Analyzing Software Engineering Processes with Provenance-based Knowledge Graphs

Software quality assurance is concerned with the efficient and effective development of large, reliable, and high-quality software systems. In agile software development and maintenance, refactoring is an important phase for the continuous improvement of a software system by removing quality defects like code smells. As time is a crucial factor in agile development, not all quality defects can be removed in one refactoring phase (especially in one iteration). Documentation of quality defects that are found during automated or manual discovery activities (e.g., pair programming) is necessary to avoid wasting time by rediscovering them in later phases. Unfortunately, the documentation and handling of existing quality defects and refactoring activities is a common problem in software maintenance. To recall the rationales why changes were carried out, information has to be extracted from either proprietary documentations or software versioning systems. In this chapter, we describe a process for the recurring and sustainable discovery, handling, and treatment of quality defects in software systems. An annotation language is presented that is used to store information about quality defects found in source code and that represents the defect and treatment history of a part of a software system. The process and annotation language can not only be used to support quality defect discovery processes, but is also applicable in testing and inspection processes.

This article presents a formalization approach for the requirements of object-oriented programs with state machines, using a spacecraft control system as a case study. It proposes a state pattern implementation, where each state is represented as a class with clearly defined responsibilities, and the transitions between states are controlled by the state objects themselves. Additionally, the application of model checking, theorem proving, and code generation techniques are discussed. The effectiveness of the proposed approach in ensuring compliance with the specified requirements is demonstrated, while also identifying potential drawbacks and limitations of the approach. The implementation is validated using a range of formal verification techniques, including model checking and theorem proving. The article also discusses how the approach can be extended and applied to other complex systems. Overall, the valuable insights into the formalization of requirements for object-oriented programs with state machines are provided, offering a practical and effective approach for verifying the correctness and completeness of such implementations. The results of this work have important implications for the development of safety-critical systems and can potentially improve the quality and reliability of software systems in various domains. By using mathematical models and rigorous formal methods, it is possible to detect and eliminate errors early in the development process, leading to higher confidence in the correctness of the final product. Future research in this area could explore the use of more advanced techniques, such as model-driven development and automatic code synthesis, to further streamline the software development process. Additionally, the development of more efficient and user-friendly tools could make these techniques more accessible to a wider range of developers and organizations. Altogether, the combination of formal methods and software engineering has the potential to revolutionize the way software systems are designed, developed, and verified, leading to safer and more reliable software for critical applications.

With the growing dependency of many technical, commercial, administrative and even social processes from computer software, the number of mission critical software projects rapidly increases. The rapid integration of formerly stand-alone systems into global networks subjects these systems to yet unknown threats. Even mission critical systems may be deliberately manipulated to let malicious attackers access vital system functions or to take over the entire system. Though such systems feature protection mechanism during operation, they are rather vulnerable during their software design and development process. This paper defines a secure software development process to reduce the risk of manipulation and enhance the trustworthiness of critical software produced by renowned manufaturers according to high quality standards. It also explained how this process may be implemented cost efficiently.KeywordsHash FunctionTrust CenterMission Critical SystemMission Critical ApplicationCertificate VerificationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Many papers proposed in the software engineering and information systems literature are dedicated to analysis of software projects missing their schedules, exceeding their budgets, delivering software products with poor quality and in some cases even wrong functionality. The expression “software crisis“ has been coined since the late 60's to illustrate this phenomenon. Various solutions has been proposed by academics and practitioners in order to deal with the software crisis, counter these trends and improve productivity and software quality. Such solutions recommend software process improvement as the best way to build software products needed by modern organizations. Among the well-known solutions, many are based either on software development tools or on software development approaches, methods, processes, and notations. Nevertheless, the scope of these solutions seems to be limited and the improvements they provide are often not significant. We think that since software artifacts are accumulation of knowledge owned by organizational stakeholders, the software crisis is due to a knowledge gap resulting from the discrepancy between the knowledge integrated in software systems and the knowledge owned by organizational actors. In particular, integrating knowledge management in software development process permits reducing the knowledge gap through building software products which reflect at least partly the organization's know-how. In this paper, we propose a framework which provides a definition of knowledge based on information systems architecture and describes a knowledge-oriented software development process to help organizations in reducing the software crisis impacts.

