Neal S. Coulter

Software engineering as seen through its research literature: a study in co-word analysis

This empirical research demonstrates the effectiveness of content analysis to map the research literature of the software engineering discipline. The results suggest that certain research themes in software engineering have remained constant, but with changing thrusts. Other themes have arisen, matured, and then faded as major research topics, while still others seem transient or immature. Co-word analysis is the specific technique used. This methodology identifies associations among publication descriptors (indexing terms) from the ACM Computing Classification System and produces networks of descriptors that reveal these underlying patterns. This methodology is applicable to other domains with a supporting corpus of textual data. While this study utilizes index terms from a fixed taxonomy, that restriction is not inherent; the descriptors can be generated from the corpus. Hence, co-word analysis and the supporting software tools employed here can provide unique insights into any disciplines evolution.

Collaborations: closing the industry-academia gap

When it comes to software engineering education, there is a gap between what industry needs and what universities offer. To close this gap, the authors propose a comprehensive collaboration between academic software engineering programs and industry. They offer a model for this collaboration and highlight three real-world ventures.

Software Science and Cognitive Psychology

Halstead proposed a methodology for studying the process of programming known as software science. This methodology merges theories from cognitive psychology with theories from computer science. There is evidence that some of the assumptions of software science incorrectly apply the results of cognitive psychology studies. HAlstead proposed theories relative to human memory models that appear to be without support from psychologists. Other software scientists, however, report empirical evidence that may support some of those theories. This anomaly places aspects of software science in a precarious position. The three conflicting issues discussed in this paper are 1) limitations of short-term memory and number of sub-routine parameters, 2) searches in human memory and programming effort, and 3) psychological time and programming time.

Current Practices, Culture Changes, and Software Engineering Education

Determining the current practice in software engineering tools, methodologies, and theories across a representative sample of international industries is difficult. An extensive software engineering education project sponsored cooperatively by Florida Atlantic University, by the Software Engineering Institute, and by nine major high‐technology firms provides data for such an assessment. This analysis may provide guidance to designers of university curricula. Opinions and insights gained from this project show that the more general, art‐oriented aspects of software engineering processes are perceived as most useful in industry; the more specific, science‐oriented topics are not as useful now. Cultures are changing, though, and practitioners are eager to try new approaches. Essential in this endeavor is support and feedback from management; otherwise, potential future leaders in software methodology and applications may be discouraged.

Computer instruction set usage by programmers: an empirical investigation

The elimination of unused instruction sets would encourage more uniform programming practices and could allow the inclusion of more useful instructions.

Ada and the evolution of software engineering

Software engineering is a term often used to describe programming-in-the-large activities. Yet, any pre cise empirical characterization of its conceptual contours and their evolution is lacking. In this study, a large number of 1982-l 994 publications represented by descriptor phrases are analyzed to determine themes and trends in software engineering. Co-word analysis is the analytical method used. This methodology identifies associations among publication descriptors (indexing terms) from the Computing Reviews Classification System and produces networks of terms that reveal patterns of associations.The analysis indicates which specialties in computing associate strongly with software engineering and which ones do not. The results suggest that certain research themes in software engineering remain constant, but with changing thrusts. Others themes mature and then diminish as major research topics, while still others seem transient or immature. More focus is becoming evident for the most recent time period covered (1991-l 994): object-oriented methods and user interfaces have emerged as central themes. Ada’s role in this evolution presents a case study of software engineering’s maturation and how Ada interacts with other topics in software engineering.

Information hiding, the Intel iAPX 432,and Ada

Information hiding principles help ensure the integrity of computer software. Additionally, those guidelines make software easier to modify and maintain. Computer architectures and languages that incorporate information hiding principles will help enforce adherence to those rules. The Intel iAPX processor and the language system Ada are, in part, based on information hiding principles.

Computer currency

The notion of continuing education is nowhere more relevant than in the computer context. The fact that many top managers completed their formal education before computer topics were a part of most university curricula, coupled with the elemental changes that have transformed our industry for even those computer specialists who completed their education a few years ago, make continuing education for “computer currency” a very real need. A continual passing from hand to hand of computer knowledge is essential if we are to deal with technology in a timely way. Understanding of computer concepts can be a medium of exchange with real financial value in our technologically oriented society; in other words, a money type of currency.

Use of neural networks to recover from software faults in real-time systems

In fault-tolerant real-time systems, software errors can be detected, recovered from, and reported using a recovery controller. A simulator has been developed to test the performance of an ANN (Artificial Neural Network) based recovery controller. The simulator for a highly reliable, fault-tolerant multiprocessor telecommunications exchange provides a real-world application to test the effectiveness of the ANN recovery controller. The ANN provides the software recovery controller with the adaptability to determine recovery actions for faults that were previously unseen or not anticipated. This reduces the number of times that human intervention is required to recover the system, and thus reduces the total down-time for the system. The ANN is trained by inserting known faults into the simulated real-time system. The system collects data on the characteristics observed when the fault is detected and uses the back propagation learning algorithm to classify the observed characteristics and recent history of recovery actions into an appropriate recovery action such as restarting or terminating a process, initializing the operating system for a specific processor, or reloading a data base for a processor of group of processors. Once the neural network has been trained, it is used to determine the appropriate responses for faults that occur during the operation of the system.

Continuing education activities of the ACM

Continuing education is a major concern for most professional societies. This is especially true for ones like ACM, whose members are working at the leading edge of technology - both in research and within numerous application areas. ACM, through its Education Board, sponsors several different activities to assist members in their quest to keep abreast of the latest technical developments. This panel has several purposes. On the one hand it will serve as a means for disseminating more widely information on our current projects. In addition it will allow us to receive feedback from the membership with respect to how they perceive theses activities, what changes they might like to see, and what new projects we should be considering. Among the topics that will be discussed are Self Assessment Procedures, Professional Development Seminars, Tutorial Weeks, and accreditation efforts, and Institute for Certification of Computer Professionals (ICCP) activities. After these activities are briefly described, the remainder of the session will be devoted to answering questions and soliciting ideas from the audience.