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Programming language tools help software developers to understand a program and to recognize possible pitfalls. Used with the right knowledge, they can be instrumented to achieve better software quality. However, creating language tools that integrate well into the development environment and workflow is challenging.This thesis utilizes a user-centered design process to identify the needs of professional developers through in-depth interviews, address those needs through a concept, and finally implement and evaluate the concept. Taking 'scope' as an exemplary source of misconceptions in programming, a “Scope Inspector” plug-in for the Atom IDE—targeting experienced JavaScript developers in the open source community—is implemented.

IoT är en marknad som har växt fort under de senaste åren och skapat sig en egen industri. Kärnan i IoT är internetanslutningen och i många fall är mobil kommunikation den bästa lösningen för en IoT-produkt. Problemet är att det inte finns något självklart val av mobil kommunikation för användning i en IoT-produkt. Den mobila kommunikationsbranschen har reagerat på det nya behovet av mobil kommunikationsstandard för IoT och 2016 släppte 3GPP en ny standard av typen LPWAN kallad NB-IoT. Flera företag verkar för att implementera denna standard, och det finns ett behov av att undersöka hur applikationer kan utnyttja standarden på ett effektivt sätt. Denna uppsats presenterar en jämförelse mellan två applikationer som använder olika ALP, HTTP och CoAP, i en LPWAN-kontext. Resultaten av denna jämförelse visar att det finns mycket att vinna på att välja CoAP istället för HTTP, speciellt i en IoT-miljö som applikationerna presenterade i denna uppsats. Uppsatsen presenterar även en samling egenskaper som en applikation bör ha för att utnyttja en LPWAN-kommunikationsstandard effektivt. / The Internet of Things (IoT) is a market that has grown very fast in the last few years,creating an industry of its own. The core of IoT is the Internet connectivity and many times, the best solution for an IoT device is to use some form of mobile connection to solve this. The problem is that there is no obvious choice of mobile communication standard for use in an IoT device. The mobile communications industry has reacted to this newly emerged need of amobile communications standard designed for the IoT domain and in 2016 the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) released a Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) type of standard named Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT). Several companies are working on implementing this standard, and there is a need to investigate how applications can utilize the standard effectively. This thesis presents a comparison between two applications using different ApplicationLayer Protocol (ALP)s, Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), in an LPWAN context. The results of this comparison shows that there is a lot to gain by choosing CoAP over HTTP, especially in an IoT environment such as the applications presented in this thesis. The thesis also presents a collection of properties that applications should have to use an LPWAN effectively.

Companies follow different approaches in the life cycle of software, but usually, activities are divided into different teams, the most important teams are the development team and the operations team. Often the goals of the operations team and the development team are different, which results in an escalating relationship between the two teams, and a conflict occurs between teams due to the blame of responsibility on each other, which in turn leads to long delivery periods and ineffective delivery methods. To solve these problems, the DevOps approach emerged, which is an acronym for the two words development and operations. This approach aims to align both the development team and the operations team and break the barriers between them by working as one team toward a single goal that shares everyone the responsibility. Thus, the speed of the program delivery process increases and the company provides better services to its customers. Since DevOps is a new approach and many companies tend to adopt this approach, this study aims to investigate the benefits of the DevOps approach and the challenges involved in adopting this approach. This study summarized that the adoption of DevOps approach has an impact on the companies in several aspects. The research presents the most important challenges that the DevOps attempts to overcome, DevOps tools that helps to achieve the value of DevOps, and the benefits of the DevOps approach.

I argue that lean software development firms become more productive if they adopt and align lean managerial accounting systems with lean software development processes. I conduct two experiments on retraining and coaching of software development teams that have used lean and agile software development practices, demonstrating that these practices significantly improve productivity compared to control groups that did not receive this retraining and coaching. In a third experiment, I expand on this theme by introducing lean accounting productivity metrics to a treatment group of software developers. Team leaders actively use these metrics as quantitative “retrospectives” in team meetings to review past performance and identify areas for process improvement. Four months after these metrics are introduced, I measure their impact on the treatment group productivity and also survey the group to determine how these metrics affect employee attitudes and productivity compared to a control group that was not trained in use of these metrics for team meetings. The results indicate that introduction of lean accounting metrics does not impact employee attitudes and understanding of processes and metrics, nor does it improve productivity in the near term. Discussions with management indicate that retraining and coaching immediately improve productivity since they are directed at remedying specific operational and process issues. Using lean accounting metrics to impact team productivity and employee attitudes is more foundational and likely requires a longer period of exposure and learning. The experimental site is a large publicly traded software firm that uses lean and agile software development practices. Key Words: Lean Accounting, Training, Coaching, Software Development, Productivity / Business Administration/Accounting

The underlying goal of SUPERvisory Methodology And Notation (SUPERMAN) is to enhance productive operation of human-computer system developers by providing easy-to-use concepts and automated tools for developing high-quality (e.g., human-engineered, cost-effective, easy-to-maintain) target systems. The supervisory concept of the methodology integrates functions of many modeling techniques, and allows complete representation of the designer's conceptualization of a system's operation. The methodology views humans as functional elements of a system in addition to computer elements. Parts of software which implement human-computer interaction are separated from the rest of software. A single, unified system representation is used throughout a system lifecycle. The concepts of the methodology are notationally built into a graphical programming language. The use of this language in developing a system leads to a natural and orderly application of the methodology. / Ph. D. / incomplete_metadata

