Káthia Marçal de Oliveira

Software maintenance seen as a knowledge management issue

Creating and maintaining software systems is a knowledge intensive task. One needs to have a good understanding of the application domain, the problem to solve and all its requirements, the software process used, technical details of the programming language(s), the systems architecture and how the different parts fit together, how the system interacts with its environment, etc. All this knowledge is difficult and costly to gather. It is also difficult to store and usually lives only in the mind of the software engineers who worked on a particular project. If this is a problem for development of new software, it is even more for maintenance, when one must rediscover lost information of an abstract nature from legacy source code among a swarm of unrelated details. In this paper, we submit that this lack of knowledge is one of the prominent problems in software maintenance. To try to solve this problem, we adapted a knowledge extraction technique to the knowledge needs specific to software maintenance. We explain how we explicit the knowledge discovered on a legacy software during maintenance so that it may be recorded for future use. Some applications on industry maintenance projects are reported.

Transportation ontology definition and application for the content personalization of user interfaces

Ontologies have been largely exploited in many domains and studies. In this paper, we present a new application of a domain ontology for generating personalized user interfaces for transportation interactive systems. The concepts, relationships and axioms of transportation ontology are exploited during the semi-automatic generation of personalized user interfaces. Personalization deals with the capacity of adaptation of a user interface, reflecting what is known about the user and the domain application. It can be performed on the interface container presentation (e.g., layout, colors, sizes) and in the content provided in their input/output (e.g., data, information, document). In this paper, the transportation ontology is used to provide the content personalization. This paper presents the ontology and how it is used for the personalization of user interfaces for developing transportation interactive systems by model-driven engineering.

Defining a catalog of indicators to support process performance analysis

To achieve high-level maturity in software process improvement, organizations must change the project management focus from the empirical assessment of process performance to quantitative management of the software process based on performance measures and statistical techniques. To this purpose, managers need to work with years of measurement data to establish control limits and conduct performance analyses. In this context, some difficulties are encountered: Which measures should be used, considering that early definition is important? Which statistical technique is more adequate in each case? How should we work with the data? We found more than 500 different measures in the literature applicable to software process performance and a number of different statistical techniques to analyze and choose from. This article aims at defining a catalog of indicators with their related measures in answer to the above questions, in a way that can help managers perform process performance analysis of the Capability Maturity Model Integration for Development (CMMI-DEV) engineering processes. This article presents how we define and use this catalog and the complete specification of two indicators. Copyright

Modeling task knowledge to support software development

One of the main reasons why the development of software does not meet the clients need is the lack of understanding of the softwares real objective, and consequently, the tasks it should perform and how they should be performed. With this assumption, we have defined a structure to represent the task knowledge which supports software engineers in understanding problems starting from the understanding of the tasks which comprise these problems. This structure combines task ontologies and problem solving methods, providing the developer with the necessary task knowledge to guide him throughout the development process. This article shows how task knowledge is defined and used to help the development of software, presenting as an example, use cases modeling.

Which documentation for software maintenance

Software engineering has been striving for years to improve the practice of software development and maintenance. Documentation has long been prominent on the list of recommended practices to improve development and help maintenance. Recently however, agile methods started to shake this view, arguing that the goal of the game is to produce software and that documentation is only useful as long as it helps to reach this goal.On the other hand, in the re-engineering field, people wish they could re-document useful legacy software so that they may continue maintain them or migrate them to new platform.In these two case, a crucial question arises: “How much documentation is enough?” In this article, we present the results of a survey of software maintainers to try to establish what documentation artifacts are the most important to them.

