The heterogeneous structure and dynamic nature of web applications have made the testing procedure a challenge. Producing high-quality web applications can be performed by conducting appropriate testing techniques. As a result, several white-box and session-based testing techniques have been proposed in the literature. In this work, the performance and effectiveness of these testing techniques are evaluated in terms of fault detection on a simulated PHP online bookstore. The testing techniques are examined with the use of PHPUnit, xDebug and Selenium automated testing tools. We believe that combining the testing techniques with appropriate automated testing tools (PHPUnit and Selenium) can be effective in terms of fault detection and time spent to construct and run test cases on PHP web applications. The results show that some testing techniques are preferred. We also identify categories of faults that are amenable to detection by each of the techniques, as well as categories of faults that are difficult to detect by any of the techniques. Moreover, using the automated tools has helped in automating the conduct of the tests and in reducing the time required to perform them. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

The poor safety situation in the United Kingdom (UK) construction industry and its adverse socio-economic record are well documented in the existing literature. The application of Lean Construction techniques has been proposed as an effective strategy to address accidents on construction sites, a major safety concern in the construction industry. However, examination of the relationship between Lean Construction techniques and safety issues has been marginal. This study explores this relationship with the aim of developing a framework for using Lean Construction techniques to promote safety on UK construction sites. A framework was initially devised based on a synthesis of the literature and further refined based on findings from interviews held with 10 Lean Construction practitioners on antecedents of Lean Construction techniques and safety issues. In order to develop and confirm the framework, data was collected from practicing Lean Construction organisations using a questionnaire survey and analysed using descriptive statistics, inferential statistics and inter-rater agreement statistical test to examine the pattern and extent of the relationships. The study found a total of thirty-eight (38) relationships between Lean Construction techniques and safety issues. These relationships are mainly positive in nature in that they demonstrate path to improvement in safety on construction sites. They show which techniques could be used to address the relevant safety issue. Furthermore, it was established that the application of Lean Construction techniques on construction sites can be impeded by challenges such as: lack of Lean Construction knowledge, complexity, misconception about Lean and difficulties in changing employees’ working culture. The study identified strategies that could be used to address these challenges. These include enlightenment on benefits of Lean practice, publication of improvements realised from Lean practice, training, workers’ involvement and empowerment, persistence, robust planning and gradual step-by-step implementation. The study, therefore, concludes that Lean Construction techniques have positive relationships with safety issues on construction sites in the UK and on the basis of the relationships develops an integrated framework to guide application of the techniques by contracting organisations in promoting safety. The study makes a number of recommendations including the incorporation of Lean Construction practice into government health and safety initiatives, regulations and policies, and identifies areas for further research.

This work addresses the issues concerned with the provision of scalable video services over heterogeneous networks particularly with regards to dynamic adaptation and user’s acceptable quality of service. In order to provide and sustain an adaptive and network friendly multimedia communication service, a suite of techniques that achieved automatic scalability and adaptation are developed. These techniques are evaluated objectively and subjectively to assess the Quality of Service (QoS) provided to diverse users with variable constraints and dynamic resources. The research ensured the consideration of various levels of user acceptable QoS The techniques are further evaluated with view to establish their performance against state of the art scalable and non-scalable techniques. To further improve the adaptability of the designed techniques, several experiments and real time simulations are conducted with the aim of determining the optimum performance with various coding parameters and scenarios. The coding parameters and scenarios are evaluated and analyzed to determine their performance using various types of video content and formats. Several algorithms are developed to provide a dynamic adaptation of coding tools and parameters to specific video content type, format and bandwidth of transmission. Due to the nature of heterogeneous networks where channel conditions, terminals, users capabilities and preferences etc are unpredictably changing, hence limiting the adaptability of a specific technique adopted, a Dynamic Scalability Decision Making Algorithm (SADMA) is developed. The algorithm autonomously selects one of the designed scalability techniques basing its decision on the monitored and reported channel conditions. Experiments were conducted using a purpose-built heterogeneous network simulator and the network-aware selection of the scalability techniques is based on real time simulation results. A technique with a minimum delay, low bit-rate, low frame rate and low quality is adopted as a reactive measure to a predicted bad channel condition. If the use of the techniques is not favoured due to deteriorating channel conditions reported, a reduced layered stream or base layer is used. If the network status does not allow the use of the base layer, then the stream uses parameter identifiers with high efficiency to improve the scalability and adaptation of the video service. To further improve the flexibility and efficiency of the algorithm, a dynamic de-blocking filter and lambda value selection are analyzed and introduced in the algorithm. Various methods, interfaces and algorithms are defined for transcoding from one technique to another and extracting sub-streams when the network conditions do not allow for the transmission of the entire bit-stream.

