CASE: a culture shock

Since the term “software engineering” was coined some 20+ years ago, [4] a number of definitions for both the practice and the practitioner, a “software engineer,” have been proposed. The definition from a recent report on undergraduate software engineering curricula [3] states:Software engineering entails the understanding and application of engineering principles, design skills, good management practice, computer science and mathematical formalism. …The Software Engineer must be able to estimate the cost and duration of the software development process, and to determine correctness and reliability and express them with a degree of precision meaningful to other engineers and informed clients. …In recent years, several advanced degree programs in “software engineering” have been instituted in the US and abroad. One example of this can be found at the SEI itself. Two of the goals of the SEI Education Program are to: (1) develop software engineering curriculum modules that identify, organize, and document the body of knowledge that could be taught in software engineering degree programs, and (2) design, develop, support, and maintain model curricula for undergraduate and graduate software engineering programs.The question remains, however, how much of this can be taught in a classroom setting or even in a design lab, and how much must be learned on the job or via some sort of apprentice program? What does Ada have to do with software engineering ? Can Ada exist without it? Can software engineering be done without Ada?There are those who believe the term “software engineering” is just plain wrong: [1]… I deeply resent the misuse of the word “engineering” in the compound term “software engineering.” Such misuse constitutes, in my opinion, a cheap, deceptive attempt to take advantage of the professional reputation and image developed by real engineers over a century or so … it constitutes theft of professional reputation.In 1986, I coordinated a similar panel for the ACM Computer Science Conference (CSC) [2]. The introduction from that session still holds true for this one, and is paraphrased and tuned below:Most universities prepare students for continued growth and development during a lifetime of employment, whether in an industrial or government setting. Since traditionally, such an education has implied better job opportunities, the university student believes that by studying computer science and/or software engineering, she2 will be assured of a good job at a reasonable salary performing interesting and challenging tasks.On the other hand, some universities prepare students for graduate education and research, placing a heavy emphasis on theory. From this perspective, the university student believes that upon completion of a computer science or software engineering degree, she will be able to choose where to pursue her research, at the university, industry, or government site of her choosing.Three years have passed; and I have found other group of articulate people to join us and present new and exciting viewpoints on the topic of software engineering, university education, and, of course Ada. Richard Fairley, who participated in that CSC panel, continues to represent the academic point of view; Marcia Finfer represents the industrial point of view; Garth Glynn also provides the industrial point of view with the interesting addition of evaluating graduate-level software engineering degree curricula; David Markus brings the perspective of the human resource issues; Lyn Plinta provides the view of the recent graduate dealing with veterans of the hacking era; and David Umphress represents the DoD interests.These panelists, bringing together a wealth of experience as educators, practitioners, and policy makers, provide insights from both the demand-side of software engineering and the supply-side, as they take a multi-faceted, multi-national look at industrial, academic, and government expectations of software engineering as it is taught and practiced today.

Putting Requirements and Quality at the Core of Global Service Delivery: Current Efforts and Future Plans at Pace University

The paper examined the problem of modeling and design of software computer systems. The article briefly describes the content aspects of the various stages of the implementation of software complexes and systems. The methodology of research and analysis of systems, which uses the method of computer simulation modeling, is given. The aim of the work is to create a new universal approach to the design and implementation of software systems of various levels of complexity. During the study, the following general scientific methods were used: system analysis, synthesis, formalization, modeling, decomposition, structuring, description, comparison. The materials used in the study were: computers and software development tools. As a result of the study proposed a universal agent-module approach to the design and implementation of software systems based on simulation agent-based modeling. The study presents the processes of modeling and designing software systems, their stages, and the possibility of their integration within the described approach. Examples of formal model and structure of the software system under design based on the agent-module approach are presented. The proposed approach can be used in the process of software development at the initial stages related to modeling and designing of software systems. Integration of modeling and design stages in the proposed approach will significantly reduce software development time and simplify the design process by making it clearer and more formalized. Materials of the article are of scientific and practical value for a wide range of specialists interested in system analysis, modeling, design and implementation of software systems.

Software engineers handle a lot of information intheir daily work. We explore how software engineers interact withinformation management systems/tools, and to what extent thesesystems expose users to increased cognitive load. We reviewed theliterature of cognitive aspects, relevant for software engineering,and performed an exploratory case study on how software engi-neers perceive information systems. Data was collected throughfive semistructured interviews. We present empirical evidence ofthe presence of cognitive load drivers, as a consequence of tooluse in large scale software engineering.

