The need for an industrial engineering software library

There is a real need for an Industrial Engineering Software Library. This need has been specified by previous studies and quantified by a widely distributed questionnaire. This article briefly outlines the work that has been accomplished so far towards the establishment of a clearinghouse to which industrial engineers can turn for available software. The question remaining is: How tto support and implement this project which we believe would be of great value to industrial engineers and others interested in quantitative techniques for decision making?     

Large-scale information retrieval with latent semantic indexing

As the amount of electronic information increases, traditional lexical (or Boolean) information retrieval techniques will become less useful. Large, heterogeneous collections will be difficult to search since the sheer volume of unranked documents returned in response to a query will overwhelm the user. Vector-space approaches to information retrieval, on the other hand, allow the user to search for concepts rather than specific words, and rank the results of the search according to their relative similarity to the query. One vector-space approach, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), has achieved up to 30% better retrieval performance than lexical searching techniques by employing a reduced-rank model of the term-document space. However, the original implementation of LSI lacked the execution efficiency required to make LSI useful for large data sets. A new implementation of LSI, LSI++, seeks to make LSI efficient, extensible, portable, and maintainable. The LSI++ Application Programming Interface (API) allows applications to immediately use LSI without knowing the implementation details of the underlying system. LSI++ supports both serial and distributed searching of large data sets, providing the same programming interface regardless of the implementation actually executing. In addition, a World Wide Web interface was created to allow simple, intuitive searching of document collections using LSI++. Timing results indicate that the serial implementation of LSI++ searches up to six times faster than the original implementation of LSI, while the parallel implementation searches nearly 180 times faster on large document collections.     

Task-specific information retrieval systems for software engineers

This paper discusses the development of task-specific information retrieval systems for software engineers. We discuss how software engineers interact with information and information retrieval systems and investigate to what extent a domain-specific search and recommendation system can be developed in order to support their work related activities. We have conducted a user study which is based on the “Cognitive Research Framework” to identify the relation between the information objects used during the code development (code snippets and search queries), the tasks users engage in and the associated use of search interfaces. Based on our user studies, a questionnaire and an automated observation of user interactions with the browser and software development environment, we identify that software engineers engage in a finite number of work related tasks and they also develop a finite number of “work practices”/“archetypes of behaviour”. Secondly we identify a group of domain specific behaviours that can successfully be used as a source of strong implicit relevance feedback. Based on our results, we design a snippet recommendation interface, and a code related recommendation interface which are embedded within the standard search engine.     

An experience in collaborative software engineering education

Large-scale software development requires the interaction of specialists from different fields who must communicate their decisions and coordinate their activities. As global software development becomes mainstream, software engineers face new challenges for which they have received little or no training. To help a new generation of software developers better understand the industry's globalization and familiarize them with distributed, collaborative development, we designed a course entitled the Distributed Software Engineering Laboratory. In the class, pairs of students from different countries work as a virtual organization overseeing the whole software development process. We describe the lessons we have learned in this course and propose a framework useful in dealing with some of the difficulties participants face     

Balancing software engineering education and industrial needs

In the world of information and communications technologies the demand for professionals with software engineering skills grows at an exponential rate. On this ground, we have conducted a study to help both academia and the software industry form a picture of the relationship between the competences of recent graduates of undergraduate and graduate software engineering programmes and the tasks that these professionals are to perform as part of their jobs in industry. Thanks to this study, academia will be able to observe which skills demanded by industry the software engineering curricula do or do not cater for, and industry will be able to ascertain which tasks a recent software engineering programme graduate is well qualified to perform. The study focuses on the software engineering knowledge guidelines provided in SE2004 and GSwE2009, and the job profiles identified by Career Space.     

Data collection in global software engineering research: learning from past experience

Global Software Engineering has become a standard in today’s software industry. Research in distributed software development poses severe challenges that are due to the spatial and temporal distribution of the actors, as well as to language, intercultural and organizational aspects. These challenges occur in addition to “traditional” challenges of the domain itself in large-scale software projects, like coordination and communication issues, requirements volatily, lack of domain knowledge, among others. While several authors have reported empirical studies of global software development projects, the methodological difficulties and challenges of this type of studies have not been sufficiently discussed. In this paper, we share our experiences of collecting and analysing qualitative data in the context of Global Software Engineering projects. We discuss strategies for gaining access to field sites, building trust and documenting distributed and complex work practices in the context of several research projects we have conducted in the past 9 years. The experiences described in this paper illustrate the need to deal with fundamental problems, such as understanding local languages and different cultures, observing synchronous interaction, or dealing with barriers imposed by political conflicts between the sites. Based on our findings, we discuss some practical implications and strategies that can be used by other researchers and provide some recommendations for future research in methodological aspects of Global Software Engineering.     

