This paper addresses the challenge of estimating eventual software system size during a development project. The approach is to build a family of estimation models that use information about architectural design characteristics of the evolving software product as leading indicators of system size. Four models were developed to provide an increasingly accurate size estimate throughout the design...

A project’s elaboration profile consists of a set of ratios called elaboration factors that quantify the step-wise expansion of a project’s requirements from very high-level business objectives to very low-level source lines of code. Knowledge of a project’s elaboration profile can be extremely useful in deriving an early estimate of its size. The real challenge, however, is to predict the elab...

For over 30 years, password requirements and feedback have largely remained a product of LUDS: counts of lowerand uppercase letters, digits and symbols. LUDS remains ubiquitous despite being a conclusively burdensome and ineffective security practice. zxcvbn is an alternative password strength estimator that is small, fast, and crucially no harder than LUDS to adopt. Using leaked passwords, we ...

Accurate and efficient record linkage is an open challenge of particular relevance to Australian Government Agencies, who recognise that so-called wicked social problems are best tackled by forming partnerships founded on large-scale data fusion.Names and addresses are the most common attributes on which data from different government agencies can be linked. In this paper, we focus on the probl...

This paper presents results of a study of the effect of global variables on the quantity of dependence in general and on the presence of dependence clusters in particular. The paper introduces a simple transformation–based analysis algorithm for measuring the impact of globals on dependence. It reports on the application of this approach to the detailed assessment of dependence in an empirical ...

Two-particle correlation functions provide experimental access to space-time extension of the particle source in nuclear collisions [1]. A typical correlation analysis involves i) looping over events, ii) looping over track pairs within the event, iii) calculating the momentum difference, iv) filling the pair histogram at the bin corresponding to this difference, v) repeating all the above but ...

The prediction of ground level ozone for air quality monitoring and assessment is simulated through an integrated system of gridded models (meteorological, photochemical), where the atmosphere is represented with a three-dimensional grid that may include thousands of grid cells. The continuity equation solved by the Photochemical Air Quality Model (PAQM) reproduces the atmospheric processes (dy...

High-integrity software systems are often so large that conventional development processes cannot get anywhere near achieving tolerable defect rates. This article presents an approach that has delivered software with very low defect rates cost-effectively. We describe the technical details of the approach and the results achieved, and discuss how to overcome barriers to adopting such best pract...

In this article we review standard null-move pruning and introduce our extended version of it, which we call verified null-move pruning. In verified null-move pruning, whenever the shallow null-move search indicates a fail-high, instead of cutting off the search from the current node, the search is continued with reduced depth. Our experiments with verified null-move pruning show that on averag...

Testing forms a critical part of the development process for large-scale software, and there is growing need for automated tools that can read, represent, analyze, and transform the application’s source code to help carry out testing tasks. However, the support required to compile applications written in common general purpose languages is generally inaccessible to the testing research communit...