The software development life-cycle is comprised of a series of successive activities consisting of analysis, design, implementation, system testing and maintenance. During the analysis phase we do planning and requirements definition for the software product. The design phase, which follows the analysis phase, is concerned with deciding exactly how the software will be implemented. However, the actual transition from the analysis to the design phase is not well documented. There exists an information gap between these two phases.In this study, the transition from the analysis to the design phase is explored by using the reverse engineering method which essentially proceeds from the design phase back to the analysis phase. This study is based on the design of an approximately five thousand line project - an Executive Calendar, which is first designed using a computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool called DesignAid. The transition is documented in order to exploit the isomorphisms between each phase.The end results show that by documenting the mapping between the analysis phase and the design phase, the process of transition from one phase to another could be partly automated. By using the reverse engineering method, the elements which are necessary in the transition between the analysis and the design phase can be easily identified. Being able to identify these elements, one can reduce the amount of effort required to transform user requirements to design, and thus improve software productivity. / Department of Computer Science

A major reengineering goal is software reuse. Effective reuse of knowledge, processes and products from previous software developments can reduce costs and increase both productivity and quality in software projects.This thesis extensively tests five projects produced by the graduate software engineering class at Ball State University. Each project has the same set of requirements.Each project is also analyzed based on subjective criteria, for example documentation, use of mnemonics for variable names and ease of understanding. Based on the outcome of testing and subjective analysis, reusable parts are identified.Metrics are collected on all of these projects. This thesis compares the metrics collected on the modules identified for reuse, and the same metrics collected on the non-reusable modules, to determine if there is a statistically significant difference in those metrics between the two groups. Metrics which are good predictors of reusable modules are identified.Metrics which are found to be good predictors of reusable modules include: number of in-parameters, number of data structure manipulations and central calls. / Department of Computer Science

Documentation is essential to software development. Experienced programmers know this well from having worked with poorly documented code. They wish to improve their documentation techniques and habits, but there is little consensus for them to follow. Somehow, the many different standards must be compared objectively. This desire motivates my work, which aims to better understand existing documentation practices. This work focuses exclusively on comments within the program code. Programming is a complex human activity, despite a widespread misconception among programmers that writing code is a mechanical process. This is especially true of comments, where programmers express themselves freely. My work fills a gap in research on software documentation by systematically investigating the comments in a unique database of code written by programmers under natural conditions. The true variety of programming behaviour is surprising. But this variety does not mean that the output of programmers is completely arbitrary; there are patterns in this data, which my research aims to understand. This work makes three contributions: A novel taxonomy of comments developed from the data, which to date is the most thorough description of commenting behaviour actually exhibited by programmers. Empirical hypotheses regarding large scale commenting behaviour, which were validated on separate test data. These hypotheses describe underlying regularities in programming which appear to transcend individual differences. The database of code I collected, which has unique opportunities for further research on software development, and is thus available for use by other researchers.

Software cost estimation nowadays plays a more and more important role in practical projects since modern software projects become more and more complex as well as diverse. To help estimate software development cost accurately, this research does a systematic analysis of the similarity distances in analogy-based software cost estimation and based on this, a new non-orthogonal space distance (NoSD) is proposed as a measure of the similarities between real software projects. Different from currently adopted measures like the Euclidean distance and so on, this non-orthogonal space distance not only considers the different features to have different importance for cost estimation, but also assumes project features to have a non-orthogonal dependent relationship which is considered independent to each other in Euclidean distance. Based on such assumptions, NoSD method describes the non-orthogonal angles between feature axes using feature redundancy and it represents the feature weights using feature relevance, where both redundancy and relevance are defined in terms of mutual information. It can better reveal the real dependency relationships between real life software projects based on this non-orthogonal space distance. Also experiments show that it brings a greatest of 13.1% decrease of MMRE and a 12.5% increase of PRED(0.25) on ISBSG R8 dataset, and 7.5% and 20.5% respectively on the Desharnais dataset. Furthermore, to make it better fit the complex data distribution of real life software projects data, this research leverages the particle swarm optimization algorithm for an optimization of the proposed non-orthogonal space distance and proposes a PSO optimized non-orthogonal space distance (PsoNoSD). It brings further improvement in the estimation accuracy. As shown in experiments, compared with the normally used Euclidean distance, PsoNoSD improves the estimation accuracy by 38.73% and 11.59% in terms of MMRE and PRED(0.25) on ISBSG R8 dataset. On the Desharnais dataset, the improvements are 23.38% and 24.94% respectively. In summary, the new methods proposed in this research, which are based on theoretical study as well as systematic experiments, have solved some problems of currently used techniques and they show a great ability of notably improving the software cost estimation accuracy.

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This work examines the belief system underlying computer-based systems development, by reference to an analogy with a model of scientific research due to Kuhn. Kuhn's model describes 'scientific communities', each united by an underlying many-faceted belief system, the 'disciplinary matrix', which forms a constellation of commitments shared by the members of these communities. A scientific community is compared here with the community of computer-based systems developers and its sub-groups. The division of the developers of computer-based systems development methods and tools into schools based on paradigmatic differences is paralleled with Kuhn's view of a scientific discipline at the early, pre-science, stage. The use of a computer-based systems development method in practice, and informal computer-based systems development activities, are paralleled with Kuhnian normal science, working within the paradigm of the discipline and of the techniques employed. This parallel provides a framework for structuring the explicit and implicit assumptions and models which form the craft knowledge underlying computer-based systems development theory and practice. Following a search for elements of the disciplinary matrix in the theory of computer-based systems development, as described in textbooks, and in its practice through interviews with developers, the results of action research and reports of systems development failures, it is concluded that the analogy with Kuhn's view of scientific activity is justifiable, and that articulation and examination of the implications of the analogy can reveal useful information to assist in describing and improving computer-based systems development. The results of this search are presented in terms of the specific beliefs and models identified. It is suggested that, as future research, the Kuhn-based model of computer-based systems development should be extended into a detailed investigation into the effects of individual elements of the disciplinary matrix, either individually or in combination, on the mind set of the computer-based systems developer.

