ICSE

Requirements such as distribution or tracing have an impact on multiple classes in a system. They are cross-cutting requirements, or aspects. Their support is, by necessity, scattered across those multiple classes. A look at an individual class may also ...

Minimally Adequate Synthesizer (MAS) is an interactive algorithm that synthesizes UML statechart diagrams from sequence diagrams. It follows Angluin's framework of minimally adequate teacher to infer the desired statechart diagram by consulting the ...

The economic relevance of Web applications increases the importance of controlling and improving their quality. Moreover, the new available technologies for their development allow the insertion of sophisticated functions, but often leave the developers ...

Finite state verification is emerging as an important technology for proving properties about software. In our experience, we have found that analysts have different expectations at different times. When an analyst is in an exploratory mode, initially ...

Resource-constrained devices are becoming ubiquitous. Examples include cell phones, palm pilots, and digital thermostats. It can be difficult to fit required functionality into such a device without sacrificing the simplicity and clarity of the ...

The Amalia framework generates lightweight components that automate the analysis of operational specifications and designs [16]. A key concept is the step analyzer, which enables Amalia to automatically tailor high-level analyses, such as behavior ...

It has been well established in the software process improvement (SPI) literature and practice that without commitment from all organizational levels to SPI the initiative will most likely fail or the results are not far reaching. Commitment construct ...

Global software development is rapidly becoming the norm for technology companies. Previous qualitative research suggests that multi-site development may increase development cycle time. We use both survey data and data from the source code change ...

Software product lines enjoy increasingly wide adoption in the software industry. Most authors focus on the technical and process aspects and assume an organizational model consisting of a domain engineering unit and several application engineering ...

The paper focuses on investigating the combined use of semantic and structural information of programs to support the comprehension tasks involved in the maintenance and reengineering of software systems. Here, semantic refers to the domain specific ...

Recent works by Sowa and by Rayside & Campbell demonstrate that there is a strong connection between object-oriented programming and the logical formalism of the syllogism, first set down by Aristotle in the Prior Analytics. In this paper, we develop an ...

Design traceability has been widely recognized as being an integral aspect of software development. In the past years this fact has been amplified due to the increased use of legacy systems and COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) components mixed with the ...

Software inspection is recognised as an effective defect detection technique, but research has suggested that its performance on object-oriented code may suffer as a result of the delocalised nature of the software. This leads to problems of how to ...

Defect content estimation techniques (DCETs), based on defect data from inspection, estimate the total number of defects in a document to evaluate the development process. For inspections that yield few data points DCETs reportedly underestimate the ...

Software inspection is one of the most effective methods to detect defects. Reinspection repeats the inspection process for software products that are suspected to contain a significant number of undetected defects after an initial inspection. As a ...

Automatic-verification capability tends to be packaged into stand-alone tools, as opposed to components that are easily integrated into a larger software-development environment. Such packaging complicates integration because it involves translating ...

Numerous researchers have reported success in reasoning about properties of small programs using finite-state verification techniques. We believe, as do most researchers in this area, that in order to scale those initial successes to realistic programs, ...

Scenario-based specifications such as Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) are becoming increasingly popular as part of a requirements specification. Our objective is to facilitate the development of behaviour models in conjunction with scenarios. In this ...

There are two basic parts to the behavioral specification of distributed systems: safety and progress. In earlier work, we developed a tool to monitor progress properties of CORBA components specified using the temporal operator transient. In this paper,...

Our research deals with the use of the Software Architecture (SA) as a reference model for the conformance testing of the implemented system with respect to its architectural specification, at the integration test level. Having formerly identified an ...

Dynamic analysis is based on collecting data as the program runs. However, raw traces tend to be too voluminous and too unstructured to be used directly for visualization and understanding. We address this problem in two phases: the first phase selects ...

Support for dynamic and client-specific customization is required in many application areas. We present a (distributed) application as consisting of a minimal functional core — implemented as a component-based system, and an unbound set of potential ...

Software developers writing new software have strong incentives to make their products compliant to standards such as CORBA, COM, and Java Beans. Standards-compliance facilitates inter-operability, component-based software assembly, and software reuse, ...

A good object-oriented design does not necessarily make a good component-based design, and vice versa. What design principles do components introduce? This paper examines component-based programming and how it expands the design space in the context of ...

Software maintenance and evolution are the dominant activities in the software lifecycle. Modularization can separate design decisions and allow them to be independently evolved, but modularization often breaks down and complicated global changes are ...

Most software systems are inflexible. Reconfiguring a system's modules to add or to delete a feature requires substantial effort. This inflexibility increases the costs of building variants of a system, amongst other problems.

New languages and tools ...

Object-oriented frameworks are a popular mechanism for building and evolving large applications and software product lines. This paper describes an alternative approach to software construction, Java Layers (JL), and evaluates JL and frameworks in terms ...