Panuchart Bunyakiati

The Certification of Software Tools with respect to Software Standards

Software development standards such as the UML provide complex modeling languages for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of software systems. Software tools support the production of these artifacts according to the model elements, relationships, well-formedness rules and semantics defined in the standards. Due to the complexities of both standards and software tools, it is difficult to establish the compliance of the software tools to the standards. It has been suggested that many existing tools that advertise standard compliance fail to lift up to their claims. The objective of this work is to propose a framework for developing systematic, disciplined, and quantifiable certification schemes to assess the compliance of these tools to standards and to diagnose the causes of non-compliance.

Fit between Agile practices and organizational cultures

Software engineering methodology such as Agile, establishes the governance of software development. Over the years, a number of Agile practices have been invented. These practices are built on the same Agile principles but emphasise on different rationales and values, and thus associated with various approaches, activities and artefacts. Given this variety, and necessity for organizations to incorporate Agile, many studies have attempted to examine the relationship between organizational attributes, particularly organizational culture, and Agile practices, which in configurations result in effective outcomes of software development. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework that deals with an alternative way in which organizations identify their cultural types, and understand underlying principles of each Agile practice in order to form the fit between organizational culture and Agile. In other words, organizations do not necessarily change their current culture in order to use Agile effectively, as existing studies suggested. Rather, they select the Agile practice that fits with their cultural type. This framework is based on interpretation of existing literature and systematic qualitative approaches.

Cherry-picking of code commits in long-running, multi-release software

This paper presents Tartarian, a tool that supports maintenance of software with long-running, multi-release branches in distributed version control systems. When new maintenance code, such as bug fixes and code improvement, is committed into a branch, it is likely that such code can be applied or reused with some other branches. To do so, a developer may manually identify a commit and cherry pick it. Tartarian can support this activity by providing commit hashtags, which the developer uses as metadata to specify their intentions when committing the code. With these tags, Tartarian uses dependency graph, that represents the dependency constraints of the branches, and Branch Identifier, which matches the commit hashtags with the dependency graph, to identify the applicable branches for the commits. Using Tartarian, developers may be able to maintain software with multiple releases more efficiently. A video demo of Tartarian is available at www.github.com/tartarian.

Checking Software Engineering Curricula with respect to SE2014 Curriculum Guidelines

The ACM and IEEE Computer Society have created curriculum guidelines in several computing disciplines, one of which is the SE2014 (Software Engineering 2014). The aim of this work is to support the conformity checking of software engineering degree curricula with respect to this curriculum guidelines. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Object Constraint Language (OCL) are applied to check the conformity of a degree curriculum. The USE tool is adopted to demonstrate the practicality of this technique for automating the checking, which can be tedious and error-prone when perform manually.

Standards compliance testing for unified modelling language tools

Software modelling standards such as the unified modelling language (UML) provide complex visual languages for producing the artefacts of software systems. Software tools support the production of these artefacts by providing model constructs and their usage rules. Owing to the size and complexity of these standards specifications, establishing the compliance of software modelling tools to the standards can be difficult. As a result, many software tools that advertise standards compliance may fail to live up to their claims. This study presents a compliance testing framework to determine the conditions of compliance of tools and to diagnose the causes of non-compliance issues. The Java-UML lightweight enumerator (JULE) tool realises this framework by providing a powerful technology to create a compliance test suite for modelling tools. JULE generates test cases only up to non-isomorphism to avoid combinatorial explosion. An experiment with respect to the UML 1.4 is presented in this study. The authors test ArgoUML for its compliance with the UML 1.4 specification. The authors also report some findings on four UML 2.x tools, including Eclipse Galileo UML2, Enterprise Architect 7.5, Poseidon for UML 8.0 and MagicDraw 16.6.