Agile development methodologies are becoming increasingly popular because they address many risks of software development through things such as quick delivery of working software and responsiveness to change. As agile organizations have begun to develop more user interface-intensive systems, they understand the value and need to design more usable systems. The fields of usability engineering and human-computer interaction are focused on exploring how people interact with computer systems. However, much of this work is inaccessible to agile practitioners because it does not align with core agile values and because there has not been adequate transfer of knowledge between practice and academia. This motivated my creation of the eXtreme Scenario-Based Design (XSBD) process, an integrated agile usability approach. XSBD provides key usability benefits of the scenario-based design (SBD) approach (an established usability engineering process) and is compatible with an agile development framework modeled on leading agile processes like XP and Scrum. XSBD was designed for use in projects in which a large part of the overall system quality is determined by system usability. This requires close communication and coordination of the disparate usability and agile development work practices. A core aspect of XSBD is the central design record (CDR), which is the shared design representation that guides usability design. It tightly couples usability evaluation results to design features and high level project goals, allowing the usability engineer to leverage key benefits of traditional SBD while working in an agile framework. I began developing XSBD at Virginia Tech, evaluating it through several student-led development efforts. To improve and demonstrate the applicability of XSBD in practice, I partnered with Meridium, Inc., a software and services company. Using an action research case study method, I worked with several development teams there who used XSBD to develop products. This directly linked usability and HCI research to practice, allowing me to demonstrate XSBD's utility in practice while evaluating it from a theoretical perspective. The results of this work suggest several avenues for further work both to increase its adoption in practice and to link to existing HCI research efforts such as design rationale and knowledge reuse. / Ph. D.

The concept of intelligent CAD systems to assist a designer in automating the design process has been discussed for years. It has been recognized that knowledge engineering techniques and the study of design theory can provide certain solutions to this approach. A major issue in developing intelligent CAD systems for geometric modeling is the integration of the design geometry with the representation of the design constraints. Current commercial computer aided design (CAD) systems are used primarily for recording the results of the design process. Using conventional CAD systems, a design engineer either must create the geometry of the design object with precise coordinates and dimensions, or start his design from an existing geometry of a previous design. It is difficult to propagate a dimensional change throughout an entire model -- especially solid models. This rigidity imposed by conventional CAD systems discourages a designer from exploring different approaches in creating a novel product. / Ph. D.

This research examined the simulation model validation process. After a model is developed, its reliability should be evaluated using validation techniques. This research was concerned with the validation of discrete simulation models which simulate an existing physical system. While there are many validation techniques available in the literature, only the techniques which compare available real system data to model data were considered by this research. Three of the techniques considered were selected and automated in a micro-computer software package. The package consists of six programs which are intended to aid the user in the model validation process. DATAFILE allows for real and model data input, and creates files using a DIF format. DATAGRAF plots real against model system responses and provides histograms of the variables. These two programs are based on the approach used in McNichol's statistical software. Hypothesis tests comparing real and model responses are conducted using TESTHYPO. The potential cost of using an invalid model, in conjunction with the determination of the alpha level of significance, is analyzed in COSTRISK. A non-parametric hypothesis test can be performed using NOTPARAM. Finally, a global validity measure can be obtained using VALSCORE. The software includes brief explanations of each technique and its use. The software was written in the BASIC computer language. The software was demonstrated using a simulation model and hypothetical but realistic system data. The hardware chosen for the package use was the IBM Personal Computer with 256k memory. / M.S.

In the last few years, interest in the application of deep learning methods for software engineering tasks has surged. A variety of different approaches like transformer based methods, statistical machine translation models, models inspired from natural language settings have been proposed and shown to be effective at tasks like code summarization, code synthesis and code translation. Multiple benchmark data sets have also been released but all suffer from one limitation or the other. Some data sets only support a select few programming languages while others support only certain tasks. These limitations restrict researchers' ability to be able to perform thorough analyses of their proposed methods. In this work we aim to alleviate some of the limitations faced by researchers who work in the paradigm of deep learning applications for software engineering tasks. We introduce a large, parallel, multi-lingual programming language data set that supports tasks like code summarization, code translation, code synthesis and code search in 7 different languages. We provide benchmark results for the current state of the art models on all these tasks and we also explore some limitations of current evaluation metrics for code related tasks. We provide a detailed analysis of the compilability of code generated by deep learning models because that is a better measure of ascertaining usability of code as opposed to scores like BLEU and CodeBLEU. Motivated by our findings about compilability, we also propose a reinforcement learning based method that incorporates code compilability and syntax level feedback as rewards and we demonstrate it's effectiveness in generating code that has less syntax errors as compared to baselines. In addition, we also develop a web portal that hosts the models we have trained for code translation. The portal allows translation between 42 possible language pairs and also allows users to check compilability of the generated code. The intent of this website is to give researchers and other audiences a chance to interact with and probe our work in a user-friendly way, without requiring them to write their own code to load and inference the models. / Master of Science / Deep neural networks have now become ubiquitous and find their applications in almost every technology and service we use today. In recent years, researchers have also started applying neural network based methods to problems in the software engineering domain. Software engineering by it's nature requires a lot of documentation, and creating this natural language documentation automatically using programs as input to the neural networks has been one their first applications in this domain. Other applications include translating code between programming languages and searching for code using natural language as one does on websites like stackoverflow. All of these tasks now have the potential to be powered by deep neural networks. It is common knowledge that neural networks are data hungry and in this work we present a large data set containing codes in multiple programming languages like Java, C++, Python, C#, Javascript, PHP and C. Our data set is intended to foster more research in automating software engineering tasks using neural networks. We provide an analysis of performance of multiple state of the art models using our data set in terms of compilability, which measures the number of syntax errors in the code, as well as other metrics. In addition, propose our own deep neural network based model for code translation, which uses feedback from programming language compilers in order to reduce the number of syntax errors in the generated code. We also develop and present a website where some of our code translation models have been hosted. The website allows users to interact with our work in an easy manner without any knowledge of deep learning and get a sense of how these technologies are being applied for software engineering tasks.