Technical Concepts of Component-Based Software Engineering, Volume 2

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.

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.

Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE) provides a way to create a new Component Based Software System (CBSS) by utilizing the existing components. The primary reason for that is to minimize the software development time, cost and effort. CBSS also increases the component reusability. Due to these advantages, software industries are working on CBSS and continuously trying to provide quality product. Usability is one of the major quality factors for CBSS. It should be measured before delivering the software product to the customer, so that if there are any usability flaws, it can be removed by software development team. In this paper, work has been done to evaluate the usability of CBSS based on major usability sub-factors (learnability, operability, understandability and configurability). For this purpose, firstly software metrics are identified for each usability sub-factor and the value of each sub-factor is evaluated for a component based software project. Secondly, overall usability of the software project is evaluated by using the calculated value of each usability sub-factor. Usability for the same project was also evaluated using Fuzzy approach in MATLAB to validate the experimental work of this research paper. It was identified that the value of usability obtained from software metrics and fuzzy model was very similar. This research work will be useful for the software developer to evaluate the usability of any CBSS and will also help them to compare different version of any CBSS in term of their usability.

Many regard widespread development and reuse of software components as one of the next biggest phenomena for software. However, widespread reuse of a software component with poor quality may lead to disasters. Improper reuse of software components of good quality may also be disastrous. Testing and quality assurance is therefore critical for both software components and component-based software systems. This tutorial provides an in-depth look at the technical issues, challenges, managerial aspects, and needs in testing of components and systems. Moreover, this tutorial reports on the recent advances and research efforts in developing new solutions to solve those problems and meet those needs, from the perspectives of component-based software engineering. The tutorial will discuss the state-of-the-art practice, issues, and challenges, new solutions and research efforts in third-party component testing, component-based program validation, and test automation. The targeted audience includes technical managers, software testing engineers, quality assurance people, and development engineers who are working on component-based software projects. The tutorial will be useful for professionals, researchers, and students interested in understanding the general concepts and methods in component testing and component-based software validation. This tutorial assumes that participants have a general understanding of software engineering and software testing methods, and have some working experience in software development and validation.

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.

Software development communities have made the true venture to software development through the concept of component-based software approach and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS). Majority of the present software applications have software components as the basic elements, and component-based software development (CBSD) has been successful in building applications and systems. However, the security of CBS for the software component is still not properly noticed. Developing secure software is the accountability of all the stakeholders involved with component-based software development model. The main challenge is to access how much security we have achieved or how can we predict and evaluate the security at the early stage of software development? Software security has a very constructive impact on software productivity, maintainability, cost, and quality. Therefore, more early we introduce and evaluate security into component-based software more productivity and quality we can achieve. In this paper, efforts are done to provide some suitable guiding principle to the software engineers in the development of secure component-based software products. This paper also discusses the overview of requirement specification and analyzes the software architectures and design for developing secure component-based software products.

Since its introduction by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in 1987, the SEI Software Process Maturity Model has gained wide visibility and acceptance by industry. Its overall goal is to enable an organization to assess its software process maturity in order that it might be able to improve its software development process. Inspired by the success of the SEI model, this paper describes an attempt to develop an analogous, but highly simplified and unvalidated process maturity framework applicable to software engineering project courses. Our goal is to enable an instructor of a software engineering project course to assess the software development processes utilized in the course and to improve these processes leading to better managed and more successful projects.

Ontology-based multi-site software development methodology and tools

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.

The educational requirements for the field of knowledge-based software engineering (KBSE) are defined. By analyzing an updated version of the program transformation system paradigm, ten topic areas reflecting KBSE educational requirements are identified. It is shown that many of the ten topics can be satisfied by using courses already available in most graduate level computer science/engineering program when examples and course projects are specifically directed at KBSE concepts. A comparison of the ten KBSE topic areas to the 21 software engineering education topic areas developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) shows that few of the KBSE requirements are satisfied by the 21 SEI topic areas. Additionally, recent efforts at the US Air Force Institute of Technology show that a KBSE program, including laboratory support, can be quickly started.<<ETX>>

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

Along with the development of object-oriented technology, component development is gradually extended to commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components and component-based software development (CBSD) has gradually become the dominant orientation of the field of software engineering. The claims of high reliability need further investigation based on reliability analysis techniques that are applicable to component-based applications. This paper introduces a new reliability analysis technique applicable to high-level designs. The technique is named reliability analysis based on rewrite logic (RABRL). RABRL is specific for component-based software whose analysis is strictly based on its operational profile and specification. Specification based on rewrite logic can be executed with the help of rewrite technique of Maude, driven by test cases designed from the operational profile. By analyzing the execution process with statistics, we can get the transition probability between components and expected number of visits to components approximately. The paper also adapts the probabilistic model "component-dependency graph" (CDG) proposed by Sherif M. Yacoub to model the component-based software, which is named "adapted component-dependency graph" (ACDG). ACDGs are directed graphs that represent components, component reliabilities, transitions, and transition probabilities. Based on ACDGs, an algorithm is presented to analyze the reliability of the application as the function of reliabilities of its components. A simple case study illustrates the applicability of the algorithm. The RABRL is also used to identify critical components.

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.

In the domain of biomedical and health informatics, ontologies are widely used to capture knowledge ranging from bioinformatics such as gene, protein, protein interactions, etc. to clinical/healthcare informatics knowledge such as diseases, symptoms, treatment, medication, etc. Currently, one medical knowledge source that encapsulates a broad spectrum of medical knowledge is the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), which can be defined as a compendium of diverse medical ontological standards. The primary components of the UMLS are: Semantic Network (UMLS-SN) – designed by interconnecting well-defined semantic types with semantic relationships, and Metathesaurus (UMLS-META) – the base of UMLS system that is comprised of millions of medical concepts from diverse medical standards. However, within the biomedical and health informatics community, the concepts of software engineering and domain modeling (using meta-models such as ERD, UML, and XML) are very successful in designing and implementing biomedical/health domain application models. In the current status, the UMLS-SN is primarily employed for classification of medical concepts in UMLS-META, but UMLS-SN knowledge can't be viewed or employed as a modeling framework for designing ontological models and is restricted to the UMLS environment. Thus, the impact of the biomedical semantics captured by UMLS-SN might be minimal in medical facilities, research and healthcare organizations that are highly influenced by software engineering, meta-models and domain model-based practices. In order fill this gap, the authors propose a meta-modeling framework for UMLS-SN based on the UML Profile (built using UML meta-model) that will result in a customized domain specific meta-model. This specialized meta-model that encapsulates the medical knowledge semantics of UMLS-SN can then be employed for designing ontological models or relevant healthcare application models and simultaneously be coherent with software meta-models and domain modeling practices.

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).