Search

Analogy-Based Estimation (ABE) is one of the promising estimation models used for predicting the software development effort. Researchers proposed different variants of the ABE model, but still, the most suitable procedure could not be produced for accurate estimation. In this study, an artificial Bee colony guided Analogy-Based Estimation (BABE) model is proposed which ensembles Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) with ABE for accurate estimation. ABC produces different weights, out of which the most appropriate is infused in the similarity function of ABE during the stage of model training, which are later used in the testing stage for evaluation. There are six real datasets utilized for simulating the model procedure. Five of these datasets are taken from the PROMISE repository. The predictive performance is improved for BABE over the existing ones. The most significant of its performance is found on the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) dataset.

Combinatorial searching-based software testing (CSST) is a challenging optimization procedure. The achievement of optimal solutions involves a careful formulation of the optimization problem and the selection of an appropriate approach. Meta-heuristic searching procedures have proven to be effective for solving CSST issues. Black hole (BH) optimization is among the more recently developed meta-heuristic searching algorithms. While this approach has been observed to be an effective alternative to particle swarm optimization, its operation is based on only one swarm. To date, no efforts have been made to modify this approach to accommodate multiple swarms. This study proposes a new variant of BH that involves a combination of multiple swarms. The BH optimizer is modified from continuous searching to binary searching and subsequently applied for solving CSST. The evaluation is based on a modified-benchmarking mathematical function and well-known CSST problems. This modified BH method is superior to the original BH and the established particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach. In terms of CSST problems, binary multiple black hole (BMBH) optimizations generate reduction rates between 50% and more than 60% for t = 4 according to the problem.

Background: The word “Global Software Development” can be described as the development of software, with development teams spread across different geographical locations. Problem statement: The issues arise when there are gaps in information, workflows or processes, policies and others in the world. Objective: This paper aims to build an understanding of the risk in Global Software Development. Then, to identify category risk in Global Software Development and how Agile can reduce or mitigate their challenges. Method: This review paper using the standard systematic literature review method by Kitchehamm by reviewing and analyzing the relevant state-of -art techniques and approaches in the journal libraries based on the research questions. Results: The findings show that communication in Agile Global Software development is the main risk challenge. Contribution: The contributions of this paper may support the academician to propose and validate an enhanced approach to solve the issues if risk management in Agile GSD environment and assist the practitioners in choosing the most suitable and relevant method based on the requirement of Agile GSD project. This review paper is also focusing on the contribution to the Software Engineering Management and Software Engineering Models and Methods Knowledge Area.

Model-driven code generation allows rapid generation of precise code thus reducing the development effort and the delivery time. Consequently, model-driven code generation has been a topic of interest in varying perspectives. While model-driven code generation has been explored well in many domains, its full potential has not been exploited in the context of aspect-oriented software development. The existing approaches have mainly focused on code generation from class diagrams only. Code generation from class diagrams is straightforward as majority of the constructs involved in these diagrams are directly mapped to those in programming languages. However, code generated using class diagrams is limited to skeletons of classes and methods only and does not contain behavior. In this study, we use the state diagrams and propose a mapping of its constructs to AspectJ language. We use the Reusable Aspect Models notation for this purpose. The approach addresses the mapping of both structure and behavior, however, owing to their strength with respect to modeling the system behavior, it essentially focuses on the state diagrams encapsulated in these models. A detailed mapping of different features of the state diagrams is proposed. The approach is illustrated by means of aspect models and corresponding mapped code from an aspect-oriented implementation of a Remote Service Caller example. The implementation shows that the approach can effectively be applied to obtain code for complete structure and behavior modeled using Reusable Aspect Models.

Real-Time Campus University Bus Tracking Mobile Application is a mobile application to help campus members detect the current location of the bus in real-time. Real-Time Campus University Bus Tracking Mobile Application is a hybrid mobile application. However, for this development, it is developed for Android user only. It can show updated estimation time arrival and the number of persons inside the bus. This project using two devices embedded inside the bus, which are GPS Tracker device and IoT people counter device. All devices will transmit the data into cloud database which is Firebase. Real-Time Campus University Bus Tracking Mobile Application is developed as a platform for user to receive the data transmitted from database. Other than that, Student will know the time arrival of the bus and the current quantity of people inside the bus to lead them avoid wasted time knowing that they wait for the bus that pack of passenger. The student also able to make complaint and feedback via the platform. Furthermore, this project using PhoneGap as a tool platform to develop the application. The GPS Tracker device using Arduino and IoT people counter using Raspberry PI to transmit data. Overall this project using the reusability techniques and Agile method to complete all the system which it is involved four interactions to make it full system work as expected.