No description available.

Success for many businesses depends on their information software systems. Keeping these systems operational is critical, as failure in these systems is costly. Such systems are in many cases sophisticated, distributed and dynamically composed. To ensure high availability and correct operation, it is essential that failures be detected promptly, their causes diagnosed and remedial actions taken. Although automated recovery approaches exists for specific problem domains, the problem-resolution process is in many cases manual and painstaking. Computer support personnel put a great deal of effort into resolving the reported failures. The growing size and complexity of these systems creates the need to automate this process. The primary focus of our research is on automated fault diagnosis and recovery using discrete monitoring data such as log files and notifications. Our goal is to quickly pinpoint the root-cause of a failure. Our contributions are: Modelling discrete monitoring data for automated analysis, automatically leveraging common symptoms of failures from historic monitoring data using such models to pinpoint faults, and providing a model for decision-making under uncertainty such that appropriate recovery actions are chosen. Failures in such systems are caused by software defects, human error, hardware failures, environmental conditions and malicious behaviour. Our primary focus in this thesis is on software defects and misconfiguration.

Society is increasingly on the move, mobile devices are commonly being used to coordinate group actions, and group communication features are rapidly being added to existing technologies. Despite this, little is known about how mobile groups act, or how communications technologies should be designed to augment existing behaviour. This is partially due to minimal research being done on the topic, but also to the lack of research methods available to study the topic with. Mobile groups are challenging to study because of frequent and long-duration movement, frequent distribution, and the rapidly changing environments they operate within. To address these issues, this research focuses on methodological issues surrounding the development of mobile devices for mobile groups and communities. More specifically it addresses backpackers, who are a relevant example of this type of community. The research primarily explores the convergence of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and the field of mobile device development. This enables the combination of emphasis on designing technologies for groups, social implications, mobile device design, and mobile settings. Major research outcomes presented in this thesis lie in three areas: 1) methods, 2) technology designs, and 3) backpacker culture. Five studies of backpacker behaviour and requirements form the core of the research. The methods used are in-situ and exploratory, and apply both novel and existing techniques to the domain of backpackers and mobile groups. Methods demonstrated in this research include: field trips for exploring mobile group behaviour and device usage, a social pairing exercise to explore social networks, contextual postcards to gain distributed feedback, and blog analysis which provides post-hoc diary data. Theoretical contributions include: observations on method triangulation, a taxonomy of mobility research, method templates to assist method usage, and identification of key categories leading to mobile group requirements. Design related outcomes include: 57 mobile tourism product ideas, a format for conveying product concepts, and a design for a wearable device to assist mobile researchers. Our understanding of backpacker culture has also improved as a consequence of the research. It has also generated user requirements to aid mobile development, methods of visualising mobile groups and communities, and a listing of relevant design tensions. Additionally, the research has added to our understanding of how new technologies such as blogs, SMS and iPods are being used by backpackers and how mobile groups naturally communicate.

Society is increasingly on the move, mobile devices are commonly being used to coordinate group actions, and group communication features are rapidly being added to existing technologies. Despite this, little is known about how mobile groups act, or how communications technologies should be designed to augment existing behaviour. This is partially due to minimal research being done on the topic, but also to the lack of research methods available to study the topic with. Mobile groups are challenging to study because of frequent and long-duration movement, frequent distribution, and the rapidly changing environments they operate within. To address these issues, this research focuses on methodological issues surrounding the development of mobile devices for mobile groups and communities. More specifically it addresses backpackers, who are a relevant example of this type of community. The research primarily explores the convergence of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and the field of mobile device development. This enables the combination of emphasis on designing technologies for groups, social implications, mobile device design, and mobile settings. Major research outcomes presented in this thesis lie in three areas: 1) methods, 2) technology designs, and 3) backpacker culture. Five studies of backpacker behaviour and requirements form the core of the research. The methods used are in-situ and exploratory, and apply both novel and existing techniques to the domain of backpackers and mobile groups. Methods demonstrated in this research include: field trips for exploring mobile group behaviour and device usage, a social pairing exercise to explore social networks, contextual postcards to gain distributed feedback, and blog analysis which provides post-hoc diary data. Theoretical contributions include: observations on method triangulation, a taxonomy of mobility research, method templates to assist method usage, and identification of key categories leading to mobile group requirements. Design related outcomes include: 57 mobile tourism product ideas, a format for conveying product concepts, and a design for a wearable device to assist mobile researchers. Our understanding of backpacker culture has also improved as a consequence of the research. It has also generated user requirements to aid mobile development, methods of visualising mobile groups and communities, and a listing of relevant design tensions. Additionally, the research has added to our understanding of how new technologies such as blogs, SMS and iPods are being used by backpackers and how mobile groups naturally communicate.