Reverse engineering aims at obtaining high-level representations of software systems from existing low-level artifacts, such as binaries, source code, execution traces or historical information. Reverse engineering methods and technologies play an important role in many software engineering tasks and quite often are the only way to get an understanding of large and complex software systems. Given for example the task to understand certain aspects of the test code in large software systems, such as Eclipse. How would you figure out the answers to the following questions:

Within the dynamic domain of software development, achieving excellence relies heavily on the proficient handling of defects and a comprehensive analysis of their root causes. This abstract thoroughly explores the fundamental roles that defect management and root cause analysis play within the realm of software quality engineering. Defect management involves a methodical approach to identifying, monitoring, and resolving flaws that arise during the software development process. On the other hand, root cause analysis delves into the underlying catalysts behind these defects, with the goal of identifying the core reasons for their occurrence. These abstract underscores the remarkable importance of these practices in the pursuit of superior software quality. Through the implementation of robust defect management strategies and rigorous root cause analysis techniques, the field of software quality engineering aims to mitigate risks, amplify customer satisfaction, and continually refine software development procedures. The exploration of these methodologies forms the bedrock for elevating software quality to unprecedented levels of distinction. "The Significance of Defect Management and Root Cause Analysis in Software Quality Engineering" In the intricate realm of software development, two essential pillars, namely defect management and root cause analysis, emerge as foundational elements of effective software quality engineering. Defects, spanning from inconspicuous errors to glaring faults, hold the potential to undermine the reliability and integrity of software systems. Defect management orchestrates a systematic process encompassing identification, categorization, prioritization, and rectification of these imperfections throughout the software development lifecycle. Concurrently, root cause analysis delves profoundly into the origins of defects, uncovering the underlying triggers that give rise to these issues.Collectively, these practices assume pivotal roles in upholding and enriching software quality.

Size, complexity, and human dependency on software--based products have grown dramatically during past decades. Software developers are struggling to deliver reliable software with acceptable level of quality, within given budget and schedule. One measure of software quality and reliability is the number of residual faults. Therefore, researchers are focusing on the identification of the number of fault presents in the software or identification of program modules that are most likely to contain faults. A lot of models have been developed using various techniques. A common approach is followed for software reliability prediction utilizing failure data. Software reliability and quality prediction is highly desired by the stakeholders, developers, managers, and end users. Detecting software faults early during development will definitely improve the reliability and quality in cost-effective way.KeywordsSoftware ReliabilityFault PredictionSoftware MetricsCapability Maturity ModelTest Case PrioritizationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

