INES – National Institute of Science and Technology for Software Engineering

INES at FMi 2015

Investigating Algorithms, Techniques and Tools for Search Based Software Engineering

Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) is an emerging field in which Software Engineering problems are reformulated and modeled as optimization problems, and subsequently are solved using concepts, techniques, algorithms and search strategies. The search goal is to identify, among all possible solutions, one that is good enough according to appropriate metrics. The reformulation allows that problems, previously resolved by adopting intensively manual and intuitive methods, can be solved wholly or partially in a systematic and automated way. In addition, SBSE can provide solutions to problems considered intractable by other methods and techniques of Software Engineering, often leading to innovative solutions, not anticipated or even imagined.

In such a context, the aim of this project is to adopt, investigate, evaluate and develop SBSE concepts, algorithms, techniques and strategies in order to solve problems that arise in several areas of the Software Engineering discipline. The scope is widely open for different types of problems. However, initially, it focuses on developing approaches for composition, selection and allocation of software development teams, in both co-located and distributed settings. In particular, this project will take into account problems related to communication and coordination among software development teams, which are geographically distributed around the world. As widely known, such communication and coordination problems arises due to their different technical skills, and, mainly, conflicting cultural, social, organizational and even legal aspects, that, jointly, can significantly impact on software development cost, time and quality. Besides, the project also deals with problems related to search, selection and certification of software components in the context of Global Software Development (GSD) applied to Software Product Lines (SPL).

S.Ma.R.T – Social Machines Research Team

The traditional concept of software has been changing during the last decades. Since the first definition of a computing machine described by Turing, software started to become part of our lives and has been turned pervasive and ubiquitous with the introduction of personal computers, the internet, smartphones and, of later, the internet of things. In fact, one can say that software and the internet changed the way we communicate, the way business is done and the internet is changing the way software is developed, deployed and used. Nowadays, computing means connecting; and it just may be the case that developing software is the same as connecting services.

Although there have been many studies about the future of the internet and concepts such as web 3.0, programmable web, linked data and semantic web, the segmentation of data and the issues regarding the communication among systems obfuscates the interpretation of this future. Kevin Kelly, of Wired fame, is quoted as having said once: “The internet is the most reliable machine ever made. It’s made from imperfect, unreliable parts, connected together, to make the most reliable thing we have”. Unstructured data, unreliable parts and problematic, non-scalable protocols are all native characteristics of the internet that has been evolving for 40 years; at the same time, they are the good, the bad and the ugly of a web in which we rely more and more in the everyday life of everything, that needs a unifying view and explanations in order to be developed, deployed and used in a more efficient and effective way.

Indeed, the web is changing in a fundamental way and approaches such as SOA, REST, XaaS, and Cloud Computing each play an important role in this emerging web. However, the read/write and programmable webs are recent enough to represent very serious difficulties in understanding their basic elements and how they can be efficiently combined to develop real, practical systems in either personal, social or enterprise contexts. There has not been a clear, precise description of each and every entity on this new emerging web (above the basic, 1.0, which is a restriction of it) and we believe it is necessary to create new mental models of such a web as a platform, in order to provide a common and coherent conceptual basis for the understanding of this young, upcoming and possibly highly innovative phase of software development.

In this context, this project aims to explain the web in terms of a new concept named Social Machines (SM). We define a notion of social machine and envisage an algebra that can describe networks of such. To start with, social machines are defined as tuples of input, output, processes, constraints, state, requests and responses; apart from defining the machines themselves, the algebra defines a set of connectors and conditionals that can be used to describe the interactions between any number of machines in a multitude of ways, as a means to represent real machines interacting in the real web, such as Twitter, Twitter running on top of Amazon AWS, mashups built using Twitter and, obviously, other social machines.

This is not a theoretical initiative as yet; but, in more than one sense, we think that this work contributes to the process of providing a unifying vision to describe web based information systems and are starting to work on what could be a practical way of dealing with the complexity of this emerging web of social machines.

If you are interested to interact and collaborate with this initiative you can start reading this paper and contact by email social-machines@googlegroups.com.

INES researcher won the ACM SIGPLAN John Vlissides Award

INES researcher Márcio Ribeiro won the ACM SIGPLAN John Vlissides Award at the SPLASH 2010 conference (formerly OOPSLA), held in Reno, NV, USA on October 2010. The award is presented annually to a doctoral student participating in the OOPSLA Doctoral Symposium showing significant promise in applied software research. The best PhD proposal was presented by Márcio, which competed with students from world’s premier universities. The presented proposal consists of providing modularity for features in software product lines. The approach uses interfaces that emerge on demand and during a maintenance task to warn developers about dependencies among features, so that the developer of a feature might not break another one which might be under somebody else responsibility.

