. A manager has to be skilled in different CASE tools and technologies to track and manage a software development process successfully. The volume of results produced by these CASE tools is so huge that a high level manager cannot look into all the details. He has to get a high level picture of the project, to know where the project is heading, and if needed, then look into the finer level details by drilling down to locate and correct problems. The objective of this thesis is to build an Advanced Charting System (ACS), which would act as a companion to PAMPA 2 (Project Attribute Monitoring and Prediction Associate) and help a manager visualize the state of a software project over a standard World Wide Web browser. The PAMPA 2 ACS will be responsible for visualizing and tracking of resources, tasks, schedules and milestones of a software project described in the plan. PAMPA 2 ACS will have the ability to depict the status of the project through a variety of graphs and charts. PAMPA 2 ACS implements a novel charting technique called as DOT Chart to track the processes and activities of a software project. PAMPA 2 ACS provides a multilevel view of the project status. PAMPA 2 ACS will be able to track any arbitrary plan starting from a collapsed / concise view of a whole project. This can be further drilled down to the lowest level of detail. The status can be viewed at the project version level, plan and workbreakdown levels, process, sub process, and activity level. Among all the process models, the DOT charts can be applied effectively to spiral process model where each spiral represents a project version.

The practice of literate programming is not widespread because existing literate programming systems have some undesirable characteristics such as programming language and text processor dependence and lack of flexible tools for viewing and manipulation of the source file. This dissertation describes the literate programming system AOPS (Abstraction Oriented Programming System) which addresses both of these problems. AOPS is programming language and text processor independent literate programming system. AOPS tools include a hypertext browser, a lister with the ability to select what is presented and what is suppressed, and a filter to extract the program code from the AOPS source file. AOPS introduces the notion of a phantom abstraction that enhances the understandability of the literate program and when used in conjunction with the browser greatly extends the capabilities of AOPS. We also discuss how the design of AOPS supports extension of the concept of literate programming to encompass the entire software life cycle. Finally we describe an experiment which showed that literate programs contain more documentation than traditional programs. / Graduation date: 1993

Open source software is becoming a credible and realistic alternative to proprietary software in municipalities. The aim of this thesis is to explore the strategies and logical issues that inspire and motivate municipalities to migrate into or integrate use of open source software. The research approach used in the study is an explorative, comparative case study performed in the three Swedish municipalities of Falköping, Alingsås and Kungälv, which considers implementation and use of OpenOffice in administration. The methodologies used in the case study were in-depth interviews with Chief Information Officers in the municipalities and document analysis. The interviews were combined with the tool of SWOTanalysis to further focus on the reasons for choosing OpenOffice as an application program. There is certainly not a unique strategy to migrate into or integrate use of Free/Open Source Software. Since each municipality is autonomous in the process of decision-making, various strategic planning or guidelines are use in different municipalities. In the municipalities of Alingsås and Kungälv the strategic planning is used for leading the processes of implementation of new software applications. However, in Falköping municipality, the procedures are guided by a set of guidelines. The lower Total Cost of Ownership and the Free/Open Source Software’s freedoms besides many other advantages, make the municipalities stimulated to migrate into use of OpenOffice suite. In contrast, there are some drawbacks and barriers, such as shortage of internal and external standardization and lack of user knowledge and familiarity, which demotivate the municipalities to take this decision. To lower costs of IT administration seems to be the most significant factor in motivating municipalities to migrate into use of OpenOffice. More research is needed in order to find out the consequences of implementation of OpenOffice in municipalities as well as to investigate if Total Cost of Ownership really is decreased by the use of Open Office.

The cloning of code is controversial as a development practice. Empirical studies on the long-term effects of cloning on software quality and maintainability have produced mixed results. Some studies have found that cloning has a negative impact on code readability, bug propagation, and the presence of cloning may indicate wider problems in software design and management. At the same time, other studies have found that cloned code is less likely to have defects, and thus is arguably more stable, better designed, and better maintained. These results suggest that the effect of cloning on software quality and maintainability may be determinable only on a case-by-case basis, and this only aggravates the challenge of establishing a principled framework of clone management and understanding. This thesis aims to improve the understanding and management of clones within software systems. There are two main contributions. First, we have conducted an empirical study on cloning in one of the major device drivers families of the Linux kernel. Different from many previous empirical studies on cloning, we incorporate the knowledge about the development style, and the architecture of the subject system into our study; our findings address the evolution of clones; we have also found that the presence of cloning is a strong predictor (87\% accuracy) of one aspect of underlying hardware similarity when compared to a vendor-based model (55\% accuracy) and a randomly chosen model (9\% accuracy). The effectiveness of using the presence of cloning to infer high-level similarity suggests a new perspective of using cloning information to assist program comprehension, aspect mining, and software product-line engineering. Second, we have devised a triage-oriented taxonomy of clones to aid developers in prioritizing which kinds of clones are most likely to be problematic and require attention; a preliminary validation of the utility of this taxonomy has been performed against a large open source system. The cloning-based software quality assurance (QA) framework based on our taxonomy adds a new dimension to traditional software QA processes; by exploiting the clone detection results within a guided framework, the developer is able to evaluate which instances of cloning are most likely to require urgent attention.

Abstract The objective of this research is to develop a greater understanding of the career development of software developers in different generations. This research applies qualitative method by using intensive interviews to form the propositions and put forward the proposals. There are two groups, the first group is referred to the software developers over 40 years of age (includes 40) and the second group is referred to the ones between 30 and 40 years old. The study concluded six propositions. First, the reasons why software developers want to work in Software Industry. Second, the time when they start to study the professional skills in information technology. Third, the timing for software developers is working in Software Industry. The forth, what is really reason they change their careers from Research and Development to management. Fifth, they are many different ideas when they choice to organizations scale. Six, the domination of the career development is very different. The detail results listed below as¡G 1.The reasons between two groups entering in Software Industry are similar, but there are difference between the graduate courses and non-undergraduate courses. 2.The timing both for undergraduate courses and non-undergraduate courses in two group starts to study the professional skills in information technology is similar but the location is slightly different. 3.The timing of entering in Software Industry between two groups is dissimilar. 4.The reasons for software developers that changed their careers from software research and development to management between groups one and groups are slide swift. 5.The choices of the organizations scale between groups one and groups two are various. 6.The domination of the career development between groups one and groups two are different.