INES – National Institute of Science and Technology for Software Engineering

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).

INES at Information and Software Technology (IST) Journal

The paper “The Pro-PD Process Model for Product Derivation within Software Product Lines” was accepted for publication at the Information and Software Technology Journal (IST). 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.

O’ Leary, P.; Richardson, I.;  Almeida, E. S. The Pro-PD Process Model for Product Derivation within Software Product Lines, Information and Software Technology Journal (IST), 2012

INES at SBSI’2012 part II

The paper “A Platform for Smart Cities based on Internet of Things” (in portuguese) was accepted for publication at the VIII Simpósio Brasileiro de Sistemas de Informação (http://www.each.usp.br/sbsi2012/).

Valter Henrique de Souza Ferreira da Silva, Alexandre Alvaro, A Platform for Smart Cities based on Internet of Things, VIII Simpósio Brasileiro de Sistemas de Informação, São Paulo/SP, 2012.

This activity is part of the project  “S.Ma.R.T – Social Machines Research Team“.

INES Researcher gets PhD

Antonio Soares de Azevedo Terceiro (DMCC-UFBA) has successfully presented his PhD viva examination, or thesis defence, “Characterizing the Evolution of Structural Complexity in Open Source Software Systems”, last Friday, March 23rd, 2012.

The examiners were Prof. Dalton Guerrero (UFCG), Prof. Guilherme Travassos (UFRJ), and Profs. Claudio Sant’Anna, Eduardo Almeida and Christina Chavez (UFBA).

Antonio’s advisors were Christina Chavez (advisor) and Manoel Mendonça (co-advisor). His work was supported by an one-year Fapesb scholarship, a three-year CNPq scholarship and also by the INES project “Models, Techniques and Tools for Software Evolution” (2009-2011).

INES at MSR 2012

INES will be present at the 9th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2012), 02-03 June 2012, co-located with ICSE 2012, in Zurich (Switzerland).

Title: Characterizing Verification of Bug Fixes in Two Open Source IDEs

INES at ICPC 2012

INES will be present at the 20th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC’2012), to be held in Passau (Germany), 11-13 June 2012.

Research members from the projects “Concern-Driven Measurement of Software Modularity” and “Models, Techniques and Tools for Software Evolution” had the following paper accepted on this conference:

Title: Concern-Based Cohesion: Unveiling a Hidden Dimension of Cohesion Measurement

Authors: Bruno Carreiro da Silva (DMCC-UFBA), Cláudio Sant’Anna (UFBA), Christina Chavez (UFBA) and Alessandro Garcia (PUC-RIO)

INES at CTGDSD Workshop

The paper “Five Years of Lessons Learned from the Software Engineering Course – Adapting Best Practices for Distributed Software Development” was accepted for publication at the  2nd Collaborative Teaching of Globally Distributed Software Development – Community Building Workshop (CTGDSD) in Switzerland. 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.

Neto, C. N. R.; Almeida, E. S. Five Years of Lessons Learned from the Software Engineering Course – Adapting Best Practices for Distributed Software Development, 2nd Collaborative Teaching of Globally Distributed Software Development – Community Building Workshop (CTGDSD), International Conference on Softawre Engineering (ICSE), Switzerland, 2012

INES at SBSI’2012

The paper “A Traceability Tool for Mapping Features and Core Assets in Software Product Lines ” – in portuguese,   Uma ferramenta para rastreabilidade de core assets em linha de produtos de software, was accepted for publication at SBSI – Brazilian Symposium on Information Systems.

This activity is part of the MSc work presented by Anderson Fonseca e Silva, mentored by Vinicius Cardoso Garcia at CESAR.EDU and is part of the project “S.Ma.R.T – Social Machines Research Team”

More details about the publication: SILVA, A. F. ; Garcia, Vinicius Cardoso . Uma ferramenta para rastreabilidade de core assets em linha de produtos de software. In: Simpósio Brasileiro de Sistemas de Informação, 2012, São Paulo. Trilha Especial – Aplicativos de SI – Ferramentas (Special Track – Applications of IS – Tools) – Full papers, 2012.

Dependable Evolution of Software Product Lines

An important competitive differential for software factories is the ability to launch similar products customized to the clients, in a fast and cost-reduced way, without compromising quality. This has been possible through software product line engineering. A software product line (PL) is a set of related software products that are generated from reusable assets. Products are related in the sense that they share common functionality. Assets correspond to components, classes, property files, and other artifacts that we compose or instantiate in different ways to specify or build the different products. This kind of reuse targeted at a specific set of products can bring significant productivity and time to market improvements.

To obtain the benefits associated to the PL approach with reduced upfront investment, we can minimize the initial PL analysis and development process by bootstrapping existing related products into a PL. Through an extraction process, we separate variations from common parts and then discard duplicated common parts. A similar process applies to PL evolution, when, for instance, adding a new product requires extracting variations from parts previously shared by a number of products.

Although useful to reduce initial investments and risks, this extraction and evolution process can be costly and tiresome. Manually extracting and modifying different code fragments, besides other kinds of assets, requires substantial effort, especially for checking necessary conditions to ensure that the evolution can be performed in a safe way. Nonetheless, it can also introduce defects, compromising the PL benefits in other cost and risk dimensions.

We believe that the PL extraction and evolution process can benefit from semi-automatic refactorings, with formal basis, to ensure correctness and avoid running tests after the refactoring. Applying semi-automatic refactorings, guided by the developer, has the advantage of guaranteeing refactoring by construction. However, it imposes restrictions over the involved assets, such as the use of reflection, and demands from the developer the knowledge of the available transformations and the ability to identify which ones are better suited for a given situation. When the developer does not have such knowledge and ability, it is important to count with an alternative: verifying, ‘a posteriori’, that modifications to a PL really consist of a refactoring can be automatically performed in various situations, and approximated in the remaining ones.

However, existing refactoring notions focus on justifying the transformation of a single program into another, they do not consider transforming a PL into another, or a set of a programs into a PL. In fact, a PL can have conflicting artifacts, such as two classes with the main method, or two versions of the same configuration file, which makes the assets from a PL an invalid program. This prevents such assets set to benefit from existing refactoring notions. Beyond such program refactoring limitations – without mentioning requirements, tests and design models – in a PL, we tipically need extra elements to automatically generate products: Feature Models (FMs) and Configuration Knowledge (CK).

For these reasons, this project intends to propose, formalize, implement, and evaluate refactorings and refactoring checkers for PLs. In particular, we will define and implement refactoring catalogues, based on a behavior-preserving refinement notion. We will have catalogues that modify the PL as a whole, as well as individually modifying FMs and CK. Separate modifications to FM and CK are important to support compositional PL evolution. Besides that, we will reuse existing program and model refactoring catalogues for different languages. Similarly, we will have checkers for specific situations, such as when we modify only a single PL element (FM, CK, or assets), and checkers for changes that affect the PL as a whole.

INES has a paper at ICSE’2012

Researchers from the Evidence-Based Software Engineering Project have a full paper at the Software Engineering in Practice (SEIP) track of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). The paper is entitled “On the Proactive and Interactive Visualization for Feature Evolution Comprehension: An Industrial Investigation” and is authored by Renato Lima Novais, Camila Nunes, Caio Lima, Elder Cirilo, Francisco Dantas, Alessandro Garcia, Manoel Mendonça. ICSE is the flagship conference on software engineering in the world.