Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering. ICSE 2001

Software product lines are enjoying increasingly wide adoption in the software industry. Most authors focus on the technical and process aspects, and assume an organizational model consisting of a domain engineering unit and several application engineering units. In our cooperation with several software development organizations applying software product-line principles, we have identified several... View full abstract»

Informal and graphical modeling techniques enable developers to construct abstract representations of systems. Object-oriented modeling techniques further facilitate the development process. The Unified Modeling Language (UML), an object-oriented modeling approach, could be broad enough in scope to represent a variety of domains and gain widespread use. Currently, UML comprises several different n... View full abstract»

Global software development is rapidly becoming the norm for technology companies. Previous qualitative research suggests that multi-site development may increase the development cycle time. We use both survey data and data from the source code change management system to model the extent of delay in a multi-site software development organization, and explore several possible mechanisms for this d... View full abstract»

XML is emerging as an important format for describing the schema of documents and data to facilitate integration of applications in a variety of industry domains. An important issue that naturally arises is the requirement to generate, store and access XML documents. It is important to reuse existing data management systems and repositories for this purpose. We describe the XML Access Server (XAS)... View full abstract»

It has long been accepted that requirements analysis should precede architectural design and implementation, but in software evolution and reverse engineering this concern with black-box analysis of function has necessarily been de-emphasized in favor of code-based analysis and designer-oriented interpretation. We redress this balance by describing 'functional paleontology': an approach to analyzi... View full abstract»

It has been well-established in the software process improvement (SPI) literature and practice that, without commitment from all organizational levels to SPI, the initiative will most likely fail or the results will not be far-reaching. In this paper, the 'commitment' construct is explored, and three forms of commitment are introduced: affective, continuance and normative commitment. Analysis show... View full abstract»

An emerging tapestry of computations will soon integrate systems around the globe. It will evolve without central control. Its complexity will be vast. We need new ideas, tools and methods to help map, understand and manage this tapestry. We contribute a light-weight architectural aspect that designers can use without compromising their own architectural preferences. Widespread use could help. The... View full abstract»

In requirements elicitation, different stakeholders often hold different views of how a proposed system should behave, resulting in inconsistencies between their descriptions. Consensus may not be needed for every detail, but it can be hard to determine whether a particular disagreement affects the critical properties of the system. We describe the Xbel framework for merging and reasoning about mu... View full abstract»

The Amalia framework generates lightweight components that automate the analysis of operational specifications and designs. A key concept is the step analyzer, which enables Amalia to automatically tailor high-level analyses, such as behavior simulation and model checking, to different specification languages and representations. A step analyzer uses a new abstraction, called an inference graph, f... View full abstract»

This dissertation explores the relationships between feature engineering, CBSE, and software evolution. Software end-users and developers have different perspectives of a software system, resulting in a complexity gap between user expectations and the software functionality. This gap together with aging code has resulted in lost assets for many organizations. By combining feature engineering and C... View full abstract»

The proliferation of wireless networks and small portable computing devices raises the need for applications that are adaptable to heterogeneous computing and communication environments and the contexts in which they are used. However, most current groupware systems as well as other software applications are not well prepared to handle the heterogeneity. The Manifold framework presented provides a... View full abstract»

Despite the advantages that object technology can provide to the software development community and its customers, the fundamental problems associated with identifying objects, their attributes, and methods remain: it is a largely manual process driven by heuristics that analysts acquire through experience. While a number of methods exist for requirements development and specification, very few to... View full abstract»

Dynamic analysis is based on collecting data as the program runs. However, raw traces tend to be too voluminous and too unstructured to be used directly for visualization and understanding. We address this problem in two phases: the first phase selects subsets of the data and then compacts it, while the second phase encodes the data in an attempt to infer its structure. Our major compaction/select... View full abstract»

Resource-constrained devices are becoming ubiquitous. Examples include cell phones, Palm Pilots and digital thermostats. It can be difficult to fit the required functionality into such a device without sacrificing the simplicity and clarity of the software. Increasingly complex embedded systems require extensive brute-force testing, making development and maintenance costly. This is particularly t... View full abstract»

We present a foundational theory of software system reliability based on components. The theory describes how component developers can design and test their components to produce measurements that are later used by system designers to calculate composite system reliability, without implementation and test of the system being designed. The theory describes how to make component measurements that ar... View full abstract»

Today's Web services not only have to be flexible, but also have to be device independent to support mobile devices such as WAP and PDAs. Supporting multiple Web formats (e.g., WML, HTML, etc.) is still an open challenge. Most sites have to provide a separate application for every format and reuse is not common. We are working on a methodology and a tool to support the Web developer in building fl... View full abstract»

Design traceability has been widely recognized as being an integral aspect of software development. In the past years this fact has been amplified due to the increased use of legacy systems and COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) components mixed with the growing use of elaborate "upstream" software modeling techniques such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The more intensive emphasis on upstrea... View full abstract»

Discussions of the role of mathematics in software engineering are common and have probably not changed much over the last few decades. There is now much discussion about the "intuitive" nature of software construction and analogies are drawn (falsely) with graphic design, (conventional) architecture, etc. The conclusion is that mathematics is an unnecessary luxury and that, like these other disci... View full abstract»

A good object oriented design does not necessarily make a good component based design, and vice versa. What design principles do components introduce? The paper examines component based programming and how it expands the design space in the context of an event based component architecture. We present a conceptual model for addressing new design issues these components afford, and we identify funda... View full abstract»

Early testing of requirements can decrease the cost of removing errors in software projects. However unless done carefully, that testing process can significantly add to the cost of requirements analysis. We show that requirements expressed as topoi diagrams can be built and tested cheaply sing our SP2 algorithm, the formal temporal properties of a large class of topoi can be proven ver... View full abstract»

Object-oriented frameworks are a popular mechanism for building and evolving large applications and software product lines. We describe an alternative approach to software construction, Java Layers (JL), and evaluate JL and frameworks in terms of flexibility, ease of use, and support for evolution. Our experiment compares Schmidt's (1998) ACE framework against a set of ACE design patterns that hav... View full abstract»

Global software development challenges traditional techniques of software engineering, such as peer reviews or teamwork. Effective teamwork and coaching of engineers contribute highly towards successful projects. In this case study, we evaluate experiences with validation activities in a global setting within Alcatel's switching and routing business. We investigate three hypotheses related to the ... View full abstract»

Over the past decade, software architecture research has emerged as the principled study of the overall structure of software systems, especially the relations among subsystems and components. From its roots in qualitative descriptions of useful system organizations, software architecture has matured to encompass broad explorations of notations, tools, and analysis techniques. Whereas initially th... View full abstract»

Finite-state verification is emerging as an important technology for proving properties about software. In our experience, we have found that analysts have different expectations at different times. When an analyst is in an exploratory mode, initially formulating and verifying properties, analyses usually find inconsistencies because of flaws in the properties or in the software artifacts being an... View full abstract»

Numerous researchers have reported success in reasoning about properties of small programs using finite-state verification techniques. We believe, as do most researchers in this area, that in order to scale those initial successes to realistic programs, aggressive abstraction of program data will be necessary. Furthermore, we believe that to make abstraction-based verification usable by non-expert... View full abstract»