Software Development Tools

With the rapid increase in offshore outsourcing of software development, Global Software Development (GSD) has become the need of the hour. This, in turn, necessitates preparing computer science students to face the challenges associated with GSD. Today’s information technology, in the form of communication networks and tooling opportunities, provides us with a supposedly ready infrastructure to support GSD. However, selecting an appropriate combination of open source tools that cross cultural boundaries and account for unique in-country connectivity situations is not a trivial task. In this paper, we describe our experience of evolving an infrastructure for student GSD projects over a period four years, culminating in an environment to accommodate the needs of five different teams from four globally dispersed universities in countries straddling many technological divides.

Fuzzy logic control is one of the most interesting fields where fuzzy theory can be effectively applied. Fuzzy logic techniques attempt to imitate human thought processes in technical environments. In doing so, the fuzzy logic approach allows the designer to handle ...

This paper presents an overview and discusses the role of certification in safety-critical computer systems focusing on software, and partially hardware, used in the civil aviation domain. It discusses certification activities according to RTCA DO-178B "Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification" and touches on tool qualification according to RTCA DO-254 "Design Assurance Guidance for Airborne Electronic Hardware." Specifically, certification issues as related to real-time operating systems and programming languages are reviewed, as well as software development tools and complex electronic hardware tool qualification processes are discussed. Results of an independent industry survey done by the authors are also presented.

Since the early years of computing, programmers, systems analysts, and software engineers have sought ways to improve development process efficiency. Software development tools are programs that help developers create other programs and automate mundane operations while bringing the level of abstraction closer to the application engineer. In practice, software development tools have been in wide use among safety-critical system developers. Typical application areas include space, aviation, automotive, nuclear, railroad, medical, and military. While their use is widespread in safety-critical systems, the tools do not always assure the safe behavior of their respective products. This study examines the assumptions, practices, and criteria for assessing software development tools for building safety-critical real-time systems. Experiments were designed for an avionics testbed and conducted on six industry-strength tools to assess their functionality, usability, efficiency, and traceability. The results some light on possible improvements in the tool evaluation process that can lead to potential tool qualification for safety-critical real-time systems.

This paper describes the use of fuzzy logic techniques to control the speed of a three-phase induction motor. The use of Matlab/Simulink and fuzzyTECH MCU96 as software development tools for system design is emphasised. Hardware implementation is based on a standard 16/32-bit microcontroller, without the need of any additional components for the fuzzy logic controller. The system performance is evaluated in comparison with a traditional PI control scheme. Both simulation and experimental results are presented. ᭧

Use case modeling refers to the process of identifying scenarios written in some natural language text, particularly to capture interactions between the system and associated actors. Several approaches have been proposed to maintain the synergy of use cases with other software models, but no systematic transformation approach is available to extract use case scenarios from the textual requirements specification. In this paper, we propose a systematic transformation approach that automatically extracts various use case elements from textual problem specifications. The approach uses Natural Language (NL) parser to identify Parts-Of-Speech (POS) tags, Type Dependencies (TDs) and semantic roles from the input text specification to populate use case elements. It further makes use of the questionnaire-based approach to develop the remaining unpopulated parts of the use case template. The paper demonstrates the applicability of the proposed approach by applying both industry and research-level case studies. The results highlight that the generated output is correct, consistent, non-redundant and complete, and helpful to use case developers in further analysis and documentation. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software notations and tools;

This paper presents an overview and discusses the role of certification in safety-critical computer systems focusing on software, and partially hardware, used in the civil aviation domain. It discusses certification activities according to RTCA DO-178B “Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification” and touches on tool qualification according to RTCA DO-254 “Design Assurance Guidance for Airborne Electronic Hardware.” Specifically, certification issues as related to real-time operating systems and programming languages are reviewed, as well as software development tools and complex electronic hardware tool qualification processes are discussed. Results of an independent industry survey done by the authors are also presented.

Measurements are fundamental any engineering discipline. They indicate the amount, extent, dimension or capacity of an attribute or a product, in a quantitative manner. The analyzed results of the measured data can be given as the basic idea of metrics. It is a quantitative representation of the measurements of the degree to which a system, component, or process possesses a given attribute. When it comes to software, the metrics are a wide scope of measurements of computer programming. The size oriented metrics takes a main role in it since they can be used as the key for better estimations, to improve trust and confidence, and to have a better control over the software products. Software professionals traditionally have been measuring the size of software applications by using several methods. In this paper the researchers discuss about the software size metrics for identifying software size and it is mainly focused on the software development projects in today’s Information Technology (IT) industry.

