International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

Component Based Software (CBS) development is the assembling of already developed components and preparing for integration. For the last two decades, researchers have been concentrating much on CBS both in industry and academia, because CBS helps in the reduction of manpower, cost, software development time and better system maintainability. The selection of the best component from the large collection of components is a difficult task and only few researchers have addressed this issue so far by using optimization techniques. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to group the components effectively, based on the software architecture, by using fuzzy concepts. Again, Fuzzy Clustering Technique (FCT) is introduced to find the optimal grouping between the reusable components and the software architectures. The proposed model has the following advantages: (i) the proposed Fuzzy Weighted Relational Coefficient (FWRC) is used to measure the fuzzy relational value of the suggested 9 component parameters; (ii) A mathematical model is established to remove all less utility leveled components before grouping; (iii) FCT performs on newly developed similarity coefficient formula; (iv) Zero — One programming (optimization) technique is used to optimize the group; (v) Fuzzy Weighted Approach is used to find the dominant component among the component grouping, and (vi) Optimal grouping is achieved by the property, namely, maximizing the cohesion and minimizing the coupling when compared to other methods. Finally, the validation of the derived methodology is verified with sample Business Enterprise Applications.

Although it is assumed that the implementation of design by contract is better modularized by means of aspect-oriented (AO) programming, there is no empirical evidence on the effectiveness of AO for modularizing non-trivial design by contract code in realistic development scenarios. This paper reports a quantitative and qualitative case study that evolves a real-life application to assess various facets of the adequacy of aspects for modularizing the design by contract concern. Our evaluation focused upon a number of system changes that are typically performed during software maintenance tasks. The study was driven by an analysis of fundamental modularity attributes, such as separation of concerns, coupling, conciseness, and change propagation. We have found that AO techniques improved separation of concerns and the design stability between the design by contract code and base application code throughout the development scenarios. However, contradicting the general intuition, the AO versions of the system did not present significant gains regarding four classical size metrics we employed.

Satisfying quality requirements for service systems is quite crucial and challenging. However, there is a gap between quality requirements analysis and quality requirements design in service systems. In order to bridge this gap, we provide a systematic approach — ProQRASS — to model and analyze quality requirements of services based on business processes, which are frequently used to model services. ProQRASS consists of five steps: (1) constructing business process models; (2) associating quality requirements with functional requirements of services in business process models; (3) identifying potential conflicts and cooperation among quality requirements; (4) filtering out false conflicts and cooperation; (5) resolving conflicts among quality requirements. We illustrate ProQRASS through an equity trading service system. We also evaluate its capability through the comparison with other approaches and conduct a usability investigation involving industrial experts. The result shows that ProQRASS is effective and useful.

Coverage-based fault localization (CBFL) techniques contrast the execution spectra of a program entity to assess the extent of how much a program entity is being related to faults. However, different test cases may result in similar executions, which further make the execution spectra of program entities be indistinguishable among similar executions. As a consequence, most of the current CBFL techniques are impacted by the noise of indistinguishable spectra. To alleviate the impact of execution similarity and improve the effectiveness of CBFL techniques, we propose a general fault localization framework. This framework is general to current execution spectra based CBFL techniques, which could synthesize a fault localization technique based on a given base technique. To synthesize the new technique, we use the concept of coverage vector to model execution spectra and capture the execution similarity, then reduce the impact of execution similarity by counting distinct coverage vectors, and finally assess the suspiciousness of basic blocks being related to faults with the spectra of distinct coverage vectors. We adopt four representative fault localization techniques as base techniques, use seven Siemens programs and three median-sized real-life UNIX utility programs as subject programs, to conduct an experimental study on the effectiveness of our framework. The empirical evaluation shows that our framework can effectively alleviate the impact of execution similarity and generate more effective fault localization techniques based on existing ones.

The design, build and evaluation of an ontology-based knowledge management system prototype tool — entitled CMMIoKMS — for supporting the consultation and understanding of CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV) is reported. Ontology-based tools have been proposed for improving such complex cognitive tasks realized by Software Engineering practitioners involved in CMMI implementations. The design of the CMMI-oKMS prototype tool is based on four proprietary ontologies (of things, of systems, of business, and of CMMI models) and built with Protégé tool. The result from a pilot empirical test, is reported as being satisfactory — compared with the extant reported systems — on the metric of perceived value (with statistical significance) and over usefulness, compatibility, and test score constructs (with practical significance), while that no gain was found in ease of use. Hence, given the limited number of similar KMS tools reported in the current literature, this research contributes to our body of knowledge in Software Engineering by providing useful design, building and evaluation insights for improving these knowledge support systems.

The specification-based testing can be employed to evaluate software functionalities without knowing program code. Decisions are the primary form of the pre- and post-conditions in formal specifications. This work expatiates on logic coverage criteria for specification-based testing at great length. It proposes and then expounds mask logic coverage criteria to solve the problems which existing determinant logic coverage criteria cannot solve. A feasible test case generation algorithm based on mask logic coverage criteria is developed. The test cases satisfying mask logic coverage criteria can detect those errors caused by the mask property of conditions. An experiment is conducted to compare MC/DC, RC/DC and two mask logic coverage criteria (RMCC and GMCC) on their test effectiveness and fault detection ability. It also elaborates on the constraint among conditions, how to decompose and compose a complicated decision, and the relationship among decisions. All these can respectively clarify the coupling problem among conditions, the multiple occurrences of a condition in a decision, and the location of a decision in a specification or program. Additionally, coverage criteria including full true decision coverage, full false decision coverage, all sub-decisions coverage, unique condition true coverage and unique condition false coverage are proposed. The test sets satisfying these criteria can detect respectively different types of errors. Finally, the hierarchical subsumption relation is established among these presented coverage criteria and some existing ones, and various applicable scenarios for different coverage criteria are suggested.