Jamilah Din

Software Quality Models: A Comparative Study

In last decade, researchers have often tried to improve the usability, portability, integrity and other aspects of software in order for it to be more users friendly and gain user trust. Several approaches and techniques have been proposed to reduce the negative effects of software size and complexity. Moreover, several software quality models were proposed to evaluate general and specific type of software products. These models were proposed to evaluate general or specific scopes of software products. The proposed models were developed based on comparisons between the well-known models, in order to customize the closed model to the intended scope. These comparisons are leak of criteria that is conducted based on different perspectives and understanding. Therefore, a formal method of comparison between software quality models is proposed. The proposed method is applied on a comprehensive comparison between well-known software quality models. The result of the proposed method shows the strength and weaknesses of those models.

Applying evolution programming Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) in selecting the best open source software maintainability metrics

The nature of an Open Source Software development paradigm forces individual practitioners and organization to adopt software through trial and error approach. This leads to the problems of coming across software and then abandoning it after realizing its lack of important qualities to suit their requirements or facing negative challenges in maintaining the software. These contributed by lack of recognizing guidelines to lead the practitioners in selecting out of the dozens available metrics, the best metric(s) to measure quality OSS. In this study, the novel results provide the guidelines that lead to the development of metrics model that can select the best metric(s) to predict maintainability of Open Source Software.

An Evaluation Model for Software Reuse Processes

Software reuse is a major concern in many software development companies. It is one of the main strategies used to reduce the cost of software product development. Studies show that the reuse strategy is the most significant strategy in terms of effort and quality. That it could save the half of the software development effort and increase the quality of the software product. Different ways of software reuse are proposed and discussed. In this study, an evaluation model for software reuse is proposed. The model is developed in order to consider the new methods of software reuse. That developed based on the framework of develop a reusable software components through software development processes. The model is proposed in order to present the applicable methods of software reuse and to evaluate their cost.

Open Source Software Adaptation in Africa: Is a Matter of Inferior or Cheap is Not Quality?

The African continent has long benefited from adopting OSS in its private and public organizations that have changed their way of development, the use and how to acquire proprietary software. This frequency of adaptation does not appear to be in balance with the contribution to the OSS community. Using views from experienced software practitioners working in different organizations across two African countries it has been observed that neglected infrastructure, a wide availability of proprietary software and misconceptions of a clear meaning of Open Source Software across Africa have been an obstacle towards the participation in the OSS technology in the global network.

Inconsistency Detection of Model and Code via Critic-Based Approach

Model Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) has become the state of the art in software abstraction and increasingly popular in industry and academia. MDSE concerns the use of models as first-class artifacts of software development process. The MDSE has been seen as a way to manage the increasing of software complexity. However, one of the challenges in MDSE is to generate a consistent model-implementation mapping between design model and source code. Source code is also an important software development artifact as it represents the executable system. Detecting inconsistencies between design models and source code is hard because both artifacts normally will have some changes or modifications. Several researchers have introduced various methods in managing the inconsistency of model-code. In this paper, we propose a critic-based approach to detect the inconsistencies between design model and source code. The critic-based approach will provide instant feedback that point out the inconsistencies between model and code.

Enhanced Weighted Method for Test Case Prioritization in Regression Testing Using Unique Priority Value

Regression testing is an integral and expensive part in software testing. To reduce its effort, test case prioritization approaches were proposed. The problem with most of the existing approaches is the random ranking of test cases with equal weight. In this paper, an enhanced weighted method to prioritize the full test suite without using random ranking is presented. In addition, a controlled experiment was executed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show an improved performance in terms of prioritizing test cases and recording higher APFD values over the original weighted method. In future, a larger experiment would be executed to generalize the results.

Genetic Algorithm Application for Enhancing State-Sensitivity Partitioning

Software testing is the most crucial phase in software development life cycle which intends to find faults as much as possible. Test case generation leads the research in software testing. So, many techniques were proposed for the sake of automating the test case generation process. State sensitivity partitioning is a technique that partitions the entire states of a module. The generated test cases are composed of sequences of events. However, there is an infinite set of sequences with no upper bound on the length of a sequence. Thus, a lengthy test sequence might be encountered with redundant data states, which will increase the size of test suite and, consequently, the process of testing will be ineffective. Therefore, there is a need to optimize those test cases generated by SSP. GA has been identified as the most common potential technique among several optimization techniques. Thus, GA is investigated to integrate it with the existing SSP. This paper addresses the issue on deriving the fitness function for optimizing the sequence of events produced by SSP.

Design Metaphor to Improve Usability of User Interface for Paddy Farmers in Malaysia

Metaphor is a representation of object and situation that have meaning and comparable to real thing to convey the message to people. The purpose of using metaphor is to facilitate in making communication more direct and effective for particular user communities. This study reveals design metaphor issues for paddy farmer population in agriculture domain in Malaysia. The work is motivated by the ICT-Based Agriculture Flagship Blueprint of the Malaysia Government, an initiative to equips agriculture stakeholders in Malaysia including farmers with ICT knowledge on multiple platforms e.g. kiosk, personal computer or mobile device. The metaphors design is deemed to have a huge potential to improve user interface usability of agriculture applications for paddy farmers in Malaysia.