Alain April

Experimental comparison of navigation in a Galois lattice with conventional information retrieval methods

Abstract A controlled experiment was conducted comparing information retrieval using a Galois lattice structure with two more conventional retrieval methods: navigating in a manually built hierarchical classification and Boolean querying with index terms. No significant performance difference was found between Boolean querying and the Galois lattice retrieval method for subject searching with the three measures used for the experiment: user searching time, recall and precision. However, hierarchical classification retrieval did show significantly lower recall compared to the other two methods. This experiment suggests that retrieval using a Galois lattice structure may be an attractive alternative since it combines a good performance for subject searching along with browsing potential.

Software Maintenance Maturity Model (SMmm): the software maintenance process model

SUMMARY We address the assessment and improvement of the software maintenance function by proposing improvements to the software maintenance standards and introducing a proposed maturity model for daily software maintenance activities: Software Maintenance Maturity Model (SM mm ). The software maintenance function suffers from a scarcity of management models to facilitate its evaluation, management, and continuous improvement. The SM mm addresses the unique activities of software maintenance while preserving a structure similar to that of the CMMi ©4 maturity model. It is designed to be used as a complement to this model. The SM mm is based on practitioners’ experience, international standards, and the seminal literature on software maintenance. We present the model’s purpose, scope, foundation, and architecture, followed by its initial validation. Copyright

REquirements TRacing On target (RETRO): improving software maintenance through traceability recovery

A number of important tasks in software maintenance require an up-to-date requirements traceability matrix (RTM): change impact analysis, determination of test cases to execute for regression testing, etc. The generation and maintenance of RTMs are tedious and error-prone, and they are hence often not done. In this paper, we present REquirements TRacing On-target (RETRO), a special- purpose requirements tracing tool. We discuss how RETRO automates the generation of RTMs and present the results of a study comparing manual RTM generation to RTM generation using RETRO. The study showed that RETRO found significantly more correct links than manual tracing and took only one third of the time to do so.

Criteria to Compare Cloud Computing with Current Database Technology

After Google published their first paper on their software infrastruc-ture in October 2003, the open-source community quickly began working on similar free solutions. Yahoo! is now able to process terabytes of data daily using Hadoop, which is a scalable distributed file system and an open-source implementation of Googles MapReduce. HBase, a distributed database that uses Hadoop, enables the reliable storage of structured data, just like Googles Bigtable which powers applications like Google Maps and Google Analytics, to name only two. Many companies are tempted to use these technologies, but it is currently difficult to compare todays systems with systems built on top of HBase. This paper presents this new technology and, a list of proposed comparison elements to existing database technology as well as proposed comparison assessment criteria.

SM/sup CMM/ model to evaluate and improve the quality of the software maintenance process

Software maintenance function suffers from a scarcity of management models that would facilitate its evaluation, management and continuous improvement. This paper is part of a series of papers that presents a software maintenance capability maturity model (SM/sup CMM/). The contributions of this specific paper are: 1) to describe the key references of software maintenance; 2) to present the model update process conducted during 2003; and 3) to present, for the first time, the updated architecture of the model.

Bloom's taxonomy levels for three software engineer profiles

This paper is the product of a workshop held in Amsterdam during the Software Technology and Practice Conference (STEP 2003). The purpose of the paper is to propose Blooms taxonomy levels for the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) topics for three software engineer profiles: a new graduate, a graduate with four years of experience, and an experienced member of a software engineering process group. Blooms taxonomy levels are proposed for topics of four knowledge areas of the SWEBOK Guide: software maintenance, software engineering management, software engineering process, and software quality. By proposing Blooms taxonomy in this way, the paper aims to illustrate how such profiles could be used as a tool in defining job descriptions, software engineering role descriptions within a software engineering process definition, professional development paths, and training programs.

Performance analysis model for big data applications in cloud computing

The foundation of Cloud Computing is sharing computing resources dynamically allocated and released per demand with minimal management effort. Most of the time, computing resources such as processors, memory and storage are allocated through commodity hardware virtualization, which distinguish cloud computing from others technologies. One of the objectives of this technology is processing and storing very large amounts of data, which are also referred to as Big Data. Sometimes, anomalies and defects found in the Cloud platforms affect the performance of Big Data Applications resulting in degradation of the Cloud performance. One of the challenges in Big Data is how to analyze the performance of Big Data Applications in order to determine the main factors that affect the quality of them. The performance analysis results are very important because they help to detect the source of the degradation of the applications as well as Cloud. Furthermore, such results can be used in future resource planning stages, at the time of design of Service Level Agreements or simply to improve the applications. This paper proposes a performance analysis model for Big Data Applications, which integrates software quality concepts from ISO 25010. The main goal of this work is to fill the gap that exists between quantitative (numerical) representation of quality concepts of software engineering and the measurement of performance of Big Data Applications. For this, it is proposed the use of statistical methods to establish relationships between extracted performance measures from Big Data Applications, Cloud Computing platforms and the software engineering quality concepts.

MEASURING SOFTWARE FUNCTIONAL SIZE FROM BUSINESS PROCESS MODELS

ISO 14143-1 specifies that a functional size measurement (FSM) method must provide measurement procedures to quantify the functional user requirements (FURs) of software. Such quantitative information, functional size, is typically used, for instance, in software estimation. One of the international standards for FSM is the COSMIC FSM method — ISO 19761 — which was designed to be applied both to the business application (BA) software domain and to the real-time software domain. A recurrent problem in FSM is the availability and quality of the inputs required for measurement purposes; that is, well documented FURs. Business process (BP) models, as they are commonly used to gather requirements from the early stages of a project, could be a valuable source of information for FSM. In a previous article, the feasibility of such an approach for the BA domain was analyzed using the Qualigram BP modeling notation. This paper complements that work by: (1) analyzing the use of BPMN for FSM in the BA domain; (2) pre...

A Software Maintenance Maturity Model (S3M): Measurement Practices at Maturity Levels 3 and 4

Evaluation and continuous improvement of software maintenance are key contributors to improving software quality. The software maintenance function suffers from a scarcity of the management models that would facilitate these functions. This paper presents an overview of the measurement practices that are being introduced for level 3 and higher to the Software Maintenance Maturity Model (S3M).

Representing Unique Stakeholder Perspectives in BPM Notations

Evidence shows that proposals for new modeling notations emerge and evolution of current ones are becoming more complex, often in an attempt to satisfy the many different modeling perspectives required by each stakeholder. This paper presents a method to identify the specific notation construct requirements, at multiple levels of abstraction, which satisfy the needs of a stakeholder when performing a specific task. Initially the focus is on two different stakeholders: software engineers (SE) and business analysts(BA), and one specific software engineering activity: requirements eliciting and analysis. The specific body of knowledge of the two stakeholders (Software Engineering Book of Knowledge (SWEBOK) for the SE, and Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) for the BA) are used to identify each stakeholder specific notation construct requirements, at multiple levels of abstraction, in order to propose a simplification of their notation and constructs set. This paper presents solution avenues to simplify business process modeling notations by identifying the specific constructs preferred by different stakeholders.