Ontology-based multi-site software development methodology and tools

Awareness of what work is being done according to the plan, keeping track of which issues have been currently raised and clarified, coordinating meetings to discuss issues, and make unified just-in-time decisions and keep moving forward are big challenges. If everyone working on a certain project is located in the same area, then situational awareness is relatively straightforward; however, the overheads in communications in a multi-site distributed environment can become very large. Consequently, these problems cause developmental delays, as outstanding issues have not been resolved, issues cannot be discussed immediately, or just in time over a multi-site environment. Ontology enables the sharing of an agreement among teams distributed across the sites by making assumptions explicit. The key idea is to have agreement explicitly interpreted by software tools rather than just being implicitly interpreted by human developers. In this paper, we propose development of ontology-based software engineering for multi-site distributed software development utilized software agent.

The ongoing trend towards multi-site software development not only brings the benefits but also creates additional challenges regarding remote communication and coordination. The Software Engineering Ontology (SE Ontology) was first developed to clarify the software engineering concepts and project information, and to enable knowledge sharing among dispersed teams. However, the current SE Ontology has the same passive structure as other ontologies that exist on the Web. Passive structure refers to a need to know exactly the concepts and relationships to which users are referring in the ontology. Otherwise, he/she may not be able to obtain the knowledge required. What is needed is active support that can help users find the information they need and provide them with meaningful output. In this paper, we propose an active Software Engineering Ontology through Multi-Agent System (SEOMAS) framework which is intended to provide active support to access software engineering domain knowledge and to recommend software project information captured in the SE Ontology. The UML and Agent UML are used to formalise the SEOMAS framework and to model interactions between the various agents. The prototype is developed and evaluated using several scenarios of the online shopping system development as a case study.

Software plays an important role in various aspects of our life. However, recent software development practices have substantial negative impacts (direct and indirect) on economy, society, human beings, and environment. To cope with these issues the concept of Green Software Engineering has boomed recently. Green and sustainable software development aims to create green software that meets the needs of current and future users while minimizing its negative impacts on the environment and society. Green software development is getting attention in Global Software Engineering (GSE). Software development multi-sourcing vendor organizations have focused on the adaptation of green practices in software development projects. The objectives of this study are to identify and scrutinize a list of critical success factors (CSFs) for vendors in the development of green and sustainable software. The required data for conducting the study was taken, via systematic literature review (SLR) process, from a sample of 74 research papers. The SLR findings reveal that ‘green software design and efficient coding ’, ‘power-saving software strategies ’, ‘low carbon emission throughout the software development process ’, ‘efficient resource utilization ’, ‘paperless communication ’, ‘filtration of requirements through green evaluator and e-waste management’ are the critical factors to be implanted by vendors in the development of green and sustainable software.

Design by contract (DBC) is a key concept in software engineering. The RESOLVE language and environment support the teaching and learning of DBC concepts. However, students encounter obstacles in fully achieving the desired educational outcomes. Some of these obstacles are related to the complexity of the content. Additional appropriate exercises can help to address these obstacles. Other obstacles are related to features of the environment and documentation. We propose a variety of interventions to address these obstacles, including potential revisions to the environment, updates to the documentation, and the creation of additional instructional materials.

Most of the principles and concepts that need to be taught in Software Engineering courses are hard to share the realistic experiences because it is difficult to give the student practical exposure to the insight and processes involved. This paper presents an innovative framework tailored for the establishment of an immersive learning environment within the context of a Software Engineering Project course. The overarching objective is to effectively tackle the inherent challenges associated with teaching intricate software engineering concepts, notably Agile Scrum and Team Software Process (TSPi). Conventional pedagogical approaches often prove inadequate in providing a comprehensive and engaging learning experience for students, educators and stakeholders. In response, our study introduces a pioneering immersive learning approach, offering a robust solution to this educational gap. To gauge the framework's efficacy and pertinence, we conducted online surveys, specifically targeting third-year students enrolled in the Software Engineering Laboratory course and the project stakeholders involved. These surveys were instrumental in collecting valuable feedback on the practicality and impact of our approach in enhancing the teaching and learning processes. This study presents a thorough exposition encompassing the framework's conceptualization, implementation and iterative evolution. Our research outcomes reveal that our immersive learning approach has successfully met the predefined course objectives, effectively addressing the intrinsic challenge of imparting hands-on experiences associated with software engineering principles and concepts. As a significant contribution to the ongoing initiatives aimed at elevating software engineering education, our study underscores the importance of providing students with tangible exposure to vital concepts such as Agile Scrum and TSPi. Moreover, this paper delineates the collaborative journey involved in the creation, execution and refinement of the course framework. Ultimately, our research endeavours to evaluate the degree to which our innovative framework aligns with the objectives established by both students and stakeholders. By doing so, it underscores the transformative potential of our approach in reshaping the landscape of software engineering education, ultimately enhancing its effectiveness and relevance.

