Mohammed Akour

A Systematic Literature Review on Software-Defined Networking

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a recently evolving networking architecture that focuses on the separation of control and data planes. Unlike traditional switches, SDN switches include flow tables that are remotely controlled by a separate software application, the controller. SDN is not completely new; it formulates an architecture on top of several good practices. In this paper, we examined the obtainable knowledge about SDN through conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) to evaluate the current SDN state of the art in terms of research tracks, publications, trends, etc. We systematically evaluate research in SDN based on questions formulated for this purpose. The results present outline information about the most active research areas, tools, security issues, obstacles, limitations, strengths, and opportunities in SDN.

Mobile Software Testing: Thoughts, Strategies, Challenges, and Experimental Study

Mobile devices have become more pervasive in our daily lives, and are gradually replacing regular computers to perform traditional processes like Internet browsing, editing photos, playing videos and sound track, and reading different files. The importance of mobile devices in our life necessitates more concerns of the reliability and compatibility of mobile applications, and thus, testing these applications arises as an important phase in mobile devices adaption process. This paper addressed various research directions on mobile applications testing by investigating essential concepts, scope, features and requirements for testing mobile application. We highlight the similarities and the differences between mobile APP testing and mobile web testing. Furthermore, we discuss and compare different mobile testing approaches and environments, and provide the challenges as emergent needs in test environments. As a case study, we compared the testing experience of hybrid application in an emulator and a real world device. The purpose of the experiment is to verify to which extent a virtual device can emulate a complete client experience. Set of experiments are conducted where five android mobile browsers are tested. Each browser will be on a real device as well as an emulated device with the same features (CPU used, memory size, etc). The application will be tested on the following metrics: Performance and function/behavior testing

Feature-Based Test Focus Selection Technique Using Classes Connections Weight

Testing could cost more than fifty percent of all development cost, particularly integration testing consumes around eighty percent of testing cost. Integration testing aims to discover errors in the connections among classes which are collaborate and communicate in order to provide specific services. Though, testing all connections among classes is impractical because of the cost, effort and time constraints. Test focus selection might help testers to concentrate on the main and vital connections among classes which it could be the most error prone ones. The authors proposed approach amalgamates the static and dynamic analysis in order to detect, trace, and weight the connections among classes through method level communications. Their approach harnessed an open source tracing tool MUTT. The MUTT allows them to return all the methods in all classes that have been called respecting to any specific feature which has triggered by the system user. The experimental results reveal how the proposed approach achieves good mutation testing score on the systems under study.

Regression Test-Selection Technique Using Component Model Based Modification: Code to Test Traceability

Regression testing is a safeguarding procedure to validate and verify adapted software, and guarantee that no errors have emerged. However, regression testing is very costly when testers need to re-execute all the test cases against the modified software. This paper proposes a new approach in regression test selection domain. The approach is based on meta-models (test models and structured models) to decrease the number of test cases to be used in the regression testing process. The approach has been evaluated using three Java applications. To measure the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we compare the results using the re-test to all approaches. The results have shown that our approach reduces the size of test suite without negative impact on the effectiveness of the fault detection.

Effective pair programming practice: toward improving student learning in software engineering class

Pair programming is one of the software development practices in which two programmers working together in partnership using one computer, cooperating with each other on the same problem. Previous research indicates that the pair programming show positive impact on the quality of produced product on the team attitudes and feeling. A formal pair programming experiments were conducted at Yarmouk University to assess and evaluate empirically the impact of pair programming in improving the learning effectiveness, efficiency, and gratification of students in software engineering course. Results reveal that students’ gratification, efficiency and effectiveness are increased when pair programming is used. Moreover, this paper shows experiment results about the compatibility between pairs. The results indicate that students who pair based on their skills are more compatible than the students who pair with different skills.

