Software reuse is a powerful tool in order to reduce development and maintenance time and cost. Any software life cycle product can be reused, not only fragments of source code. A high degree of reuse correlates with a low defect density. In the literature, many theoretical and empirical researches have examined the relationship of software reuse and quality. In this thesis, the effects of reuse on software quality are investigated in an industrial setting. Throughout this study, we worked with Turkey&rsquo / s leading defense industry company: Aselsan&rsquo / s software engineering department. We aimed to explore their real-life software projects and interpret reuse and quality relations for their projects. With this intention, we defined four different hypotheses to determine reuse and quality relations / and in order to confirm these hypotheses / we designed three separate case studies. In these case studies, we collected and calculated reuse and quality metrics i.e. Object-oriented quality metrics, reuse rates and performance measures of individual modules, fault-proneness of software components, and productivity rates of different products. Finally, by analyzing these measurements, we developed suggestions to further benefit from reuse in Aselsan through systematic improvements to the reuse infrastructure and process. Similar case studies have been reported in the literature, however, in Turkey, there are not many case studies using real-life project data, particularly in the defense industry.

Japan obtained equal status with the west imperialism, like Britain and North America, after defeating Russia in 1905. For promoting their mainland policy, they set up the semi-official and semi-private company- South Manchuria Railway (SMR). It owned a huge Research Bureau to investigate some aspects like railway, natural resources, transportation and military, not only for satisfying colonial goal but also for producing rich, valuable and multidimensional knowledge .During forty-years, the Research Bureau attracted and enrolled many Japanese who had interests on, or preference to China. Japanese took this process as a approach or domain to contact with China. This process also reflected their own ideology, image and relative location to China by the rise of the Empire of Japan. This dissertation starts from reviewing important research results, such as Shina Resistance Report, Nōson Chūgoku Kankō Chōsa Surveys. The discussion goes further to four researchers in the SMR: Shūmei Ōkawa, Tachibana Shiraki, Amano Waranosuke and Itō Takeo, who were with various academic background and even standpoint. The investigators attempted to construct their own research approach and meanwhile suffered from dealing it with the subjective power structure. The last section focuses on the academic debate after the war time, in term of controversial interpretation about Mantetsu knowledge from Japanese Sinology. From these three perspectives, the dissertation intends to take Mantetsu as a example to portray the context, power relationship and conflicts within research institute in Japan. It would therefore generalize objectivity, autonomy and path-dependence from the Mantetsu knowledge.

This study mainly discusses the effect, in country level, of minority shareholder protection on shareholder wealth during mergers and acquisitions (M&A). In particular, based on the index of anti-director rights (ADRI) developed by LLSV (1998) and the index of shareholder protection index (SPI) by John Armour et al.(2009), I empirically examine the linkage between M&A activities and indexes as well as the components of these indexes. This study expects the result may show some relevance between of indices and M&A activities, and the legal value of this relevance. The purpose is to show whether minority shareholder protection is workable in M&A activities, and whether it can facilitate M&A markets. To begin with, this paper discusses LLSV¡¦s uniqueness in corporate law study ¡V using empirical method to value whether corporate law matters or not around the world. Then, I analyze LLSV¡¦s possible defects, review criticisms and effects they had incurred. Secondly, we design a study to compare the revised LLSV methodology developed by the Harvard scholar Spamann with SPI index through stock market and M&A market. I also code China¡¦s and Taiwan¡¦s data to make up the lack of samples of cross level variation, and take this as the basis for corporate institutional comparison. This study reports that each of sub-indexes from ADRI and SPI has different relevance to M&A activities: three are positive, five are negative, three are insignificant, and two are valueless of discussion (definition or design defect). Thus we may see the importance of law quantification. We appreciate further research and authorities¡¦ consideration following our work in Taiwan. Finally, the contribution of this study is to attempt to integrate empirical and comparative legal analysis, in response to global corporate governance issues of promoting cross research. On policy implications is that it can predict some investor protection mattes, direct the way of policy adjustment. Besides, this study can also suggest specific amendment for Company Law and Securities law to re-examine how to balance between market development and the protection of minority shareholders.