Emerging technologies in education in these recent years have constantly impacted teaching and learning. One of those emerging technologies for teaching nowadays is using robotics. In the field of engineering and technology, programming is one of the most vital and challenging skills to learn. Programming can be tough for novices especially for those who have not acquired any basic programming skills. Robots have been used in the past few years to support the teaching of programming. Researchers have found that students are more interested in programming through robots utilization in teaching compared to traditional teaching methods. Therefore, this study has proposed a way for teaching and learning of programming to be more effective through adapting an existing Project-Oriented Problem-Based Learning (POPBL) framework. Most research works in the past have only implemented the teaching of programming using robotics through a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) framework without considering a systematic PBL framework. Thus, this work aims to study the effectiveness of using a mobile robot known as ‘RoboKar’ as a tool to support the learning of introductory programming by adapting an existing POPBL framework. The effectiveness of the adapted framework was assessed by evaluating three categories of learning comprising analytical and problem solving, learner's knowledge, as well as, collaborative learning. Our study results showed that by adapting a POPBL framework, students can acquire a better understanding in learning introductory programming concepts.

Healthcare is one of the core areas in medical domain. In healthcare the data exist in various forms like respiration data, blood pressure readings, prescriptions and others. The data may help in decision-making for different initiatives in order to provide better healthcare services. However, in order to make this possible there is a need to diagnose the data in a professional way. Currently, there is a lack of a system or way which may help in decision-making in big data analysis in the form of phases. In this research, a framework has been proposed to diagnose the healthcare data for efficient data analysis.

Regression testing of a large test pool consistently needs a prioritization technique that caters requirements changes. Conventional prioritization techniques cover only the methods to find the ideal ordering of test cases neglecting requirement changes. In this paper, we propose string dissimilarity-based priority assignment to test cases through the combination of classical and non-classical textual comparison metrics and elaborate a prioritization algorithm considering requirement changes. The proposed technique is suitable to be used as a preliminary testing when the information of the entire program is not in possession. We performed evaluation on random permutations and three textual comparison metrics and concluded the findings of the experiment.

Real-time tasks can be classified into three categories, based on the “seriousness” of deadline misses - hard, soft and weakly hard real-time tasks. The consequences of a deadline miss of a hard real-time task cannot be accepted whereas soft real-time tasks tolerate “some” deadline misses. While, in a weakly hard real-time task, the distribution of its met and missed deadlines is stated and specified precisely. Due to the complexity and significantly increased functionality in system computation, attention has been given to multiprocessor scheduling, comprised of several processors. Due to the fact that in multiprocessor, there have more than one processor, algorithms which can cater higher computational complexity for task allocation and for task migration are highly required. Thus, the sufficient and efficient scheduling algorithm supported by accurate schedulability analysis technique is presented to provide weakly hard real-time guarantees. In this paper, a schedulability analysis to schedule weakly hard real-time tasks has been proposed by using the global multiprocessor scheduling technique, called multiprocessor response time analysis combining with the exact analysis, named hyperperiod analysis and deadline models; weakly hard constraints and μ-pattern under static priority scheduling. Then, the Matlab simulation tool is used in order to validate the result of analysis. From the performance evaluation results, it proved that the proposed approach is satisfied the tasks deadlines with less number of misses.

Reliability is a software quality characteristic that refer to the probability a system will work correctly over a period of time. Reliability prediction is important as it can be used to plan deployment, maintenance and test activities. This study assesses the efficiency of several techniques in software reliability model (SRM) selection and aims to find out the possible enhancement to improve software reliability accuracy. The result of the survey shows most of the SRM selection technique does not optimizes the model parameter.

Software behavioural models that derive from early requirements specifications such as use-case scenarios and properties have proven useful in early analysis and checking of the design correctness of individual components or whole system. However, deriving of these models becomes harder as a system specification grows. Expressive scenario description language that able to compact and concise scenario specifications is one of the solutions can enhance the ability of modeling large requirements specifications. Deriving behaviour models from compacted scenario specifications is a challenge related to this solution. This paper, introduce expressive scenario language and outline a process to derive system behavioural models from scenarios of this language in form of Labelled Transition Systems (LTS). In addition, the paper also covers some discussion of how these derived models can help analysis of software quality attributes.

This paper reports results of an action research conducted in an outreach program aimed at introducing secondary school students to the exciting world of computer programming. The key challenges were to introduce programming and problem solving session that can be done in a very short time (within 1 to 2 hours) and in a fun way. This was achieved by using a physical mobile robot called RoboKar to engage students with the problem solving activities involving programming. From the entry and exit surveys, and facilitators' observations, it can be concluded that the robot platform and the outreach program were able to introduce and spark interest in learning programming among the school students.