Evaluating Maintainability of Open Source Software: A Case Study

Maintainability is one of the most important quality attribute that affect the quality of software. There are four factors that affect the maintainability of software which are: analyzability, changeability, stability, and testability. Open source software OSS developed by collaborative work done by volunteers through around the world with different management styles. Open source code is updated and modified all the time from the first release. Therefore, there is a need to measure the quality and specifically the maintainability of such code. This paper discusses the maintainability for the three domains of the open source software. The domains are: education, business and game. Moreover, to observe the most effective metrics that directly affects the maintainability of software. Analysis of the results demonstrates that OSS in the education domain is the most maintainable code and cl_stat number of executable statements metric has the highest degree of influence on the calculation of maintenance in all three domains.

Software fault proneness prediction: a comparative study between bagging, boosting, and stacking ensemble and base learner methods

Modules with defects might be the prime reason for decreasing the software quality and increasing the cost of maintenance. Therefore, the prediction of faulty modules of systems under test at early stages contributes to the overall quality of software products. In this research three symmetric ensemble methods: bagging, boosting and stacking are used to predict faulty modules based on evaluating the performance of 11 base learners. The results reveal that the defect prediction performance of the base learner classifier and ensemble learner classifiers is the same for naive Bayes, Bayes net, PART, random forest, IB1, VFI, decision table, and NB tree base learners, the case was different for boosted SMO, bagged J48 and boosted and bagged random tree. In addition the results showed that the random forest classifier is one of the most significant classifiers that should be stacked with other classifiers to gain the better fault prediction.

Application domain and programming language readability yardsticks

Software maintainability is one of the most factors that used to ensure software quality. It targets the structure of the software rather than its functionality. Hence, code readability is highlighted whenever maintainability is discussed. There is a huge difference between an organized code and a messy code, or between easy to read code and a difficult to read code. This difference can be very subjective but many efforts have been put together in order to formalize it. Therefore, the result was a set of readability factors that have a direct or indirect impact on software readability. These factors measure to which extent readers can understand the text of the software code. Many metrics were developed to generalize the readability score across a set of pieces of code. Unfortunately, not all proposed metrics take into account the possibility of having variable readability factors. This paper tries to investigate to which extent the readability factors considering different application domains. Since readability is very subjective, it will be interesting to see whether it is useful to have specialized readability models that measure this attribute. This also implies looking into the impact of these readability models on measuring software quality.

Vulnerability assessments: a case study of Jordanian universities

Websites of universities are considered the most important gateways to those Universities. They are heavily used by faculty members, employees, past, current and future students. They have a significant impact on University popularity and ranking. From a security perspective, those websites can be targets for a large number of possible security attacks such as: Flooding, denial of service (DoS), web defacement, etc. Attacks can be also from outsiders as well as insiders. In this paper, we conducted a vulnerability assessment on Websites of universities in Jordan. To ensure that our tests are constructive, we only employed passive penetration testing methods. Results showed that a significant number of those evaluated universities have critical or sever level vulnerabilities. Such vulnerabilities can be relatively easily be exploited by security attacks or attackers.

Smart Lighting Controlling System: Case Study of Yarmouk University Museum

In museum, the light plays important role in viewing the value of the collections, but light might cause gradual objects damage. The light damages are permanent and cumulative. No object can be recovered from light damage. Resting objects from the effects of light does not mean that they could handle more light; the object will not “heal”. Typically, it is visible light that fades (or bleaches) colors. This light would come from the sun shining directly into museum. UV light will not only fade colors but it will cause “yellowing, chalking, weakening, and/or disintegration” of objects. UV light not only comes from the sun but also comes from some sources of artificial lighting, such as fluorescent. IR light heats the surface of objects, which then leads to the same conditions as Incorrect Temperature IR light comes from the sun as well as Incandescent lighting. In this paper, smart system is built to control the lights in the museum. The system is mainly consisting of thermal sensors that detect the presence of humans, DC LED spotlights, Arduino boards and Zigbee modules for a wireless communication to send data to a server. Once the visitor stops by the display, the thermal sensors will be able to detect that visitor and prepare to calculate several measurements. The system is already installed to be working in the Main Museum in the college of Archaeology and Anthropology as a prototype in Yarmouk University. The measurements show how the system is reliable and effective.