Open source software has gained a lot of well-deserved attention during the last few years. Eclipse is one of the most successful open source communities providing an open development environment and an application life-cycle platform. The main aim of this paper is to describe a case study on contributing to the Eclipse open source community and report experiences. The most important experiences are related to building an architecture model repository tool as an Eclipse plug-in and starting a new community around it.

Current software development tools let developers model a software system and generate program code from the models to run the system. However, generating code and installing a non-trivial system induces a time delay between changing the model and executing it that makes rapid model prototyping awkward if not impossible. This paper presents the architecture of a virtual machine for UML that interprets UML models without any intermediate code-generation step. The paper shows how to embed UML in a metalevel architecture so that a key property of model-based systems, the causal connection between models and model instances, is guaranteed. With this architecture, changes to a model have immediate effects on its execution, providing users with rapid feedback about the model's structure and behavior. This approach supports model innovation better than today's codegeneration approaches.

Since the early years of computing, programmers, systems analysts, and software engineers have sought ways to improve development process efficiency. Software development tools are programs that help developers create other programs and automate mundane operations while bringing the level of abstraction closer to the application engineer. In practice, software development tools have been in wide use among safety-critical system developers. Typical application areas include space, aviation, automotive, nuclear, railroad, medical, and military. While their use is widespread in safety-critical systems, the tools do not always assure the safe behavior of their respective products. This study examines the assumptions, practices, and criteria for assessing software development tools for building safety-critical real-time systems. Experiments were designed for an avionics testbed and conducted on six industry-strength tools to assess their functionality, usability, efficiency, and traceability. The results shed some light on possible improvements in the tool evaluation process that can lead to potential tool qualification for safety-critical real-time systems.

The objective of the 1st International Workshop on Advanced Software Development Tools and Techniques (WASDeTT-1) was to provide interested researchers with a forum to share their tool building experiences and to explore how tools can be built more effectively and efficiently. The theme for this workshop did focus on tools that target object-oriented languages and that are implemented with object-oriented languages. This workshop report provides a brief overview of the presented tools and of the discussions that took place. The presented tools, 15 in total, covered a broad range of functionalities, among them: refactoring, modeling, behavioral specification, static and dynamic program checking, user interface composition, and program understanding. The discussion during the workshop centered around the following topics: language independent tools, tool building in an industrial context, tool building methodology, tool implementation language, and building tools with external code.

With the rapid increase in offshore outsourcing of software development, Global Software Development (GSD) has become the need of the hour. Today's information technology, in the form of communication networks and tooling opportunities, provides us with a supposedly ready infrastructure to support GSD. However, selecting an appropriate combination of tools that cross cultural boundaries and account for unique in-country connectivity situations is not a trivial task. In this paper, we describe our experience of evolving an infrastructure for student GSD projects over a period of four years, culminating in an environment to accommodate the needs of five different teams from four globally dispersed universities in countries straddling many technological divides. We suggest that our experience offers lessons that can also support those organizations embarking upon GSD initiatives and with their own infrastructure decisions to make.

Current software development tools let developers model a software system and generate program code from the models to run the system. However, generating code and installing a non-trivial system induces a time delay between changing the model and executing it that makes rapid model prototyping awkard if not impossible. This paper presents the architecture of a virtual machine for UML that interprets UML models without any intermediate code-generation step. The paper shows how to embed UML in a ...

We present the detailed planning and execution of the Insight Toolkit (ITK), an application programmers interface (API) for the segmentation and registration of medical image data. This public resource has been developed through the NLM Visible Human Project, and is in beta test as an open-source software offering under cost-free licensing. The toolkit concentrates on 3D medical data segmentation and registration algorithms, multimodal and multiresolution capabilities, and portable platform independent support for Windows, Linux/Unix systems. This toolkit was built using current practices in software engineering. Specifically, we embraced the concept of generic programming during the development of these tools, working extensively with C++ templates and the freedom and flexibility they allow. Additional software development tools for distributed consortium-based code development have been created and are available from the project. In this paper, we discuss our assumptions, design decisions, and some of the lessons we have learned.

In recent years, a new paradigm for software development has appeared, and it promises to release developers from writing code. The basis of this paradigm is to increase the level of abstraction to its maximum, allowing developers (or even customers) to simply detail their business process, letting the machine to do the "hard work". This machine, conveniently configured, will be able to generate the software that will comply with customer's definition. The purpose of this paper is to provide an extensive review of the available tools. There tools allow put into practice the principles of this paradigm.