The course on Software Engineering is important for both the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes of computer science. This is particularly so in terms of making the students industry ready by exposing them to the processes and practices of life cycle activities of software development. The traditional approach to teaching the course on Software Engineering has not been able to make a positive impact on learning because: the course instructors mostly lack exposure to industry practices, the course material being referred while teaching the course fails to establish the context as the case studies referred are alien to the students and assessment focusing mainly on memory oriented questions. Thus teaching the course on Software Engineering has got reduced to monotonous lecturing, in the absence of experience and case studies. An attempt to address the issues referred above is made by the authors. The theory course on Software Engineering was redesigned by tightly coupling a Mini project course with it. Different activities are designed along with Class room teaching to make Software Engineering as joyful course for the students. The proposed methodology helped the students to improve their Software Engineering concepts and quality of capstone projects. The paper discusses the approach followed, the results obtained and the experience gained.

A recurring theme within software development has been the problem of poor quality software. This problem has underpinned a “software crisis” that has lasted since the early 1960s, and which led to the term “Software Engineering” being introduced in 1968 at a NATO conference held to discuss the problems in software product, delivery and quality [Naur69]. The concept of Software Engineering was originally intended to provide a provocative theme, but it has evolved over the last 25 years into a technological discipline of considerable importance especially within academic institutions. However, there are still major problems within the computing industry and the need for the adoption of truly professional approaches has never been greater.

The discipline of Software Engineering is continuously adapting to new challenges while gaining more and more insights. The age of globalisation has brought about a new movement of internationalisation and localisation. While practitioners fully embrace the efforts, educators only marginally consider the implications for the teaching and learning of Software Engineering. While the relevance of the software deployment context has been widely recognised, the intrinsic values of the development context are less evident. Besides western cultural indicators being omnipresent in software applications, they are deeply rooted in Software Engineering concepts and methods. Standards and models have been established in the absence of possible deviations from other -- e.g. African -- contexts. Educators and authors of common and internationally used textbooks present Software Engineering concepts and methods as universally valid. Thus software engineering graduates all over the world continue to be ill-equipped for specific software development contexts. Moreover the necessity to localise Software Engineering education is illustrated by our vast amount of challenges, experiences and best-practices of teaching Software Engineering in a Sub-Saharan country. In this paper, we introduce a generic framework leading towards a Contextualised Software Engineering education (CSE2).

In Engineering and Scientific computing, a significant number of software systems that are being commonly used by the Engineering community are developed and deployed as Open Source Systems (OSS). This collaborative development model has been widely accepted in both academia and industry. As these systems are typically developed by developers who are experts in their fields (e.g., Engineering), some of those programmers may be lacking an essential skillset today's software quality and engineering concepts (e.g., source code maintainability and analyzability, source code vulnerability, parallelization, etc.). An empirical study is presented that examines some of the source code quality aspects and programming practices (e.g., jumps statements, usage of recursion) from software engineering perspective in ten open source Engineering software systems. The studied systems are written in the C/C++ programming languages and comprised of over ten million lines of code, and present numerous tasks of the engineering community, including computer-aided design, computational fluid dynamics, and finite element analysis. Static analysis methods are applied to each system to determine the number of jump statements (Goto and Break statements) and functions that are recursively invoked. Functions that contain direct or indirect recursive calls are determined and counted. The results show that number of the used jump statements and functions that have recursive calls are significant and thus pose more of a roadblock to effectively and automatically maintain, comprehend, analyze, and re-engineer systems. Lastly, this leads to inefficiencies in a software engineer's ability to accomplish these common tasks. The study showed that issues in source code stemming from the lack of coding standards have increased over time and are prevalent.