work of W. Edwards Deming has convinced industry that must first measure quality and then emphasise process to improve quality. In response to Deming's arguments and in light of perception that software industry is unable to produce quality products on schedule, and within budget, more software development organisations are now emphasising process measurement, monitoring, and assessment. This paper describes what is meant by software process and discusses an approach for its measurement and improvement. INTRODUCTION Unreliable software makes big news, from emergency services disasters to social security payment blunders. Improved software quality is essential to ensure reliable products and services, and gain customer satisfaction. While software development has existed for more than four decades, we failed so far to make as an industry and as an engineering discipline rather than craft. Developing reliable and usable software that is delivered on and within budget still represents difficult endeavour for many organisations. As role of software becomes increasingly critical for businesses as well as for human lives, problems caused by software products that are late, over budget, or that do not work, become magnified. If lives are lost or people inconvenienced due to incapable computer software, news media is there to make big stories. Organisations are realising that their fundamental problems is immaturity of their software process. Robert Lai (1993) proposes that process improvement is second maturity wave of software industry. He states that the first wave of software was developed using waterfall model in 1970's. Today we are Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 8, © 1994 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517 216 Software Management in midst of second wave maturity movement as we attempt to formally define development process and best ways to continuously improve it (Lai 1993). Taking lead in this area has been Watts Humphrey (Humphrey 1989, 1990, 1991), and Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. SEI started in 1986 to develop process maturity framework to help organisations appraise maturity of their software process, and to provide guidance for organisations to improve their software process capability. A brief description of framework was released in September 1987, including maturity questionnaire. SEI evolved model and questionnaire into 5 -Level Capability Maturity Model (CMM) in 1991. In February 1993, released CMM version 1.1 (Paulk et al 1993). This paper discusses software process and describes capability maturity model (CMM). It also shows how CMM can be used as basis to measure maturity of software process of an organisation and plan its improvement. SOFTWARE QUALITY AND PROCESS IMPROVEMENT In his book Quality is Free Phil Crosby states that: Quality is free. It is not gift, is free. What cost money are unqualify of things all actions that involve not doing jobs right first time (Crosby 1980). If such statement is true for many disciplines, is particularly true for evidence is abundant in number of software products which exceeded their budget, were produced late, failed to satisfy user requirements, and are full of bugs. demand for improved software quality is increasing to ensure reliable products and services. benefits of improved quality comes in form of reduction in failure costs. For software projects failure costs include (DTI 1992): • costs of correcting defects, both before and after delivery • overruns against and budget • unnecessary high maintenance costs • indirect costs which users incur due to poor quality software link between process maturity and software quality is expressed in premise that The quality of software system is governed by quality of process used to develop and maintain it. One stumbling block to improving software quality seems to be that not enough attention is paid to overall development process itself. While software professionals typically devote their to developing, testing or documenting software products, no one has prime responsibility for improving software process. Experience has shown that if Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 8, © 1994 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517 Managing Systems 217 no one is working on software process, orderly improvement is unlikely. process certainly won't improve itself, rather, most likely, will deteriorate over time. Continuous improvement can occur only if process infrastructure is in place. Watts Humphrey argues in an early article published in Datamation, April 1989 that: Without work on process, there will be little or no progress in improving software. THE SOFTWARE PROCESS Adopting process view of software development represents revolutionary change in perspective. A process orientation to software development involves elements of structure, focus, measurement, ownership, skills, and supporting technology. In this section we investigate what is meant by software process. What Is Software Process According to Webster's dictionary, process is a system of operations in producing something .. series of actions, changes, or functions that achieve an end result. Chambers Concise Dictionary defines process as a series of actions or events .. sequence of operations or changes undergone. IEEE defines process as a sequence of steps performed for given purpose. In general business context, process is defined as a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce specified output for particular customer or market (Davenport 1993). These definitions put strong emphasis on HOW work is done, in contrast to product focus's emphasis on WHAT. Accordingly, process can be considered as a specific ordering of work activities across and place, with beginning, an end, and clearly identified inputs and outputs: structure for action. In this paper we will adopt following definitions quoted in (Humphrey 1990, Paulk et al 1993) are intended to encompass software throughout its life, which covers new development, enhancement, and repair. software process is The set of activities, methods, and practices used in production and evolution of software. software engineering process is The total set of software engineering activities needed to transform user's requirements into software. Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 8, © 1994 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517 218 Software Management People and Software Process Software development is still people-intensive activity. Talented people are most important element in any software organisation. Even if you get best people available, if they do not follow common process, if everyone wrote in different programming languages, used different conventions, or didn't co-ordinate their design and code changes with their peers, results will be chaos. Successful software organisations have learned that even best professionals need structured and disciplined environment in which to do cooperative work. Software organisations that do not establish such disciplines condemn their people to endless hours of repetitively solving technically trivial problems. obvious fact is that attracting best people is vital, but is also essential to support them with an effectively managed software process. Technology and Software Process Another myth is widespread belief that some technologically advanced tool or method will provide magic answer to software crisis. This is not only wrong, but is dangerous. Organisations which jumped on bandwagon of CASE tools, and ended up in failure and wasted and effort have learned their lesson hard way. Just ask yourself before introducing technology: What do I want to automate? In absence of defined, practised, and managed process, introducing automation can lead to increased chaos. There are several factors which limit effective use of software technology: an illdefined process, inconsistent process implementation, and poor process management. Software technology cannot be fully effective until these problems have been properly addressed. Need for Defined Process If no effort is made to define and enhance software development process across whole organisation, each software development project latches on to its own tools, methods, and practices with little guidance available on how to use them. This ad hoc approach will not be sufficient to tackle task of developing complex software systems. goal of software process management is to enable organisations to produce software that meets cost, schedules, and quality objectives. principles are same that underpins statistical process control-principles that have been successfully used in controlling scientific experiments and in high -volume manufacturing operations. Statistical concepts have been found to be just as applicable to software development as they are to production of manufactured goods such as motor cars. Applying such concepts will only be possible if there is defined and managed process. Software Process Models Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 8, © 1994 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517

