Statistical process control (SPC) which includes very powerful techniques used in other mature engineering disciplines for providing process control is not used by many software organizations. In software engineering domain, SPC is currently utilized only by organizations which have high maturity levels according to the process improvement models like CMM, ISO/IEC 15504 and CMMI. Guidelines and software tools to implement SPC techniques should be developed for effective use and dissemination of SPC especially for low maturity organizations. In this thesis, a software tool (SPC-AAT) which we developed to assess the suitability of software processes and metrics for SPC and use of SPC tools is presented. With SPC-AAT, we aim to ease and enhance application of SPC especially for emergent and low maturity organizations. Control charts, histograms, bar charts and pareto charts are the supported SPC tools for this purpose. We also explained the validation of the tool over two processes of a software organization in three case studies.

Background: A key idea of feature orientation is to decompose a software product line along the features it provides. Feature decomposition is orthogonal to object-oriented decomposition it crosscuts the underlying package and class structure. It has been argued often that feature decomposition improves system structure (reduced coupling, increased cohesion). However, recent empirical findings suggest that this is not necessarily the case, which is the motivation for our empirical investigation. Aim: In fact, there is little empirical evidence on how the alternative decompositions of feature orientation and object orientation compare to each other in terms of their association with observable properties of system structure (coupling, cohesion). This motivated us to empirically investigate and compare the properties of three decompositions (object-oriented, feature-oriented, and their intersection) of 28 feature-oriented software product lines. Method: In an exploratory, observational study, we quantify internal attributes, such as import coupling and cohesion, to describe and analyze the different decompositions of a feature-oriented product line in a systematic, reproducible, and comparable manner. For this purpose, we use three established software measures (CBU, IUD, EUD) as well as standard distribution statistics (e.g., Gini coefficient). Results: First, feature decomposition is associated with higher levels of structural coupling in a product line than a decomposition into classes. Second, although coupling is concentrated in feature decompositions, there are not necessarily hot-spot features. Third, the cohesion of feature modules is not necessarily higher than class cohesion, whereas feature modules serve more dependencies internally than classes. Fourth, coupling and cohesion measurement show potential for sampling optimization in complex static and dynamic product-line analyses (product-line type checking, feature-interaction detection). Conclusions: Our empirical study raises critical questions about alleged advantages of feature decomposition. At the same time, we demonstrate how the measurement of structural attributes can facilitate static and dynamic analyses of software product lines. (authors' abstract) / Series: Technical Reports / Institute for Information Systems and New Media

This thesis endeavors to determine the feasibility of design metrics as a predictor of attack surface size by finding a positive correlation between one or more design metrics and an application’s attack surface measurement. An attack surface is the set of ways in which an adversary can enter a system and potentially cause damage. For an experimental setting, six open-source java-based projects were analyzed. For each project, the attack surface is assessed using Microsoft’s Attack Surface Analyzer, which takes a snapshot of a system state before and after the installation of product(s) and displays the changes to a number of key elements of the Windows attack surface. A collection of design metrics was collected from each open-source project as well. The goal is to find a metric or set of metrics that predicted the attack surface changes identified by the Attack Surface Analyzer. / 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

This thesis developed a new markup language based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML), named as the Unified Programming Markup Language (UPML), which represents an abstraction of programming techniques of popular programming languages, and is used to store the programming semantic information of various programming languages. UPML aims to provide a general software quality analysis platform and as a gateway to translate programs between high-level programming languages. This research created and analyzed the features of UPML and concluded that UPML may have advantages over the traditional and newly appeared methods in software quality analysis and programming language translation. As the proof of concept in building such a software analysis and translation system, this research developed a PHP to UPML transformer. Execution examples showed its correctness of working in the core programming area of popular programming techniques, structure programming (SP) and object-oriented programming (OOP). The PHP implementation can be easily applied to other programming languages that support the same programming techniques. Since UPML is extensible, languages of other programming paradigms beyond the SP and OOP can be easily added. / Related work -- Analysis of programming languages and programming techniques -- Implementation of UPML -- Implementation of a PHP to UPML transformer -- Examples of execution. / Department of Computer Science

Software metrics tools help people analyze, measure, and understand selected features and attributes of software systems. In recent years, more and more software metrics tools have incorporated sophisticated visualization capabilities to present software metrics results more effectively to end users. Despite advanced graphical user interfaces, adoption of custom stand-alone metrics tools is still a problem. Moreover, increasing functionality and complexity exacerbates this problem. To address this problem, we investigated how to build a software metrics research tool using Microsoft Visio -- a Commercial-Of-The-Shelf product that is familiar to most end users. As the industry leader for business drawing, Visio offers a complete solution for engineers and technicians who need to create detailed schematics. Hence, Visio is an ideal candidate for visualizing metrics data. With built-in scripting capabilities, Visio is end-user programmable and therefore developers are able to extend its functionality and design custom solutions. Our assumption is that industrial collaborators, who are already familiar with Visio, are more amenable to investigate and evaluate a software engineering research tool based on Visio than an idiosyncratic tool built from scratch. Moreover, Visio has a large user base and thus a Visio-based research tool has a better chance of being adopted in practice. In this thesis, we report on our investigations of using Visio for building a software metrics research tool, called Vimex. In particular, we describe the design and implementation of Vimex as well as its integration with REVisio -- a reverse engineering tool built on top of Visio. Finally, we report on our lessons learned in these investigations, discuss current limitations of this approach, and outline avenues for future research.

This thesis study presents a software measurement program. The literature on software measurement is reviewed. Conditions for an effective implementation are investigated. A specific measurement system is designed and implemented in ASELSAN, Inc. This has involved organizational as well as technical work. A software tool has been developed to assist in aggregating measurements obtained from various CASE tools in use. Results of the implementation have started to be achieved. Lots of useful feedbacks have been returned to the organization as a result of analyzing of the measurement data.

This thesis focuses on measurement based software process improvement, especially improvement of requirements change management process. The literature on software measurement is investigated, software process improvement methodologies are studied and requirements change management metrics are examined. Requirements change management process at a private company working in the defense industry is observed and metrics obtained from various tools have been aggregated. Moreover, an improvement proposal, which also simplifies collecting metrics, is presented for the requirements change management process. A tool is developed for evaluating the performance of the improvement proposal using event driven simulation method.

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-93).