Challenges over multi-site software development are on working in virtual teams and sharing knowledge. It is quite normal that software engineers working in a virtual team have never met face to face in multi-site environments. In addition they have different educational backgrounds and interpret methods in different ways. Software engineering education, training, and practice are different between universities, cities, and countries. As a result, it is difficult to share a piece of knowledge between distributed teams and among remote team members. There are a number of standards that different teams could be referring to. Remote software engineers use a particular standard as their own individual guide and when they share their own knowledge base and terminology is different from those of others. Most issues raised are related to inconsistency in understanding software engineering theories and practice. Therefore sharing knowledge is the challenge and to resolve the differences between the distributed teams we need to understand its key variables of knowledge sharing. In this paper we propose an ontology-based approach for knowledge sharing measurement. Particularly in the approach, we look into measurement of transferability and complexity of knowledge. The impact of nature of knowledge on knowledge sharing is focused. A prototype is developed taking Software Engineering Ontology as example.KeywordsOntologyKnowledge Sharing MeasurementTransferability of KnowledgeComplexity of KnowledgeMulti-site Software DevelopmentSoftware Engineering

This paper describes an approach to integrating software engineering concepts and principles into the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Computer Science (CS) curricula. Our philosophy is to apply software engineering techniques throughout the ECE/CS curricula to leverage learning in non-software engineering courses. Our technique is to seek out faculty interested in innovative teaching techniques, consult with them to identify some way that they and we feel a course they are teaching could benefit pedagogically from some application of software engineering, and work with them to make that happen. The chief intended result is to leverage learning in diverse courses, thereby benefiting pedagogy of non-software engineering topics. An auxiliary important result is to increase awareness among both students and faculty of the software engineering body of knowledge. Many software engineering approaches to understanding and solving problems in the software life cycle can also address a variety of learning needs across disciplines in ECE and CS. For example, there are software engineering techniques that can emphasize visualization (benefiting students who respond to the visual modality), logical sequences (benefiting sequential learners), summarizations (benefiting global learners), and others. Additionally, general issues of teamwork and the engineering life cycle can be addressed. We have applied our approach to a diverse set of electrical engineering and computing courses at four universities in the US and Canada, and based on those experiences we believe we have identified a win-win paradigm that can be a model for integration of software engineering concepts into electrical engineering and computing curricula.

This paper concerns the new development in multi-agent based enterprise software engineering practices, systematically discusses the main issues and approaches towards successful enforcement of complex agent-oriented software engineering, related to multi-agent system (MAS) organization structure design, ontology based domain knowledge representation and put forward an ontology based MAS coordination architecture. This paper mainly focuses on multi-agent approaches to enterprise legacy system evolution, intelligent integration and coordination design, not on specific agent architectures. Organization structure design provide MAS long-term system guidelines, together with the ontology-based domain knowledge structure and relationship representation, that provide the agents structure and environment description for MAS coordination mechanisms, also this paper gives a fundamental ontology-based agent communication interface definition. As a case study, this paper analyses China deregulated power industry information system integration requirements, apply MAS organization design approaches in electric power decision support application system MAS architecture design, and suggests CIM/XML as a standard criteria to ontology-based electric power domain knowledge management for multi-agent resources sharing, reuse and coordination.

Today, one of the challenges in software engineering is utilising application lifecycle management (ALM) tools effectively in software development. In particular, it is hard for software developers to engage with the work items that are appointed to themselves in these ALM tools. In this study, the authors have focused on bug tracking in ALM where one of the most important metrics is mean time to resolution that is the average time to fix a reported bug. To improve this metric, they developed a serious game application based on an auction‐based reward mechanism. The ultimate aim of this approach is to create an incentive structure for software practitioners to find and resolved bugs that are auctioned where participants are encouraged to solve and test more bugs in less time and improve quality of software development in a competitive environment. They conduct hypothesis tests by performing a Monte Carlo simulation. The preliminary results of this research support the idea that using a gamification approach for an issue tracking system enhances the productivity and decreases mean time to resolution.

Gamification has proven to be an adequate approach in various educational environments, from kindergarten and elementary school to higher education classrooms. While it has been extremely effective with school students and standard subjects, such as STEM, when applied correctly, gamification and game-based learning can be applied with older students, even in the information technology and software engineering field. The paper outlines the results based on the experience of applying gamification of education to attract and stimulate student motivation and engagement in class. An approach for including games to teach software engineering methods and concepts is described. Different styles of software engineering games are examined and several of the most appropriate and relevant to the students’ field of study are integrated in the Software engineering course. Descriptions of the games and the planned student progression through them are presented. A collaborative agile team-based approach is implemented and described. A suitable number of student groups have been selected, and the results from surveys held among those students are shown. Conclusions about the improvement of the process are discussed.

Discrete fracture network simulations are computationally intensive and usually time-consuming to construct and configure. This paper presents a case study with techniques for building a 3D finite element model of an inhomogeneous fracture network for modelling flow and tracer transport, combining deterministic and stochastic information on fracture aperture distributions. The complex intersected fractures represent a challenge for geometrical model design, mesh quality requirements and property allocations. For the integrated and holistic modelling approach, including the application of numerical and analytical simulation techniques, new object-oriented concepts in software engineering are implemented to ensure a resourceful and practicable software environment.