Volume1, Number1, 2000

 

 

Title:

Empirical analysis of CASE Tool Effects on Software Development Effort

Author:

Jongmoon Baik and Barry Boehm

Abstract:

During the last couple of decades, CASE(Computer Aided Software Engineering) tools have played a critical role in improvement of software productivity and quality by assisting tasks in software development processes. Many initiatives in the field were pursued in the 1980’s and 1990’s to provide more effective CASE technologies and development environments. Even though the CASE field is no longer active research area, most software development teams use a huge range of CASE tools that are typically assembled over some period with the hope of productivity and quality improvements throughout the software development process. The variety and proliferation of tools in the current CASE market makes it difficult to understand what kinds of takes are supported and how much effort can be reduced by using CASE tools. In this paper, we provide a classification of CASE tools by activity coverage in a software development lifecycle. We also report an experimental result of Bayesian analysis on CASE tool effects with a extended set of tool rating scales from COCOMO(COnstructive COst MOdel) Ⅱ with which CASE tools are effectively evaluated.

 

 

Title:

A Taxonomy of Module Interaction for Object-Oriented Testing

Author:

Allen Parrish, David Cordes, Brandon Dixon, and John McGregor

Abstract:

Like most disciplines, the majority of object-oriented research has evolved independently, in advance of a global conceptual framework for the field. Such a framework could potentially identify, define and categorize all of the major concepts in the field, thus supporting both research and pedagogy. Although a conceptual framework for object-orientation is beginning to materialize, it is immature and continuing to evolve. In this paper, we strengthen this framework by defining a taxonomy of module interactions for object-oriented testing.

 

 

Title:

Computer-Aided Design Validation of Safety-Critical Software Systems

Author:

Jin-ki Hong, Rex E. Gantenbein, and Sung Y. Shin

Abstract:

Formal validation and verification methods, while valuable in the assessment of safety-critical embedded systems, are often perceived as hard to use and resource intensive. The Computer-Aided Cost-Effective Validation (CACEV) method addresses these problems through the use of graphic notation and software tools to simplify the validation of critical properties in the system design. CACEV is based on systematic formalization of informal requirements and the comparison of an operational specification of a system against the formal presentation of its expected behavior. It has been used to validate the design of a voter module in a software testbed developed by NASA.

 

 

Title:

Using Mobile Crawlers to Search the Web Efficiently

Author:

Jachim Hammer and Jan Fiedler

Abstract:

Due to the enormous growth of the World Wide Web, search engines have become indispensable tools for Web navigation. In order to provide powerful search facilities, search engines maintain comprehensive indices for documents and their contents on the Web by continuously downloading Web pages for processing. In this paper, we demonstrate an alternative, more efficient approach to the “download-first process-later” strategy of existing search engines by using mobile crawlers. The major advantage of the mobile approach is that the analysis portion of the crawling process is done locally where the data resides rather than remotely inside the Web search engine. This can significantly reduce network load which, in turn, can improve the performance of the crawling process. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of our architecture supporting mobile Web crawling and report on its novel features as well as the rational behind some of the important design decisions that were driving our development. In order to demonstrate the viability of our approach and to validate our mobile crawling architecture, we have implemented a prototype that uses the UF intranet as its testbed. Based on this experimental prototype, we conducted a detailed evaluation of the benefits of mobile Web crawling.