A Produção mais Limpa (P+L) é uma abordagem preventiva de gestão ambiental destinada a reduzir a poluição na fonte. Apesar dos casos de sucesso, a literatura indica algumas barreiras que tem dificultado a implantação da P+L nas empresas. Entre essas barreiras estão o fato de sua aplicação ser pontual e pouco integrada à gestão das empresas e a falta de informações detalhadas e sistematizadas sobre práticas que podem ser aplicadas no processo de implantação da P+L. O principal objetivo deste trabalho é introduzir um Modelo de Maturidade de Produção mais Limpa para apoiar a implantação de produção mais limpa nas empresas. O Modelo de Maturidade proposto é composto por três elementos: Estágios de Maturidade, Práticas de Produção mais Limpa e Método de Aplicação para melhoria contínua. Para isso, uma revisão da literatura foi realizada com objetivo de identificar as principais dimensões de evolução em Produção mais Limpa e sistematizar práticas, técnicas e ferramentas de P+L que foram incluídas como parte do modelo. Além disso, a primeira versão do Modelo foi submetida à avaliação de especialistas com objetivo de melhorar sua descrição e consistência. Os principais benefícios que o modelo oferece tanto para área acadêmica como para as empresas são a sistematização do conhecimento sobre Produção mais Limpa, um conjunto de práticas, técnicas e ferramentas e um guia simplificado e visual para avaliar a condição atual e definir metas futuras para avançar na implantação da P+L. / Cleaner Production (CP) is a preventive environmental management approach aimed at reducing pollution at source. Despite the success stories, the literature indicates barriers that difficults the implementation of CP into companies. Among these barriers are the fact that the CP application is timely and poorly integrated with the management of companies and the lack of detailed and systematized information on practices that can be applied in the CP implementation process. The main objective of this work is to introduce a Cleaner production Maturity Model to support the implementation of cleaner production into companies. The Cleaner Production Maturity Model proposed is composed of three elements: Maturity stages, Cleaner Production Practices and Application Method for continuous improvement. For this, a literature review was conducted to identify the main evolution dimensions on cleaner production adoption and systematize CP practices, techniques and tools that were included into the model framework. Moreover the first version of Cleaner Production Maturity Model was submitted to experts evaluation in order to improve the framework description and consistency. The main benefits the model provides both to academic and business areas is a systamatization of cleaner production knowledge, a set of practices, techniques and tools and a simplified and visual guide to evaluate current condition and define future goals to advance the CP implementation into a company.

A Produção mais Limpa (P+L) é uma abordagem preventiva de gestão ambiental destinada a reduzir a poluição na fonte. Apesar dos casos de sucesso, a literatura indica algumas barreiras que tem dificultado a implantação da P+L nas empresas. Entre essas barreiras estão o fato de sua aplicação ser pontual e pouco integrada à gestão das empresas e a falta de informações detalhadas e sistematizadas sobre práticas que podem ser aplicadas no processo de implantação da P+L. O principal objetivo deste trabalho é introduzir um Modelo de Maturidade de Produção mais Limpa para apoiar a implantação de produção mais limpa nas empresas. O Modelo de Maturidade proposto é composto por três elementos: Estágios de Maturidade, Práticas de Produção mais Limpa e Método de Aplicação para melhoria contínua. Para isso, uma revisão da literatura foi realizada com objetivo de identificar as principais dimensões de evolução em Produção mais Limpa e sistematizar práticas, técnicas e ferramentas de P+L que foram incluídas como parte do modelo. Além disso, a primeira versão do Modelo foi submetida à avaliação de especialistas com objetivo de melhorar sua descrição e consistência. Os principais benefícios que o modelo oferece tanto para área acadêmica como para as empresas são a sistematização do conhecimento sobre Produção mais Limpa, um conjunto de práticas, técnicas e ferramentas e um guia simplificado e visual para avaliar a condição atual e definir metas futuras para avançar na implantação da P+L. / Cleaner Production (CP) is a preventive environmental management approach aimed at reducing pollution at source. Despite the success stories, the literature indicates barriers that difficults the implementation of CP into companies. Among these barriers are the fact that the CP application is timely and poorly integrated with the management of companies and the lack of detailed and systematized information on practices that can be applied in the CP implementation process. The main objective of this work is to introduce a Cleaner production Maturity Model to support the implementation of cleaner production into companies. The Cleaner Production Maturity Model proposed is composed of three elements: Maturity stages, Cleaner Production Practices and Application Method for continuous improvement. For this, a literature review was conducted to identify the main evolution dimensions on cleaner production adoption and systematize CP practices, techniques and tools that were included into the model framework. Moreover the first version of Cleaner Production Maturity Model was submitted to experts evaluation in order to improve the framework description and consistency. The main benefits the model provides both to academic and business areas is a systamatization of cleaner production knowledge, a set of practices, techniques and tools and a simplified and visual guide to evaluate current condition and define future goals to advance the CP implementation into a company.

