Thesis (M.S. in Software Engineering)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 445-446). Also available online.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1987.

Thesis (M.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Software Engineering)--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): James Bret Michael, Richard Riehle. Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-66). Also available online.

Software plays an important role in making products usable. We couldn’t imagine a laptop without software that run it making the things it does possible with the laptop hardware. Software has penetrated into several industries making significant contribution in how the products are designed and to make them more usable. This thesis focuses on semiconductor industry and analyzes the role played by software to enhance their products and differentiate them from competition. In this context, the thesis looks at acquisition of software companies by chip companies and analyzes them to determine the benefits and how it changed the market space. In a semiconductor company, the focus is predominantly on hardware. Although software is equally crucial to the success of the product, not much focus is placed on it in terms of innovation and building sustained software IP portfolio. One of the questions that this thesis tries to answer is how to build a robust software IP portfolio in a chip company. Case studies of different products were conducted to analyze their IP building strategies in general and focusing specifically on software patenting in terms number of patents filed and procedures adopted to encourage it. It looks closely at the best and not-so-best practices adopted by the teams and analyzing them to determine why certain initiatives succeeded while others failed. A crucial aspect of building software IP pipeline is to involve junior level engineers in this process. The thesis looks at some of the strategies companies could use to bring the culture of patents to the lowest levels of engineers. Typically the senior engineers are well tuned in to the process and regularly file patents while the junior engineers don’t. This is crucial to the company since today’s junior engineer is tomorrow’s senior engineer leading technology initiatives. The thesis concludes by putting forward recommendations to encourage software patenting. / text

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M. Tech. Information Networks / Code clone is a code portion in one source code fragment that is similar or identical to a code portion in another source code fragment. Clones in applications are inevitable within an organization's intranet. There are a great number of clone detection tools to help maintenance programmers to locate and refactor code clones where they exist. Currently clone detection process has not been explored fully to construct digital libraries to store clones for reuse and shareability. This is because most of clone detection techniques produce Indexed Statistical Reports as textual file showing related group of code fragments. Other techniques visualize clones to depict clones versions history as genealogies. Furthermore current techniques do not indicate the reusability and shareability worthiness of the detected clones in taxonomy. In this mini-dissertation a Clone Wrapper Detection Technique prototype is developed to detect and store commonly used structural clones into a Discoverable Digital Clone Library hosted in Fedora Repository. Stored clones metadata are then extracted to induce a Clone Family Tree Ontology of related class clones in a taxonomy based on Abstraction (inheritance and composition hierarchy) process.

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.

A software developer explores a software system by asking and answering a series of questions. To answer these questions, a developer may need to consult various sources providing information about the program, such as the static relationships expressed directly in the source code, the run-time behaviour of a program recorded in a dynamic trace, or evolution history as recorded in a source management system. Despite the support afforded by software exploration tools, developers often struggle to find the necessary information to answer their questions and may even become disoriented, where they feel mentally lost and are uncertain of what they were trying to accomplish. This dissertation advances a thesis that a developer's questions, which we refer to as conceptual queries, can be better supported through a model to represent and compose different sources of information about a program. The basis of this model is the sphere, which serves as a simple abstraction of a source of information about a program. Many of the software exploration tools used by a developer can be represented as a sphere. Spheres can be composed in a principled fashion such that information from a sphere may replace or supplement information from a different sphere. Using our sphere model, for example, a developer can use dynamic runtime information from an execution trace to replace information from the static source code to see what actually occurred. We have implemented this model in a configurable tool, called Ferret. We have used the facilities provided by the model to implement 36 conceptual queries identified from the literature, blogs, and our own experience, and to support the integration of four different sources of program information. Establishing correspondences between similar elements from different spheres allows a query to bridge across different spheres in addition to allowing a tool's user interface to drive queries from other sources of information. Through this effort we show that sphere model broadens the set of possible conceptual queries answerable by software exploration tools. Through a small diary study and a controlled experiment, both involving professional software developers, we found the developers used the conceptual queries that were available to them and reported finding Ferret useful.

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