INES – National Institute of Science and Technology for Software Engineering

INES at LADC’2011

INES member Fernando Castor will be presenting two papers in the Fifth Latin-American Symposium on Dependable Computing (LADC’2011), to be held in São José dos Campos, 25-29 April 2011. One of the papers will be presented in the main track of the conference, whereas the other one was accepted for presentation at the Workshop on Exception Handling in Contemporary Software Systems (EHCoS’2011). LADC is the premier conference on software dependability in Latin American. It is supported by the Brazilian Computer Society, the IEEE Computer Society and IFIP. The conference proceedings will be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press. Fernando will be presenting the papers at the conference as a member of the “Tools for the Development and Evolution of Software Product Lines” project.

The titles and abstracts of the two papers are presented below.

Title: Exception Handling for Service Component Architectures

Abstract:

The Service Component Architecture (SCA) makes it possible to combine existing and new services based on a variety of technologies with components built using a component-based development approach. However, when asynchronous services compositions are executed, one or more errors can occur, possibly at the same time, affecting the composition’s dependability. In many cases, parts of the com- position are off-the-shelf components or Web services whose individual dependability cannot be reliably ascertained. In this paper, we propose a novel exception handling model that targets the needs of dependable SCA applications. The model is applicable to service-oriented systems and allows the creation of fault-tolerant asynchronous service compositions. We also present the EH-SCA framework, an instantiation of the proposed model implemented as an extension of the Apache Tuscany SCA infrastructure. Developers can apply this instantiation of the model to both new and existing applications by using a simple and flexible aspect-oriented programming model. Finally, a case study of the EH-SCA framework shows how it can be used to build dependable distributed applications.

Title: Towards Agile Testing of Exceptional Behavior

Abstract:

Many of the problems found in the uses of exception handling are caused by the lack of testing and a priori design of the exceptional behavior. As a consequence, exceptions flow in unforeseen ways during the execution of a software system, causing a negative impact on reliability. This paper presents a new agile approach to test the exceptional behavior of a system. It supports developers in checking whether exceptions, at runtime, travel through the expected paths. It is agile because tests are written without the need for extra documentation. We present a preliminary evaluation of the proposed approach, where it helped us to uncover four bugs in a production system, two of them previously unknown. We have implemented the proposed approach as an extension of the JUnit framework.

PhD research internship at UBC

PhD student Antonio Soares de Azevedo Terceiro (DMCC-UFBA), member of the project “Models, Techniques and Tools for Software Evolution”, will undertake a PhD research internship in Empirical Software Engineering at the Software Practices Lab, Department of Computer Science at UBC (University of British Columbia) from March to September, 2011, and will be supervised by professor Gail C. Murphy.

Professor Gail Murphy’s team has been working on the concept of Degree of Knowledge over source code elements. In his PhD, Antonio Terceiro investigates the influence of developer characteristics over the
evolution of source code structural complexity in free software projects. In this research internship, Degree of Knowledge over source code elements will be considered as one of the factors that may influence the variation in structural complexity, what will be investigated in a empirical study.

UFPE is acquiring equipment for INES LabPS

The project “Software Productivity Laboratory Network” is acquiring access control equipment to the Software Productivity Laboratory at CIn-UFPE.

INES at WeTSOM-ICSE’2011

INES will be present at the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’2011), to be held in Honolulu (Hawaii), 21-28 May 2011. Research members from the project “Models, Techniques and Tools for Software Evolution” had the following paper accepted on the WeTSOM workshop at ICSE’2011:

Authors: Bruno Silva, Cláudio Sant’Anna and Christina Chavez.

Title: Concern-Based Cohesion as Change Proneness Indicator: An Initial Empirical Study.

ICSE is the premier conference in all areas related to software engineering, providing a forum for researchers, practitioners and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences and concerns in the field of software engineering.

WeTSOM’2011 (2nd International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics) aims at gathering together researchers and practitioners to discuss the progress of software metrics. The motivation for this workshop is the low impact that software metrics has on current software development. The goals of this workshop includes critically examining the evidence for the effectiveness of existing metrics and identifying new directions for metrics.

Prof. Elisa Huzita is going to visit UFPB

The professor Elisa Huzita from State University of Maringá is going to visit UFPB from 17-20 March. The purpose is to discuss the integration of the ontology model for Global Software Development, proposed by her research group, together with the representation of technical and non-technical features related to distributed development teams, which is part of the project “Distributed Development based on Software Product Lines”.