Presented dissertation thesis has focused on the project management; its objective has been to achieve set main goal applying used methodology, i.e., to propose a model of management of project financial flows. The pre-requisite of achievement of said main goal has been the primary research undertaken in the monitored area of processing industry, following criteria established in advance. These criteria have been formulated in particular in harmony with the evaluation of current condition of given issue both in the Czech Republic and abroad; furthermore, by interviews made in qualitative research, the verification of which has applied the combination of quantitative and qualitative research, as well as statistical verification of formulated hypotheses. On the basis of such acquired and verified data the model of management of project financial flows has been generated based, among others, on the application of so-called system approach, the pre-requisite of which has been the optimization of managerial approach and decision-making reflected in the process of budget creation in mutual links with three-imperative during project planning.

Future space missions, such as Mars Science Laboratory, suggest the engineering of some of the most complex man-rated autonomous software systems. The present process-oriented certification methodologies are becoming prohibitively expensive and do not reach the level of detail of providing guidelines for the development and validation of concurrent software. Time and concurrency are the most critical notions in an autonomous space system. In this work we present the design and implementation of the first concurrency and time centered framework for product-oriented software certification of autonomous space systems. To achieve fast and reliable concurrent interactions, we define and apply the notion of Semantically Enhanced Containers (SEC). SECs are data structures that are designed to provide the flexibility and usability of the popular ISO C++ STL containers, while at the same time they are hand-crafted to guarantee domain-specific policies, such as conformance to a given concurrency model. The application of nonblocking programming techniques is critical to the implementation of our SEC containers. Lock-free algorithms help avoid the hazards of deadlock, livelock, and priority inversion, and at the same time deliver fast and scalable performance. Practical lock-free algorithms are notoriously difficult to design and implement and pose a number of hard problems such as ABA avoidance, high complexity, portability, and meeting the linearizability correctness requirements. This dissertation presents the design of the first lock-free dynamically resizable array. Our approach o ers a set of practical, portable, lock-free, and linearizable STL vector operations and a fast and space effcient implementation when compared to the alternative lock- and STM-based techniques. Currently, the literature does not offer an explicit analysis of the ABA problem, its relation to the most commonly applied nonblocking programming techniques, and the possibilities for its detection and avoidance. Eliminating the hazards of ABA is left to the ingenuity of the software designer. We present a generic and practical solution to the fundamental ABA problem for lock-free descriptor-based designs. To enable our SEC container with the property of validating domain-specific invariants, we present Basic Query, our expression template-based library for statically extracting semantic information from C++ source code. The use of static analysis allows for a far more efficient implementation of our nonblocking containers than would have been otherwise possible when relying on the traditional run-time based techniques. Shared data in a real-time cyber-physical system can often be polymorphic (as is the case with a number of components part of the Mission Data System's Data Management Services). The use of dynamic cast is important in the design of autonomous real-time systems since the operation allows for a direct representation of the management and behavior of polymorphic data. To allow for the application of dynamic cast in mission critical code, we validate and improve a methodology for constant-time dynamic cast that shifts the complexity of the operation to the compiler's static checker. In a case study that demonstrates the applicability of the programming and validation techniques of our certification framework, we show the process of verification and semantic parallelization of the Mission Data System's (MDS) Goal Networks. MDS provides an experimental platform for testing and development of autonomous real-time flight applications.

Future space missions, such as Mars Science Laboratory, suggest the engineering of some of the most complex man-rated autonomous software systems. The present process-oriented certification methodologies are becoming prohibitively expensive and do not reach the level of detail of providing guidelines for the development and validation of concurrent software. Time and concurrency are the most critical notions in an autonomous space system. In this work we present the design and implementation of the first concurrency and time centered framework for product-oriented software certification of autonomous space systems. To achieve fast and reliable concurrent interactions, we define and apply the notion of Semantically Enhanced Containers (SEC). SECs are data structures that are designed to provide the flexibility and usability of the popular ISO C++ STL containers, while at the same time they are hand-crafted to guarantee domain-specific policies, such as conformance to a given concurrency model. The application of nonblocking programming techniques is critical to the implementation of our SEC containers. Lock-free algorithms help avoid the hazards of deadlock, livelock, and priority inversion, and at the same time deliver fast and scalable performance. Practical lock-free algorithms are notoriously difficult to design and implement and pose a number of hard problems such as ABA avoidance, high complexity, portability, and meeting the linearizability correctness requirements. This dissertation presents the design of the first lock-free dynamically resizable array. Our approach o ers a set of practical, portable, lock-free, and linearizable STL vector operations and a fast and space effcient implementation when compared to the alternative lock- and STM-based techniques. Currently, the literature does not offer an explicit analysis of the ABA problem, its relation to the most commonly applied nonblocking programming techniques, and the possibilities for its detection and avoidance. Eliminating the hazards of ABA is left to the ingenuity of the software designer. We present a generic and practical solution to the fundamental ABA problem for lock-free descriptor-based designs. To enable our SEC container with the property of validating domain-specific invariants, we present Basic Query, our expression template-based library for statically extracting semantic information from C++ source code. The use of static analysis allows for a far more efficient implementation of our nonblocking containers than would have been otherwise possible when relying on the traditional run-time based techniques. Shared data in a real-time cyber-physical system can often be polymorphic (as is the case with a number of components part of the Mission Data System's Data Management Services). The use of dynamic cast is important in the design of autonomous real-time systems since the operation allows for a direct representation of the management and behavior of polymorphic data. To allow for the application of dynamic cast in mission critical code, we validate and improve a methodology for constant-time dynamic cast that shifts the complexity of the operation to the compiler's static checker. In a case study that demonstrates the applicability of the programming and validation techniques of our certification framework, we show the process of verification and semantic parallelization of the Mission Data System's (MDS) Goal Networks. MDS provides an experimental platform for testing and development of autonomous real-time flight applications.

