Improving CSE software through reproducibility requirements

Clean room software engineering is a formal software development method that can strictly engineer software development and eliminate defects before they can cause serious harm. The clean room software engineering model has its own advantages and disadvantages in use. To use it in traditional software engineering, it is necessary to clarify the relationship between it and traditional software engineering methods and practices. Based on the technology and principles of the clean room software process, this paper gets the advantages and disadvantages of the clean room. Corresponding the traditional method-based software process to the key technology of the clean room, making the traditional management-based software engineering method and the tailored clean room compatible, and the software engineering practice of the clean room software process is compared with the traditional software engineering practice. To discuss the clean room and traditional software engineering, in order to expand the use of clean room methods, improve the clean room software process, and improve the quality of software.

Context: In the last years, the Grey Literature (GL) had a notable increase in interest in diverse areas of knowledge. In Software Engineering (SE), with the advance of social media, the SE practitioners are heavy consumers of GL, opposite to traditional research papers, such as the Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Problem: Despite the increase of numbers of SLRs, some researchers claim the lack of connection to the practice of SE, due to the lack of evidence derived from SE practitioners. Goal: Introduce methods and techniques to support a Grey Literature Review (GLR) in SE, aiming to approximate the literature review to the practice of SE. Method: First, we will investigate how secondary studies use GL; Second, we will employ a survey with researchers of SLRs and SE practitioners; Third, we will analyze the use of GL according to the context; Fourth, we will review the GL source in SE; Finally, we will propose a guideline to help SE researchers and practitioners to conduct the GLR. Preliminary findings: We have initiated the tertiary study conducting the manual (4,875 studies) and automatic (6,279 studies) searches. We eliminated those that were not an article, and also those were not written in English, remaining 8,019 potential studies. Currently, we are applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria.

The Computational Research and Engineering Acquisition Tools and Environments (CREATE) Program was established as a new 12-year program in FY 2008 by the Department of Defense (DoD). The CREATE goal is to enable major improvements in DoD's acquisition engineering design and analysis processes by developing and deploying scalable, multi-disciplinary, physics-based computational engineering software products for the design and analysis of DoD Ships, Air Vehicles, and Radio Frequency Antennas. Meshing and Geometry (MG) generation is being provided by a fourth project, MG. CREATE is a multi-institutional, multi-service, multi-agency and multi-disciplinary program with participation by the Navy, Air Force, Army, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, industry, and academia. The CREATE products are being developed and released on an annual cycle. In 2010, the program released five new products: SENTRI 1.0 -- RF antenna design; NESM 0.1 -- Ship Shock Analysis; IHDE 1.0 -- Ship Hydrodynamic Design and Analysis; Kestrel 1.0 -- Fixed-wing air vehicle analysis; and Helios 1.0 -- Rotorcraft analysis. Enhanced versions of these products will be released every year starting in 2011. In 2011, five additional products will begin annual releases: DaVinci -- a tool for the rapid physics-based design of air vehicles; RDI -- an integrated suite of tools to enable rapid physics-based design of naval ships; Firebolt -- components to provide models for gas turbine propulsion systems for Kestrel and Helios; NavyFoam -- a high- fidelity hydrodynamics analysis tool for predicting drag and resistance, sea-keeping and seaway loads; and Capstone -- components to enable the generation of geometries and meshes for all of the other products. The CREATE products are designed to be modular, maintainable, extensible, and scalable. To accomplish this, the CREATE team1 has developed a set of software engineering and software project management practices and processes that strike the appropriate balance between the agility and flexibility, and organizational structures and planning that are appropriate for developing complex physics-based, scalable and sustainable engineering software.

