An Integrated Cost Model for Product Line Engineering

Today, we will publish in this blog one more M.Sc. dissertation defended in our group.

Jarley Nobrega's dissertation presents a relevant contribution for the field defining an economic model for software product lines.

Here is the abstract of the work:

In the software development community, the process of using existing artifacts rather than building them from scratch – generally known as software reuse – has been advanced as a way in which the problems associated with cost and schedule overruns can be avoided. Despite the potential rewards from an effective reuse program, it appears that its large-scale adoption is not particularly prevalent. Among the factors that inhibit reuse adoption there are the economic obstacles faced by organizations, which are concerned with the cost related to develop software for reuse and with reuse. Currently, thedecisions concerning large-scale reuse are often related with an economic viewpoint, since the development of software to be reusable can be considered as an investment. Moreover, the adoption of a software product line in a reuse context comes up with some inhibitors, such as the application of cost models in a restricted way, the lack of an investment analysis strategy, and the fact that a few cost models have a reuse scenario-based approach.

In this context, this work presents an integrated cost model for product line engineering in order to help the decisions concerning reuse investment. The foundations of the model were based on an extensive survey on cost models for software reuse and its extension to the product line approach. The model presents the definition of a set of cost and benefits functions, the description of reuse scenarios for product line engineering, and an investment analysis strategy. In addition, a simulation model based on the Monte Carlo method was proposed for simulating the reuse scenarios.

Finally, this work discusses the results of a case study in the context of a real software development environment where the model was applied.

See the full document here.

Applying a Semantic Layer in a Source Code Retrieval Tool

Today, a master thesis of a RiSE member is published in this blog.

Here is the abstract of the work: The challenge for achieving a more efficient software engineering practice comprises a vast number of obstacles related to the intrinsic complexity of software systems and their surrounding contexts. Consequently, software systems tend to fail in meeting the real needs they were developed to address, consuming more resources, thus having a higher cost, and taking longer to complete than anticipated. The software reuse field is often regarded as the most promising discipline for closing these gaps, however, models and tools are still immature to make its adoption on a systematic fashion.

To promote the development of practices, models and tools are welcome activities to boost the reuse activity in most software development organizations. The lack of knowledge about reusable assets and the use of inappropriate tools are example of reasons for the low reuse activity. In this sense, this work presents a semantic layer applied to a source code search tool with the objective of bringing real relevant returns closer to user need, and, consequently to increase the chance of reuse. Two new components are proposed for the execution of the semantic activities and the resulting semantic search engine is evaluated with a realistic environment configuration analogous to projects from software organizations.

Outline: The main contribution of this work refers to the semantic layer applied to a keyword-based search engine in order to increase the precision of search returns. The proposed solution utilizes a domain ontology for enhancing the construction of the query with related terms and a machine learning technique for source code classification. The implemented proposal configures a viable and practical solution for being utilized in an industrial scenario in favor of source code reuse. Through the real experiment, it was evidenced the increase of precision during the code searches and this finding goes against the semantic conceptual gap between user needs and machine understanding.

The full text you can get here.

ADMIRE: Asset Development Metrics-based Integrated Reuse Environment

Today, we will publish in this blog one more M.Sc. dissertation defended in our group.

Jorge Mascena's dissertation presents a relevant contribution for the field involving reuse tools and metrics. Nowadays, Mascena is living in U.S. working as a Project Manager.

Here is the abstract of the work: “The challenge for achieving a more efficient software engineering practice comprises a vast number of obstacles related to the intrinsic complexity of software systems and their surrounding contexts. Consequently, software systems tend to fail in meeting the real needs they were developed to address, consuming more resources,
thus having a higher cost, and taking longer to complete than anticipated.

The software reuse field is often regarded as the most promising discipline for closing these gaps, however, it still fails to fulfill this promise by providing a comprehensive set of models and tools that can be adopted on a systematic way.

This leads to a poor reuse activity in most software development organizations. One of the main reasons for the low reuse activity is that developers simply do not attempt to reuse because of a number of factors, including lack of knowledge about reusable assets and the notion that the cost for reusing is higher than the cost of developing new code.

This work aims at building an integrated reuse environment, the Asset Development Metrics-based Integrated Reuse Environment (ADMIRE), that addresses this problem in two fronts: (1) aiding developers to achieve a higher reuse activity and (2) providing managers with means to monitor the achieved reuse activity and thus take prompt corrective actions.

An active information delivery scheme is used to provide the first part, while a continuous reuse metric extraction mechanism is employed to implement the second part. A new reuse metric is proposed for this purpose and the resulting ADMIRE environment is evaluated with a set of real projects from a software development organization.”

See the full document here.

Software Component Certification: A Component Quality Model

Today, for the reuse community the RiSE is starting one more effort. We will publish in this blog all the M.Sc. and Ph.D. thesis defended in our group.

Starting, we have Alexandre Alvaro's dissertation, which won the best dissertation award in the Brazilian Simposium on Software Quality.

Here is the abstract of the work: "Component-based software development is becoming more generalized, representing a considerable market for the software industry. The perspective of reduced development costs and shorter life cycles acts as a motivation for this expansion. However, several technical issues remain unsolved before the software components industry reaches the maturity as other software industries.

Problems such as component selection, the lack of component catalogs formalization and the uncertain quality of third-party developed components bring new challenges to the software engineering community. On the other hand, software component certification is still immature and much research is needed in order to create well-defined standards for certification. This dissertation introduces a component quality model, based upon consistent and well-defined characteristics, quality attributes and related metrics for the component evaluation.

A formal case study was used in order to analyze the viability of the use such of a model. The results showed that the model is a good candidate for evaluating software component quality, and future work already scheduled to continue evolving until it reaches a maturation level that makes it applicable in industry."

See the full document here.