Este trabalho de tese apresenta o Modelo Presença Plus (PPlus) para identificação de pistas textuais denotadoras de presença social em interações discursivas feitas por alunos em fóruns e chats educacionais. O grau de presença social (PS) é um indicativo de como os sujeitos interagem entre si e com o ambiente de aprendizagem; sendo considerado, na literatura, significativo para o desenvolvimento de relacionamentos e fortalecimento de sentimento de pertencimento no grupo. O trabalho se baseia na vertente Pragmática da Linguística, campo que enfatiza a importância de se considerar o contexto de produção dos eventos comunicativos e a dinâmica dialógica entre os interlocutores. Considerando que o mapeamento das interações dos discentes para detectar e avaliar seu grau de presença pode se constituir uma tarefa complexa e morosa para tutores de cursos a distância, desenvolveu-se um software para realizar o processamento automático das mensagens eletrônicas visando torná-lo uma funcionalidade a ser adicionada a ambientes virtuais de ensino e aprendizagem (AVEAs). Apesar de alguns impasses referentes, particularmente, aos aspectos sintáticos dos textos, os resultados obtidos no processamento, por lexicometria, das postagens foram satisfatoriamente semelhantes aos levantados na análise manual. O modelo PPlus e a escala de graus de PS foram também testados em um segundo ambiente disponibilizado na plataforma Moodle, tendo apresentado resultados equivalentes. A sondagem com professores e tutores de cursos a distância forneceu dados que corroboram a proposta de uma ferramenta a ser inserida em AVEAs de modo a facilitar o acompanhamento de estados afetivos, grau de envolvimento e interação entre os participantes no e com o ambiente. / This thesis presents Presence Plus (PPLus), a model for identifying indicators of social presence in text-based interactions made by students in educational forums and chats. The degree of social presence (SP) can be an indicator of how individuals interact among themselves and with the learning environment, and is considered by the literature to be relevant for the development of relationships and the strengthening of the sense of belonging in the group. This study is based on Pragmatics, an area of Linguistics that emphasizes the importance of the context in communicative events and the dialogic dynamics among speakers. Considering that mapping students’ interactions, as well as detecting and evaluating their degree of SP, may be a complex and time-consuming task in distance learning tutoring, a software was developed to do the automatic processing of posts, aiming at making it a possible functionality in virtual learning environments (VLEs). Despite the few conflicting results, mostly related to textual syntactic relations, data from processing tests using lexicometrics were satisfactorily similar to those obtained by manual analysis. The PPlus model and the SP scale were also tested in a different course in the Moodle platform. Results from this experiment presented equally positive data. Feedback from the questionnaire answered by teachers and tutors working in distance learning courses support the proposal of a tool that may facilitate their assessment of affective states, involvement and text-based interaction dents within the environment.

No description available.

Data for empirical studies of software engineering can be difficult to obtain. Extrapolations from small controlled experiments to large development environments are tenuous and observation tends to change the behavior of the subjects. In this thesis we propose the use of data gathered from software repositories in observational studies of software engineering. We present tools we have developed to extract data from CVS repositories and the SourceForge Research Archive. We use these tools to gather data from 9,999 Open Source projects. By analyzing these data we are able to provide insights into the structure of Open Source projects. For example, we find that the vast majority of the projects studied have never had more than three contributors and that the vast majority of authors studied have never contributed to more than one project. However, there are projects that have had up to 120 contributors in a single year and authors who have contributed to more than 20 projects which raises interesting questions about team dynamics in the Open Source community. We also use these data to empirically test the belief that productivity is constant in terms of lines of code per programmer per year regardless of the programming language used. We find that yearly programmer productivity is not constant across programming languages, but rather that developers using higher level languages tend to write fewer lines of code per year than those using lower level languages.

No description available.

An extensive review of multi-seam under-mining literature was conducted and a data base of case studies was compiled. A critical review of the design principles outlined in this literature resulted in the compilation of specific design criteria for the design of lower seam mines. Analysis of this criteria demonstrated the necessity for a protocol for the design of unsymmetrically loaded pillars. Such a design criteria was developed using finite element methods for a wide range of possible loading conditions. This design criteria can be utilized for underlying pillar design when the loading conditions can be determined. To facilitate using all the under-mining research results by field/planning engineers a Windows™ based software package was developed. This software package contains a multi-seam tutorial, analytical tools and a case history database. The software is very friendly and fully interactive and results of analysis can be verified against case study data included in the program. / Master of Science

Various vulnerabilities in software products can often represent a significant security threat if they are discovered by malicious attackers. It is therefore important to identify these vulnerabilities and report their presence to responsible persons before they are exploited by malicious subjects. The number of security reports about discovered vulnerabilities in various software products has grown rapidly over the last decade. It is becoming more and more difficult to process all of the incoming reports manually. This work discusses various methods that can be used to automate several important processes in collecting and sorting the reports. The reports are analyzed in various ways, including techniques of text mining, and the results of the analysis are applied in form of practical implementation.

As software becomes more important to society, the number, age, and complexity of systems grow. Software organizations require continuous process improvement to maintain the reliability, security, and quality of these software systems. Software organizations can utilize data from manual fault classification to meet their process improvement needs, but organizations lack the expertise or resources to implement them correctly. This dissertation addresses the need for the automation of software fault classification. Validation results show that automated fault classification, as implemented in the MiSFIT tool, can group faults of similar nature. The resulting classifications result in good agreement for common software faults with no manual effort. To evaluate the method and tool, I develop and apply an extended change taxonomy to classify the source code changes that repaired software faults from an open source project. MiSFIT clusters the faults based on the changes. I manually inspect a random sample of faults from each cluster to validate the results. The automatically classified faults are used to analyze the evolution of a software application over seven major releases. The contributions of this dissertation are an extended change taxonomy for software fault analysis, a method to cluster faults by the syntax of the repair, empirical evidence that fault distribution varies according to the purpose of the module, and the identification of project-specific trends from the analysis of the changes.

