Showing papers by "Muhammad Ali Babar published in 2015"

Quality assessment of systematic reviews in software engineering: a tertiary study

Abstract: Context: The quality of an Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is as good as the quality of the reviewed papers. Hence, it is vital to rigorously assess the papers included in an SLR. There has been no tertiary study aimed at reporting the state of the practice of quality assessment used in SLRs in Software Engineering (SE).Objective: We aimed to study the practices of quality assessment of the papers included in SLRs in SE.Method: We conducted a tertiary study of the SLRs that have performed quality assessment of the reviewed papers.Results: We identified and analyzed different aspects of the quality assessment of the papers included in 127 SLRs.Conclusion: Researchers use a variety of strategies for quality assessment of the papers reviewed, but report little about the justification for the used criteria. The focus is creditability but not relevance aspect of the papers. Appropriate guidelines are required for devising quality assessment strategies.

Effectiveness of persona with personality traits on conceptual design

Abstract: Conceptual design is an important skill in Software Engineering. Teaching conceptual design that can deliver a useful product is challenging, particularly when access to real users is limited. This study explores the effects of the use of Holistic Personas (i.e. a persona enriched with personality traits) on students' performance in creating conceptual designs. Our results indicate that the students were able to identify the personality traits of personas and their ratings of the personalities match closely with the intended personalities. A majority of the participants stated that their designs were tailored to meet the needs of the given personas' personality traits. Results suggest that the Holistic Personas can help students to take into account personality traits in the conceptual design process. Further studies are warranted to assess the value of incorporating Holistic Personas in conceptual design training for imparting skills of producing in-depth design by taking personalities into account.

Partial Selection of Agile Software Requirements

Abstract: Prioritization And Selection (PAS) of requirements is an important concern of Agile software development. Existing PAS techniques are primarily binary selection of requirements and postponing lower-priority requirements to the future. As a result, lower-priority requirements may be constantly delayed until they never have a chance to be implemented at all. However, ignoring lower-priority requirements may threaten the quality of software. In this paper, we propose the concept of partial selection as an alternative to binary selection of Agile software requirements rather than ignoring them altogether or postponing them to the future releases. We further contribute a goal-oriented framework that allows requirements to be partially satisfied when tolerated. The framework specifies the fuzzy priority of requirements and accomplishes partial selection through relaxing the satisfaction level of requirements with respect to their priority in the release backlog of software. The experimental results show that partial selection of requirements will reduce the number of neglected requirements when compared to binary selection.

A Reference Architecture for a Cloud-Based Tools as a Service Workspace

Abstract: Software Architecture (SA) plays a critical role in developing and evolving cloud-based applications. We present a Reference Architecture (RA) for designing Cloud-based Tools as a service work SPACE (TSPACE) - a platform for provisioning chain of tools following the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The TSPACE RA has been designed by leveraging well-known design principles and patterns and has been documented using a view-based approach. The RA has been presented in terms of its context, goals and design elements by describing the requirements, design tactics, and components of the RA. We evaluate the RA in terms of completeness and feasibility. Our proposed RA can provide valuable guidance and insights for designing and implementing concrete software architectures of TSPACE.

Ant colony algorithm based scheduling for handling software project delay

Abstract: Delay on a critical path may cause the failure in meeting the software project deadline. By adding extra employees with similar skills for help, the delay is expected to be eliminated or reduced. However, the originally scheduled activities may be suspended due to reallocation of employees, which may lead to the problem of delay propagation. So how to minimize and even eliminate the delay without delay propagation is worth investigation. In this paper, we first use a simple scenario to demonstrate the problem of employee scheduling which shows that in the scheduling process, one activity can have many ways for selecting employees from another project. In fact, the searching path in a multi-branch tree and its complete traversal is a NP hard problem. Furthermore when the scale of the problem becomes large, it is impractical to generate a search tree for implementation. Therefore, we propose an ant colony algorithm to address such a problem. Both case studies and initial simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can obtain feasible solutions under different circumstances.

A dataflow optimisation mechanism for service-oriented cloud workflow

Abstract: While service-oriented cloud workflow shows potentials of inherent scalability, loose coupling and expenditure reduction, such issues as data transfer and efficiency have popped up as major concerns. In this paper, a dataflow optimisation mechanism is proposed, including data transfer strategy and data placement strategy. The data transfer strategy uses integrated data structures to enable the elimination of the SOAP serialisation and de-serialisation within the web service invocation by the exchange of their references. In addition, the data placement strategy groups the existing datasets and dynamically clusters newly generated datasets to minimise data transfers while keeping a polynomial time complexity. By integrating the optimisation mechanism into service-oriented cloud workflow system, we can expect efficiency improvements in data transfer and workflow execution. Experiments and analysis supported our efforts.

Introducing Learning Mechanism for Class Responsibility Assignment Problem

Abstract: Assigning responsibilities to classes is a vital task in object-oriented design, which has a great impact on the overall design of an application. However, this task is not easy for designers due to its complexity. Though many automated approaches have been developed to help designers to assign responsibilities to classes, none of them considers extracting the design knowledge (DK) about the relations between responsibilities in order to adapt designs better against design problems. To address the issue, we propose a novel Learning-based Genetic Algorithm (LGA) for the Class Responsibility Assignment (CRA) problem. In the proposed algorithm, a learning mechanism is introduced to extract DK about which responsibilities have a high probability to be assigned to the same class, and the extracted DK is employed to improve the design qualities of generated solutions. An experiment was conducted, which shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering

Abstract: Welcome to the Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE 2015) that held in Nanjing, China on April 27th and 29th, 2015. For almost two decades, the EASE conference has become the premier event of the empirical software engineering and evidence-based software engineering. EASE offers an international forum where researchers and practitioners interested in empirical software engineering can present their latest work, and where issues related to all forms of empirical research and evaluation in software practice can be discussed. In 2015, it was the first time that EASE was organised in the Asia, an indication that the conference was broadening its influence in the worldwide community. In the past decade, Systematic Literature Reviews have become an important research method in software engineering since the introduction of Evidence Based Software Engineering (EBSE) at ICSE 2004. Apart from the traditional technical program consisting of keynote speeches, main research track (full papers and short papers), and panel discussion, EASE 2015 incorporated a special track that was dedicated to Systematic Secondary Studies, in the forms of Systematic Reviews, Mapping Studies, Tertiary Studies, Meta-Analyses, and the related methodological improvements.

Improving the Quality of Architecture Design Through Peer-Reviews and Recombination

Abstract: Software architecture reviews help improve the quality of architecture design decisions. Traditional reviews are considered expensive and time-consuming. We assert that organizations can consider leveraging peer-reviews and recombination (i.e., promoting design improvement through sharing design ideas) activities to improve the quality of architectures and getting staff trained. This paper reports a case study aimed at exploring the potential impact of combining peer-review and recombination on the quality of architecture design and design decisions made by novice architects, who usually have limited practical experience of architecture design. The findings show that the use of peer-review and recombination can improve both the quality of architecture design and documented decisions. From the decision-making perspective, this study also identifies the main types of challenges that the participants faced during architectural decision making and reasoning. These findings can be leveraged to focus on the types of training novice architects may need to effectively and efficiently address the types of challenges identified in this study.