Instituto Nacional para Engenharia de Software opens Research Laboratory at UFRN

The National Institute for Software Engineering, INES, launches an associated research laboratory at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte. Initially, the laboratory will be equipped with 10 workstations among Macs and PCs. This laboratory will provide infrastructure to INES projects that are coordinated by the UFRN research group, ForAll.

Reform of the Laboratory of INES in CIN/UFPE

The project “Software Productivity Laboratory Network ” reform Laboratory of Software Engineering group in CIn/UFPE

The reform would benefit all projects of INES that run on the CIn.

INES at WICSA

INES researchers will participate at  Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture 2009 & European Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA).

The conference, the main one in the software architecture area, the project members will present the paper Experimenting a Process to Design Product Line Architectures, from Ednaldo Dilorenzo, Eduardo Almeida and Silvio Meira. The paper will be presented at 2nd Workshop on Empirical Assessment in Software Architecture.

This activity is part of the project  “An Investigation of Methods, Processes, Tools, and Metrics for the Development of Software Product Lines (SPL)” — in portuguese, Uma Investigação de Processos, Ferramentas e Métricas para o Desenvolvimento de Linhas de Produto de Software.

INES at SBLP, SBES-Tools, and OOPSLA Student Research Competition

The INES project “Evolution and Refactoring tools” published the following papers:

• Gustavo Soares, Rohit Gheyi, Tiago Massoni, Márcio Cornélio e Diego Cavalcanti. Generating Unit Tests for Checking Program Refactorings. In XIII Brazilian Symposium on Programming Languages – SBLP’09, Gramado-RS, Brazil, 2009.
• Gustavo Soares, Diego Cavalcanti, Rohit Gheyi, Tiago Massoni, Dalton Serey e Márcio Cornélio. SafeRefactor – Tool for Checking Refactoring Safety. In XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, XVI Tools Session, Fortaleza, Brazil, 2009.
• Diego Cavalcanti. Improving Safety when Refactoring Aspect-Oriented Programs. Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications (Student Research Competition), United States, 2009.

INES at SBES 2009 (Tools Session)

INES researchers will participate at tools session during the Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering. The tool: BAST: A Tool for Bug Report Analysis and Search, presents an initial solution for the CR duplicated problem.

This activity is part of the project  “An Investigation of Methods, Processes, Tools, and Metrics for the Development of Software Product Lines (SPL)” — in portuguese, Uma Investigação de Processos, Ferramentas e Métricas para o Desenvolvimento de Linhas de Produto de Software.

More details on the publication:

• Cavalcanti, Y. C.; Cunha, C. E. A.; Almeida, E. S.; Meira, S. R. L. BAST: A Tool for Bug Report Analysis and Search , 23rd Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, Tools Session, Fortaleza, Brazil, 2009.

Social Networks as a Knowledge Management Tool for Software Development

On enterprises, a change also called the thrid industrial revolution is happening. This change represents a turn to the knowledge based economy, where knowledge is the most important asset, surpassing traditional resources like earth, capital and work. This collective knowledge and its management contribute the a continued improvement of productivity, raising the enterprise competitiveness.

Knowledge comes from the environment, because it comes form interaction between people and this environment, modifying both during these interactions. Knowledge resides on the mind, behaviour, perception and interaction of people, which is called tacit knowledge. The knowledge which is easily captured, formalized and documented is called explicit knowledge. In general, knowledge management processes focuses on explicit knowledge, which represents only 10% to 20% of all enterprise knowledge. The other 80% to 90% os knowledge is tacit and can not be processed by traditional information systems.

Social networks are tools that help to manage explicit knowledge, and also support people interaction. Because they are usually informal, non-structured and non-hierarchized, the information and knowledge lifecycle allows the social network members to express themselves in a really natural way, reducing the existing barriers of formalizing knowledge.

This project has as main objective to provide the needed mechanisms for using social networks environments as the main Knowledge Management Tool for enterprises and its software development projects. Aiming to achieve this goal, a social networks platform will be extended in order to provide the criation and management of software development projects. Knowledge Management processes will be researched and adapted to help defining a process which fits better to the proposed domain. In addition, a set of metrics and tools will be proposed, implemented, deployed and analysed in order to better support the defined process and evaluate its efficiency.