Current Application Specific Instruction set Processor (ASIP) design methodologies are mostly based on itera-tive architecture exploration that uses Architecture Descrip-tion Languages (ADLs) and retargetable software develop-ment tools. However, for improved design efficiency, ad-ditional pre-architecture exploration tools are required to help narrow-down the huge design space and making coarse-grained Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) decisions before detailed ADL modeling. Extensive application code pro-filing is the key in such early design stages. Based on a novel code instrumentation technology, we present a micro-profiling approach that fills the current gap between source-level and instruction-level profilers and combines their ad-vantages w.r.t. speed and accuracy. We show how the micro-profiler is embedded into an advanced ASIP design flow and justify its use in a case study to design an MP3 decoder ASIP.

Contemporary development environments do not directly and explicitly support developers in having a conversation about the code they write and maintain. This problem is aggravated when geographically dispersed teams need to collaborate on development artifacts. CodeTalk allows developers to have conversations about source code elements. They can mark code sections they are concerned about and annotate them. These annotations provide entry points for an informal discourse about the strengths and weaknesses of these sections and developers can work towards a conclusion on how to proceed on the raised issues. A Squeak/Smalltalk implementation of CodeTalk was evaluated by several small development teams, indicating improvement in the informal assessment of code.

This paper presents a multimodal toolkit for rapid performance-driven façade design that includes both virtual and physical performance feedback. The toolkit has been user tested in the SmartGeometry 2013 event by the Thermal Reticulations workshop cluster. Although the workshop participants were predominately digital design focused, the authors observed several distinct approaches to the tool selection and workflow involving both physical and virtual simulations, with a favoring to tools that produce fast visual outcomes. The approaches to tool selection are presented here as case studies with their workflow mapped for discussion. We conclude that access to a diverse range of simulation tools for design evaluation is advantageous to the creativity of the design process.

It is widely acknowledged that many professionals suffer from "e-mail overload." This article presents findings from in-depth fieldwork that examined this phenomenon, uncovering six key challenges of task management in e-mail. Analysis of qualitative and quantitative data suggests that it is not simply the quantity but also the col-

Computer science teachers often struggle with design programming assignments that both introduce students to object-oriented design and provide meaningful opportunities for students to develop object-oriented programming skills. As a result, teachers seek creative alternatives for educating the next generation of computer scientists. Using the context of game design, we identify a team-based pedagogical strategy to assist students with understanding object-oriented design principles. Team-based pedagogy includes well-defined rubric, application-focused team programming assignments, software development tools and built-in incentives for individual and team learning. We extend Microsoft's Flight Simulator X game platform as a software development tool for team programming assignments that reinforce object-oriented game design. Additionally, we develop team-based learning tools that promote social interactions as a part of the learning process as students develop proficiency in object-oriented programming. Finally, we propose a method for evaluating team-based pedagogy applicable to computer programming courses that influence positive learning outcomes for students.

With the rapid increase in offshore outsourcing of software development, Global Software Development (GSD) has become the need of the hour. Today's information technology, in the form of communication networks and tooling opportunities, provides us with a supposedly ready infrastructure to support GSD. However, selecting an appropriate combination of tools that cross cultural boundaries and account for unique in-country connectivity situations is not a trivial task. In this paper, we describe our experience of evolving an infrastructure for student GSD projects over a period of four years, culminating in an environment to accommodate the needs of five different teams from four globally dispersed universities in countries straddling many technological divides. We suggest that our experience offers lessons that can also support those organizations embarking upon GSD initiatives and with their own infrastructure decisions to make.

In order to effectively validate the performance of software systems throughout their development cycle it is necessary to continuously build performance models from software models and then use the obtained models to check whether the system is being developed according to its performance requirements. The model building activity is a critical and effort-consuming activity. Several approaches have been envisaged to endow software designers with tools that automatically build ready-to-evaluate performance models from software development models. One essential requirement of such tools, often disregarded by current approaches, is a high degree of interoperability with software development tools, which has the positive effect of reducing both the level of required expertise in performance theory and the burden of learning separate tools. This paper introduces a framework for transforming source software models into target performance models. The transformation requires a clear understanding of the abstract syntax and semantics of both the source and target models, which is obtained by use of metamodeling techniques for defining the abstract syntax of models, the interrelationships between model elements and the model transformation rules. In the paper case, the framework is applied to the transformation of source models of UML type into target models of LQN (layered queueing network) type. The proposed approach is founded on the precepts recently introduced by model-driven development (MDA) and makes use of the set of related standards (MOF, QVT, XMI). This allows to obtain a high degree of automation, so that interoperable model transformation tools can be implemented in a timely and efficient way, leading to improvements in terms of software designers' productivity and system quality. *

Two experiments were carried out to assess the utility of external documentation aids such as macro flowcharts, pseudocode, data structure diagrams, and data structure descriptions. A 223 line Pascal program which manipulates four arrays was used. The program interactively handles commands that allow the user to manage five lists of items. A comprehension test was given to participants along with varying kinds of external documentation. The results indicate that for this program the data structure information was more helpful than the control flow information, independently of whether textual or graphic formats were used.

