This paper analyzes the reuse choices made by open source developers and relates them to cost efficiency. We make a distinction between the commonality among applications and the actual reuse of code. The former represents the similarity between the requirements of different applications and, consequently, the functionalities that they provide. The latter represents the actual reuse of code. No...

There is a great deal of "hype" about the objectoriented paradigm offering all the solutions to the problems of software engineering. Goals of software engineering like reliability, maintainability, and reusability are said to be more easily achieved using this paradigm, than with traditional ones based on functional decomposition. In order to monitor whether these goals are indeed being achiev...

Understanding and optimizing multithreaded execution is a significant challenge. Numerous research and industrial tools debug parallel performance by combing through program source or thread traces for pathologies including communication overheads, data dependencies, and load imbalances. This work takes a new approach: it ignores any underlying pathologies, and focuses instead on pinpointing th...

Software fault count and density prediction Dr. Bob Hughes, Franklyn Young-Martos, Alan Cunliffe Synopsis It has often been found that the majority of faults in a software application are caused by a small number of software components. Previous work on fault distribution has also tended to show that smaller modules often have larger fault densities than ones with more lines of code. Work carri...

Context: Code ownership metrics were recently defined in order to distinguish major and minor contributors of a software module, and to assess whether the ownership of such a module is strong or shared between developers. Objective: The relationship between these metrics and software quality was initially validated on proprietary software projects. Our objective in this paper is to evaluate suc...

This paper studies the problem of predicting the coding effort for a subsequent year of development by analysing metrics extracted from project repositories, with an emphasis on projects containing XML code. The study considers thirteen open source projects and applies machine learning algorithms to generate models to predict one-year coding effort, measured in terms of lines of code added, mod...

Most current programming debuggers do not have any built-in intelligence to help programmers perform debugging. When using these non-intelligent debuggers, programmers have to debug their programs statement by statement in order to track down the bugs. There are several disadvantages with the current non-intelligent debuggers. The first disadvantage is that the debugger does not know the variab...

Modeling and simulation efforts continue to expand in areas where they have been used for some time, and they are also beginning to be used in new application areas. Modeling and simulation have been heavily used in risk assessment for high-consequence systems, such as nuclear power reactors, underground storage of radioactive wastes, and the nuclear weapon stockpile. For complex engineered or ...

Linux is penetrating into mobile software as the basis for a mobile middleware platform. It is accelerating the increasing visibility of open source software (OSS) components in mobile middleware platforms. Considering the 10-million lines of code of OSS-based industrial platforms such as a mobile middleware platform, engagement in foundations is inevitable for large-scale packages of OSS for i...

Visual representations of systems or processes are rife in all fields of science and engineering due to the concise yet effusive descriptions such representations convey. Humans’ pervasive tendency to visualise has led to various methods being evolved through the years to represent different aspects of software. However visualising running software has been fraught with the challenges of provid...