Y. Raghu Reddy

Verifiable composition of access control and application features

Access control features are often spread across and tangled with other functionality in a design. This makes modifying and replacing these features in a design difficult. Aspect-oriented modeling (AOM) techniques can be used to support separation of access control concerns from other application design concerns. Using an AOM approach, access control features are described by aspect models and other application features are described by a primary model. Composition of aspect and primary models yields a design model in which access control features are integrated with other application features. In this paper, we present, through an example, an AOM approach that supports verifiable composition of behaviors described in access control aspect models and primary models. Given an aspect model, a primary model, and a specified property, the composition technique produces proof obligations as the behavioral descriptions in the aspect and primary models are composed. One has to discharge the proof obligations to establish that the composed model has the specified property.

In Support of Peer Code Review and Inspection in an Undergraduate Software Engineering Course

Peer code review and inspection is a quality improvement software engineering activity consisting of systematic examination of source code. While peer code review is commonly used in industrial and open-source software projects, it is seldom taught or practiced in undergraduate level Software Engineering courses. We conduct a study on the use of peer code reviewin a sophomore level introductory Software Engineering course consisting of more than 200 students and present our experiences, findings and challenges. We use Bitbuckets (a free code distributed version control system hosting site for Git and Mercurial) in-built code-review system and web-based hosting service. We extract the peer code review comments using Bitbucket API for detecting coding standard or compliance violation and identification of defects (number and type) by reviewers. We also conduct a survey on the benefit of peer code review activity on peer cohesion and communication. Our experiments and survey reveal that employing peer code review in an undergraduate class has several learning benefits such as improvement in coding skills, program comprehension abilities, knowledge of coding standard, and compliance and peer communication.

An Aspect Oriented Approach for Renarrating Web Content

The ability to modify the existing published web pages is what we are calling Renarration of the web. Such a mechanism is useful for improving accessibility and personalization of the content currently on the web. There are many techniques in place for enabling both Web Accessibility and Web Personalization. In this paper we propose a novel approach: an Aspects inspired design of renarration. Aspects have traditionally been applied to programming. Here we reinterpret concepts like Join Points, Point-cuts and Advices and apply them to web documents. To validate our approach, we designed a framework called Rennaration Studio that is built using microservices based architecture pattern and implemented using Pythons flask platform. We demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal by renarrating different Aspects (text, language, phonetics) of two specific web documents.

Mobile App Usability Index (MAUI) for improving mobile banking adoption

India has 790+ million active mobile connections and 80.57 million smartphone users. However, as per Reserve Bank of India, the number of transactions performed using smartphone based mobile banking applicationsis less than 12% of the overall banking transactions. One of the major reasons for such low numbers is the usability of the mobile banking app. In this paper, we focus on usability issues related tomobile banking apps and propose a Mobile App Usability Index (MAUI) for enhancing the usability of a mobile banking app. The proposed Index has been validatedwith mobile banking channel managers, chief information security officers, etc.

Transformation of Flash files to HTML5 and JavaScript

Adobe Flash is a popular platform frequently used for creation of advertisements, videos and interactive contents on web pages. However its utility is lost with the decreasing support of Flash players on some platforms, where open standards like HTML5 and JavaScript are widely supported. This paper describes a transformation process for converting Flash files into HTML5 and Javascript to give a human readable output. This will lend users the same resourcefulness of Flash in open standards without relying on the former.

Code Comprehension Activities in Undergraduate Software Engineering Course - A Case Study

In industry, inspections, reviews, and refactoring are considered as necessary software engineering activities for enhancing quality of code. In academia, such activities are rarely taught and practiced at Undergraduate level due to various reasons like limited skill set, limited knowledge of the available tools, time constraints, project setting, project client availability, flexibility with Syllabus, etc. However, we argue that such activities are an essential part of introductory software engineering courses and can result in improvement of coding skills, knowledge of coding standard and compliance to the same, and peer communication within teams. We have studied the use of such activities in a sophomore level Software Engineering course consisting of more than 200 students working in teams on projects from start-ups and present our experiences, findings and challenges. We present the results of quantitative evaluation of the impact of code comprehension activities before and after each iteration of the team projects.

A defect dependency based approach to improve software quality in integrated software products

Integrated software products are complex in design. They are prone to defects caused by integrated and non-integrated modules of the entire integrated software suite. In such software products, a small proportion of defects are fixed as soon as they are reported. Rest of the defects are targeted for fixes in future product release cycles. Among such targeted defects, most of them seem to be insignificant and innocuous in the current version but have the potential to become acute in future versions. In this paper, we propose an approach to study defect dependency of the reported defect using a dependency metric. Identifying the dependency of a defect in an integrated product suite can help the product stake-owners to prioritize them and help improve software quality.

Improving Mobile Banking Usability Based on Sentiments

India has 868+ million active subscribers with 160+ smartphone users. However,the number of mobile banking transactions on smartphones is less than 1/6th of the smartphone users and 1/5th of the other digital transactions excluding ATM channel. Though adoption of mobile (feature/smartphone) has been in the increasing trend, concerns of security, availability of sustained data connectivity and usability will be the key factors for improving usage. We suggest a Mobile App Usability Index (MAUI) metric for improving usability based on various usability parameters. The parameters were formulated from sentiment analysis of user comments posted in Google play store on the mobile banking apps of banks. The proposed index has been validated by mobile banking channel managers and chief information security officers.

A Report on Software Engineering Education Workshop (SEEW) 2014 Co-Located with Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference 2014

The Software Engineering Education Workshop (SEEW) 2014 was held on 1st December 2014 at Jeju (South Korea). The worksho was co-located with The 21st Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC 2014). The objective of SEEW is to create an annual discussion forum on Software Engineering (SE) Education in the Asia-Pacific region. The workshop was organized by experienced Software Engineering educators (working in Academia and Industry) from three different countries in the Asia-Pacific region: India, Japan, and Thailand. The total number of participants were 18 spread across 7 countries. The workshop consisted of 7 position paper presentations consisting of a wide range of topics and research questions. The paper presentation was followed by a group discussion which resulted in identifying important aspects and future research directions on Software Engineering Education. The workshop was a successful endeavor and the response in terms of the contributions by participants is a clear indicator and confirmation of the need of having a focused discussion forum for brainstorming on software engineering education in Asia-Pacific region.

Moving Beyond: Insights from 1st International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Industrial Practices (SER&IPs 2014)

Software engineering researchers and their industrial counterparts have emphasized that research is essential for innovation. In practice, rather than ending up in a win-win situation, most of the times both the parties lose because of differences in expectations between the two sides. In this report, we briefly summarize the key insights from 1st International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Industrial Practices (SER&IPs 2014) co-located with 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2014). The core lesson that stems out of this workshop is a definite need to have multiple approaches to deal with software engineering research-industrial practices partnership. Specifically, the workshop presented two keynotes: one from an industrial researcher explaining the need for academic expertise and an academic researcher on how their research added value to industry. An invited seminar unveiled short-term and long-term funding opportunities followed by a list of presentations from peerreviewed submissions from both software engineering research and industry partners. Finally, the workshop ended with group discussions, brainstorming of potential topics that can lead to fruitful collaboration between software engineering researchers and industrial practitioners. A major lesson from the workshop is the choice of a topic that fosters a win-win situation for both parties in short-term and long-term collaborations.