E.S. de Almeida

A survey on software components search and retrieval

In the literature, several works that explore component search may be found, since the decade of 90 until today. Current research on component-based software engineering (CBSE) point to the creation of component markets, which allow reuse to occur at large scale. Although search mechanisms play a very important role in such markets, the literature is quite poor in putting these two concerns together. This work presents a survey about the main research on component search, and discusses how should be a mechanism to efficiently search components, in order to offer support for future component markets.

A survey on software reuse processes

Software reuse processes have been under continuous attention in the software engineering and software reuse research communities during past years. Although several processes have been investigated to develop reusable software, there are not available studies that compare them. In this way, this paper presents a detailed survey on software reuse processes.

A comparative study on software reuse metrics and economic models from a traceability perspective

A fundamental task when employing software reuse is evaluating its impacts by measuring the relation of reused and developed software, the cost for obtaining reuse and the cost avoided by reusing software during development and maintenance. Different reuse related metrics exist in the literature, varying from strictly code-based metrics, aiming to measure the amount of code reused in a product, to more elaborate cost-based metrics and models, aiming to measure the costs involved in reuse programs and to evaluate the impacts of reuse in software development. Although reuse is commonly claimed to benefit maintenance, the traceability problem is still neglected on the reuse metrics arena, despite its great impacts on software maintenance. Reuse metrics may be used as important support tools for dealing with the traceability between reused assets and their clients. The goal of this work is to evaluate the current state of the art on the reuse metrics area with special emphasis on code-based metrics, building on previous surveys with further analysis and considerations on the applicability of such metrics to reuse traceability.

RiSE project: towards a robust framework for software reuse

Software reuse is a critical aspect for companies interested in the improvement of software development quality and productivity, and in costs reduction. However, achieving it is a nontrivial task. In this paper, we present a robust framework for software reuse, based on previous success factors, in order to guide organizations in the effective reuse. Nontechnical and technical aspects compose the framework.

A Software Component Quality Model: A Preliminary Evaluation

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 software components industry reaches the maturity exhibited by other component industries. Problems such as the component selection by their integrators and the uncertain quality of third-party developed components, bring new challenges to the software engineering community. By the other hand, the software components certification area is still immature and further research is needed in order to obtain well-defined standards for certification. In this way, we aim to propose a component quality model, describing consistent and well-defined characteristics, quality attributes and related metrics for the components evaluation. A preliminary evaluation to analyze the results of using the component quality model proposed is also presented

A Software Component Maturity Model (SCMM)

Component-based software development (CBSD) is focused on assembling existing components to build a software system, with a potential benefit of delivering quality systems more fast, thus, increasing its productivity. These benefits are just achieved if the software components used to compose the software system were previously evaluated in order to establish a certain quality level. However, there are a set of different risk- levels associated to each software component, depending, mainly, on its application domain. In this way, we aim to propose a software component maturity model in order to assure quality for each kind of software component risk-level, describing its levels, techniques adopted and the guidelines for selecting evaluation levels. A preliminary case study was accomplished in order to prove its real applicability and viability.

Toward a Code Search Engine Based on the State-of-Art and Practice

Software engineering and reuse-oriented tools have been studied along the last years, aiming to provide help in the software development. With the importance of reuse growing significantly, effective software reuse tools and environments started to be needed. This paper presents and discusses some works that comprise many issues related to source code search tools, covered by university and industry since 90s until today. In the end of the paper, a set of requirements is presented, integrating the features that can be found in most works of the area, serving as a basis for future work toward an effective source code search tool.

A Case Study in Software Product Lines - The Case of the Mobile Game Domain

Software product lines (SPL) processes are gradually being adopted by many companies in several domains. A particular domain where the adoption of such processes may bring relevant benefits is the mobile applications domain given the big diversity of handsets, although the characteristics of this domain usually create barriers to apply these processes in practice, such as, restrictions of memory size and processing power and different API implementations by different manufacturers. In this context, this work presents briefly a practical approach to implement core assets in a SPL applied to the mobile game domain combining the good practices from the already published processes and describes in details a case study performed with the application of this approach, based on three different adventure mobile games. The results of the case study have shown the approach can be suitable for the domain in question.

Component Quality Assurance: Towards a Software Component Certification Process

The griming use of commercial components in large systems makes selection and evaluation of components an essential activity. Many organizations struggle in their attempts to select an appropriate component in their system. In this way, we propose a component certification process to evaluate the quality of software components in an efficient way.

Towards an effective approach for reverse engineering

Currently, the demand for the reverse engineering has been growing significantly. The need of different business sectors to adapt their systems to Web or to use other technologies is stimulating the research for methods, tools and infrastructures that support the evolution of existing applications. We present the main research trends on reverse engineering, and discuss how should be an efficient reverse engineering approach, aiming at higher reuse levels.