Application of AI in software and information engineering

Methodologies already exist for information systems analysis and design (e.g. SSADM, JSP, Merise, etc.) and supporting tools, namely, CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) and RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) and/or 4GL tools. All of these tools contain a data dictionary at the core of certain facilities.

In the underlying research and in this paper, the following questions need to be addressed:

• —How can the capability of a recently available data dictionary be enhanced with some knowledge-based modules?

• —What would be the architecture of such a system, based on the data dictionary of some CASE tools?

• —How can the informal and formal modelling approach information system design be combined?

• —What sort of knowledge-representation techniques would be suitable for the different tasks during the analysis and the design of the system?

The system outlined here would work as an intelligent assistant and workbench supporting the developer, but not as an automatic programming environment.     

Empirical software engineering: Industrial experience reports

Announcement

Empirical software engineering: Industrial experience reports     

Transfer of software engineering tools from information systems to production systems

This paper considers the prospects of transferring software-engineering methods and tools from the field of information systems (IS) to the field of production systems (PS). In particular, object-oriented programming is transferable to control programming by providing: (1) a standard, high-level, general purpose, real-time modules for controlling motion, logic and sequences; (2) detailed task specification; and (3) CAD/CAM database management and interaction with control. Additional transferable tools are man–machine interfaces for programmable logic controllers (PLC), robots, and numerically controlled (NC) machines. Current development of industrial standards should help provide full multi-platform support and connectivity and increase transfer of software development methods and tools from IS to PS.     

工程应用软件开发中应注意的问题

分析了软件开发过程中存在的典型错误观点,说明了开发工程应用软件的过程管理与软件质量间存在的必然联系,指出了具有必要的管理手段并解决好软件开发中的关键问题是得到高质量软件的必要条件。提出了在工程应用软件开发过程管理中应着重从人、问题和过程这3个方面加以分析和考虑。     

Conceptual model of an integrated management information system incorporating industrial engineering techniques

Operations Research (OR) is in a state of decline because of insufficient data, and management information systems are a disappointment because they have failed to achieve optimization which OR models could provide. This study proposes the conceptual design of a management information system (MIS) for a manufacturing organization which incorporates OR techniques, and consequently enables the MIS to achieve the ultimate goal of information systems development - optimization. Top-down analysis is applied to identify needed data and to determine the most useful form in which that data should be stored in the database, and is coupled with bottom-up design to ensure that meaningful information is provided so that managers can optimize their decision-making process. By incorporating the industrial engineering tools of OR the MIS contributes to this optimization.     

Bridging the gap between information architecture analysis and software engineering in interactive web application development

Web development teams comprise non-computer experts working on the conceptual modeling of non-functional aspects in software applications. Later on, such conceptual information is processed by analysts and software engineers to face the technical phases of the software project. However, this information transfer is often difficult to automate since the information processed by the different professionals involves different abstraction levels, as well as important cost and effort that need to be considered. The main aim of this research is to minimize these problems by increasing automation and interoperability in the development of interactive web applications. To take up this challenge, we have created and evaluated a tool that aims at bridging the gap between the conceptual definitions of web contents–i.e., the information architecture, and the UML elements for analysis and design required by software engineers, connecting functional and non-functional information to achieve the rest of technical activities during the software development process.     

Statistical prioritization for software product line testing: an experience report

Software product lines (SPLs) are families of software systems sharing common assets and exhibiting variabilities specific to each product member of the family. Commonalities and variabilities are often represented as features organized in a feature model. Due to combinatorial explosion of the number of products induced by possible features combinations, exhaustive testing of SPLs is intractable. Therefore, sampling and prioritization techniques have been proposed to generate sorted lists of products based on coverage criteria or weights assigned to features. Solely based on the feature model, these techniques do not take into account behavioural usage of such products as a source of prioritization. In this paper, we assess the feasibility of integrating usage models into the testing process to derive statistical testing approaches for SPLs. Usage models are given as Markov chains, enabling prioritization of probable/rare behaviours. We used featured transition systems, compactly modelling variability and behaviour for SPLs, to determine which products are realizing prioritized behaviours. Statistical prioritization can achieve a significant reduction in the state space, and modelling efforts can be rewarded by better automation. In particular, we used MaTeLo, a statistical test cases generation suite developed at ALL4TEC. We assess feasibility criteria on two systems: Claroline, a configurable course management system, and Sferion?, an embedded system providing helicopter landing assistance.     

