One of the main objectives of software development in scientific computing is efficiency. Being focused on highly specialized application domain, important software quality metrics, e.g., usability, extensibility ,etc may not be amongst the list of primary objectives. In this research, we have studied the design structures and iterative releases of scientific research software using Design Structure Matrix(DSM). We implemented a DSM partitioning algorithm using sparse matrix data structure Compressed Row Storage(CRS), and its timing was better than those obtained from the most widely used C++ library boost. Secondly, we computed several architectural complexity metrics, compared releases and total release costs of a number of open source scientific research software. One of the important finding is the absence of circular dependencies in studied software which attributes to the strong emphasis on computational performance of the code. Iterative release analysis indicates that there might be a correspondence between “clustering co-efficient” and “release rework cost” of the software. / x, 87 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm

No description available.

There are two popular approaches when developing a software system, the first being System Analysis/System Design (SA/SD) and the second being an Object-Oriented (00) approach. In either approach a poor design inevitably produces a poor application. Thus, being able to evaluate the quality of a systems design is advantageous.The Design Metrics Research Team at Ball State University has developed metrics that measure the quality of software systems. From this research the metric D(G) (a composite of the metrics De and D) has been shown to be very effective when used to determine fault prone modules in a system. However, D(G) has been primarily applied to systems developed using the SA/SD approach. This thesis translated D(G) to an 00 setting and empirically evaluated D(G) to determine if D(G) is a good predictor of error-prone classes. The results indicate that De and Di are indeed good predictors of error-prone classes. Of the classes highlighted by De, 67% had errors, while 100% of the classes highlighted by D; had errors. / Department of Computer Science

There exist a number of well-known and validated design metrics, and the fault prediction available through these metrics has been well documented for systems developed in languages such as C and Ada. However, the mapping and application of these metrics to SDL systems has not been thoroughly explored. The aim of this project is to test the applicability of these metrics in classifying components for testing purposes in a large-scale SDL system. A new model has been developed for this purpose. This research was conducted using a number of SDL systems, most notably actual production models provided by Motorola Corporation. / Department of Computer Science

This study provides information on the effectiveness of design metrics when used on object oriented systems and explores means of increasing metric use-fulness in regard to the problem areas identified. Evidence shows that current metrics are weak in assessing some qualities when faced with concepts central to object orientation. It describes practices in design and implementation that cause complications in calculating metrics and what effects those practices may have on various types of metrics by examining specific examples as well as discussing the theory involved. It examines assumptions which can be made in the formulation of metrics to avoid the issues caused by these practices and what effect these assumptions will have on metric results. / Department of Computer Science

There is no abstract available for this thesis. / Department of Computer Science

Global Software Development (GSD) is based on a geographical distance where teams are spread throughout the world. The related research have for a long time addressed the challenges presented by geographical distances. GSD is basically a necessity for many businesses to use in order to reduce development costs, reduce production time and to maintain high quality. The study aims to investigate the relationship between the reality of a specific maintenance project. Thus, our research question: How do distributed maintenance teams experience temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distances? To achieve the purpose of the study, we chose to perform a case study of a global consulting company which recently started a new system maintenance project. The data collection was done through interviews and observations at the premises of the consulting company. We have confirmed the previous research and come up with our own contributions to the field. The findings of our thesis provides aspects of communication, coordination and control related to the three distances stated in our research question. A new collective term has also emerged, off-shore blackboxing.

Many organizations specialize in the development of families of software systems, called software product lines (SPLs), for one or more domains (e.g., automotive, telephony, health care). SPLs are commonly developed as a shared set of assets representing the common and variable aspects of an SPL, and individual products are constructed by assembling the right combinations of assets. The feature-oriented software development (FOSD) paradigm advocates the use of system features as the primary unit of commonality and variability among the products of an SPL. A feature represents a coherent and identifiable bundle of system functionality, such as call waiting in telephony and cruise control in an automobile. Furthermore, FOSD aims at feature-oriented artifacts (FOAs); that is, software-development artifacts that explicate features, so that a clear mapping is established between a feature and its representation in different artifacts. The thesis first identifies the problem of developing a suitable language for expressing feature-oriented models of the functional requirements of an SPL, and then presents the feature-oriented requirements modelling language (FORML) as a solution to this problem. FORML's notation is based on standard software-engineering notations (e.g., UML class and state-machine models, feature models) to ease adoption by practitioners, and has a precise syntax and semantics to enable analysis. The novelty of FORML is in adding feature-orientation to state-of-the-art requirements modelling approaches (e.g., KAOS), and in the systematic treatment of modelling evolutions of an SPL via enhancements to existing features. An existing feature can be enhanced by extending or modifying its requirements. Enhancements that modify a feature's requirements are called intended feature interactions. For example, the call waiting feature in telephony intentionally overrides the basic call service feature's treatment of incoming calls when the subscriber is already involved in a call. FORML prescribes different constructs for specifying different types of enhancements in state-machine models of requirements. Furthermore, unlike some prominent approaches (e.g., AHEAD, DFC), FORML's constructs for modelling intended feature interactions do not depend on the order in which features are composed; this can lead to savings in analysis costs, since only one rather than (possibly) multiple composition orders need to be analyzed. A well-known challenge in FOSD is managing feature interactions, which, informally defined, are ways in which different features can influence one another in defining the overall properties and behaviours of their combination. Some feature interactions are intended, as described above, while other feature interactions are unintended: for example, the cruise control and anti-lock braking system features of an automobile may have incompatible affects on the automobile's acceleration, which would make their combination inconsistent. Unintended feature interactions should be detected and resolved. To detect unintended interactions in models of feature behaviour, we must first define a taxonomy of feature interactions for the modelling language: that is, we must understand the different ways that feature interactions can manifest among features expressed in the language. The thesis presents a taxonomy of feature interactions for FORML that is an adaptation of existing taxonomies for operational models of feature behaviour. The novelty of the proposed taxonomy is that it presents a definition of behaviour modification that generalizes special cases found in the literature; and it enables feature-interaction analyses that report only unintended interactions, by excluding interactions caused by FORML's constructs for modelling intended feature interactions.

