International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

One of the main goals of the Software Engineering discipline is to find higher abstraction levels and ways to reuse software in order to increase its productivity and quality. Ontologies, which are typically considered as a technique or an artifact used in one or more software lifecycle phases, may be used to help achieve that goal. This paper provides a systematic literature review of the proposed solutions for applying ontologies in automatic and generative programming. The paper aims to identify ontologies and software development tools, frameworks, prototypes, design patterns and methodologies that use them as development artifacts for source code generation or product derivation. The review provides researchers with the state of the art, while also identifying challenges and gaps that require further exploration and development.

Load balancing, which redistributes dynamic workloads across computing nodes within cloud to improve resource utilization, is one of the main challenges in cloud computing system. Most existing rule-based load balancing algorithms failed to effectively fuse load data of multi-class system resources. The strategies they used for balancing loads were far from optimum since these methods were essentially performed in a combined way according to load state. In this work, a fuzzy clustering method with feature weight preferences is presented to overcome the load balancing problem for multi-class system resources and it can achieve an optimal balancing solution by load data fusion. Feature weight preferences are put forward to establish the relationship between prior knowledge of specific cloud scenario and load balancing procedure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively balance loads consisting of multi-class system resources.

Interactive software can run not only independently but also often collaboratively to perform tasks thus forming a larger group of software networks. Hence the analysis of interactions is essential as a way to measure the stability of the entire software group network, i.e. the interactive patterns and frequency. However, current studies rarely investigate the performance of software as groups but as individuals thus omitting their interactions. Especially, the performance of some traditional measurement algorithms which execute in nondistributed runtime environments is poor. In this paper, we proposed a new software group stability model concentrating on software network level behaviors as a group. An algorithm is proposed to extract key nodes and critical interactive items based on frequent interaction pattern, then the stability of software group can be assessed based on the loss of connectivity caused by removing key nodes and key edges from the network, using the algorithm SG-StaMea. Furthermore, our algorithms can quantify the stability. To validate the efficacy of our model, the Spark and Hadoop platforms have been selected as targets systems. Both experiments and experimental data showed that our algorithms have significantly improved the accuracy of software stability measurement compared to classical algorithm such as Apriori of frequent pattern.

We present an interactive system using one RGB-D sensor, which allows a user to use bare hands to perform sand drawing. Our system supports the common sand drawing functions, such as sand erosion, sand spilling, and sand leaking. To use hands to manipulate the virtual sand, we design four key hand gestures. The idea is that the gesture of one hand controls the drawing actions. The motion and gesture of the other hand control the drawing positions. There are three major steps. First, our system adopts a vision-based bare-hand detection method which computes the hand position and recognizes the hand gestures. Second, the drawing positions and the drawing actions are sent to a sand drawing subsystem. Finally, the subsystem performs the sand drawing actions. Experimental results show that our system enables users to draw a rich variety of sand pictures.

Evaluating software modules for inclusion in a Drupal website is a crucial and complex task that currently requires manual assessment of a number of module facets. This study applied data-mining techniques to identify quality-related metrics associated with highly popular and unpopular Drupal modules. The data-mining approach produced a set of important metrics and thresholds that highlight a strong relationship between the overall perceived reliability of a module and its popularity. Areas for future research into open-source software quality are presented, including a proposed module evaluation tool to aid developers in selecting high-quality modules.

This study analyzes relevant contemporary software testing process models. In addition to contemporary theoretical models, the study also analyzes business software testing process models in a considerable number of software organizations. The dual (i.e. theoretical and empirical) analysis of the testing process aims to provide a basis for a testing process model design which is specific to testing business software in small and medium software organizations. The empirical study was conducted by a survey research strategy in 24 software organizations. In order to gather detailed information on the testing process, an interview was conducted on a purpose-selected sample of four organizations. The gathered data were processed by quantitative and qualitative data analysis. The results of theoretical and empirical research were used as a basis for attaining the study’s desired outcome: the business software testing process-based model which was graphically presented in BPMN 2.0 notation and described according to the ISO/IEC TR 24774 standard for process description in systems and software engineering. The combination of the graphic representation of the model and its description in compliance with the process description is a proven method in process management, which should enable easier understanding, and thus the implementation of the model in small and medium software organizations.