In requirements engineering (RE), different activities are carried on to add up business values to the software products. In value-base software (VBS), financial impacts on business are measured, and this phenomenon makes VBS different than other traditional software applications. In VBS systems, determination of valuable requirements is a crucial task and depends on multiple aspects or factors. Requirement prioritization is a part of RE and is considered as a crucial decision-making activity. Requirements prioritization is a process where requirements are arranged in an order to create a stakeholder priority list. Different requirements prioritization techniques are used by the experts in the industry to partially support the prioritization process for VBS development. Business and technical aspects play a vital role to make prioritization process effective. In existing requirements prioritization techniques, technical aspects are not applied well, and their consideration is partial only. Moreover, the business aspects are ignored which are highly vital for VBS development. There is a need to introduce multi-aspects requirements prioritization technique to support the selection of candidate requirements for VBS development. Hence, this paper focuses on a new requirements prioritization technique for VBS.

Aspect-oriented design notations improve the reusability and maintainability of models by means of separating crosscutting concerns from the core functionality of the system. However, as different design notations propose dissimilar ways of modeling and composing the crosscutting and core concerns, the capabilities of aspect design notations with regards to producing highly reusable and maintainable models may also vary. In this paper, we apply a selected set of aspect modeling notations to a modeling scenario and evaluate them with respect to reusability and maintainability of the obtained models. For this purpose, we have used different metrics related to well-known software engineering attributes that affect the reusability and maintainability of produced design. The results reveal that the Reusable Aspect Models performs well against majority of the employed metrics.

Software development process (SDP) and Software products are like two sides of a coin. We cannot achieve one without another. Today, in our software industries, monitoring software process is very challenging. Many problems of software process monitoring are hampering the quality of our software products. Several researchers in this area contributed their quota on addressing process monitoring issues using quantitative techniques. In this study, we address the problem of detecting software process deviations as a result of variations, investigating the causes of variations in software process, and the problem of process measurement. In addition, the study focus on code peer review process (CPRP). The first two problems can be addressed using one of the powerful quantitative techniques known as statistical process control (SPC). Also, control charts would be used in this study as it has been proved to be one of the suitable tools of SPC in monitoring process issues. As we know, the more defects we found during SDP, the less quality of the software product. Therefore, this study considers defect density as the metric to be use due to its significance in determining product quality. In order to have good analysis, this study conduct a case study on both Capability Maturity Model (CMM), lower and higher maturity levels software industries. On the other hand, to handle the problem of process measurement, a Sequential Strategy for Process Measure (SSPM) is proposed. This strategy is evaluated by Instrument for Evaluating Software Measurement Repository (IESMR) and Normative Information Model-based System Analysis and Design (NIMSAD) framework. Based on its evaluation, the strategy is similar to IESMR but differ in selecting measures, therefore it can be use for process measurement.

Requirements engineering (RE) in software development life cycle is considered as a main pillar of success of a software system. RE process is used to find out the key requirements in order to develop a system as per needs of the stakeholders. The two focal points in RE process are stakeholders and requirements. Systematic literature review (SLR) is the mean of collecting evidence-based data about the key areas of a research topic and its related issues. In this paper, a study of existing SLRs on RE is conducted in order to find out the key intricacies dealt in the domain of RE. The main purpose of this study is to aggregate the knowledge in the domain of software RE as elicited in different SLRs about different RE problems.

System scenarios that derived from system design specification play an important role in the reliability engineering of component-based software systems. A great deal of research effort has been devoted to predict the reliability of a system at the design-time, only few papers address the challenges of modeling and calculation of scenarios reliability. This paper identifies various challenges related to scenario modeling at the early design stages based on software architecture specification. It discusses the truncation and modeling methods of scenarios, the related computation cost, and their effect on the approach scalability, which has been missed by most of the current approaches. The paper proposes a modeling and calculation approach that, pragmatically, models and divides scenarios by a scenario specification language and finite state machine. It utilizes mathematical formulas for the calculations. The proposed work can be used as part of the reliability prediction approach to model and calculate the reliability of scenarios. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach by modeling and calculating scenarios reliability of an automated railcar system.

