Reza Meimandi Parizi

Cost optimization approaches for scientific workflow scheduling in cloud and grid computing: A review, classifications, and open issues

Abstract Workflow scheduling in scientific computing systems is one of the most challenging problems that focuses on satisfying user-defined quality of service requirements while minimizing the workflow execution cost. Several cost optimization approaches have been proposed to improve the economic aspect of Scientific Workflow Scheduling (SWFS) in cloud and grid computing. To date, the literature has not yet seen a comprehensive review that focuses on approaches for supporting cost optimization in the context of SWFS in cloud and grid computing. Furthermore, providing valuable guidelines and analysis to understand the cost optimization of SWFS approaches is not well-explored in the current literature. This paper aims to analyze the problem of cost optimization in SWFS by extensively surveying existing SWFS approaches in cloud and grid computing and provide a classification of cost optimization aspects and parameters of SWFS. Moreover, it provides a classification of cost based metrics that are categorized into monetary and temporal cost parameters based on various scheduling stages. We believe that our findings would help researchers and practitioners in selecting the most appropriate cost optimization approach considering identified aspects and parameters. In addition, we highlight potential future research directions in this on-going area of research.

The impact of inadequate and dysfunctional training on Agile transformation process: A Grounded Theory study

Context Training is an essential facilitator in moving from traditional to Agile software development. Objective This paper addresses the importance of adequate and functional training in Agile transformation process, the causes of inadequate and dysfunctional training, and the heuristic strategies that can be used in software companies for dealing with this phenomenon. Method A Grounded Theory study was conducted with participation of 35 Agile experts from 13 different countries. Results This research discovered that inadequate and dysfunctional training was one of the critical issues that affected Agile transformation process. This study shows that comprehensive and functional training is not often provided to support Agile transformation. This paper shows the primary causes of inadequate and dysfunctional training, its adverse consequences on the transformation process, and the heuristic and ad-hoc treatments as the strategies used by Agile teams to cope with this challenge. Conclusion Comprehensive training is important in Agile transformation process. Inadequate and dysfunctional training causes several challenges and problems for software companies and development teams when moving to Agile. Several ad-hoc strategies identified by this study can be employed to help software teams and companies facing similar problems.

Achievements and Challenges in State-of-the-Art Software Traceability Between Test and Code Artifacts

Testing is a key activity of software development and maintenance that determines the level of reliability. Traceability is the ability to describe and follow the life of software artifacts, and has been promoted as a means for supporting various activities, most importantly testing. Traceability information facilitates the testing and debugging of complex software by modeling the dependencies between code and tests. Actively supplementing traceability to testing enables rectifying defects more reliably and efficiently. Despite its importance, the development of test-to-code traceability has not been sufficiently addressed in the literature, and even worse there is currently no organized review of traceability studies in this field. In this work, we have investigated the main conferences, workshops, and journals of the requirements engineering, testing, and reliability, and identified those contributions that refer to traceability topics. From that starting point, we characterized and analyzed the chosen contributions against three research questions by utilizing a comparative framework including nine criteria. As a result, our study arrives to some interesting points, and outlines a number of potential research directions. This, in turn, can pave the way for facilitating and empowering traceability research in this domain to assist software engineers and testers in test management.

Automated test generation technique for aspectual features in AspectJ

Abstract Context Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has been promoted as a means for handling the modularization of software systems by raising the abstraction level and reducing the scattering and tangling of crosscutting concerns. Studies from literature have shown the usefulness and application of AOP across various fields of research and domains. Despite this, research shows that AOP is currently used in a cautious way due to its natural impact on testability and maintainability. Objective To realize the benefits of AOP and to increase its adoption, aspects developed using AOP should be subjected to automated testing. Automated testing, as one of the most pressing needs of the software industry to reduce both effort and costs in assuring correctness, is a delicate issue in testing aspect-oriented programs that still requires advancement and has a way to go before maturity. Method Previous attempts and studies in automated test generation process for aspect-oriented programs have been very limited. This paper proposes a rigorous automated test generation technique, called RAMBUTANS , with its tool support based on guided random testing for the AspectJ programs. Results The paper reports the results of a thorough empirical study of 9 AspectJ benchmark programs, including non-trivial and larger software, by means of mutation analysis to compare RAMBUTANS and the four existing automated AOP testing approaches for testing aspects in terms of fault detection effectiveness and test effort efficiency. The results of the experiment and statistical tests supplemented by effect size measures presented evidence of the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed technique at 99% confidence level (i.e. p Conclusion The study showed that the resulting randomized tests were reasonably good for AOP testing, thus the proposed technique could be worth using as an effective and efficient AOP-specific automated test generation technique.

On the gamification of human-centric traceability tasks in software testing and coding

Traceability is the ability to trace the influence of one software artifact on another by linking dependencies. Test-to-code traceability (relationships between test and system code) plays a vital role in the production, verification, reliability and certification of highly dependable systems. In practical settings, however, traceability tasks are most often observed in the breach by human developers/testers. Prior research works on test-to-code traceability in software engineering do not provide high traceability output and accuracy as they mainly rely on sought-after approaches to recover links. Gamified Software Engineering (GSE) is a growing field that in particular taps into gamification, the application of game mechanics in non-game contexts, to address human-related concerns in the field of SE. This paper argues that a new gamified approach is necessary to tackle the human issue of capturing traceability information in a by-product manner. Thus, it advocates for the induction of gamification concepts in software traceability. We propose a conceptual framework where the gamification is infusing engagement into human-centric traceability tasks to record trace links. An empirical evaluation was performed to assess the performance of the framework compared with a state-of-the-art approach.

