ICSE

Program understanding is the process of making sense of a complex source code. This process has been considered as computationally difficult and conceptually complex. So far no formal complexity results have been presented, and conceptual models differ ...

Building efficient tools for understanding large software systems is difficult. Many existing program understanding tools build control flow and data flow representations of the program a priori, and therefore may require prohibitive space and time when ...

Many approaches to requirements engineering include building a model of the domain. Those using entity relationship modeling or deriving from it employ the concept of relations between entities, but identifying the relations is still more of an art than ...

The paper describes Opsis, a view mechanism applied to graph based process modelling languages of type Petri net. A view is a sub model which can be mechanistically constructed from another model by application of a perspective which: identifies all ...

The paper presents a multi dimensional software engineering model, based on a formal graph specification. In contrast to other software engineering approaches, we concentrate on the integration of the "partial" models of software processes, system ...

There are at least three challenges with requirements analysis. First, it needs to bridge informal requirements, which are often vague and imprecise, to formal specification methods. Second, requirements often conflict with each other. Third, existing ...

Assertions are recognized as a powerful tool for automatic run time detection of software errors. However, existing testing methods do not use assertions to generate test cases. We present a novel approach of automated test data generation in which ...

The paper presents a specification based adaptive test case generation (SBATCG) method for integration testing in an open operating system standards environment. In the SBATCG method, templates describing abstract state transitions are derived from a ...

Informally, a call graph represents calls between entities in a given program. The call graphs that compilers compute to determine the applicability of an optimization must typically be conservative: a call may be omitted only if it can never occur an ...

A design pattern is a particular prose form of recording design information such that designs which have worked well in the past can be applied again in similar situations in the future. The availability of a collection of design patterns can help both ...

The paper describes engineering a system for a distributed Austrian Alpine road-pricing environment as well as the structure and organization of the software development. The client/server-based road-pricing system, handling on average 1.2 million ...

The article discusses the extension to an existing object-oriented implementation for B-ISDN signalling. After a brief overview of the existing implementation it is shown where changes in the existing software were made to meet the new requirements (in ...

We argue that the trustworthiness of evolving software systems can be significantly enhanced by a rigorous process of independent on-line monitoring. Such monitoring can prevent fraud, encourage careful maintenance, and serve as an early detector of ...

The software architecture of a distributed program can be represented by an hierarchical composition of subsystems, with interacting processes at the leaves of the hierarchy. Compositional reachability analysis has been proposed as a promising automated ...

Mobile computing represents a major point of departure from the traditional distributed computing paradigm. The potentially very large number of independent computing units, a decoupled computing style, frequent disconnections, continuous position ...

The staff resources or effort required for a software project are notoriously difficult to estimate in advance. To date most work has focused upon algorithmic cost models such as COCOMO and Function Points. These can suffer from the disadvantage of the ...

Many software quality metrics to objectively grasp software products and process have been proposed in the past decades. In actual projects, quality metrics has been widely applied to manage software quality. However, there are still several problems ...

How much can be saved by using existing software components when developing new software systems? With the increasing adoption of reuse methods and technologies, this question becomes critical. However, directly tracking the actual cost savings due to ...

This paper describes a case study that used and evaluated key aspects of a method developed for systematic reusable off-the-shelf software selection. The paper presents a summary of the common problems in reusable off-the-shelf software selection, ...

The procurement of complex software product involves many risks. To properly assess and manage those risks, Bell Canada has developed methods and tools that combine process capability assessment with a static analysis based software product assessment. ...

Systematic reuse of large-scale software components promises rapid, low cost development of high-quality software through the straightforward integration of existing software assets. To date this promise remains largely unrealized, owing to technical, ...

KIDS/VDM is an experimental environment that supports the synthesis of executable prototypes from VDM specifications. The development proceeds as a series of correctness preserving transformations under the strict control of the tool. A by-product of ...

This paper reports on an effort to develop an integrated set of diagrammatic languages for modeling object-oriented systems, and to construct a supporting tool. The goal is for models to be intuitive and well-structured, yet fully executable and ...