The importance of missing a deadline is one of the classifications of a real-time tasks or systems. A weakly hard real-time system is a new generation for a real-time system in which some degree of missed or losses deadlines are tolerated occasionally but the missing of deadlines has to be stated precisely. For a traditional real-time system, timing requirements in hard real-time are very restrictive, must meet all the tasks deadlines. Meanwhile, in soft real-time timing requirements, the requirements are too relaxed because there are no guarantees can be given for the deadline, whether it is met or missed. As a systems demand complex and significantly increased functionality, multiprocessor scheduling has been given attention and taken into consideration. In fact, within the multiprocessor, the predictability problems seem even harder. Thus, in order to deal with the problem, the partitioned multiprocessor scheduling techniques with solutions for the bin-packing problem, named R- BOUND-MP-NFRNS (R-BOUND-MP with next-fit-ring noscaling) combining with the exact analysis, called hyperperiod analysis and deadline models; weakly hard constraints and µ- pattern are present to provide weakly hard real-time guarantees under static priority scheduling algorithm. We prove that the proposed approach provides predictable weakly hard real-time tasks through validation and simulation results.

Web services composition is a process of creating a new Web service from a set of available Web services. Semi-dynamic Web services composition in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) consists of designing composition plan by service provider, and automation of Web service discovery and selection at runtime. This research paper describes redundant-free Web services composition in order to reduce execution time and overall cost of the composition process and also improve efficiency of the composition method. To fulfill the needs, this paper uses a linked list data structure called Composition List (CL) to select the ideal services. In addition, a hash table called Available Output Parameters (AOP) is used to find redundant Web services and reject them from Web services composition process.

An integration of aspect orientation and model-driven engineering is expected to enhance software development from many perspectives. Different approaches for this integration have already appeared in literature. In general, all such approaches use aspect-oriented model as the primary artifact and apply different techniques to obtain an executable from it. In this study we have provided a survey of existing research in this context by conducting a systematic mapping study. Classification schemes were defined and 38 selected primary studies were classified on the basis of research focus, contribution type and research type. Results show that solutions proposals are in a majority and current research has mainly focused on using model weavers for the integration (81% versus 19% code generation approaches). The majority of contributions are methods.

The successful implementation of Service-Oriented development of Distributed Embedded Real-time Systems (DERTS) in the recent years has proved the importance of Service-Orientation over previous paradigms. However, efforts are still needed on systematic Service-Oriented design of DERTS, especially on the modelling of DERTS. The UML standard profile MARTE can be used for modelling of embedded real-time system while UML standard profile SoaML can be used to represent Service-Oriented concepts. Therefore, a thorough investigation of both standard profiles is needed to determine which parts of these profiles are useful for Service-Oriented DERTS development. This paper investigates these profiles in order to highlight the portions of the two profiles and provides some suggestions that can be utilized for Service-Oriented modelling of DERTS. The results of this investigation would be useful in developing a Service-Oriented based meta-model for DERTS.

Model-driven code generation is being increasingly applied to developing software systems as a result of its recognition as an instrument to enhance the produced software. At the same time, aspect-oriented programming languages have come to the mainstream of software development due to their distinctive features to provide better modularization and separation of concerns. As a consequence of this prevalence and recognition of its impact on improving several software quality factors, different approaches have been proposed in literature to generate aspect-oriented model-driven code. This paper provides a comparative review of some existing approaches and discusses important issues and directions in this particular area. The results of this survey indicate aspect-oriented model-driven code generation being a rather immature area. Majority of approaches address structure diagrams only, a fact that limits them to partial code generation. There is a need for research that incorporates behavior diagrams, in order to achieve long term goal of full code generation from aspect-oriented models.

Software quality analysis is an important part in getting better software systems. Performing software quality analysis during design time enhances design decisions. In order to assist design decisions and the quality analysis, the design model, which is annotated with quality information, must be transformed into analysis model to execute software analysis part. To achieve this purpose, a main idea is to define model transformation that takes some input from design model and transformed into analysis model. However, both model inherits heterogeneous notation and semantic that could be difficult to perform direct model transformation. To solve this shortcoming, the intermediate metamodel, which is based on failure behavior, is defined as to capture the essential quality information particularly for performance and reliability and be able to transform into a multiple analysis model. In this paper, the intermediate metamodel is presented and focusing on the mapping rules for model transformation from design model to intermediate model. First, the design model (annotated sequence diagram) is modeled and then is transformed into intermediate model (output of intermediate metamodel) by following the defined mapping rules. Then, the intermediate model is constructed to obtain failure based behavior factors. The intermediate metamodel is applied on a simple case study to show the applicability of the intermediate metamodel.