Software practitioners make technical and business decisions based on the understanding they have of their software systems. This understanding is grounded in their own experiences, but can be augmented by studying various kinds of development artifacts, including source code, bug reports, version control meta-data, test cases, usage logs, etc. Unfortunately, the information contained in these artifacts is typically not organized in the way that is immediately useful to developers’ everyday decision making needs. To handle the large volumes of data, many practitioners and researchers have turned to analytics — that is, the use of analysis, data, and systematic reasoning for making decisions. The thesis of this dissertation is that by employing software analytics to various development tasks and activities, we can provide software practitioners better insights into their processes, systems, products, and users, to help them make more informed data-driven decisions. While quantitative analytics can help project managers understand the big picture of their systems, plan for its future, and monitor trends, qualitative analytics can enable developers to perform their daily tasks and activities more quickly by helping them better manage high volumes of information. To support this thesis, we provide three different examples of employing software analytics. First, we show how analysis of real-world usage data can be used to assess user dynamic behaviour and adoption trends of a software system by revealing valuable information on how software systems are used in practice. Second, we have created a lifecycle model that synthesizes knowledge from software development artifacts, such as reported issues, source code, discussions, community contributions, etc. Lifecycle models capture the dynamic nature of how various development artifacts change over time in an annotated graphical form that can be easily understood and communicated. We demonstrate how lifecycle models can be generated and present industrial case studies where we apply these models to assess the code review process of three different projects. Third, we present a developer-centric approach to issue tracking that aims to reduce information overload and improve developers’ situational awareness. Our approach is motivated by a grounded theory study of developer interviews, which suggests that customized views of a project’s repositories that are tailored to developer-specific tasks can help developers better track their progress and understand the surrounding technical context of their working environments. We have created a model of the kinds of information elements that developers feel are essential in completing their daily tasks, and from this model we have developed a prototype tool organized around developer-specific customized dashboards. The results of these three studies show that software analytics can inform evidence-based decisions related to user adoption of a software project, code review processes, and improved developers’ awareness on their daily tasks and activities.

A critical component of software development is the process whereby the software requirements of users and stakeholders are established. This process is referred to as the Requirement Elicitation (RE) process of software development. The high rate of failed, cancelled or unsuccessful projects due to not meeting user requirements may be attributed to insufficient focus on the RE process. This case study investigates the relationship between the type of RE technique used and the success of an information system at a global petrochemical company based in South Africa. The end user involvement during the software development life cycle (SDLC) and the acceptance of the resultant information system was also examined. Three information systems (IS) projects that employed different RE techniques were selected for the purpose of this study. An electronic questionnaire was disseminated to a randomly selected representative sample from the user community for each system in order to obtain feedback with regards to the success of the system from the user’s perspective. The study adopted the strategy of focusing on end user acceptance of each information system as a pivotal contributory factor to information system success. In this regard, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) model was used to operationalize user acceptance of each information system that formed the focus of the study. For each IS project, the quantitative dimension was extended to include a qualitative aspect that entailed structured interviews with the business analyst (BA) and project manager (PM), with the primary purpose of ascertaining the RE strategy used for the development of each system. The interviews also served the purpose of providing the researcher with an opportunity to obtain a deeper insight into the logistics of system development. The results of the study indicated that planned, user intensive RE techniques resulted in greater system acceptance by the end users of the respective systems. A significant outcome of the study is that there is a strong correlation between the amount of end user involvement in the SDLC process and the success of the information system. A converse of this trend was also noted. When users have systems imposed on them, this results in lower satisfaction levels as a consequence of poor system usability and a lack of confidence in the value that the system provides for the end users. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.