INES – National Institute of Science and Technology for Software Engineering

INES researcher at SBQS’2012

Last year, Vinicius Cardoso Garcia, one of the researches responsible for the projet S.Ma.R.T – Social Machines Research Team won the Software Quality Thesis and Dissertations Competition (CTDQS’2011) – type PhD. CTDQS aims to promote and award the best M.Sc. dissertations and Ph.D. thesis in the field of software quality, defended and approved in Brazil during the year 2010.

The CTDQS is also intended to encourage further work in postgraduate on Quality Software and stimulating University-Industry interaction in this area.

As a prize for the award, Vinicius was invited to attend the SBQS’2012 in Fortaleza, with passages paid by the event sponsor.

Besides, the following paper Agile Motodologies Adoption for Social Games Production with Distributed Teams (in portuguese) was accepted for publication at the conference.

ANTUNES, Jamilson Batista; GOMES, João Emanoel Ambrósio; OTERO, Lenin Ernesto Abadié; GARCIA, Vinicius Cardoso; MEIRA, Silvio Romero de Lemos Meira. Adoção de Metodologias Ágeis para Produção de Jogos Sociais com Times Distribuídos. XI Simpósio Brasileiro de Qualidade de Software (SBQS), Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil, 2012.

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

INES at WTICG/XII ERBASE

The paper Uma Abordagem para o Gerenciamento Integrado de Testes Manuais e Automatizados no TestLink of the INES reasearchers Diego Martins (UFS), Ely Goes (UFS), Leila Silva (UFS) and Marcos Dósea (UFS) has been accepted in WTICG 2012 (Workshop de Trabalhos de IC e de Graduação), a workshop of XII ERBASE (Escola Regional de Computação Bahia Alagoas Sergipe). The paper will be presented by Diego Martins, an IC student at UFS and the work has been developed in the context of the LabPS/UFS.

Software Engineering in the Transition to Multicore Platforms

In the last few years, both the software development industry and academia have shown a strong belief that multicore machines are an irreversible tendency. To exploit the power of multicore machines, applications must be capable of running in parallel. However, the construction of concurrent and parallel applications is know to be a difficult and error-prone activity. Although operating systems, architectures, and compilers can assist in the construction of parallel applications, most of the responsibility rests in the hands of programmers.

In this scenario, a number solutions have been proposed to improve the performance of applications running on multicore machines and to ease their construction and maintenance. Nonetheless, many of these solutions ignore the needs of developers and the current state of the practice of the construction of concurrent and parallel applications. In addition, researchers rarely evaluate the efficacy new mechanisms for the construction of concurrent systems from a software engineering perspective. At the same time, there are only a few approaches to support developers to introduce concurrency control mechanisms in existing systems, further aggravating problems. Finally, even when existing systems are successfully made concurrent, developers have little support to switch between different techniques for concurrency control and to structure their applications so as to be capable of handling errors at runtime.

This research project aims to propose new techniques, methods, and tools to support developers in the transition to multicore platform, from a Software Engineering standpoint. More specifically, it has the following goals:

– Improve the current body of knowledge about the state-of-the-practice of the use of existing constructs for concurrency control and how their usage has evolved over time.

– To develop refactoring techniques to introduce concurrency control mechanisms in systems that do not use them. The methods and techniques that we intend to develop should also ease the task of switching between different techniques.

– To design and implement new approaches to handle errors in concurrent systems, since concurrency is an abundant source of problems in the construction of real-world applications.

INES researchers developing educational-oriented recommender systems

INES researchers at C.E.S.A.R/Atepassar.com are investigating and developing educational-oriented recommender systems for providing students with personalized learning material respecting their individual needs. One of the main challenges of the research is to depict the student’s user model due to its granularity of characteristics to determines user’s interest. In order to offer students with appropriate learning resources and courses, machine learning and data mining techniques such as prediction, classification and clustering are being investigated and applied to an under-development recommendation system. The outcome of this work will be implemented at Atepassar.com, an educational social network. Frederico Durao (C.E.S.A.R/Atepassar.com), Marcel Caraciolo (Atepassar.com) and Silvio Meira (C.E.S.A.R) are leading the research.

INES Research Group at UFRN acquires books

INES researchers at Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte are purchasing books to complement the bibliography available at their institution. The purchased volumes will be made available to all the members of the Forall (Formal Methods and Languages Laboratory) group.

Prof. Gledson Elias is going to visit Prof. Leila Silva at UFPE in April

Prof. Gledson Elias from Federal University of Paraiba (UFPB) is going to visit Prof. Leila Silva from Federal University of Sergipe (UFS) at Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) on 12th April. During this visit, they are going to discuss obtained results, possible publications and future work of current collaborations on the adoption of clustering algorithms as a technique for reducing the storage requirements when indexing large software components repositories.

Building Robust Applications by Integrating Exception Control Flow Mining into Automatic Test Case Generation

This project aims to integrate some approaches to generate test cases into static analysis tools proposed by [Roberta et al, 2009] and [Garcia, 2011th; Garcia 2011B ]. The SAFE tool proposed by [Roberta et al, 2009] is a static analysis tool that calculates the exception control flows of applications written in Java or AspectJ. The  eFlowMining proposed by [Garcia, 2011th; Garcia 2011B] is a static analysis tool that capture, mine and visualize the main features of the exceptional control flow defined by multiple versions of applications written in various programming languages, such as: Java, C #, C, VB.NET and  F #.

This project therefore aims to achieve the following goals:
• Identification of key issues related to capture, analyze and view the exceptional control flow in software systems;
• Identification of key issues related to support automatic generation of test cases for validating the exception control flow;
• Development of new techniques, methods, algorithms and tools for validating the exceptional code of software systems;
• Validation of the proposed solutions through case studies and controlled experiments.

Member of INES at UFS is going to visit CIN/UFPE

Dr. Leila Silva is going to visit Cin/UFPE in the second week of April to work with Dr. Augusto Sampaio, in the context of the project Making Program Evolution Safer.