IET Software
Volume 7, Issue 4, August 2013
Volumes & issues:
Volume 7, Issue 4
August 2013
Analysing the quality of object-oriented models from novice modellers
- Author(s): Zhiyi Ma and Hongjie Chen
- Source: IET Software, Volume 7, Issue 4, p. 187 –194
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2012.0124
- Type: Article
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Syntactic, semantic and pragmatic defects in object-oriented (OO) models all will result in poor quality of applications based on the models. This study analyses the quality of OO models from two types of novice modellers based on the course projects from the authors 4 years teaching practice. In this study, the authors summarise a set of quality defect types and the typical design activities, quantify the level of occurrence for the defect types and lack of the activities, explore the causes for the defects to occur in OO models in the aspects of syntax, semantics and pragmatics in the phases of OO analysis and design, and conclude preventive measures. These findings can be used for improving the novice modellers’ skills for building OO models with good quality.
Value of ranked voting methods for estimation by analogy
- Author(s): Mohammad Azzeh and Marwan Alseid
- Source: IET Software, Volume 7, Issue 4, p. 195 –202
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2012.0119
- Type: Article
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One long-standing issue in estimation by analogy (EBA) is finding closest analogies. Prior studies revealed that existing similarity measures are easily influenced by extreme values and irrelevant features. Instead of identifying closest projects based on the aggregated similarity degrees, the authors propose to use ranked voting methods that rank projects per feature, and then aggregate those ranks over all features using voting count rules. The project(s) with highest score will be the winners and form new estimate for the target project. This also enables us to automatically come up with the preferred number of analogies for each target project, since the winner set may contain more than a single winner. Empirical evaluation with Jack-knifing procedure has been carried out, in which nine datasets come from two repositories (PROMISE and ISBSG) were used for benchmarking. The proposed models are compared with some well known estimation methods: regular K-based EBA, stepwise regression, ordinary least-square regression and categorical regression tree. The performance figures of the proposed models were promising. The use of voting methods present some useful advantages: (i) saving time in finding appropriate K number of analogies for each individual project, (ii) no need for project pruning and (iii) no data standardisation are required.
Automated testing of eXtensible Access Control Markup Language-based access control systems
- Author(s): Antonia Bertolino ; Said Daoudagh ; Francesca Lonetti ; Eda Marchetti ; Louis Schilders
- Source: IET Software, Volume 7, Issue 4, p. 203 –212
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2012.0101
- Type: Article
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The trustworthiness of sensitive data needs to be guaranteed and testing is a common activity among privacy protection solutions, even if quite expensive. Accesses to data and resources are ruled by the policy decision point (PDP), which relies on the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) standard language for specifying access rights. In this study, the authors propose a testing strategy for automatically deriving test requests from a XACML policy and describe their pilot experience in test automation using this strategy. Considering a real two-level PDP implemented for health data security, the authors compare the effectiveness of the test plan automatically derived with the one derived by a standard manual testing process.
Supporting the adaptation of open-source database applications through extracting data lifecycles
- Author(s): Kaiping Liu ; Hee Beng Kuan Tan ; Xu Chen
- Source: IET Software, Volume 7, Issue 4, p. 213 –221
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2012.0105
- Type: Article
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The adaptation of open-source database applications is common in the industry. Most open-source database applications are incomplete. During adaptation, users usually have to implement additional data maintenance. Hence, the completeness of an application is an important concern for the adaptation as a key factor to indicate how much additional effort is required before using a system. From our study of database applications with complete functionalities, we observe that data in a database has common patterns of lifecycles. Anomaly in data lifecycles provides a good indicator on the completeness of database applications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to automatically extract the data lifecycles out of the source code of database applications through inter-procedural static program analysis. This representative information can benefit the adaptation of database applications specifically for selection, maintenance and extension. We have developed a tool to implement the proposed approach for PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor)-based database applications. Case studies have shown that the proposed approach is useful in assisting adaptation and detecting faults of open-source database applications.
Web services property sequence chart monitor: a tool chain for monitoring BPEL-based web service composition with scenario-based specifications
- Author(s): Pengcheng Zhang ; Hareton Leung ; Wenrui Li ; Xuandong Li
- Source: IET Software, Volume 7, Issue 4, p. 222 –248
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2012.0047
- Type: Article
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Web service composition is a new paradigm to develop distributed and reactive software-intensive systems. Owing to the autonomous nature of basic services, the validation of composite service must be extended from design-time to run-time. Here, the authors describe a novel tool chain called web services property sequence chart monitor to monitor temporal, timing and probabilistic properties in composite service based on scenario-based property specifications called property sequence chart, timed property sequence chart and probabilistic timed property sequence chart, respectively. The tool chain provides a completely graphical front-end that eliminates the need to deal with any particular textual and logical formalism. Furthermore, the framework and implementation detail of the tool chain are also presented. Finally, the feasibility and usability of the tool have been validated by the case studies and performance measurement.
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