Evaluating the service quality of software providers appraised in CMM/CMMI

Recently, several companies have decided to adopt maturity models such as the CMM/CMMI to ensure quality software processes. The state year report of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) showed that more than three thousand CMMI appraisals have been conducted since 2002. Many of these were performed at software providers, i.e. companies that develop software for other companies. Although the costs of the implementation and appraisal of CMM/CMMI are high for the software providers, there is no formal study investigating whether this investment pays off or, in other words, whether their customers are measurably satisfied with the quality of the service provided. This article presents the results of a formal evaluation of customer perception of the service quality offered by the software providers appraised in CMM/CMMI. We developed an instrument based on a widely used service quality evaluation model (SERVQUAL) and applied this instrument to several customers of software providers appraised in CMM/CMMI. The results show a considerable discrepancy between customers’ expectations and their perceptions of the services provided.

Using the GQM Method to Evaluate Calmness in Ubiquitous Applications

Ubiquitous systems change the way users interact with computers, because their services must be available everywhere at any time, supporting users in various everyday activities. An essential element for these systems is their calm interaction with users, which means the system should not disturb them unnecessarily. Literature currently lacks work focusing on how to evaluate calmness and case studies made in a real usage situation. The aim of this work is to propose a model, defined using the Goal-Question-Metric GQM method, for calmness evaluation in ubiquitous systems and to show our results from a case study with three ubiquitous applications.

Quality characteristics and measures for human---computer interaction evaluation in ubiquitous systems

The advent of ubiquitous systems places even more focus on users, since these systems must support their daily activities in such a transparent way that does not disturb them. Thus, much more attention should be provided to human–computer interaction (HCI) and, as a consequence, to its quality. Dealing with quality issues implies first the identification of the quality characteristics that should be achieved and, then, which software measures should be used to evaluate them in a target system. Therefore, this work aims to identify what quality characteristics and measures have been used for the HCI evaluation of ubiquitous systems. In order to achieve our goal, we performed a large literature review, using a systematic mapping study, and we present our results in this paper. We identified 41 pertinent papers that were deeply analyzed to extract quality characteristics and software measures. We found 186 quality characteristics, but since there were divergences on their definitions and duplicated characteristics, an analysis of synonyms by peer review based on the equivalence of definitions was also done. This analysis allowed us to define a final suitable set composed of 27 quality characteristics, where 21 are generic to any system but are particularized for ubiquitous applications and 6 are specific for this domain. We also found 218 citations of measures associated with the characteristics, although the majority of them are simple definitions with no detail about their measurement functions. Our results provide not only an overview of this area to guide researchers in directing their efforts but also it can help practitioners in evaluating ubiquitous systems using these measures.

Learning Software Maintenance Organizations

Developing and maintaining software systems is a knowledge intensive task. One needs knowledge of the application domain of the software, the problem the system solves, the requirements for this problem, the architecture of the system and how the different parts fit together, how the system interacts with its environment, etc. More often than not, this knowledge is not documented and lives only in the head of the software engineers. It is, therefore, volatile and an organization may repeatedly pay professionals to rediscover a knowledge it previously acquired and lost. In recognition of this fact, knowledge management techniques such as Postmortem Analysis are being used to help salvage this knowledge. Traditionally, Postmortem Analysis has been applied at the end of software development projects with a focus on organizational aspects such as how to improve the execution of a process. In this paper, we present the application of Postmortem Analysis in a new context: for software maintenance projects. We also apply it, not only for process improvement, but to discover knowledge on the software maintained itself.

What Changes from Ubiquitous Computing to Internet of Things in Interaction Evaluation

Internet of Things (IoT) is a new paradigm that includes a network of smart objects, which are embedded sensors, communicating using the Internet. One of the areas that are leading up to IoT is Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp). There are thus solutions such as frameworks, middlewares, and other development artifacts that come from the UbiComp community and can be used for IoT applications. On the other hand, the interaction evaluation of the applications can be more complex in IoT than in UbiComp systems, once we have two different perspectives: Human-Thing and Thing-Thing interactions. In this paper, based on the literature, our experience in these two domains, and case studies with Ubicomp and IoT applications, we discuss how we can benefit from the UbiComp move towards IoT, focusing on the main differences and similarities related to interaction evaluation. These differences open a set of questions that are also presented and discussed in this paper.