The LDL software package is a set of short, concise routines for factorizing symmetric positive-definite sparse matrices, with some applicability to symmetric indefinite matrices. Its primary purpose is to illustrate much of the basic theory of sparse matrix algorithms in as concise a code as possible, including an elegant method of sparse symmetric factorization that computes the factorization...

Base measures such as the number of lines-of-code are often used to make predictions about such phenomena as project effort, product quality or maintenance effort. However, quite often we rely on the measurement instruments where the exact algorithm for calculating the value of the measure is not known. The objective of our research is to explore how we can increase the certainty of base measur...

We examine the code base of the OpenBSD operating system to determine whether its security is increasing over time. We measure the rate at which new code has been introduced and the rate at which vulnerabilities have been reported over the last 7.5 years and fifteen versions. We learn that 61% of the lines of code in today’s OpenBSD are foundational: they were introduced prior to the release of...

Touch and stylus sensitive computer displays are widely available. Yet, the development of gesture sets to support these interaction methods continues to be difficult. We present RATA, a tool for interaction designers and software developers to create gesture recognizers for novel and custom gesture sets. Guided by the RATA wizard, the developer: defines their gesture set; collects example gest...

SRI International participated in the MUC-6 evaluation using the latest version of SRI's FASTUS system [1] . The FASTUS system was originally developed for participation in the MUC-4 evaluatio n [3] in 1992, and the performance of FASTUS in MUC-4 helped demonstrate the viability of finit e state technologies in constrained natural-language understanding tasks . The system has undergon e signifi...

is much more complicated and leads to slowly convergent or even divergent expressions for the stress resultants. 2 The circular support's action on the plate is equivalent to a line load, and so the discontinuity in the elastic constants certainly make the deflection function singular at r = a. This is reflected in the fact that two different expressions are needed to describe the deflection fu...

In this study, we revisit the question of identifying the characteristics of “optimum” software components. Specifically, we focus on those characteristics that are expected to minimize defect densities uncovered during the testing phases of software development. Although a number of such models have been examined in the past, these models have embodied some methodological difficulties that we ...

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016 | IEEE SOFTWARE 29 LIKE MANY PEOPLE, we’ve been following closely the rapidly unfolding story on the “defeat” software at Germany’s giant automotive company, VW. This, we believe, adds a new dimension to our original questions, “Software: What’s in it and what’s it in?”1—particularly, “What’s hidden in it, and how many people knew?” It would appear that aside from the norm...

As hardware support for improved endhost security becomes ubiquitous, it is important to consider how network security and performance can benefit from these improvements. If endhosts (or at least portions of each endhost) can be trusted, then network infrastructure no longer needs to arduously and imprecisely reconstruct data already known by the endhosts. Through the design of a general-purpo...

The objective of this research work is to improve the degree of excellence by removing the number of exceptions from the software. The modern age is more concerned with the quality of software. Extensive research is being carried out in this direction. The rate of improvement of quality of software largely depends on the development time. This development time is chiefly calculated in clock hou...