This paper presents an overview and discusses the role of certification in safety-critical computer systems focusing on software, and partially hardware, used in the civil aviation domain. It discusses certification activities according to RTCA DO-178B "Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification" and touches on tool qualification according to RTCA DO-254 "Design Assurance Guidance for Airborne Electronic Hardware." Specifically, certification issues as related to real-time operating systems and programming languages are reviewed, as well as software development tools and complex electronic hardware tool qualification processes are discussed. Results of an independent industry survey done by the authors are also presented.

With the rapid increase in offshore outsourcing of software development, Global Software Development (GSD) has become the need of the hour. Today's information technology, in the form of communication networks and tooling opportunities, provides us with a supposedly ready infrastructure to support GSD. However, selecting an appropriate combination of tools that cross cultural boundaries and account for unique in-country connectivity situations is not a trivial task. In this paper, we describe our experience of evolving an infrastructure for student GSD projects over a period of four years, culminating in an environment to accommodate the needs of five different teams from four globally dispersed universities in countries straddling many technological divides. We suggest that our experience offers lessons that can also support those organizations embarking upon GSD initiatives and with their own infrastructure decisions to make.

Parallelism is becoming the leading paradigm in today's computer architectures. In order to take full advantage of this development, new algorithms have to be specifically designed for parallel execution while many old ones have to be upgraded accordingly. One field in which parallel computing has been firmly established for many years is computer graphics. Calculating and displaying three-dimensional computer generated imagery in real time requires complex numerical operations to be performed at high speed on a large number of objects. Since most of these objects can be processed independently, parallel computing is applicable in this field. Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) have become capable of performing millions of matrix and vector operations per second on multiple objects simultaneously. As a side project, a software tool is currently being developed at the Institute of Aerospace Systems that provides an animated, three-dimensional visualization of both actual and simulated space debris objects. Due to the nature of these objects it is possible to process them individually and independently from each other. Therefore, an analytical orbit propagation algorithm has been implemented to run on a GPU. By taking advantage of all its processing power a huge performance increase, compared to its CPU-based counterpart, could be achieved. For several years efforts have been made to harness this computing power for applications other than computer graphics. Software tools for the simulation of space debris are among those that could profit from embracing parallelism. With recently emerged software development tools such as OpenCL it is possible to transfer the new algorithms used in the visualization outside the field of computer graphics and implement them, for example, into the space debris simulation environment. This way they can make use of parallel hardware such as GPUs and Multi-Core-CPUs for faster computation. In this paper the visualization software will be introduced, including a comparison between the serial and the parallel method of orbit propagation. Ways of how to use the benefits of the latter method for space debris simulation will be discussed. An introduction of OpenCL will be given as well as an exemplary algorithm from the field of space debris simulation.

In today's software industry, development teams are no longer co-located but distributed over locations, and problems associated with different time zones and cultures come into play. To reflect these industry scenarios, and to better prepare computer science students to capitalize upon the opportunities and address the challenges, five institutions distributed across four countries and two continents have been collaborating to investigate models of working in global software development settings. The model for the spring 2008 project emphasized friendly competition between distributed development teams and quality, via the support of coaches and the external feedback of auditors, to increase the likelihood that software suitable to deploy would be developed by the students. A virtual world environment was also used as a socialization tool with the expectation that it would provide support for the needed face-to-face interaction that lacks in distributed teams and so promote additional forms of communication. In this paper, we describe the goals behind investing in socialization and the emerging technologies that can support such activities in global software development projects. We also outline the setting and the results of our particular socialization study. We conclude the paper with reflections on the future use of virtual world environments in global projects of this nature and the resulting implications for practitioners.

Debugging and diagnostic tools are some of the most important software development tools, but most expect developers choose the right code to inspect. Unfortunately, this rarely occurs. A new tool called the Whyline is described which avoids such speculation by allowing developers to select questions about a program's output. The tool then helps developers work backwards from output to its causes. The prototype, which supports Java programs, was evaluated in an experiment in which participants investigated two real bug reports from an open source project using either the Whyline or a breakpoint debugger. Whyline users were successful about three times as often and about twice as fast compared to the control group, and were extremely positive about the tool's ability to simplify diagnostic tasks in software development work.

