Software Life Cycle

Software maintenance claims a large proportion of organizational resources. It is thought that many maintenance problems derive from inadequate software design and development practices. Poor design choices can result in complex software that is costly to support and difficult to change. However, it is difficult to assess the actual maintenance performance effects of software development practices because their impact is

The complex requirements of software systems justify the use of the best existing techniques to guar- antee the quality of speciflcations and to preserve this quality during the programming,phase of a software life-cycle. On the one hand, visual speciflcation lan- guages (such as UML) have been widely used for spec- ifying, visualizing, understanding and documenting software systems, but they

The maintenance of information systems is one of the greatest problems in the software life cycle. It is the most conflictive, costly, less planificable; and the process requiring the most resources. In spite of this reality, most organizations do not possess methodologies for software maintenance. These facts, key to the imperative need of controlling the maintenance process, have carried us to propose a maintenance methodology. In this paper an adjustment of the ISO/IEC 12207 standard for the processes of life cycle maintenance is presented. This methodology is being used by Atos ODS, one of the most important European consultants on software outsourcing and maintenance

Table of Contents Introduction Morten Borup Harning and Jean Vanderdonckt........................... ..................................... iv 1 Architecture for Personal Text Entry Methods Poika Isokoski and Roope Raisamo.................................................................................... 1 2 The Software Quality Star: A conceptual model for the software quality curriculum Ronan Fitzpatrick............ ... ... Introduction Almost half of software in systems being developed today and thirty-seven to fifty percent of efforts throughout the software life cycle are related to the system's user interface. For this reason issues ...

Current software cost estimation models, such as the 1981 Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO) for software cost estimation and its 1987 Ada COCOMO update, have been experiencing increasing difficulties in estimating the costs of software developed to new life cycle processes and capabilities. These include non-sequential and rapid-development process models; reuse-driven approaches involving commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) packages, re-engineering, applications composition, and applications generation capabilities; object-oriented approaches supported by distributed middleware; and software process maturity initiatives. This paper summarizes research in deriving a baseline COCOMO 2.0 model tailored to these new forms of software development, including rationale for the model decisions. The major new modeling capabilities of COCOMO 2.0 are a tailorable family of software sizing models, involving Object Points, Function Points, and Source Lines of Code; nonlinear models for software reuse and re-engineering; an exponentdriver approach for modeling relative software diseconomies of scale; and several additions, deletions and updates to previous COCOMO effort-multiplier cost drivers. This model is serving as a framework for an extensive current data collection and analysis effort to further refine and calibrate the model's estimation capabilities.

Formal Concept Analysis has been originally developed as a subfield of Applied Mathematics based on the mathematization of concept and concept hierarchy. Only after more than a decade of development, the connections to the philosophical logic of human thought became clearer and even later the connections to Piaget’s cognitive structuralism which Thomas Bernhard Seiler convincingly elaborated to a comprehensive theory of concepts in his recent book [Se01]. It is the main concern of this paper to show the surprisingly rich correspondences between Seiler’s multifarious aspects of concepts in the human mind and the structural properties and relationships of formal concepts in Formal Concept Analysis. These correspondences make understandable, what has been experienced in a great multitude of applications, that Formal Concept Analysis may function in the sense of transdisciplinary mathematics, i.e., it allows mathematical thought to aggregate with other ways of thinking and thereby to support human thought and action.

Software maintenance has long been one of the most difficult and expensive phases of the software life-cycle. Maintenance is especially difficult for large-scale systems. The more code involved, the larger the chance that there may be unexpected interactions that may cause problems when updates and corrections are made during maintenance. The large number of developers who were probably involved at various points in the system’s creation means that it is likely to be difficult to answer questions about the intent behind the design and implementation decisions. The designer’s, or developer’s, intent can be captured as their Design Rationale. Unlike standard design documentation, which is a description of the final design, Design Rationale (DR) offers more: not only the decisions, but also the reasons behind each decision, including its justification, other alternatives considered, and argumentation leading to the decision. To drive and evaluate our research into using rationale for s...

There is a growing interest in creating tools that can assist engineers in all phases of the software life cycle. This assistance requires techniques that go beyond traditional static and dynamic analysis. An example of such a technique is the application of information retrieval (IR), which exploits information found in a project's natural language. Such information can be extracted from the source code's identifiers and comments and in artifacts associated with the project, such as the requirements. The techniques described ...

Quantitative analysis of software systems is a critical issue in the development of applications for heterogeneous distributed and mobile systems. It has been recognised that performance analysis should be integrated in the software development life cycle since the early ...