The new trend is to move from the traditional software development approach, which focuses on building software systems from scratch, to component based software development approach, which revolutionizes how software systems are built. The focus of this new approach is on development of new systems, by selecting and assembling a set of off the shelf components within an appropriate software architecture. On one hand, the use of off the shelf components has led to a great potential for: (1) significantly reducing cost and time to market of large scale and complex software systems; (2) improving system maintainability and flexibility by allowing new components to replace old ones; and (3) enhancing system quality by allowing components to be developed by those who are specialized in the application area and systems to be built by software engineers who are specialized in component based software development. On the other hand, the use of commercial off the shelf software-delivered as black box components-has raised a few major technical and non technical issues. The paper explores those issues, and discusses several directions for future research that would help to expand the use of component based software development approach.

Software Engineering: A Methodical Approach (Second Edition) provides a comprehensive, but concise introduction to software engineering. It adopts a methodical approach to solving software engineering problems, proven over several years of teaching, with outstanding results. The book covers concepts, principles, design, construction, implementation, and management issues of software engineering. Each chapter is organized systematically into brief, reader-friendly sections, with itemization of the important points to be remembered. Diagrams and illustrations also sum up the salient points to enhance learning. Additionally, the book includes the author’s original methodologies that add clarity and creativity to the software engineering experience. New in the Second Edition are chapters on software engineering projects, management support systems, software engineering frameworks and patterns as a significant building block for the design and construction of contemporary software systems, and emerging software engineering frontiers. The text starts with an introduction of software engineering and the role of the software engineer. The following chapters examine in-depth software analysis, design, development, implementation, and management. Covering object-oriented methodologies and the principles of object-oriented information engineering, the book reinforces an object-oriented approach to the early phases of the software development life cycle. It covers various diagramming techniques and emphasizes object classification and object behavior. The text features comprehensive treatments of: Project management aids that are commonly used in software engineering An overview of the software design phase, including a discussion of the software design process, design strategies, architectural design, interface design, database design, and design and development standards User interface design Operations design Design considerations including system catalog, product documentation, user message management, design for real-time software, design for reuse, system security, and the agile effect Human resource management from a software engineering perspective Software economics Software implementation issues that range from operating environments to the marketing of software Software maintenance, legacy systems, and re-engineering This textbook can be used as a one-semester or two-semester course in software engineering, augmented with an appropriate CASE or RAD tool. It emphasizes a practical, methodical approach to software engineering, avoiding an overkill of theoretical calculations where possible. The primary objective is to help students gain a solid grasp of the activities in the software development life cycle to be confident about taking on new software engineering projects.

Advances in software engineering and their relations to pattern recognition and image processing

Software quality assurance and testing is a vital phase in the software development lifecycle, oftentimes requiring a significant portion of the overall development budget. Providing authentic, real-world software quality assurance and testing experiences within the context of a Computer Science or Software Engineering curriculum is challenging. Based on prior experience leveraging Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) as an instructional medium for teaching Software Engineering concepts, this paper describes five increasingly involved learning interventions that utilize FOSS in a software testing course to provide students real-world hands-on software testing knowledge and experience. The proposed approach will be piloted and assessed in software testing courses at the undergraduate and graduate level.

International standards for software testing have been published in 2013 and are now widely used in industry and academia. However, these standards are difficult to use for the analysis of testing for complex software. Complex software has a huge number of components and an enormous number of relations between them. If we analyze such complex software according to the software testing standards, the results of the analysis will have a huge number of testing patterns or cases. Therefore, planning a project of complex software testing is impossible, and even if we could plan it, the plan would be infeasible. We propose a method of testing analysis for complex software by using definitions of software architecture in international standards. We believe that the outcomes of the proposed method are software-test-architecture. The software-test-architecture helps to analyze complex software, plan software testing, and develop test cases. We select existing case studies that have testing on a large and complex software, and discuss techniques to apply the proposed method for the case studies.

Music technology is known to have the ability to enhance creativity and creative development among students. A high level of engagement has been shown among students who studied and developed musical projects, and among students who were intellectually involved in the process of meaningful exploration. When students develop a music technology project, they use their software design skills to build and combine different artistic and computational components. Here we present a creative education method for computer science and software engineering students, it uses Muzilator, a plugin-based web platform that enables developers to develop a project as a set of independent web applications (plugins). Students can share their plugins with others or use plugins developed by others. We examined 75 projects of teams of computer science students who participated in a Computer Music course. We studied the characteristics of these projects and Muzilator’s effectiveness as a creative education and collaboration tool. Some of our results show that Muzilator-based projects received higher creativity and multidisciplinarity ratings than did other projects, and that high-risk projects were more creative and artistic than low-risk ones. We also found a gender-dependency: women tended more than men to develop interactive applications, while men tended to choose more theoretic (algorithmic), non-interactive projects. Keywords: educational method, creativity, music education, software design, multidisciplinarity. DOI: 10.7176/JEP/12-11-01 Publication date: April 30 th 2021