Verification and validation is one of the most important concerns in the area of software engineering towards more reliable software development. Hence it is important to overcome the challenges of testing concurrent programs. The extensive use of concurrent systems warrants more attention to the concurrent software testing. For testing concurrent software, automatic tools development is getting increased focus. The first part of this study presents a systematic review that aims to explore the state-of-the-art of concurrent software testing. The systematic review reports several issues like concurrent software characteristics, bugs, testing techniques and tools, test case generation techniques and tools, and benchmarks developed for the tools. The second part presents the evaluation of four commercial and open source static analysis tools detecting Java multithreaded bugs. An empirical evaluation of the tools would help the industry as well as the academia to learn more about the effectiveness of the static analysis tools for concurrency bugs.

Métodos ágeis foram criados para sanar fraquezas reais e perceptíveis dos métodos tradicionais de desenvolvimento de software. Devido à pressão na entrega de produtos de software dentro do prazo, muitas vezes requisitos de segurança são pouco mensurados ou até deixados de lado. Durante o desenvolvimento ágil de software é importante detectar possíveis vulnerabilidades. Esta dissertação descreve um survey aplicado a membros de equipes de desenvolvimento de software que aplicam métodos ágeis. Para tanto, foram identificados por meio da rede de profissionais LinkedIn 110 membros de equipes ágeis que implantaram, estão em processo de implantação ou ainda irão implantar técnicas e ferramentas para detecção de vulnerabilidades. Além disso, foram entrevistados nove gerentes de equipes ágeis. O questionário e o roteiro da entrevista foram baseados em três conhecidos processos de desenvolvimento de software seguro, a saber, Processo de McGraw, OWASP CLASP e as atividades de Howard e Lipner. A coleta de dados se deu por meio de questionários e entrevistas. A análise dos resultados utilizou técnicas de estatística descritiva e análise de conteúdo. Elas indicaram os métodos ágeis mais utilizados, o uso atual das técnicas e ferramentas, as aptidões, os interesses e as necessidades em treinamento em técnicas e ferramenta para detecção de vulnerabilidades. Além disso, os benefícios obtidos com a implantação das técnicas e ferramentas, as motivações, as estratégias, as dificuldades, as limitações e as lições aprendidas foram identificadas. Os resultados indicam que existe motivação para a implantação de segurança, mas ainda não se dá atenção especial à detecção de vulnerabilidades nas equipes ágeis cujos membros participaram do survey / Agile methods were created to address real and perceived weaknesses of traditional software development methods. Due to the pressure to delivery software products on time, security requirements are often poorly addressed or even neglected. During agile software development it is important to detect possible vulnerabilities. This dissertation describes a survey applied to members of software development teams who apply agile methods. Thus, 110 members of agile teams were identified through LinkedIns network of professionals who deployed, are in the process of being deployed or will still implement techniques and tools for vulnerability detection techniques and tools were identified. The questionnaire was based on three known safe software development processes, namely, the McGraw Process, OWASP CLASP, and the activities of Howard and Lipner. Data were collected through questionnaires and interviews. The analysis of the results used techniques of descriptive statistics and content analysis. They indicated the most widely used agile methods, the current use of techniques and tools, the skills, interests and training needs of agile teams in vulnerability detection techniques and tools. In addition, the benefits of implementing the techniques and tools, the motivations, the strategies, the difficulties, the limitations and the lessons learned were identified. The results suggest that special attention is still not given to detection of vulnerabilities in the agile teams whose members participated in the survey