René L. Krikhaar

An analysis of unit tests of a flight software product line

This paper presents an analysis of the unit testing approach developed and used by the Core Flight Software System (CFS) product line team at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). The goal of the analysis is to understand, review, and recommend strategies for improving the CFS existing unit testing infrastructure as well as to capture lessons learned and best practices that can be used by other software product line (SPL) teams for their unit testing. The results of the analysis show that the core and application modules of the CFS are unit tested in isolation using a stub framework developed by the CFS team. The application developers can unit test their code without waiting for the core modules to be completed, and vice versa. The analysis found that this unit testing approach incorporates many practical and useful solutions such as allowing for unit testing without requiring hardware and special OS features in-the-loop by defining stub implementations of dependent modules. These solutions are worth considering when deciding how to design the testing architecture for a SPL.

Software engineering technology innovation - Turning research results into industrial success

This paper deals with the innovation of software engineering technologies. These technologies are methods and tools for conducting software development and maintenance. We consider innovation as a process consisting of two phases, being technology creation and technology transfer. In this paper, we focus mainly on the transfer phase. Technology transfer is of mutual interest to both academia and industry. Transfer is important for academia, because it shows the industrial relevance of their research results to, for example, their sponsoring authorities. Showing the industrial applicability of research results is sometimes referred to as valorization of research. Nowadays, valorization is often required by research funding bodies. The transfer is important for industries, because innovating their development processes and their products is supportive in gaining a competitive edge or remaining competitive in their business. We describe the technology transfer phase by means of three activities: technology evaluation, technology engineering, and technology embedding. The technology evaluation activity is perceived as the main gate between the technology creation phase and the technology transfer phase. With two case studies, originating from the Dutch high-tech systems industry, we will illustrate the activities in the transfer phase. In addition to the process we will also define the main roles in a software engineering technology innovation, namely: the technology provider (academic research, industrial research and technology vendor) and the technology receiver (industrial development). With those roles we also address the issues concerning the ownership of technologies.

Software Configuration Management

Software Configuration Management (SCM) concerns the control of the evolution of complex software systems. CM is one of the most successful Software Engineering research fields with respect to acceptance in the industry. Almost any development organization that releases software applications and/or supplies complete software intensive systems, can only survive with the right attention to Configuration Management. The importance of SCM is also addressed by software process improvement models, such as CMM, CMMI and SPICE, in which SCM processes play a major role in achieving an initial level of maturity. During the last three decades, SCM has emerged towards a mature Software Engineering discipline. During these years, several topics in SCM have been researched and their results are currently common in the available SCM tools. Software development is changing, which implies that aspects of SCM should correspondingly change over time to serve new software development needs. For example, model driven engineering is a growing field that also requires different SCM support. Another example of concern is the growth of software code bases that require extra tool support during maintenance (in order to find the correct information). In this special issue of the Science of Computer Programming we present two excellent papers that are related to given examples in new areas of research. In this introduction, we provide a short overview of SCM. Furthermore, we present SCM in the perspective of the changing world of Software Engineering. Challenges in SCM are discussed to trigger new research in the SCM field. The SCM workshop is the main workshop in this field, so we provide a short historical overview of this also.

Sustainable Technology Transfer

In this position paper we address the issue of transferring a technology from research into an industrial organization by presenting a refined process for technology transfer. Based on over two decades of industrial experience, we identified the need for a dedicated technology engineering phase for that process. Although little attention has been paid to this technology engineering phase in the academic world, we believe it to be essential for sustainable technology transfer.

Managing software development information in global configuration management activities

Software Configuration Management (SCM) techniques have been considered the entry point to rigorous software engineering, where multiple organizations cooperate in a decentralized mode to save resources, ensure the quality of the diversity of software products, and manage corporate information to get a better return of investment. The incessant trend of Global Software Development (GSD) and the complexity of implementing a correct SCM solution grow not only because of the changing circumstances, but also because of the interactions and the forces related to GSD activities. This paper addresses the role SCM plays in the development of commercial products and systems, and introduces a SCM reference model to describe the relationships between the different technical, organizational, and product concerns any software development company should support in the global market.

Software development improvement with SFIM

Most industries are challenging to increase productivity of software development. Often many process improvement activities are started with enthusiasm, unfortunately most of these are less successful than forecasted or improvements do not sustain for long. This paper presents the Seven Forces Improvement Method, SFIM, which claims to overcome unexpected disappointment in improvement results. SFIM is built upon different aspects that influence the success of software process improvements, such as culture, skills and organization. The method has been applied to improvement activities in a large software department for a number of years. The success of SFIM is compared with the compliance with the SFIM method. The paper shows that application of SFIM increases the success rate of software improvement activities in industry.

Editorial: Guest editors' introduction

This special issue collects 5 contributions that are substantially revised and extended versions of papers that appeared in the conference proceedings of ICPC 2008 - The 16th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension. In this introduction of the special issue, we briefly summarize the mission of the ICPC conference series, report on the actual conference event, and characterize the collected contributions.

Editorial: Understanding the past, improving the present, and mapping out the future of software architecture

Software architecture has rapidly emerged as an important subfield of software engineering research and practice. Architecture has widely been recognized as the key facet of any software system, and a linchpin of software development processes. A software project’s fate is so tightly interwoven with its underlying architecture that it is now widely recognized that architecture is not just a development phase. Rather, it permeates every aspect of software development, from the initial conceptualization of the system through requirements to the system’s deployment and operation including supporting such activities as Software Configuration Management and Project Management. As such, it is important that our understanding of software architecture be aided by a rich accompanying body of underlying principles, techniques, standards, notations, and tools. The goal of the Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA) is to provide a unique on-going platform for the formulation, presentation, discussion, evaluation, and dissemination of this growing body of software architectural knowledge. WICSA is the only specialist conference series devoted to software architecture. As an interactive, working conference, WICSA provides a forum for researchers and practitioners to meet and exchange ideas about the state-of-the-art as well as the state-of-the-practice of architecture-based software engineering. The conference provides keynotes, paper sessions, lively panel discussions, and interactive working sessions where practitioners and researchers discuss their experiences, priorities, and perspectives in order to understand the current state of the field, and identify opportunities to make a difference in the future. The most recent WICSA, which took place in Pittsburgh in November 2005, was the fifth gathering in this series. WICSA-5 took place on the tenth ‘‘birthday’’ of modern software architecture research: it took place exactly ten years after the first International Software Architecture Workshop (ISAW-1) and the first two special issues of IEEE Software and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering devoted to this subject. To mark this anniversary, WICSA-5 aimed to be a dialogue between researchers