Motivation in software engineering industrial practice: A cross-case analysis of two software organisations

ContextThe research about motivation in software engineering has provided important insights into characterizing factors and outcomes related to motivation. However, the complex relationships among these factors, including the moderating and mediating effects of organisational and individual characteristics, still require deeper explanatory investigation.ObjectiveOur general goal is to build explanatory theories of motivation in different software organisations and to integrate these local theories towards a comprehensive understanding of the role of motivation in the effectiveness of the individuals and the teams in which they work. In this article, we describe the integrative synthesis of the results of two case studies performed with software organisations in different business contexts.MethodWe performed two case studies using a multiple-case, replication design, focusing on the software engineers as the unit of analysis. For 13 months, we conducted semi structured interviews, diary studies, and document analyses, and analysed the collected data using grounded theory procedures. The results of the two cases were synthesized using a meta-ethnography supported process.ResultsWe built translations of the concepts and propositions from the two studies into one another. We then used the translations to build a central story of motivation that synthesizes the individual stories. This synthesis is contextualized by the differences in organisational and individual characteristics.ConclusionThe differences in organisational contexts and in the characteristics of the software engineers in each study provided rich explanations for contrasts in perceptions and feelings about motivation in both organisations. The theory that emerged from the synthesis, supported by these explanations, provides a deeper understanding of the interplay between motivators and outcomes, and the needs and personal goals of the software engineers. This theory also characterises the role of team cohesion in motivation, advancing previous models about motivation in software engineering.     

Context checklist for industrial software engineering research and practice

The relevance of context is particularly stressed in case studies, where it is said that “case study is an empirical method aimed at investigating contemporary phenomena in their context”. In this research, we classify context information and provide a context checklist for industrial software engineering. The checklist serves the purpose of (a) supporting researchers and practitioners in characterizing the context in which they are working; (b) supporting researchers with a checklist to identify relevant contextual information to elicit and report during primary and secondary studies. We utilized a systematic approach for constructing the classification of context information and provided a detailed definition for each item. We collected feedback from researchers as well as practitioners. The usefulness of the checklist was perceived more positively by researchers than practitioners, though they highlighted benefits (raising awareness of the importance of context and usefulness for management). The understandability was perceived positively by both practitioners and researchers. The checklist may serve as a “meta-model”, forming the basis for specific adaptations for different research areas, and as input for researchers deciding which context information to extract in systematic reviews. The checklist may also help researchers in reporting context in research papers.     

The applicability of software engineering in information systems development

The development of computer-based information systems involves more than the building of a complicated software system because each information system is embedded in a social and organizational environment. Software Engineering, which relies mainly on engineering approaches and places emphasis on formal methods, is inadequate to steer information systems development projects. Particular advances in Software Engineering will be best utilized within a broad framework which is capable of dealing with both technical and social/organizational issues.     

Applications of information theory to software engineering measurement

In the 1990s, there is an emphasis on finding ways to lower software cost and improve quality. Thus, it is very important to quantify and measure factors, such as software complexity, which have been shown to affect cost and quality. Researchers have defined many software complexity measures, and have exploited them to identify fault-prone program modules, to predict the number of faults that testing and operation will reveal, or to assess maintainability. Information theory based software measures are attractive because they quantify, with a standard unit, the amount of information in an abstraction of a program. The unit of measure is a bit. The purpose of this paper is to survey the state of the art of applications of information theory to software measurement, beginning in 1972. Information theory based measures have been applied to most phases of the development lifecycle. However, there have been relatively few papers. Most measures have not been empirically validated. One can conclude that the field is in its infancy. Relevant concepts of information theory are briefly described, and tables summarize the references from various perspectives. Since the amount of research, thus far, has been very limited, researchers will find numerous opportunities to validate, refine, and improve the measures presented here. Such research should give future practitioners useful software measures for each phase of the lifecycle.     

Tracing requirements to defect reports: an application of information retrieval techniques

To support debugging, maintenance, verification and validation (V&V) and/or independent V&V (IV&V), it is necessary to understand the relationship between defect reports and their related artifacts. For example, one cannot correct a code-related defect report without being able to find the code that is affected. Information retrieval (IR) techniques have been used effectively to trace textual artifacts to each other. This has generally been applied to the problem of dynamically generating a trace between artifacts in the software document hierarchy after the fact (after development has proceeded to at least the next lifecycle phase). The same techniques can also be used to trace textual artifacts of the software engineering lifecycle to defect reports. We have applied the term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) technique with relevance feedback, as implemented in our requirements tracing on-target (RETRO) tool, to the problem of tracing textual requirement elements to related textual defect reports. We have evaluated the technique using a dataset for a NASA scientific instrument. We found that recall of over 85% and precision of 69%, and recall of 70% and precision of 99% could be achieved, respectively, on two subsets of the dataset.     

Models in software engineering – an introduction

Modelling is a concept fundamental for software engineering. In this paper, the word is defined and discussed from various perspectives. The most important types of models are presented, and examples are given. Models are very useful, but sometimes also dangerous, in particular to those who use them unconsciously. Such problems are shown. Finally, the role of models in software engineering research is discussed. Received: 21 October 2002 / Accepted: 10 January 2003 Published online: 27 February 2003