INES – National Institute of Science and Technology for Software Engineering

INES at VaMoS 2012

INES researchers have project funding approved by FAPESB

INES researchers Christina Chavez, Claudio Sant’Anna and Manoel Mendonça had a new project — “A Service for Assessing the Quality of Open Source Software projects for Adoption in Corporate Environments” — approved by FAPESB (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado da Bahia). The funding includes scholarships, equipment and books.

This project comprises one of the new goals submitted to INES, Edital 02 — Quality Assessment in Open Source Software — in the context of the project “Models, Techniques and Tools for Software Evolution”.

Abstract: In recent years, open source software (OSS) has brought a number of opportunities that can be exploited by different kinds of stakeholders, from companies and government agencies to researchers, developers and users in general. The adoption of a solution based on OSS by companies or government agencies can bring many benefits but also may pose risks to the business. Free software has significant characteristics in terms of product and process — not always explicitly documented or available from repositories — that can be critical to support feasibility studies and decisions about adopting or not the software.
This project’s main goal is therefore to provide a service for evaluating OSS projects for general use, including the use in corporate environments. The service includes the assessment of the products and processes associated with OSS projects to provide information for potential applicants to adopt it.

INES researchers at CSMR 2012

INES researchers, working in the context of the project “Models, Techniques and Tools for Software Evolution” had 2 papers accepted at CSMR 2012:

(1) “Understanding Structural Complexity Evolution: a Quantitative Analysis”,
Antonio Terceiro, Manoel Mendonça, Christina Chavez (UFBA) and Daniela Cruzes (NTNU)

Abstract—Background: An increase in structural complexity
makes the source code of software projects more difficult to
understand, and consequently more difficult and expensive to
maintain and evolve. Knowing the factors that influence structural
complexity may help developers to avoid the effects of
higher levels of structural complexity on the maintainability of
their projects.
Aims: This paper investigates factors that might influence the
evolution of structural complexity.
Method: We analyzed the source code repositories of 5 free/open
source software projects, with commits as experimental units. For
each commit we measured the structural complexity variation it
caused, the experience of the developer who made the commit,
the size variation caused by the commit, and the change diffusion
of the commit.
Results: Change diffusion was the most influential among the factors
studied, followed by size variation and developer experience;
system growth was not necessarily associated with complexity
increase; all the factors we studied influenced at least two
projects; different projects were affected by different factors; and
the factors that influenced the increase in structural complexity
were usually not the same that influenced the decrease.
Conclusions: All the factors explored in this study should be
taken into consideration when analysing structural complexity
evolution. However, they do not fully explain the structural
complexity evolution in the studied projects: this suggests that
qualitative studies are needed in order to better understand
structural complexity evolution and identify other factors that
must be included in future quantitative analysis.

(Activity: http://amigos.ines.org.br/ines/viewTask.do?method=viewTask&code=572&project=8)

(2) “On the Relevance of Code Anomalies for Identifying Architecture Degradation Symptoms”, Isela Macia(PUC-Rio), Roberta Arcoverde(PUC-Rio), Alessandro Garcia(PUC-Rio), Christina Chavez (UFBA) and Arndt von Staa(PUC-Rio).

This work has been developed by PUC-Rio researchers,  and Christina Chavez (UFBA) co-authored it during her pos-doc at PUC-Rio.

INES acquires notebooks

“MDAOnto System – a solution for educational applications development based on models and ontology “ project is acquiring two Mac notebooks to support activities in FACAPE and UFBA.

INES at DBKDA 2012

INES researchers had a paper accepted at 4th International Conference on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications (DBKDA 2012), Saint Gilles, Reunion Island, March 2012.

Publication details
Title: Clustering Large-Scale, Distributed Software Component Repositories
Authors: Marcos Paulo Paixão, Leila Silva and Gledson Elias

Abstract
In software component repositories, search engines have to deal with challenges related to storage space requirements for indexing semi-structured data models, which are adopted for representing syntactic and semantic features of software assets. In such a context, clustering techniques seem to be attractive for reducing the number of assets in a repository, and so, the size of index files. Accordingly, this paper proposes and evaluates a distributed clustering approach for large-scale, distributed software component repositories. Based on experiments, outcomes indicate relevant gains in storage space requirements for index files.