Maintenance and evolution are important parts for all successful software projects. In recent years, version control systems have played a key role in software development process. Not only do they provide a means to coordinate programmers, organize and manage source code, but they also persist the evolution history of the source code into their software repositories. Mining software repositories has provided many insights on the evolution of software, both for researchers and practitioners. In this paper we propose that versioned software contracts--mined from software repositories--can be a powerful tool for better understanding and supporting software evolution. Tooling support is critical, due to the complexities of configuring, compiling, and running the software to produce meaningful inferred contracts. This paper contributes both techniques and tool support for downloading, building, and analyzing open source software from social coding sites like GitHub. The tool automatically produces a description of software evolution represented by versions of program invariants.

Software Quality is very important aspect for any software development company. Software quality measurement is also a major concern for improving the software applications in software development processes in these companies. The quantification of various quality factors and integrate them into various software quality models is very important to analyze the quality of software system. Software usability is one of the important quality factors now days due to the increasing demand of interactive and user friendly software systems. In this paper, an attempt has been made to quantifying the usability of Ms-Excel 2007 and Ms-Excel 2010 application software using ISO/IEC 9126 model and compare the numeric value of usability for both version of Ms-Excel 2007 and Ms-Excel 2010. Due to the random nature of the usability attributes, the fuzzy multi criteria decision technique has been used to evolve the usability of the software office application. The present method will be helpful to analyze and enhance the quality of interactive software system.

Software Quality Assurance is a sub-process that ensures that developed software meets and complies with defined or standardized quality specifications. Focusing on source code, there are characteristics that can be used to evaluate the quality. Introductory courses must encourage freshmen students to improve internal quality of their source code, but only as sophomore they have contact with Software Engineering concepts, including Quality Assurance. In this paper we present a tool to source code quality evaluation aimed at supporting students to improve their source code and, consequently, their programming skills. The proposed tool uses quality reports (available to professional environment integrate with software repositories) to analyze students' source code and provide a feedback about the student coding. The proposed tool run locally, with few computational resources. In addition, we proposed the methodology to use the proposed tool: it consists of challenging students to perform a set of maintenance tasks in a controlled environment. We prepared a source code by introducing common defects, what decreases the quality of source code, and ask to students to perform maintenance tasks in order to both eliminate the introduced defects and introduce new features. After each modification, the students must evaluate their code using the proposed tool to obtain a feedback about quality of source code. To evaluate the approach and the tool, we created a survey and applied to students and the teacher. As a result, we show the benefits of using the proposed tool to both teachers and students perspectives. The results are positive to enhance the teaching-learning Software Quality Assurance to Software Engineering students.