We welcome you to the Twenty-Eighth International Conference on Software Engineering and Shanghai, China. This is the first instance of the ICSE conference series to be held in China, and it is an exciting time and place for ICSE 2006. The conference brings researchers, educators, practitioners and students together to present, exchange ideas and engage in discussions about the recent and exciting innovations and research in software engineering. Exciting sessions on practical experience, educational issues, and doctoral and new faculty symposia have been organized. The conference also includes a wide variety of tutorial, workshops and demonstration offerings. Finally, since research and markets in our host country China are continuously growing, ICSE includes a separate Far East Track for discussions on the contributions and challenges of our Chinese colleagues. We trust that this mix will provide interesting and stimulating offerings to all members of our growing community. The technical program committee is pleased to present this conference proceeding that contains the research papers of the technical program for ICSE 2006. The technical program for this conference focuses on new and innovative software engineering contributions in theory, formal methods, system building and empirical studies. The papers represent an alluring array of topics, including software design, architecture, reuse, testing, analysis, processes and formal methods. Because of the growing number of paper submission and the resulting large program committees in the past, we instituted a new two-phase reviewing process this year. Our program committee had 36 members. In the first phase, each submitted paper was reviewed by 3 reviewers: 2 from the program committee and an external reviewer from the software engineering community. We had 265 external reviewers who contributed 370 reviews for this phase. Those papers receiving the best reviews were considered in the second phase. A total of 99 papers entered the second phase. Each of these papers was reviewed by another program committee member. Thus, each accepted paper had a total of 4 reviews (3 reviews from pc members and 1 review from an external reviewer). Each rejected paper had at least 3 reviews. The pc members reviewed 24-25 papers in the two phases, a reasonable number. We feel that this system worked very well. The program committee met for two days in December, 2005 in Frankfurt, Germany. By the end of the meeting, a consensus emerged for the 36 papers in this proceedings (9% of the total submissions). There were many high quality submissions that could not be accommodated in the program; hopefully a revised version will be published elsewhere. In addition to the papers, we organized four invited sessions. One invited session focuses on empirical studies, an increasingly important component of software engineering research and practice. We also have an invited panel that addresses the value and practice of formal methods. Since software engineering techniques are growing in importance in challenging safety critical domains, we included two invited sessions: one on software engineering for automotive engineering and the other on software engineering for assisted living. We are very pleased that a notably diverse and outstanding group of three leaders of the software engineering community have agreed to present keynote speeches. The opening day keynote will be presented by Prof. Yang Fuqing, from Peking University, a woman who has been at the very forefront of the software engineering communities of research and practice in China for decades. Her perspectives on the past and future of software engineering in China will be complemented by a keynote on similar themes presented on the second day. This second keynote will be delivered by Prof. Barry Boehm, from the University of Southern California, USA. His talk will review the history of software engineering research and practice in the West over the past decades, and project it forward into the 21st century. Finally, the keynote speaker on the third day, Mr. Reinhold Achatz, from Siemens Corp., will present a complementary view of software engineering research and practice, as viewed from the perspective of one of the great multinational corporations, based in Europe. We are truly excited at the prospect that these three keynotes will provide a searching multidimensional view of our community at this time of historic convergence of communities. The continued success and high quality of the ICSE conference series would not be possible without the help and support of the software engineering community. First, we would like to gratefully acknowledge and thank all of the authors who submitted papers. We especially thank the program committee members for their efforts and commitments in reviewing the papers and securing reviews from external reviewers. They put in an extraordinary amount of their time to provide thoughtful and knowledgeable reviews. The exceptionally strong technical program represented by the papers in this proceeding could not be possible without their efforts.

This paper seeks to combine a traditional computer science course with software engineering process. A computer science course such as computer graphics, digital image processing, compiler or operating systems gives a chance to students working in a group to write a realistic large project of almost 3000 lines and make it function correctly. The course involves a team programming project. The software engineering lifecycle addresses issues on design, coding, documenting, unit testing and integration testing. Innovative and active learning based educational methods are adopted for teaching such a course.

The utility of complexity metrics during code reviews for CSE software projects

The multidisciplinary nature of contemporary computational modeling impacts the development of computational science and engineering (CSE) software. Multidisciplinary efforts often require large-scale software development to serve a broad audience of developers and users. This article describes software engineering practices adopted in the Community Laser-Induced Incandescence Modeling Environment (CLiiME). The authors explain how CLiiME's design enables extension of the model. The project uses the agile methodology of test-driven development (TDD) to implement the infrastructure for a collaborative model that different researchers will use, modify, and extend. They discuss some of the software engineering practices that developers can integrate throughout the life of a project, beginning with its inception when only a few developers are contributing to the project. They also describe the mechanisms they've incorporated to allow for natural expansion of the model.

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

Research has substantially increased in modern times due to availability and search facility of literature sources through Internet. Carrying out research and proving that it is done is a necessity for excellent academic career and for satisfying requirements of Master or PhD degrees in most universities. There is no recipe book for producing the research with desired taste and quantity, however, general methodology does exist. This paper presents crucial parts concerning research process in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). The paper discusses the important parts of research methodology in CSE including research problem formulation, literature review, research design, and research communication. The paper presents each phase of the research process with essential ingredients, moreover, wherever required, the paper also provides pointers for further reading. The presented discussion is in the context of research applicable in CSE field. Therefore, we expect that this paper would become a good starting point for newbie researchers in CSE.

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Attracting and Retaining Women in Computer Science and Engineering: Evaluating the Results Abstract Computer science and engineering communities have been exploring a variety of activities and techniques to attract and retain more students, especially women and minorities, to computer science and computer engineering degree programs1. This paper briefly describes the efforts and results of a plan for actively recruiting young women into undergraduate computer engineering and computer science programs hosted by the University of North Texas (UNT). It also describes a series of activities aimed at improving the retention rate of students already in our programs, particularly during the freshman year. Such recruitment and retention efforts are critical to the country’s efforts to increase the number of engineering professionals, and are a priority for the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department at UNT. We initially designed a three-part plan to achieve our recruitment and retention goals: • Sponsorship of portable and mobile summer computer engineering robotics camps for middle and high-school women students, coordinating with the regional Girl Scouts councils and other organizations to help with the recruitment; • Creation of an Ambassador program using young women currently enrolled in the upper division of current computer science and computer engineering programs as a form of outreach to area high schools and junior colleges; and • Expansion of our successful undergraduate mentoring program by using the Ambassador cohort mentioned above as mentors for incoming freshman and first-year transfer women entering our programs. This paper will focus primarily on the summer camp program and present an analysis of the results we have seen to date after 2 years of camp activities. Results from student surveys and parent surveys will be presented. The paper concludes with recommended changes and improvements in the program, as well as a discussion of adaptations that would create programs suitable for implementation at other institutions as well as programs aimed at a different target population. The three phases previously enumerated each build upon currently accepted educational practices. The robotics summer camp in particular used problem-based learning approaches, similar to those described in The Power of Problem-Based Learning2. This study clearly demonstrates the significant benefits of teaching students how to think by using a problem-based approach. We also developed a mobile laboratory so that the summer camp can be held at several locations, thus broadening and expanding the reach of the camps to traditionally underserved populations and geographical regions. Similarly, both the ambassador and mentoring programs derive from research showing how the recruitment and retention of women in engineering- related fields can be increased by providing opportunities to develop student-to-student relationships3, 4.