Data engineering and software engineering have a very close relationship. Our ability in developing and maintaining large-scale software mainly depends on our ability to understand, analyze, use and update the enormous amount of data associated with various phases of the life cycle of the large-scale software system under consideration. Although many tools to provide useful assistance in developing and maintaining software are available, they are often not effective for large-scale software due to the complexity in dealing with the very large amount of data. One way to overcome this difficulty is to develop a knowledge-based software environment so that artificial intelligence techniques can be applied to large-scale software development and maintenance. On the other hand, the effectiveness and quality of data engineering depend upon the performance of the software engineering approaches and tools used in data engineering. In this panel session, the panelists will discuss various aspects of this subject and exchange their ideas and experiences in this area. Ample time will be available for discussion from the floor.

Modern systems are critically dependent on software for their design and operation. The next generation of developers must be facile in the specification, design and implementation of dependable software using rigorous developmental processes. To help prepare this generation we have developed a teaching approach and materials that serve a two-fold purpose: promote an understanding and appreciation of the discrete mathematical structures (DM) that are the foundation of software engineering (SE) theory; and provide motivation and training of modern software development and analysis tools. Our teaching approach and materials form a two-course sequence establishing mastery of important SE areas: DM underlying modern SE theory (e.g., static analysis and proof); formal languages and their use (e.g., software specification languages); application of DM to SE (e.g., composition of theory and application for artifact development); and mathematics for advanced SE engineering needs (e.g., finite state machines and graph theory)

Software testing is one of the crucial supporting processes of the software life cycle. Unfortunately for the software industry, the role is stigmatized, partly due to misperception and partly due to treatment of the role. The present study aims to analyse the situation to explore what restricts computer science and software engineering students from taking up a testing career in the software industry. To conduct this study, we surveyed 88 Pakistani students taking computer science or software engineering degrees. The results showed that the present study supports previous work into the unpopularity of testing compared to other software life cycle roles. Furthermore, the findings of our study showed that the role of tester has become a social role, with as many social connotations as technical implications.

Software testing is one of the crucial supporting processes of the software life cycle. Unfortunately for the software industry, the role is stigmatized, partly due to misperception and partly due to treatment of the role. The present study aims to analyze the situation to explore what restricts computer science and software engineering students from taking up a testing career in the software industry. To conduct this study, we surveyed 88 Pakistani students taking computer science or software engineering degrees. The results showed that the present study supports previous work into the unpopularity of testing compared to other software life cycle roles. Furthermore, the findings of our study showed that the role of tester has become a social role, with as many social connotations as technical implications.

In most software engineering approaches, software design begins with defining functional requirements, which is well suited to web-based software development projects. When designing high-critical large-scale software intended for industrial use, accounting for non-functional software requirements is also required. The main idea of the proposed document-oriented approach is to design a stable architectural solution as early as possible, taking into account the nonfunctional characteristics of the software: reliability, security, maintainability and performance (quality attributes). At the same time, the key issue is the coordination of functional requirements, taking into account technical limitations and business requirements achieved during the steady interaction of customer and developer teams. To increase the flexibility of the designed solutions and prevent crisis situations when developing highly critical large-scale software, it is proposed to use the approach integrating the architecture-centric design method (ACDM), the architecture-tradeoff analysis method (ATAM) with a matrix enterprise architecture matrix (EAM). This allows getting a result that is adequate to the required level of responsibility and reliability. Consideration of quality attributes within the framework of the method of compromise analysis makes it possible to select and make certain decisions in software design taking into account the scale of the software and its scope. The main attributes of product quality are highlighted (ISO 25010 standard), critical scenarios are defined for each of them (templates and use cases). The use of these templates for detailed software design with the necessary parameters of functional requirements, business conditions and technological limitations reduces the risk of developing unpredictable and uncertain system behavior. Based on the proposed approach, an architectural solution is presented for highly critical, responsible, large-scale software for managing autonomous robotic open-pit mining of minerals. Critical attributes for creating the specified software were identified and ranked, and the architecture of the solution according to the SWEBOK software development standard was described. Further, taking into account the nature, scale and scope of the software solution, recommendations are given on high-level architectural templates for the system design, including layers, pipelines and microservices. The proposed architecture-oriented development method is suitable for industrial-level software in various subject areas.