International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

Security specifications of IT products and systems are inherently complex and may subject products to semantic threats due to misunderstanding of key aspects of security objectives by developers, customers and end users. A study is conducted on expressing the security specifications by specially interpreted UML use case diagrams to avoid misunderstanding by peer groups, i.e. to prevent semantic threats at the development phase through improved comprehension of security specifications. We base our results on engineering frameworks for comprehensive security and demonstrate the need for improved communication by concrete examples of semantic threats. The threats result from the use of complex textual artifacts as a means of communicating the security requirements. We demonstrate the use of a diagrammatic technique for expressing and communicating security specifications in a less ambiguous manner and illustrate how the technique assists in communication.

This paper presents a visual approach that will make program comprehension easy. This visual approach employs "Cyber-Films" where a user can use them not only as a programming tool but also as a learning tool. This paper briefly describes how to use "Cyber-Films" as a programming tool, how to use them as a learning tool, and how to guarantee the absence (or at least minimize the presence) of syntax errors in programming. In order to verify that "Cyber-Films" are also useful as a learning tool, a prototype implementation was developed and an experiment was conducted. This paper presents and discusses the results of that experiment. Its goal was to evaluate whether or not the visual approach used was easy to understand even for users with no background at all. The results of that experiment showed that the majority of the respondents correctly identified each scheme of communication presented in "Cyber-Film" format by just observing the set of frames in animation either once or twice and at most thrice before understanding a given scheme. Because the respondents easily identified how a given scheme worked by observing it, this approach can also facilitate the understanding of programs written by other people.

In this paper we promote a document-oriented approach to the development of content-intensive applications (i.e., applications that critically depend on the informational contents and on the characterization of the contents' structure). This approach is the result of our experience as developers in the educational and in the hypermedia domains, as well as in the domain of knowledge-based systems. The main reason for choosing the document-oriented approach is to make it easier for domain experts to comprehend the elements that represent the main application's features. Among these elements are: the application's contents, the application's customizable properties including those of its interface, and the structure of all this information. Therefore, in our approach, these features are represented by means of a set of application documents, which are marked up using a suitable descriptive Domain-Specific Markup Language (DSML). If this goal is fully accomplished, the application itself can be automatically produced by processing those documents with a suitable processor for the DSML defined. The document-oriented development enhances the production and maintenance of content-intensive applications, because the applications' features are described in the form of human-readable and editable documents, understandable by domain experts and suitable for automatic processing. Nevertheless, the main drawbacks of the approach are the planning overload of the whole production process and the costs of the provision and maintenance of the DSMLs and their processors. These drawbacks can be palliated by adopting an incremental strategy for the production and maintenance of the applications and also for the definition and the operationalization of the DSMLs.

A software comprehension tool defines an abstract software model, views on this model, analyses creating the model, and a mapping between model and view. For creating new comprehension tools, we configure online analyses, models, views and their mappings instead of hand-coding them. In this paper, we introduce an architecture allowing such an online configuration and, as a proof of concept, a framework implementing this architecture. In several examples, we demonstrate the generality and flexibility of our approach.

Program partitioning is a task of splitting a large, complex software system into functionally independent program modules. It is a key step in program understanding, software maintenance and software reuse. Traditional program partitioning methods are nonlinear. In most cases, the computational efforts needed for partitioning a source program will increase exponentially with the size of the source program. The NP-hard complexity constitutes a computational barrier for partitioning legacy software systems properly and efficiently. In this paper, we propose a new method that can partition a source program into program modules within a timescale that is linear with the size of the program. Our method uses special heuristic knowledge, based on psychological analysis on human programming styles, to partition a source program into domain-oriented program modules. A case study on a legacy C program that consists of 92 functions is reported to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of this method.

In automatic user interface adaptation, developers pursue the delivery of best-fit user interfaces according to the runtime-supplied profiles of individual end users and usage contexts. Software engineering of automatic interface adaptability entails: (a) storage and processing of user and usage-context profiles; (b) design and implementation of alternative interface components, to optimally support the various user activities and interface operations for different users and usage contexts; and (c) runtime decision-making, to choose on the fly the most appropriate alternative interface components, given the particular user and context profile. In automatic interface adaptation, the decision making process plays a key role in optimal on-the-fly interface assembly, engaging consolidated design wisdom in a computable form. A verifiable language has been designed and implemented which is particularly suited for the specification of adaptation-oriented decision-making logic, while also being easily deployable and usable by interface designers. This paper presents the language, its contextual role in adapted interface delivery and the automatic verification method. The employment of the language in an adaptation-design support tool is discussed, the latter automatically generating language rules by relying upon adaptation rule patterns. Finally, the deployment methodology of the language in supporting dynamic interface assembly is discussed, further generalizing towards dynamic software assembly, by introducing architectural contexts and polymorphic architectural containment.