International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

UML is now popularly applied as a requirements modeling language for software system analysis and design, and the dynamic behaviors of system are described in UML behavioral model. As the UML model suffers from lack of well-defined formal semantics, it is difficult to formally analyze and verify the behavioral model. The paper presents a method of UML behavioral model verification based on Description Logic system and its formal inference. The semantics of UML behavioral models is divided into static semantics and dynamic semantics, which are formally specified in OWL DL ontology and DL-Safe rules. To check the consistency of the behavioral models, the algorithms are provided for transforming UML behavioral models into OWL DL ontology, and hence model consistency can be verified through formal reasoning with a DL supporting reasoner Pellet. A case study is provided to demonstrate applicability of the method.

Reducing software defects is an essential activity for Software Process Improvement. The Action-Based Defect Prediction (ABDP) approach fragments the software process into actions, and builds software defect prediction models using data collected from the execution of actions and reported defects. Though the ABDP approach can be applied to predict possible defects in subsequent actions, the efficiency of corrections is dependent on the skill and knowledge of the stakeholders. To address this problem, this study proposes the Action Correction Recommendation (ACR) model to provide recommendations for action correction, using the Negative Association Rule mining technique. In addition to applying the association rule mining technique to build a High Defect Prediction Model (HDPM) to identify high defect action, the ACR builds a Low Defect Prediction Model (LDPM). For a submitted action, each HDPM rule used to predict the action as a high defect action and the LDPM rules are analyzed using negative association rule mining to spot the rule items with different characteristics in HDPM and LDPM rules. This information not only identifies the attributes required for corrections, but also provides a range (or a value) to facilitate the high defect action corrections. This study applies the ACR approach to a business software project to validate the efficiency of the proposed approach. The results show that the recommendations obtained can be applied to decrease software defect removal efforts.

The term "software entropy" refers to the tendency for software, over time, to become difficult and costly to maintain. A software system that undergoes continuous change, such as having new functionality added to its original design, will eventually become more complex and can become disorganized as it grows, losing its original design structure.

A recent study show that software degradation may be measured using the WMC expressed in terms of Shannon entropy. In this paper we extended the empirical analyses also to RFC and CBO since these CK metrics have been shown to be correlated with fault-proneness of OO classes.

We analyzed various releases of the publicly available Eclipse and Netbeans software systems, calculating the entropy of some CK metrics for every release analyzed. The validity is shown through a direct measure of software quality such as the number of detected defects. Our results display a very good correlation between the entropy of CBO and RFC and the number of bugs for Eclipse and Netbeans.

Complexity and quality metrics are in general computed on every system module while the entropy is just a scalar number that characterizes a whole system, this result suggests that the entropy of some CK metrics could be considered as a global quality metric for large software systems. Our results need, however, to be confirmed for other large software systems.

Software projects often fail, because they are not adequately managed. The establishment of effective and efficient project management practices still remains a key challenge to software organizations. Striving to address these needs, "best practice" models, such as, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) or the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), are being developed to assist organizations in improving project management. Although not required, software tools can help implement the project management process in practice. In order to provide comprehensive, low-cost tool support for project management, specifically, for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), in this paper we compare the most popular free/open-source web-based project management tools with respect to their compliance to PMBOK and CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV). The results of this research can be used by organizations to make decisions on tool adoptions as well as a basis for evolving software tools in alignment with best practices models.

The object deployment of a distributed software has a great impact on its performance. In this paper an analytical model for performance evaluation of different object deployments, is presented. The key advantage of the proposed model over the traditional Queuing Network models is the usefulness in the deployment optimization when the search space is huge and automatic instantiation of Queuing performance models corresponding to an object deployment is costly. Since our model produces an optimal deployment corresponding to each input load separately, the runtime behavior of the software corresponding to each input load should be profiled using simulation first. In this paper a translation scheme for generating the simulate-able Labeled Transition Systems (LTS) from scenarios is also presented. Moreover, two deployment algorithms (a GA-based and an INLP-based) are implemented and the results are compared.

In this paper we present SyBeL (System Behaviour modelling Language), an XML based formalism for software system modelling. In particular, SyBeL focuses on the description of the system behaviour in order to capture its functional requirements and has been designed to fulfill some of the most trendy software engineering issues. The use of the underlying XML language makes the artifacts generated by SyBeL immediately available to further automatic manipulation (e. g., to automatically generate test cases) without the need of intermediate models, as usually done in semi-formal approaches. Moreover, we are experimenting SyBeL on a variety of practical case studies.