Search results for "Software engineering"
showing 10 items of 1151 documents
How to Comprehend Large and Complicated Systems
2002
The basic problem at early analysis stage of the development life cycle is how to quickly comprehend a large and complicated system. One of the ways to comprehend such a system is to build an object model, as it was suggested by the pioneers of object modelling approach such as J.Rumbaugh1 and J.Martin2. In up-to-date terminology it means building a UML class diagram. The authors have got convinced in their everyday practice on extreme efficiency of this type of modelling, though at the same time a significant experience for this job is also required. To make this job easier, a modelling methodology must be developed. The goal of this paper is, on the one hand, to give some methodological r…
Improving the Reuse Process is Based on Understanding the Business and the Products: Four Case Studies
2002
The reuse of software engineering assets has been proposed as the most promising alternative for improving productivity and software quality. The improvement of reuse requires understanding of suitable reuse strategies and the software process. In four industrial cases the reuse process is analyzed for the purpose of its improvement and remarkable differences between successful processes are found. Those differences are due to differences in the products and businesses of the analyzed companies. In some cases the product line approach fits the business very well and high level of reuse can be achieved by using it. In other cases the black-box approach to reuse has turned out to suit the bus…
Use of Non-IT Testers in Software Development
2007
Because of a shortage of IT specialists, many companies which are not involved in software development business are forced to use employees who have minimal or no any knowledge about software development and IT as testers (let's call them non-IT testers). The author of this paper has used years of experience in working with such testers to provide a description of them, looking also at their most typical testing styles and the problems which occur for testers, their colleagues and bosses, and the overall software development processes. Non-IT testers often feel like second-class employees, because they are forced to work in an environment in which they do not have sufficient skills. This pa…
ValWorkBench: an open source Java library for cluster validation, with applications to microarray data analysis.
2015
Background: Cluster analysis is one of the most well known activities in scientific investigation and the object of research in many disciplines, ranging from statistics to computer science. It is central to the life sciences due to the advent of high throughput technologies, e.g., classification of tumors. In particular, in cluster analysis, it is of relevance to assess cluster quality and to predict the number of clusters in a dataset, if any. This latter task is usually performed via internal validation measures. Despite their potentially important role, both the use of classic internal validation measures and the design of new ones, specific for microarray data, do not seem to have grea…
On Supervising Master’s Theses in Industry Context
2022
In software engineering, students easily find internships in companies while still studying. To combine their studies and employment, many of them seek to compose their final theses in an industry context, for the benefit of the employer as well as to simplify their context switching between job and studies. This can put the student between a rock and a hard place, as on one hand the employer has certain expectations in terms of working for the company, whereas the supervising professor needs to follow the university guidelines. An additional aspect worth considering is the university as an administrative home for the thesis and owner of the thesis process. In this paper, we study how the d…
An Expert System for the Design of Agents
2007
The growing interest for the design and development of multi-agent systems has brought to the creation of a specific research area called Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE), specifically conceived for the development of complex systems. The development of such systems needs the support of appropriate tools that could help the designer in producing the design artefacts. We developed a tool called Metameth that may be used to define a new (agent-oriented) design process as well as to apply it. In this paper, we describe only a slice of this complex tool, specifically addressing the interaction with human actors (the designers). This subsystem is conceived as a collaborative multi-agen…
State Model of Service Reliability
2006
We propose a simple formalism for modelling of a service reliability. A service is defined as an ordered set of states of a modelled application. In the model, a certain reliability is assigned to each application state. Reliability of a service is expressed in terms of above partial reliabilities.
Insights from Operator Interviews
2009
The previous section analysed use of software to improve productivity from a general perspective and provided a quick statistical analysis of software usage to the performance of a CSP. Before conducting elaborated statistical analysis on CSP software usage, we need to gain some insight into operator business and understanding on how operators see the role of software in their business as well as how they acquire software.
A metrics suite for evaluating agent-oriented architectures
2010
The Multi-agent Systems (MASs) paradigm continues to consolidate itself as a new branch of software engineering. Traditional software engineering strongly recommends to apply metrics in software developments. However, several research groups of experts in agent-oriented software engineering agree that classical software metrics and object-oriented metrics cannot directly measure the quality of MAS architectures. For this reason, this work proposes a suite of metrics to measure certain quality attributes of MAS architectures, considering agents and their organization. Most of these metrics are inspired by object-oriented metrics but they are adapted to agent-oriented concepts. Proposed metri…
Graph grammar engineering: A software specification method
1987
Graphs as conceptual data models are accepted and used in a wide range of different problem areas. Giving some examples we outline common aspects for modeling complex structures by graphs. We present a formal frame-work based on graph grammars to specify graph classes and the corresponding graph manipulations. We show that such a specification can be written in a systematic, engineering-like manner. This is achieved by an extension of the known programmed, attributed graph grammars. Node-set operators are introduced to facilitate graph queries. Concepts like abstraction, decomposition, refinement, parameterization, and integration have been adopted from software engineering to yield a compr…