Fausto Fasano

Recovering traceability links in software artifact management systems using information retrieval methods

The main drawback of existing software artifact management systems is the lack of automatic or semi-automatic traceability link generation and maintenance. We have improved an artifact management system with a traceability recovery tool based on Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), an information retrieval technique. We have assessed LSI to identify strengths and limitations of using information retrieval techniques for traceability recovery and devised the need for an incremental approach. The method and the tool have been evaluated during the development of seventeen software projects involving about 150 students. We observed that although tools based on information retrieval provide a useful support for the identification of traceability links during software development, they are still far to support a complete semi-automatic recovery of all links. The results of our experience have also shown that such tools can help to identify quality problems in the textual description of traced artifacts.

Enhancing an artefact management system with traceability recovery features

We present a traceability recovery method and tool based on latent semantic indexing (LSI) in the context of an artefact management system. The tool highlights the candidate links not identified yet by the software engineer and the links identified but missed by the tool, probably due to inconsistencies in the usage of domain terms in the traced software artefacts. We also present a case study of using the traceability recovery tool on software artefacts belonging to different categories of documents, including requirement, design, and testing documents, as well as code components.

ADAMS Re-Trace: a traceability recovery tool

We present the traceability recovery tool developed in the ADAMS artefact management system. The tool is based on an information retrieval technique, namely latent semantic indexing and aims at supporting the software engineer in the identification of the traceability links between artefacts of different types. We also present a case study involving seven student projects, which represented an ideal workbench for the tool. The results emphasise the benefits provided by the tool in terms of new traceability links discovered, in addition to the links manually traced by the software engineer. Moreover, the tool was also helpful in identifying cases of lack of similarity between artefacts manually traced by the software engineer, thus revealing inconsistencies in the usage of domain terms in these artefacts. This information is valuable to assess the quality of the produced artefacts.

Traceability management for impact analysis

Software change impact analysis is the activity of the software maintenance process that determines possible effects of proposed software changes. This activity is necessary to be aware of ripple-effects caused by the change and record them so that nothing is overlooked. A change has not only impact on the source code, but also on the other related software artefacts, such as requirements, design, and test. For this reason, impact analysis can be efficiently supported through traceability information. In this paper we review traceability management in the context of impact analysis and discuss the main challenges and research directions.

Supporting Distributed Software Development with fine-grained Artefact Management

Distributed software development is increasingly becoming a common practice in the software industry. The increased complexity of software systems also reflects in the complexity of design documentation, thus requiring a specific tool support for change and configuration management in distributed development settings. We present the fine-grained versioning management approach adopted in the ADAMS artefact management system, focusing on support to high level documentation versioning. We also present the results of experimenting the tool in software development projects developed at the University of Salerno

Fine-grained management of software artefacts: the ADAMS system

We present ADvanced Artefact Management System (ADAMS), a web-based system that integrates project management features, such as work-breakdown structure definition, resource allocation, and schedule management as well as artefact management features, such as artefact versioning, traceability management, and artefact quality management. In this article we focus on the fine-grained artefact management approach adopted in ADAMS, which is a valuable support to high-level documentation and traceability management. In particular, the traceability layer in ADAMS is used to propagate events concerning changes to an artefact to the dependent artefacts, thus also increasing the context-awareness in the project. We also present the results of experimenting with the system in software projects developed at the University of Salerno. Copyright

Teaching software engineering and software project management: an integrated and practical approach

We present a practical approach for teaching two different courses of Software Engineering (SE) and Software Project Management (SPM) in an integrated way. The two courses are taught in the same semester, thus allowing to build mixed project teams composed of five-eight Bachelors students (with development roles) and one or two Masters students (with management roles). The main goal of our approach is to simulate a real-life development scenario giving to the students the possibility to deal with issues arising from typical project situations, such as working in a team, organising the division of work, and coping with time pressure and strict deadlines.

Enhancing collaborative synchronous UML modelling with fine-grained versioning of software artefacts

Software development teams are composed of people with different knowledge and skills, who contribute to a project from often widely dispersed locations. Software development in geographically distributed environments creates software engineering challenges due to the interaction among members of distributed teams and the management of consistency and concurrency among project artefacts. In this paper, we propose Synchronous collaborative modelling Tool Enhanced with VErsioning management (STEVE) a collaborative tool supporting distributed Unified Modelling Language (UML) modelling of software systems. The tool provides a communication infrastructure enabling the concurrent editing of the same UML diagram at the same time by distributed developers. Complex UML diagrams are decomposed and managed in a fine-grained hierarchy of sub-artefacts, thus providing change and configuration management functionalities for both the diagram and the graphical objects. Thus, software predefined diagram components can be consistently reused and shared across different diagrams of a given project.

ADAMS: advanced artefact management system

In this paper, we present ADAMS (ADvanced Artefact Management System), a Web-based system that integrates project management and artefact management features, as well as context-awareness and artefact traceability features. In particular, we focus on two features of the tool, namely hierarchical versioning and traceability support

On the diffuseness and the impact on maintainability of code smells : A large scale empirical investigation

Code smells are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices that may hinder code comprehensibility and maintainability. Despite the effort devoted by the research community in studying code smells, the extent to which code smells in software systems affect software maintainability remains still unclear. In this paper we present a large scale empirical investigation on the diffuseness of code smells and their impact on code change- and fault-proneness. The study was conducted across a total of 395 releases of 30 open source projects and considering 17,350 manually validated instances of 13 different code smell kinds. The results show that smells characterized by long and/or complex code (e.g., Complex Class) are highly diffused, and that smelly classes have a higher change- and fault-proneness than smell-free classes.