Tim Klinger

Toward Engineered, Useful Use Cases

We explore common problems that exist in the practice of use case modeling: lack of consistency in defining use cases, misalignment between the UML metamodel and the textual representations of use cases expounded in the literature, and the lack of a semantics that allows use cases to be executable and analyzable. We propose an engineering approach to the issues that can provide a precise foundation for use case development. We next discuss four potential uses of such a foundation and identify the research problems that must be addressed to support these applications.

Roles, rights, and responsibilities: Better governance through decision rights automation

At its essence software development governance is about guiding the development organization so that it produces value that aligns with the needs of the business. As software development platforms mature they provide increasingly sophisticated capabilities for process measurement and guidance. These new capabilities in turn offer an excellent opportunity for governance tools to help guide the development. In this paper we discuss a model of the development organization that includes: roles, responsibilities, decisions, rights, artifacts and their lifecycles. We show how this model can be elicited and deployed as part of a governance solution to guide the development organization and provide a description of a prototype we have built to automate this process. We conclude with a discussion and important directions for future work in the area.

Inferring developer expertise through defect analysis

Fixing defects is an essential software development activity. For commercial software vendors, the time to repair defects in deployed business-critical software products or applications is a key quality metric for sustained customer satisfaction. In this paper, we report on the analysis of about 1,500 defect records from an IBM middle-ware product collected over a five-year period. The analysis includes a characterization of each repaired defect by topic and a ranking of developers by inferred expertise on each topic. We find clear evidence that defect resolution time is strongly influenced by a specific developer and his/her expertise in the defects topic. To validate our approach, we conducted interviews with the products manager who provided us with his own ranking of developer expertise for comparison. We argue that our automated developer expertise ranking can be beneficial in the planning of a software project and is applicable beyond software support in the other phases of the software lifecycle.

Supporting enterprise stakeholders in software projects

Today, large enterprises create a significant body of commercially available software. As a result, the key stakeholders include not only those typically responsible for software development, but also stakeholders not typically involved in software engineering discussions. Current software development approaches ignore or poorly manage these enterprise level concerns. This hampers the ability to create connections among the stakeholders responsible for enterprise wide issues, the development team, and the artifacts with which they are concerned. In this paper we identify a set of propositions for coordination in enterprise software engineering environments and describe a preliminary framework to support such interactions.

Less is More: A Minimalistic Approach to UML Model-Based Conformance Test Generation

We present a minimalist approach to model-based test generation. Our approach leverages the information provided in the domain and behavioral models of an application under test to produce a small yet effective set of test cases without additional user input. The domain model consists of UML class diagram with invariants, while the behavioral model consists of UML use cases. Each use case flow has an associated guard condition and a set of updates (to the domain object diagram and the output parameters). We treat the model invariants to enable a novel specify once, test everywhere paradigm. Our approach frees the modeler from the responsibility of specifying appropriate alternate flows on use cases affected by each invariant - our analysis augments the specified use cases with appropriate alternate flows. Our approach then produces suitable testing goals which are refinements of the guard conditions on the augmented flows using a set of fault models. Another salient feature of our approach is generation of verification sequences to ensure that the object diagram updates associated with a given flow are implemented correctly. Our technique uses a novel set of fault models to mutate an object diagram and a novel algorithm which distinguishes between the original and the mutated object diagrams. We describe the techniques used in our test generation approach.

Enacting responsibility assignment in software development environments

In this paper we present the concept of responsibility assignment and its use as a governance mechanism in a software development environment. We review common representations of responsibility assignments, their relationship to the operational model of software engineering and the semantics required to automate their enactment in development tools. We also present a vision for enactment scenarios in tools and compare with the process extensibility mechanisms currently implemented in the Jazz Team Platform.

Integrated solution engineering

Integrated Solution Engineering helps developers manage software complexity by offering semi-automated support for capturing and mining relationships among artifacts and/or developer tasks at different stages of the software lifecycle, and by aiding developers in the use and management of the information contained in these relationships. The use of these relationships can facilitate traceability, propagation of change, change impact analysis, evolution, and comprehension.

Automated consistency and completeness checking of testing models for interactive systems

The growing acceptance of model-based test generation in industry has created a need for a tester-friendly model construction process and associated tools. In this paper, we present an automated approach for checking consistency and completeness of testing models for interactive systems. The testing models are described in terms of operations provided by the system under test (SUT). Each operation is specified as a set of possible results each with a guard condition and a set of actions on its parameters and the system state. The consistency and completeness checks performed include identification of malformed models, irrelevant state variables, incomplete and redundant guard conditions, missing data values, and nondeterminism in and executability of operation results. We review our testing requirements model, and describe various consistency checks performed on this model. We illustrate these checks with an example test model, and also present algorithms used to perform our analysis

Characterizing defect trends in software support

We present an empirical analysis of defect arrival data in the operational phase of multiple software products. We find that the shape of the defect curves is sufficiently determined by three external and readily available release cycle attributes: the product type, the license model, and the cycle time between releases. This finding provides new insights into the driving forces affecting the specifics of defect curves and opens up new opportunities for software support organizations to reduce the cost of maintaining defect arrival models for individual products. In addition, it allows the possibility of predicting the defect arrival rate of one product from another with similar known attributes.