KM is the process of creating value from the intangible assets of an enterprise. It deals with how best to leverage knowledge internally in the enterprise (in its individual employees, and the knowledge that gets built into its structures and systems) and externally to the customers and stakeholders. As KM initiatives, projects and systems are just beginning to appear in organisations, there is little research and empirical field data to guide the successful development and implementation of such systems or to guide the expectations of the potential benefits of such systems. In addition, about 84 per cent of KM programmes failed or exerted no significant impact on the adopting organisations worldwide due to inability to consider many critical factors that contribute to the success of KM project implementation. Hence, this study is an exploratory investigation into the KM implementation based on an integrated approach. This includes: (1) a comprehensive review of the relevant literature; (2) a comprehensive analysis of secondary case studies of KM implementations in 90 organisations presented in the literature, in order to arrive at the most critical factors of KM implementation and their degree of criticality; (3) exploratory global survey of 92 organisations in 23 countries that have already implemented or are in the process of implementing KM; (4) in-depth case studies of four leading organisations to understand how KM implementation processes and the critical factors identified are being addressed. Based on the empirical findings of the study, 28 critical factors were identified that must be carefully considered in the KM implementation to achieve a successful project. Moreover, the study proposes an integrated model for effective KM implementation which contains essential elements that contribute to project success.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

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Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-11T14:02:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Sergio Roberto Costa Vieira.pdf: 3218639 bytes, checksum: 3935b43e35cc99b70f873c5ddb6e1882 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-07-18 / This thesis presents a requirements elicitation technique guided by business processes modeling. This technique, called REMO (Requirements elicitation by oriented Business Process Modeling), uses a set of heuristics to extract the software requirements from business process diagrams. The purpose of the technique is to aid systems analysts in the identification of functional requirements, non-functional requirements, and business rules. To accomplish such task, the REMO technique uses business process diagrams created using the BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) notation. This thesis describes how the REMO technique was created and evaluated using an empirical-based research method. Furthermore, we present the analyses of the results obtained through three controlled experiments, which showed evidence that the REMO technique may be considered useful to be applied in software development during a requirements elicitation. / Esta dissertação apresenta uma técnica de elicitação de requisitos orientada pela modelagem de processos de negócios. A técnica de elicitação é denominada como REMO (Requirements Elicitation oriented by business process MOdeling), uma técnica que utiliza um conjunto de heurísticas para extrair os requisitos de software a partir dos diagramas de processos de negócios. O propósito da técnica é apoiar os analistas de sistemas na identificação dos requisitos funcionais, não funcionais e regras de negócios a partir dos diagramas de processos de negócios feitos em BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation). Esta dissertação descreve como a técnica REMO foi elaborada e avaliada por meio de um método de pesquisa baseado em experimentação. Além disso, apresentam-se as análises dos resultados obtidos de três estudos experimentais controlados, que apontaram indícios de que a técnica REMO pode ser considerada útil para ser aplicada no desenvolvimento de software durante a elicitação de requisitos.

Context. Global Software Development (GSD) is the plan of action in which software development is performed under temporal, political, organizational and cultural boundaries. Offshore outsourced software development is the part of GSD, which refers to the transfer of certain software development activities to an external organization in another country. The primary factors driving offshore outsourced software development are low cost, access to a large pool of skilled laborers, increased productivity, high quality, market access and short development cycle. Requirements engineering (RE) and especially requirements elicitation is highly affected by the geographical distribution and multitude of stakeholders. Objectives. The goal of conducting this study is to explore the challenges and solutions associated with requirements elicitation phase during offshore software projects, both in research literature and in industrial practice. Moreover, this study examines that which of the challenges and practices reported in literature can be seen in industrial practice. This helped in finding out the similarities and differences between the state of art and state of practice. Methods. Data collection process has been done through systematic literature review (SLR) and web survey. SLR has been conducted using guidelines of Kitchenham and Charters. During SLR, The studies have been identified from the most reliable and authentic databases such as Compendex, Inspec (Engineering village) and Scopus. In the 2nd phase, survey has been conducted with 391 practitioners from various organizations involved in GSD projects. In the 3rd phase, qualitative comparative analysis has been applied as an analysis method. Results. In total 10 challenges and 45 solutions have been identified from SLR and survey. Through SLR, 8 challenges and 22 solutions have been identified. While through industrial survey, 2 additional challenges and 23 additional solutions have been identified. By analyzing the frequency of challenges, the most compelling challenges are communication, control and socio-cultural issues. Conclusions. The comparison between theory and practice explored the most compelling challenges and their associated solutions. It is concluded that socio-cultural awareness and proper communication between client and supplier organization’s personnel is paramount for successful requirements elicitation. The scarcity of research literature in this area suggests that more work needs to be done to explore some strategies to mitigate the impact of additional 2 challenges revealed through survey. / 0046 707123094