We address the problem of formally representing the programmability of a system. We define the programmability of a system as the set of valid execution paths that can be configured statically by software. We formally represent this programmability as a Boolean function. From this representation, we extract a subset of on-set minterms that we call minimal minterms. We prove that

Systolic array network processors represent an effective alternative to ASICs for the design of multi-gigabit packet switching and forwarding devices because of their flexibility, high aggregate throughput and deterministic worst-case performances. However such advantages come at the expense of some limitations, given both by the specific characteristics of the pipelined architecture and by the lack of support for portable high-level languages in the software development tools, forcing software engineers to deal with low level aspects of the underlying hardware platform.

Past studies show that developers who navigate code in a structural manner complete tasks faster and more correctly than those whose behavior is more opportunistic. The goal of this work is to move professional developers towards more effective program comprehension and maintenance habits by providing an approach that fosters structural code navigation. To this end, we created a Visual Studio plugin called Prodet that integrates an always-on navigable visualization of the most contextually relevant portions of the call graph. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach by deploying it in a six week field study with professional software developers. The study results show a statistically significant increase in developers' use of structural navigation after installing Prodet. The results also show that developers continuously used the filtered and navigable call graph over the three week period in which it was deployed in production. These results indicate the maturity and value of our approach to increase developers' effectiveness in a practical and professional environment.

Applications over wireless sensor networks are growing quickly. Traditional software development tools are not well adapted to this technology. In particular, adequate testing methodologies are required. Many issues have not been formally addressed as energy-conservation, congestion control, reliability data dissemination, security. In this paper, we present a pragmatic approach to detect some kind of anomalies based on defined scenarios on wireless sensor networks. A scenario is considered as a set of events which should happen on the network in an ordered way. We discuss a formal architecture able to perform these scenarios over the wireless sensor networks and to raise alarms if necessary. This methodology has been implemented on a prototype and has been experimented with various examples. This contribution is a first attempt for a formal testing methodology for wireless sensor networks.

This research reports on the development of a framework to be used to benchmark the e-readiness of e-Commerce websites. This model will be used in a follow up study relating customer trust and the maturity levels of websites. While several models of e-Commerce capability and maturity have been developed over the years most of them have identified the stages of growth in broad and/or strategic terms. With advances in technology, and the availability of software development tools and new ways of enhancing the customer's shopping experience, it is possible to determine the maturity levels of websites in terms of these value added features. For this study, a list of website tools, technologies and services were placed in a common pool and subjected to classification by a selected panel of e-Commerce users who would determine which items should be assigned to which level of maturity. The objective was to determine which features, in the view of typical customers, suggested a certain level of maturity. The result is the establishment of a process for developing a general framework of e-Commerce maturity from a customer perspective based on the usage of currently available technology solutions and services.

This paper discusses the ongoing application of Strategic Digital Dashboard (SGD) technologies to a growing number of important medical applications. The growing number of medical data warehouses and repositories in military and civilian healthcare applications have proved challenging for useful application due to the sheer size and complexity of the knowledge-base (HighTechMaui 2002, Stratton and Dick 2002). Advances in graphical

Software development tools are very important in software engineering. Although roles have been acknowledged and applied for many years in several areas related to software engineering, there is a lack of research on software development tools based on roles. Most significantly, there is no complete and consistent consideration of roles in all the phases of software development. Considering the increasing importance and applications of roles in software development, this paper intends to discuss the importance of roles in software engineering and that of role-based software development; review the literature relevant to role mechanisms in software engineering; propose and describe a role-based software process; and implement a prototype tool for developing complex software systems with the help of role mechanisms.

Pluggable type systems have been proposed in order to allow programmers to easily extend a programming language's type system to enforce new properties of interest. In previous work we presented an approach to supporting pluggable type systems along with an instantiation of the approach for Java, called JAVACOP. This paper evaluates JAVACOP as a practical software development tool. We describe our experiences developing and using four different checkers with JAVACOP. The first two checkers illustrate JAVACOP's ability to enforce domain-specific properties of two different Java libraries, the Polyglot extensible compiler and the JUnit unit-testing framework. The other two checkers illustrate JAVACOP's ability to express advanced type systems, respectively for enforcing non-null and unique object references. Using these checkers as motivation, we also describe two extensions to JAVA-COP that resolve earlier practical limitations: the ability to easily employ dataflow information in JAVACOP checkers, and the ability to test a JAVACOP checker against both the expected static discipline and a set of expected runtime invariants.