Software lifecycles are becoming an increasingly important issue for computational science & engineering (CSE) software. The process by which a piece of CSE software begins life as a set of research requirements and then matures into a trusted high-quality capability is both commonplace and extremely challenging. Although an implicit lifecycle is obviously being used in any effort, the challenges of this process-respecting the competing needs of research vs. production-cannot be overstated. Here we describe a proposal for a well-defined software life-cycle process based on modern Lean/Agile software engineering principles. What we propose is appropriate for many CSE software projects that are initially heavily focused on research but also are expected to eventually produce usable high-quality capabilities. The model is related to TriBITS, a build, integration and testing system, which serves as a strong foundation for this lifecycle model, and aspects of this lifecycle model are ingrained in the TriBITS system. Indeed this lifecycle process, if followed, will enable large-scale sustainable integration of many complex CSE software efforts across several institutions.

Empathy, defined as the ability to understand and share others’ perspectives and emotions, is essential in software engineering (SE), where developers often collaborate with diverse stakeholders. It is also considered as a vital competency in many professional fields such as medicine, healthcare, nursing, animal science, education, marketing, and project management. Despite its importance, empathy remains under-researched in SE. To further explore this, we conducted a socio-technical grounded theory (STGT) study through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 22 software developers and stakeholders. Our study explored the role of empathy in SE and how SE activities and processes can be improved by considering empathy. Through applying the systematic steps of STGT data analysis and theory development, we developed a theory that explains the role of empathy in SE. Our theory details the contexts in which empathy arises, the conditions that shape it, the causes and consequences of its presence and absence. We also identified contingencies for enhancing empathy or overcoming barriers to its expression. Our findings provide practical implications for SE practitioners and researchers, offering a deeper understanding of how to effectively integrate empathy into SE processes.

The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a federally funded research and development center situated as a college‐level unit at Carnegie Mellon University with facilities in Pittsburgh, PA and Arlington, VA. The SEI was created in 1984 by the U.S. Department of Defense to mature and transition new technology to industry so that the government could acquire software‐intensive systems from a broader, more capable contractor base. The SEI works to transform software engineering from an ad‐hoc, labor‐intensive activity to a managed, technology‐supported engineering discipline. The SEI's objectives are to accelerate the introduction and widespread use of high‐payoff software engineering practices and technology by identifying, evaluating, and maturing promising or underused technology and practices; maintain a long‐term competency in software engineering and technology transition; enable government and industry organizations to make measured improvements in their software engineering practices by working with them directly; and foster the adoption and sustained use of standards of excellence for software engineering practice. The institute explores promising solutions to potentially significant problems, selects the best candidate solutions, and works on them to determine their value. In some cases, the SEI works to overcome the limitations that prevent a solution from being of general use in the software community. Finally, the SEI moves mature solutions of proven value into widespread use; examples include the Capability Maturity Model® for Software (SW‐CMM®), and a model curriculum for a master's degree program in software engineering that has been adopted by universties across the country. SEI activities are grouped into two principal areas: software engineering management practices and software engineering technical practices.

Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) software is typically developed using research funding where the primary focus is research and development of advanced algorithms and modeling capabilities. As a result, formal software engineering is seldom a primary goal. CSE software developers intend to write good software, but often lack the training, resources or time to adopt advanced formal methods and practices. In this paper, we present a list of practices identified from the Trilinos project that we believe most CSE software teams can adopt and from which they can benefit.

In 1991 the UK Government awarded the project ’Software Engineering Methods for Safe Programmable Logic Controllers (SEMSPLC) to a consortium of fourteen organisations. The organisations were drawn from several application sectors including process control, machinery control, software engineering and food manufacture and from across the supply chain — including end-users, systems integrators, tools suppliers and regulatory authorities. The project aimed to bring together the experiences of the many different participants for the mutual benefit of all. Whilst the widely differing experience and perspectives of the partners brought many challenges, the end result has been a document which has the full support of both practitioners and theoreticians. Moreover, both the research community and the industrialists have gained new insights into the practice of software engineering. This paper summarises the insights gained and outlines the ways in which practical technology transfer between widely differing communities was achieved.