Zugl.: Kaiserslautern, Univ., Diss., 2009

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Naval Postgraduate School, September 2003. / Dissertation supervisors: Luqi, James B. Michael. Includes bibliographical references (p. 399-533). Also available online.

Thesis (M.S. in Software Engineering)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 445-446). Also available online.

Thesis (M.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Software Engineering)--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): James Bret Michael, Richard Riehle. Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-66). Also available online.

Thesis (M.S.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: java; software visualization; probes; event notification. Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-82).

With over 1.3 million applications on the Android marketplace, there is increasing competition between mobile applications for customer sales. As usability is a significant factor in an application’s success, many mobile developers refer to the Android design guidelines when designing the user interface (UI). These principles help to provide consistency of navigation and aesthetics, with the rest of the Android platform. However, misinterpretation of the abstract guidelines may mean that patterns and elements selected to organise content of an application do not improve the usability. Therefore, usability tests would be beneficial to ensure that an application meets objectives efficiently and improve on user experience. Usability testing is an important and crucial step in the mobile development process Many freelance developers, however, have limited resources for usability testing, even though the advantages of usability feedback during initial development stages are clear and can save time and money in the long-run. In this thesis, we investigate which method of usability testing is most useful for resource constrained mobile developers. To test the efficacy of Android guidelines, three alternate designs of a unique Android tablet application, Glycano, are developed. High-fidelity paper prototypes were presented to end-users for usability testing and to usability experts for heuristic evaluations. Both usability and heuristic tests demonstrated that following the Android guidelines aids in user familiarity and learnability. Regardless of the different UI designs of the three mockups, Android guidelines provided an initial level of usability by providing familiarity to proficient users and an intuitiveness of certain patterns to new users. However, efficiency in building Glycano schematics was an issue that arose consistently. Testing with end-users and experts, revealed several navigational problems. Usability experts uncovered more general UI problems than the end-user group, who focused more on the content of the application. More refinements and suggestions of additional features to enhance usability and user experience were provided by the experts. Use of usability experts would therefore be most advantageous in initial design stages of an application. Feedback from usability testing is, however, also beneficial and is more valuable than not performing any test at all.

M. Tech. Software Development Tshwane University of Technology 2011. / The von Neumann model has been for years a successful model of computation architecture in sequential computing. This model provides both consistency and synchronization in the development of computer products such as application algorithms, computer architecture as well as programming languages. The success of this model of sequential computation is due extensively to the fact that it is an efficient bridge between software and hardware: high-level languages can be efficiently compiled on to this model; yet it can be efficiently implemented in hardware. The demand for solving large and complex problems in a relative short time has motivated scientists to improve computational performance by adopting parallel computing. Unfortunately, there has not been the similar success in terms of a unifying model of computation in parallel computing. The need for such a unifying parallel model or set of models is heightened by the greater demand for performance and the greater diversity among machines. The author argues that an equivalent bridge between software and hardware is required for parallel computation since the latter is considered the future of computing. This dissertation expands a little further in motivating the need for a new model of parallel computation and considers one such model called AriDeM.

Project Management is the primary key to successful software development. In 1995 Caper Jones stated that the failure or cancellation rate of large software systems was over 20% in his article on patterns of large software systems. More than two thirds of the projects fail due to improper management of skills, activities, and personnel. One main reason is that software is not a tangible entity and is hard to visualize and hence to monitor. A manager has to be skilled in different CASE tools and technologies to track and manage a software development process successfully. The volume of results produced by these CASE tools is so huge that a high level manager cannot look into all the details. He has to get a high level picture of the project, to know where the project is heading, and if needed, then look into the finer level details by drilling down to locate and correct problems. The objective of this thesis is to build an Advanced Charting System (ACS), which would act as a companion to PAMPA 2 (Project Attribute Monitoring and Prediction Associate) and help a manager visualize the state of a software project over a standard World Wide Web browser. The PAMPA 2 ACS will be responsible for visualizing and tracking of resources, tasks, schedules and milestones of a software project described in the plan. PAMPA 2 ACS will have the ability to depict the status of the project through a variety of graphs and charts. PAMPA 2 ACS implements a novel charting technique called as DOT Chart to track the processes and activities of a software project. PAMPA 2 ACS provides a multilevel view of the project status. PAMPA 2 ACS will be able to track any arbitrary plan starting from a collapsed / concise view of a whole project. This can be further drilled down to the lowest level of detail. The status can be viewed at the project version level, plan and workbreakdown levels, process, sub process, and activity level. Among all the process models, the DOT charts can be applied effectively to spiral process model where each spiral represents a project version.

In this dissertation we identify two problems with current integrated development environments (IDEs) and present JQuery as a tool to address these issues. The first problem is that IDE views answer low level questions and do not provide a mechanism to combine results to answer complex higher level questions. Even relatively simple questions force the developers to mentally combine results from different views. The second problem is that IDEs do not provide an easy way to create perspectives on project specific concerns such as naming conventions or annotations. Most IDEs do offer support for creating custom perspectives but the effort required to create a perspective is considerably more than the benefit a custom perspective provides. JQuery is an Eclipse plugin which generates code views using an expressive query language. We have redesigned JQuery to support a number of new user interface (UI) features and add a more flexible architecture with better support for extending the UI. To address the first problem, we have added multiple views to JQuery where each view supports drag and drop of results, selection linking, and regular expression search. These features enable a user to combine results from different views to answer more complex higher level questions. To address the second problem, we can leverage the fact that JQuery is built on an expressive query language. Through this query language we are able to define project specific concerns such as naming conventions or annotations and then create views and perspectives for these concerns through the JQuery UI.

Software product lines (SPLs) manage product variants in a systematical way and allow stakeholders to derive variants by selecting features. Finding a desirable variant is hard, due to the huge configuration space and usually conflicting objectives (e.g., lower cost and higher performance). This scenario can be reduced to a multi-objective optimization prob- lem in SPLs. We address the problem using an exact and an approximate algorithm and compare their accuracy, time consumption, scalability and parameter setting requirements on five case studies with increasing complexity. Our empirical results show that (1) it is feasible to use exact techniques for small SPL multi-objective optimization problems, and (2) approximate methods can be used for large problems but require substantial effort to find the best parameter settings for acceptable approximation. Finally, we discuss the tradeoff between accuracy and time consumption when using exact and approximate techniques for SPL multi-objective optimization and guide stakeholders to choose one or the other in practice.