Functional and non-functional requirements prioritization: empirical evaluation of IPA, AHP-based, and HAM-based approaches

Throughout the requirements engineering phase, the process of giving precedence to one requirement over another is beneficial to accomplish projects on a predefined schedule. This process is referred to as requirements prioritization. Although plenty of research has been dedicated to proposing various approaches to perform the requirements prioritization, only a small number of prioritization approaches have been recently reported with the aim of considering both functional and non-functional requirements during the prioritization stage. However, it is not a straightforward task to decide which of these approaches could be selected for a given prioritization problem unless the main properties of these approaches are well-evaluated. Hence, a detailed evaluation of the recently proposed approaches in an empirical manner would be needed. In this paper, we performed two successive controlled experiments with the aim of evaluating the current requirements prioritization approaches. In the first experiment, we compared the integrated prioritization approach (IPA) with the other approach, called AHP-based approach, whereas in the second experiment, IPA was compared with the other state-of-the-art alternative, named HAM-based approach. In the experiments, evaluation was based on measuring three properties: actual time-consumption, accuracy of results, and ease of use. Statistical analysis of the results obtained from the two experiments showed a better performance of IPA on all the measured properties compared to both AHP-based approach and HAM-based approach. The findings would be useful for practitioners to choose the most appropriate approach for a given prioritization problem, and also could be used as a guideline by interested researchers for identifying trends before conducting a study in future.

A code coverage-based test suite reduction and prioritization framework

Software testing is extensively used to ensure the development of a quality software system. The test suite size tends to increase by including new test cases due to software evolution. Consequently, the entire test suite cannot be executed considering budget and time limitations. Researchers have examined test suite reduction and prioritization techniques to address the test suite size problem. However, combination of these techniques can be useful for various regression testing situations. In this paper, we present a new code coverage-based test suite reduction and prioritization framework called TestOptimizer. The framework performs a suitable combination of TestFilter and St-Total techniques to determine optimal test cases, keeping in view of time restrictions. The performance of the proposed framework has been assessed using a case study. Results show that TestOptimizer can be beneficial to solve the test suite size problem within time constraints and has a profound impact on the required cost and effort of regression testing.

Secure and quality-of-service-supported service-oriented architecture for mobile cloud handoff process

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) combines the features of mobile computing, cloud computing, and wireless networks to create the healthy computational resources to mobile cloud users. The aim of MCC is to execute the highly attractive mobile applications on a plethora of mobile cellular telephones, with highly rich user experience. From the perspective of mobile computing, Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning depends on the efficiency of the handoff process. Thus, it is highly important to introduce an energy efficient and secure handoff process to improve the performance. In this paper, we propose a Secure Seamless Fast Handoff (SSFH) scheme to improve the energy efficiency and the QoS in the MCC. The proposed scheme consists of four layers: application layer, service layer, infrastructure layer, and media layer. These four layers collectively handle the security, energy-efficiency, and the QoS. Existing service-oriented architectures designed for the MCC are based on the symmetric encryption protocols to support the application layer. However, it is much easier for an adversary to expose the symmetric key and gain access to the confidential data. The application layer is secured using a combination of both attribute-based encryption and an asymmetric encryption cryptography. To extend the mobile lifetime, energy detection (ED) model is deployed at the infrastructure layer to detect the energy level of the mobile devices prior to the pre-registration process. Furthermore, a dual authentication process is performed on the service and at the application layer to minimize the possibility of identity-high jacked or impersonation attack. The media layer supports the secure handoff process using policy enforcement module that allows only legitimate users to complete the re-registration process after initiating the handoff. Thus, a significant amount of the bandwidth and energy could be preserved. Finally, the secure service-oriented architecture is programmed using C++ platform and the results are compared with other well-known existing service-oriented architectures. The experimental results confirm the validity and the effectiveness of our proposed architecture.

Application of Hybrid Assessment Method for Priority Assessment of Functional and Non-Functional Requirements

Requirements prioritization is recognized as a critical but often neglected activity during software development process. To achieve a high quality software system, both functional and non-functional requirements must be taken into consideration during the prioritization process. Although in recent past years a lot of research has been devoted to requirements prioritization problems, research on proposing approaches to consider both functional and non-functional requirements throughout the prioritization process is still limited. In this article, we propose an approach using Hybrid Assessment Method (HAM) to prioritize both functional and non-functional requirements simultaneously. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been evaluated through an experiment with the aim of comparing the approach with the other state-of-the-art-based approach, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP).

A test-to-code traceability method using .NET custom attributes

According to the fact that unit tests are valuable sources of up-to-date documentation, maintaining traceability links between unit tests and production code can be helpful for software engineers to perceive parts of a system. Traceability information facilitates the testing and debugging of complex software by linking the dependencies between code and tests. Researchers have proposed various approaches in order to recover test-to-code traceability links. However, results from applying these approaches are not satisfactory due to low accuracy and manual effort required by a domain expert to verify recovered links. This paper further identifies the problems of existing test-to-code traceability recovery approaches and proposes a new method, called Embedding test-to-code Traceability links into Unit tests via a Custom Attribute (ETUCA).This method establishes traceability links between unit tests and production code with minimal effort required from unit-test developers. ETUCA introduces a .NET custom attribute which acts as a direct and explicit traceability link to be incorporated into every unit test during the unit-test development process for recording the traceability information. Empirical results indicate that, compared to manual tracing, ETUCA notably reduces the time taken for tracing test units in relation to production code. Moreover, it would be able to recover all traceability links, given test developers correctly embedded custom attributes in the development phase.