Jagadeesh Nandigam

Learning software engineering principles using open source software

Traditional lectures espousing software engineering principles hardly engage studentspsila attention due to the fact that students often view software engineering principles as mere academic concepts without a clear understanding of how they can be used in practice. Some of the issues that contribute to this perception include lack of experience in writing and understanding large programs, and lack of opportunities for inspecting and maintaining code written by others. To address these issues, we have worked on a project whose overarching goal is to teach students a subset of basic software engineering principles using source code exploration as the primary mechanism. We attempted to espouse the following software engineering principles and concepts: role of coding conventions and coding style, programming by intention to develop readable and maintainable code, assessing code quality using software metrics, refactoring, and reverse engineering to recover design elements. Student teams have examined the following open source Java code bases: ImageJ, Apache Derby, Apache Lucene, Hibernate, and JUnit. We have used Eclipse IDE and relevant plug-ins in this project.

Enterprise application integration using extensible Web services

This paper describes an approach to enterprise application integration (EAI) using extensible Web services. The approach is demonstrated by building a real-world application for EAI in the financial services domain. Business drivers for and approaches to EAI are presented first. The manifestation of Web services in general and their role in EAI are discussed next. Financial services domain characteristics are presented. Business drivers that entail a strong need for functional extensibility in the financial services domain are described. Our proposed architecture for EAI which addresses functional extensibility is described. This architecture is based on the notion of extensible Web services. We then present our implementation of the architecture and practical challenges encountered in EAI. A brief discussion of how our work relates to the current research in service-oriented computing (SOC) and semantic Web concludes the paper.

The Impact of the Model-Driven Approach to Software Engineering on Software Engineering Education

As businesses rely on software solutions to preserve their position in a highly competitive market, the need for reliable and robust software systems is vital. Lately, there has been a significant interest in building software using models as their main artifacts. Unlike traditional development techniques which tend to be code-centric, model driven approaches, such as the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) standard, stress the usage of models at all levels of the software development life-cycle. The MDA, which is supported by the Object Management Group (OMG), is based on a comprehensive set of standards including MOF, UML, and OCL, to mention a few. This paradigm shift in software engineering has impacted not only the way software is built but also the way software engineering is being taught - The standards introduce a significant body of knowledge that should be integrated in a software engineering curriculum. In this paper, we discuss the impact of the model-driven software engineering approach on software education. This discussion is based on an experience teaching a graduate course on model-driven software engineering at Concordia University.

Enhancing student learning in database courses with large data sets

Rapidly increasing storage device capacities at ever decreasing costs have resulted in mushrooming of publicly available large data sets on the Web. In this paper, we describe a novel approach to teaching relational database course by using such data repositories. We demonstrate our approach using the Amazon.com product database, though the approach is generic and is applicable to other data repositories. The Amazon database is supposedly the largest product database ever in existence. We have used the Amazon Web Services API and .NET/C# application to extract a subset of the product database to enhance student learning in a relational database course. This realistic data served various activities of the course and provided a rich backdrop to demonstrate more interesting features of SQL and Oracle cost-based query optimization. Central to the course is a semester-long team project. We discuss the details of data extraction from Amazon.com, conceptual and logical data modeling, logical and physical database design, database creation and data loading, database querying, and database application development.

Corporate Compliance and its Implications to IT Professionals

Corporate financial misrepresentation and its consequences including the recent stock market meltdown has only exacerbated the need for more government vigilance on corporate governance. This has resulted in the introduction and enforcement of a plethora of regulations for corporate governance - regulatory and legislative compliance. Recently corporations have shifted their focus from reducing the risks associated with non-compliance to making corporate compliance an enterprise-wide, strategic initiative. In this paper, we provide an introduction to corporate compliance; discuss how information technology (IT) can be leveraged to provide solutions to corporate compliance. We also make a case for introducing compliance topics into software engineering courses and indicate ways to accomplish this.

Work in Progress: Open Source Software as the Basis of Developing Software Design Case Studies

Case studies are often used as a vehicle to introduce fundamental principles and techniques in a software engineering course. However, finding a realistic yet manageable application as the basis of developing a case study is challenging to the instructors. We describe our preliminary experience with using an open source product, JUnit, to develop a case study. We also describe using a follow-up exercise to exploit potential benefits of such a case study. We believe that case studies based on open source software can help prepare our students for the real challenges of professional software development

Interface-Based Object-Oriented Design with Mock Objects

Interfaces are fundamental in object-oriented systems. One of the principles of reusable object-oriented design, according to Gamma et al., is program to an interface, not an implementation. Interface-based systems display three key characteristics – flexibility, extensibility, and pluggability. Designing with interfaces is therefore a better way of building object-oriented systems. Getting students in introductory software engineering and design courses to program to interfaces and develop interface-based systems is a challenge. This paper presents our experiences with the use of mock objects to promote interface-based design and effective unit testing in software engineering and design courses.

A Conceptual Framework for Application Comprehension

The scope and purpose of application comprehension is much broader than that of program comprehension. Application comprehension can be viewed as a spectrum spanning the gamut comprising code-level understanding at one end (low level) and understanding the architecture of interorganizational systems at the other end (high level). The nature and the depth of knowledge sought through application comprehension is directly related to the purpose at hand. In this paper, we propose a unified conceptual framework for application comprehension. The framework is influenced by Blooms taxonomy. The proposed framework considers several aspects of application comprehension and draws upon our experience in developing large-scale, multi-tier distributed applications for brokerage and financial services. We discuss how the proposed conceptual framework can be implemented by leveraging the sophisticated tools that are available as open-source software. We conclude the paper by indicating how the proposed framework can be used to learn software engineering principles, tools, and practices in education and training contexts.

An integrated toolset for developing extensible applications

Financial-services IT systems should feature functional extensibility - an architectural mechanism to extend a systems functional capabilities. The paper describes an architecture and toolset provide the infrastructure to build extensible applications based on a services model.