Clauirton de Siebra

Tracking technical debt — An exploratory case study

The technical debt metaphor is increasingly being used to describe the effect of delaying certain software maintenance tasks on software projects. Practitioners understand intuitively how technical debt can turn into a serious problem if it is left unattended. However, it remains unknown how serious the problem is and whether explicit measurement and management of technical debt is useful. In this paper, we explore the effect of technical debt by tracking a single delayed maintenance task in a real software project throughout its lifecycle and simulate how explicit technical debt management might have changed project outcomes. The results from this study demonstrate how and to what extent technical debt affects software projects. The study also sheds light on the research methodologies that can be used to investigate the technical debt management problem.

Early diagnosis of gastrointestinal cancer by using case-based and rule-based reasoning

We present a medical diagnosis decision support model for gastrointestinal cancer.The model uses case-based reasoning (CBR) and rule-based reasoning (RBR).We used real patient data as inputs to our model.The model was validated through K-fold cross validation and the paired t-test.Improved diagnosis accuracy compared to a CBR approach not using RBR in retrieval. In this paper, we present a medical diagnosis decision support model for gastrointestinal cancer. It should be used by general practitioners whenever there is a suspicion that a patient has this type of cancer. To build our model, we used Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) and Rule-Based Reasoning (RBR). We used real patient data as inputs to our model. We applied RBR to improve the CBR retrieve process. The models output presents the probability of the patient having a specific cancer. In order to adjust the attributes weights, we collected data from a general practitioner. To validate our model, we used K-fold cross validation and the paired t-test. The results showed that, with our approach, the accuracy of the diagnosis increased by 22.92% when compared to a CBR approach not using RBR in case retrieval. Furthermore, we evaluated our approach with an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. Even though, given the number of respondents, we cannot generalize our conclusions, the results indicate that our approach would be useful for general practitioners.

Applying Metrics to Identify and Monitor Technical Debt Items during Software Evolution

The Technical Debt (TD) metaphor has been used in the software community as a way to manage and communicate the long-term consequences that some technical decisions may cause. Although intuitive, researches in TD do not discuss practical approaches to identify and monitor TD items, which could be applied in a transparent way during the process of software evolution. This work proposes a technique based on software metrics that automates the process of TD identification and monitoring. For that end, a subset of metrics was analyzed and related to aspects of TD items. As a form to validate the technique, it was used to analyze a TD item from a past 7 years multinational project. Evidences suggest that TD items can be related to software metrics so that software metric tools could be an important resource to automate the identification and monitoring of TD items.

The software perspective for energy-efficient mobile applications development

Nowadays, there is a growing concern about the energy consumption of the ICT industry. This fact has given rise to a lot of energy saving research activities, which mainly focus on the hardware side of computational systems. However, it is tempting to suppose that only hardware dissipates power, not software. This paper discusses several software methods, which could be explored to develop energy-efficient mobile techniques. We argue that the development of applications that consider the energy saving, as one of their requirements, can result in a significant final energy saving because solutions will be part of the own software and they do not depend of external resources to obtain a lower consumption.

Knowledge tv

While iTV content is aimed at human manipulation, it does not appropriately support the performance of computational processes, such as search engines. The principal problem is that the meaning of multimedia documents cannot be explored, reducing the actuation limit of services and applications. In this context, this project proposes the definition of a semantic layer to the iTV platform, based on the Semantic Web concepts, which organizes its content and offers intelligent services, such as semantic queries and recommendation. Thus, this project tries to avoid the same problems that are currently presented by the Web platform, following the Semantic Web trend and increasing the potential to the development of more advanced applications. This technology is being developed in accordance with the Ginga project, which is the official specification for the Brazilian iTV middleware.

An extraction method to collect data on defects and effort evolution in a constantly modified system

This paper describes a data extraction method that was carried out on a set of historical development documentation, related to a commercial software system for mobile platform. This method is part of a major project, which aims to identify evidences of technical debt via the analysis of the defect evolution and effort estimation deviation, verifying if there are relations between these concepts and project decisions during the cycles of development. We intend that a future analysis of such data supports the identification of patterns regarding specific decisions and variations of the defect number/frequency and effort deviation. Thus, such patterns could assist project managers during future project decisions, mainly regarding the maintenance and evolution stages.

Observation based analysis on the use of mobile applications for visually impaired users

The current efforts to specify an usability guideline for accessible mobile applications are sparse and they are still far to present a concrete pattern. Our previous work carried out a broad survey to consolidate the findings of these efforts in a unique list with 36 requirements, 13 of them focused on vision impairments. In this paper we show the results of an observation-based analysis involving visually impaired volunteers, whose aim was to complement this review and confirm if the lack of these requirements in fact affects the use of mobile applications.

Dynamic frequency scaling on android platforms for energy consumption reduction

Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) is an efficient energy saving technique for processing units. This paper evaluates the impact of the DVFS on the energy consumption, when it is applied to adjust the operational frequency of an Android based smartphone during common mobile activities, such as 3G and Wi-Fi communications. An experimental infrastructure was defined to carry out energy measurements, using a simulated environment and a Samsung Galaxy SII smartphone. After defining the best operational frequency for each activity, we identified the amount of energy that could be saved if the smartphone was using an optimized strategy to adjust the frequency. Results of the proposed approach were compared to the performance mode of this smartphone and an average energy reduction of about 23.4% was obtained.

An embedded mobile deductive system for low cost health monitoring support

Home-based health monitoring systems are currently being used to support early detection of abnormal conditions and prevention of its serious consequences. Many patients can benefit from continuous ambulatory monitoring as a part of a diagnostic procedure, optimal maintenance of a chronic condition or during supervised recovery from an acute event or surgical procedure. An evolution of this approach is the use of the mobile infrastructure and wearable technology, which mainly provides more freedom to their users. While these approaches use mobile communication devices just as a router of health information, we argue that such devices can make use of reasoning mechanisms so that they can take decisions and provide a better health care support to their users. This paper discusses the specification of a deductive health monitoring system, where its components are represented by assistant agents running in mobile devices and using a low cost wireless communication protocol (SMS) to exchange knowledge with a central root. Requirements for communication protocol and agent reasoning, based on a production system, are shown in details together with some practical experiments.

Toward accessibility with usability: understanding the requirements of impaired uses in the mobile context

When applications intend to support accessibility, aspects of usability must be reviewed to adapt or extend common functional requirements that are implemented to ensure an easy use of applications. However, initiatives to develop guidelines for accessible mobile applications are recent and several approaches present only suggestions rather than a concrete list of requirements. This work presents an ample study on this subject, analyzing 247 scientific and technical articles to identify requirements that are discussed related to different types of impairments. This identification and further consolidation are carried out in a contextualized way via a classification schema proposed in this work. An observation based on analysis with real users is then performed to confirm and extend the initial requirements list and support our understanding about the limitations and needs of impaired users regarding the use of mobile technology. As result, this paper presents the main points of a guideline proposal for functional requirements, which should be considered by mobile applications to ensure accessibility with usability.