The main objective of this thesis is to identify how the software repository features influence software quality during software evolution. To do that the mining software repository area was used. This field analyzes the rich data from software repositories to extract interesting and actionable information about software systems, projects and software engineering. The ability to measure code quality and analyze the impact of software repository features on software quality allows us to better understand project history, project quality state, development processes and conduct future project analysis. Existing work in the area of software quality describes software quality analysis without a connection to the software repository features. Thus they lose important information that can be used for preventing bugs, decision-making and optimizing development processes. To conduct the analysis specific tool was developed, which cover quality measurement and repository features extraction. During the research general procedure of the software quality analysis was defined, described and applied in practice. It was found that there is no most influential repository feature and the correlation between software quality and software repository features exist, but it is too small to make a real influence.

abstract: The following is a case study composed of three workflow investigations at the open source software development (OSSD) based Apache Software Foundation (Apache). I start with an examination of the workload inequality within the Apache, particularly with regard to requirements writing. I established that the stronger a participant's experience indicators are, the more likely they are to propose a requirement that is not a defect and the more likely the requirement is eventually implemented. Requirements at Apache are divided into work tickets (tickets). In our second investigation, I reported many insights into the distribution patterns of these tickets. The participants that create the tickets often had the best track records for determining who should participate in that ticket. Tickets that were at one point volunteered for (self-assigned) had a lower incident of neglect but in some cases were also associated with severe delay. When a participant claims a ticket but postpones the work involved, these tickets exist without a solution for five to ten times as long, depending on the circumstances. I make recommendations that may reduce the incidence of tickets that are claimed but not implemented in a timely manner. After giving an in-depth explanation of how I obtained this data set through web crawlers, I describe the pattern mining platform I developed to make my data mining efforts highly scalable and repeatable. Lastly, I used process mining techniques to show that workflow patterns vary greatly within teams at Apache. I investigated a variety of process choices and how they might be influencing the outcomes of OSSD projects. I report a moderately negative association between how often a team updates the specifics of a requirement and how often requirements are completed. I also verified that the prevalence of volunteerism indicators is positively associated with work completion but what was surprising is that this correlation is stronger if I exclude the very large projects. I suggest the largest projects at Apache may benefit from some level of traditional delegation in addition to the phenomenon of volunteerism that OSSD is normally associated with. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Industrial Engineering 2017

Submitted by Automa??o e Estat?stica (sst@bczm.ufrn.br) on 2017-04-17T21:35:20Z No. of bitstreams: 1 DanielAlencarDaCosta_TESE.pdf: 9198560 bytes, checksum: 463f875eda2671bd33beca615f72eef3 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Arlan Eloi Leite Silva (eloihistoriador@yahoo.com.br) on 2017-04-18T22:34:50Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 DanielAlencarDaCosta_TESE.pdf: 9198560 bytes, checksum: 463f875eda2671bd33beca615f72eef3 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-04-18T22:34:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DanielAlencarDaCosta_TESE.pdf: 9198560 bytes, checksum: 463f875eda2671bd33beca615f72eef3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-02-08 / The timely delivery of addressed software issues (i.e., bug fixes, enhancements, and new features) is what drives software development. Previous research has investigated what impacts the time to triage and address (or fix) issues. Nevertheless, even though an issue is addressed, i.e., a solution is coded and tested, such an issue may still suffer delay before being delivered to end users. Such delays are frustrating, since end users care most about when an addressed issue is available in the software system (i.e, released). In this matter, there is a lack of empirical studies that investigate why addressed issues take longer to be delivered compared to other issues. In this thesis, we perform empirical studies to understand which factors are associated with the delayed delivery of addressed issues. In our studies, we find that 34% to 98% of the addressed issues of the ArgoUML, Eclipse and Firefox projects have their integration delayed by at least one release. Our explanatory models achieve ROC areas above 0.74 when explaining delivery delay.We also find that the workload of integrators and the moment at which an issue is addressed are the factors with the strongest association with delivery delay.We also investigate the impact of rapid release cycles on the delivery delay of addressed issues. Interestingly, we find that rapid release cycles of Firefox are not related to faster delivery of addressed issues. Indeed, although rapid release cycles address issues faster than traditional ones, such addressed issues take longer to be delivered.Moreover, we find that rapid releases deliver addressed issues more consistently than traditional ones. Finally, we survey 37 developers of the ArgoUML, Eclipse, and Firefox projects to understand why delivery delays occur. We find that the allure of delivering addressed issues more quickly to users is the most recurrent motivator of switching to a rapid release cycle.Moreover, the possibility of improving the flexibility and quality of addressed issues is another advantage that are perceived by our participants. Additionally, the perceived reasons for the delivery delay of addressed issues are related to decision making, team collaboration, and risk management activities. Moreover, delivery delay likely leads to user/developer frustration according to our participants. Our thesis is the first work to study such an important topic in modern software development. Our studies highlight the complexity of delivering issues in a timely fashion (for instance, simply switching to a rapid release cycle is not a silver bullet that would guarantee the quicker delivery of addressed issues).