Mutation testing is a powerful, but resource intense technique for asserting software quality. This report investigates two claims about one of the mutation operators on procedural logic, the relation operator replacement (ROR). The constrained ROR mutant operator is a type of constrained mutation, which targets to lower the number of mutants as a “do smarter” approach, making mutation testing more suitable for industrial use. The findings in the report shows that the hypothesis on subsumption is rejected if mutants are to be detected on function return values. The second hypothesis stating that a test case can only detect a single top-level mutant in a subsumption graph is also rejected. The report presents a comprehensive overview on the domain of mutation testing, displays examples of the masking behaviour previously not described in the field of mutation testing, and discusses the importance of the granularity where the mutants should be detected under execution. The contribution is based on literature survey and experiment. The empirical findings as well as the implications are discussed in this master dissertation.

[pt] Sistemas de software estão evoluindo frequentemente devido a diversas requisições de mudanças. A medida que o software evolui, seu tamanho e complexidade aumentam, e consequentemente, sua arquitetura tende a se degradar. Sintomas de degradação arquitetural são por muitas vezes uma consequência direta da inserção progressiva de anomalias de código. Uma anomalia de código é uma estrutura da implementação recorrente que possivelmente indica problemas mais severos no projeto arquitetural. Anomalia de código é considerada crítica quando ela está relacionada problemas estruturais na arquitetura do software. Sua criticidade origina-se da sua influência negativa em uma ampla gama de requisitos não-funcionais. Por exemplo, a presença e anomalias e código críticas dificulta a manutenibilidade e software., ex. uma grande refatoração pode ser necessária para remover um problema arquitetural. Diversas abordagens tem sido propostas para a detecção de anomalias em sistemas de software, mas nenhuma delas suporta eficientemente a priorização e classificação de anomalias de código críticas de acordo com seu impacto na arquitetura. O presente trabalho investiga como a priorização e classificação dessas anomalias críticas de código pode se melhorado com o uso de blueprints arquiteturais. Blueprints arquiteturais são providos pelo arquiteto de software desde estágios iniciais de desenvolvimento do sistema. Blueprints são modelos de projeto informais normalmente definidos para capturar e comunicar as principais decisões de projeto arquitetural. Embora blueprints normalmente sejam incompletos e inconsistentes com respeito a implementação do sistema, eles podem contribuir para o processo de priorização e classificação de anomalias de código críticas. Com o intuito de alcançar nossos objetivos de pesquisa, um conjunto de estudos empíricos foram realizados. O trabalho também propõe e avalia um conjunto de heurísticas para auxiliar desenvolvedores na priorização e classificação de anomalias de código em 3 sistemas de software. Os resultados mostraram uma acurácia média de mais de 60 porcento na priorização e classificação de anomalias de código associadas com problemas arquiteturais nesses sistemas. / [en] Software systems are often evolving due to many changing requirements. As the software evolves, it grows in size and complexity, and consequently, its architecture design tends to degrade. Architecture degradation symptoms are often a direct consequence of the progressive insertion of code anomalies in the software implementation. A code anomaly is a recurring implementation structure that possibly indicates deeper architectural design problems. Code anomaly is considered critical when it is related with a structural problem in the software architecture. Its criticality stems from its negative influence on a wide range of non-functional requirements. For instance, the presence of critical code anomalies hinders software aintainability, i.e. these critical anomalies require wide refactoring in order to remove an architectural problem. Symptoms of architecture degradation have often to be observed in the source code due to the lack of an explicit, formal representation of the software architecture in a project. Many approaches are proposed for detecting code anomalies in software systems, but none of them efficiently support the prioritization and ranking of critical code anomalies according to their architecture impact. Our work investigates how the prioritization and ranking of such critical code anomalies could be improved by using blueprints. Architecture blueprints are usually provided by software architects since the early stages of the system development. Blueprints are informal design models usually defined to capture and communicate key architectural design decisions. Even though blueprints are often incomplete and inconsistent with respect to the underlying implementation, we aim to study if their use can contribute to improve the processes of prioritizing and ranking critical code anomalies. Aiming to address these research goals, a set of empirical studies has been performed. We also proposed and evaluated a set ofheuristics to support developers when prioritizing and ranking code anomalies in 3 software systems. The results showed an average accuracy higher than 60 percent when prioritizing and ranking code anomalies associated with architectural problems in these systems.