The low-code approach is an important area of research being developed to improve the rapid creation and performance of software applications. This approach allows developers and users to easily create software applications through an interactive interface. Existing research shows that the low-code approach accelerates the development process in innovative ways, saves effort and time, and reduces code complexity. This study analyses and compares automatic code generation and transformation techniques in low-code platforms. The study analyses the contributions of automatic code generation and transformation to software engineering processes and evaluates the impact of these techniques on software product quality and development speed. The importance of the Model-Based Development (MBD) approach in automated code generation processes is highlighted. It is stated that MBD provides benefits such as speeding up the software development process and reducing errors by enabling automatic code generation from high-level abstract models. In the study, various literature studies were evaluated to examine the impact of automatic code generation and transformation techniques on the application development process. These studies have shown how automatic code generation and transformation techniques are applied, what results are achieved and what contributions these techniques make to the software development process. The results of the study show that automatic code generation and transformation techniques have a great impact on the application development process. In particular, the acceleration of the software development process, the reduction of errors and the ability to produce more effective and efficient software products are important benefits of these techniques. In addition, it has been found that this approach increases the success of software projects by enabling software developers to produce fast and accurate solutions in complex systems. In this context, the importance of automatic code generation and transformation techniques plays an important role in software development processes.

Security has become an important concern with the development of large scale distributed and heterogeneous multi-agent systems (MAS). One of the main problems in addressing security during the development of MAS is that security is often an afterthought. The cost involved to patch existing systems against vulnerabilities and attacks after deployment is high. If developers and designers can spend some quality time investigating security aspects before beginning to code then this cost can be reduced significantly. Also, using formal methods to specify the complex behavior of large scale software systems has resulted in reliable software systems. This research effort was focused on using formal methods early in the development lifecycle to specify security requirements for MAS. New solutions are emerging to fix security related issues, but how much thought gets in during the early phases of development in terms of security needs to be answered. In this paper, analysis of security requirements for MAS, existing solutions to secure MAS, and the use of formal methods to specify security requirements has been studied. Descartes-Agent, a formal specification language for specifying agent systems has been taken into study to model the security requirements of MAS early on in the development process. Functional specifications of MAS are modelled along with the non-functional security requirements using the Descartes-Agent specification language. This paper also describes the extensions made to the Agent Unified Modeling Language (AUML) to represent the security requirements of MAS. The extensions proposed to AUML are in accordance with the extensions made to the Descartes-Agent specification language. A case study example is used to illustrate the specification of security requirements in MAS using the Descartes-Agent.

Welcome to the International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) held in Zurich, Switzerland, on June 2nd and 3rd, 2012. Having grown from a Software Process Workshop in 2005 to the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) in 2007, and finally to the International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) in 2011, this conference series has established its place in the software engineering community as a respected conference focusing on research and practice related to software and systems development process. Software and software systems development use processes as one major means for achieving and ensuring the quality of the final product. This leads to specific challenges regarding software processes such as simplicity, adaptability, standard conformance, the coordination of multiple domains and lifecycles, etc. Processes from other domains (e.g., health care, manufacturing, business, aerospace, automotive systems, and others) face similar challenges. Yet, they share interesting similarities with and differences to software processes. The question is: How can we in the software domain learn from other domains to meet our software process engineering challenges? The ICSSP conferences hence connect the traditional software and systems process community with outside views and insights, broadening its scope of software development processes to system development and explicitly including processes of other domains such as health care, business, and manufacturing. By sharing process development theories and practices from such domains, ICSSP 2012 is investigating novel solutions to today's process challenges. Correspondingly, the main theme of ICSSP 2012 is Beyond Software and Software Systems Processes, signaling our goal of learning from domains other than the traditional software process community.

Developing a good software system is a very complex task. In order to produce a good software product, several measures for software quality attributes need to be taken into account. System complexity measurement plays a vital role in controlling and managing software quality because it generally affects the software quality attributes like software reliability, software testability and software maintainability. Thus, software quality assurance (SQA) needs to be addressed keeping in view the new strategies, tool, methodologies and techniques applicable to software development life cycle.This paper is primarily aimed at revisiting and examining peculiar aspects of software development process that affect software quality management process. These aspects of software development process include software reliability measurement, ISO approach applicable to software quality and some aspects related to software testing improvement. Software testing and evaluation methods/tools/techniques do not guarantee effective testing and ensure high software quality. The way to improve the effectiveness of testing is to improve the attitude of software developers towards testing.In this paper, all these factors affecting software quality management have been discussed as well as all the possible improvements have been suggested. The results of this paper may be quite helpful to the researchers in quantifying the specific measuring tools for these software quality attributes.