The complexity of Embedded Real Time (ERT) software development represents a challenging of analyzing, designing and building ERT software. From this standpoint, the complexity of ERT software development means a challenging to adopt all ERT software requirements such as timing and resource constraints into its software life cycle. Against these claims, a wide range of software development methodologies has been devised such as patterns. Patterns codify an effective solution for recurring problems, which allows software engineers to reuse. By applying patterns into ERT software development, the complexity of ERT software development may be decreased and at the same time promote a high degree of reuse through software patterns. This paper presents the integrated Rapid Object Process for Embedded System (ROPES) and Pattern-oriented Analysis and Design (POAD) methodology to show a promising way to build ERT software with software patterns reuse. To make the integrated methodology more compelling and confirm the rules of patterns oriented modeling, the integrated ROPES and POAD metamodel has been developed. The aim of the integrated metamodel is to conform to the correctness of the integrated methodology modeling rules together with patterns. To prove the correctness of the integrated metamodel, the mapping process between the Meta-Object Facility (MOF) and proposed metamodel by using graph theory has been conducted.

In ERT (Embedded Real Time) software development, software functionality is not the only focus but multi-constraints extra-functionality requirement such as timing, resources constraint, statically predictable, safety-critical, processing power and memory is also important. Besides that, ERT software development involves multi-disciplinary knowledge that includes software, mechanical and electronic engineering fields. To meet these two challenges ERT software development must be able to support the multi-constraint and multi-disciplinary challenges. From this perspective, CBD (Component-Based Development) appears to be one of the appropriate approaches to design the ERT software due to the ability of domain experts to interactively compose and adapt sophisticated ERT software which the decrease of development time and improvement of software quality. Existing component infrastructures used in ERT software development are MARMOT (Component-Based Real-Time Object-Oriented Development and Testing) and PECOS (Pervasive Component System). However, these technologies are not enough to support the two challenges in their CBD activities. This paper discusses about the integration of PECOS and MARMOT by mapping the metamodel of the two technologies and proposing a process model. The aim of the integration is to support methodological CBD software to enable systematic development of ERT software with consideration of multi-disciplinary knowledge and multi-constraint.

Reactive autonomous mobile robot navigating in real time environment is one of the most important requirements. Most of the systems have some common drawbacks such as, large computation, expensive equipment, hard implementation, and the complexity of the system. The work presented in this paper deals with a type-2 fuzzy-neural controller using RAM-based network to make navigation decisions. The proposed architecture can be implemented easily with low cost range sensor and low cost microprocessor. To minimize the execution time, we used a look-up table and that output stored into the robot RAM memory and becomes the current controller that drives the robot. This functionality is demonstrated on a mobile robot using a simple, 8 bit microcontroller with 512 bytes of RAM. The experiment results show that source code is efficient, works well, and the robot was able to successfully avoid obstacle in real time

Applying software reuse to many embedded realtime systems, such as autonomous mobile robot system poses significant challenges to industrial software processes due to the resource-constrained and realtime requirements of the systems. An approach for early life-cycle systematic reuse for component-based software engineering (ELCRA) of autonomous mobile robot software is developed. The approach allows reuse at the early stage of software development process by integrating analysis patterns, component model, and component-oriented programming framework. The results of applying the approach in developing software for real robots show that the strategies and processes proposed in the approach can fulfill requirements for self-contained, platform-independent and real-time predictable mobile robot.

Recent@, Component-Based Sofiare Enxineering (CBSE) has becoming a poptrlar approach.for developing embedded sofiare. In CBSE, a component model is required to specifY the standards and conventions imposed on developers of components. Indushial cornponent models such as CORBA, CUM and JavaBeans are general!^ not stritable for embedded real-time (ERT) Vstenis. Consequently, a number of component models slritahle for CBSE ofERT sofiare such 0.7 PBO, Koala, PECOS and ReFIex are introduced. Assessments of the PECOS component model were conducted to evaltrate the suitabiliw of PECOS component model for adoption in CRSE of autonomous mobile-robot (AMR) software. The as.~e.ssments emphasize on three requirentent.y: facilitates predictable real-time performance, support for resource constraint systems, and support plarfonn-independent implementation. Three enhancemenlr were proposed for the PECOS component model. These enhancements were implemented on a real m-wheeled mobile robot. and resul~f show that, the PECOS cornponent model together with the proposed modifications can generate application siritable for resource constrained AMR vstem.r, the new mapping of component behavior to tash process can be used to guarantee the nm-time predictabili(v and perjormance, and the new irnplenientation pamework proposed enable plarform independent development of AMR sofiare.

Designing and developing software for autonomous robot control system is a challenging task. Issues related to real-time control, embedded system and artificial intelligence are involved in the software development process. This type of software must be developed with proper software methodology or well-defined development process in order to increase the productivity and quality of the software design and software products. This paper presents a review of two real-time software development methodologies and compares their suitability for developing real-time control software for a wall-climbing robot under development at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM).