User-friendly interfaces play a critical role in enhancing user experience within software development. As back-ground images, graphics, and intricately stylized text evolve in Web UI/UX design, testing for accessible visual appeal has become increasingly difficult. While evaluating text-background contrast may seem straightforward in simple cases, existing methods often fall short when faced with complex backgrounds, overlapping text, or exquisitely stylized text, thus motivating our research. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach capable of detecting and visualizing low-contrast text at a granular character level through a pixel-level contrast-based clustering algorithm. Based on experimental findings from 10 real-world cases involving 1106 web elements, we've demonstrated the efficacy of our approach, achieving a high precision of 0.803 and a recall of 0.747.

Real-time systems play an important role in nu-merous industries, including automobiles, telecommunications, medical systems, among others. When designing these systems, we must consider strict timing constraints and operational logic to ensure the correctness and safety during their operation. Model checking is an effective method to bridge the gap between high-level system requirements and formal verification processes. However, practitioners are often requested to have a profound understanding of the system in order to write properties for verification as comprehensively as possible. In this paper, we investigate the potential of utilizing a large language model, G PT-4, to aid in generating properties for the UPPAAL timed automata model. This is accomplished through the reconstruction of the time automata of a classic industrial real-time system concerning a gear controller. We employ four design settings to prompt the model, meticulously inspect and categorize the generated properties, and manually rectify any syntax errors to facilitate verification using UPPAAL. The experimental findings reveal that GPT-4 can generate properties akin to those conceived by humans in 10.3% of cases. Despite exhaustive human-crafted properties, GPT-4 still generates 6 additional properties alongside the 46 human-crafted ones. Notably, GPT-4 can generate new properties even without system requirements, solely relying on provided UPPAAL timed automata and examples of human-crafted properties. However, syntax errors in GPT-4 generated properties are high at 82.5 %, while illogical properties are relatively low at 12.5 %.

Test case recording and playback technology, normally implemented as a test case recorder, has been widely applied in the industry. One of the key research topics is how to determine if a web page has entered a ready state before the recorder can perform the next test command? If a web element is incorrectly selected during playback, the related test command will fail to process. This research puts forward four kinds of automatic waiting mechanism for playing test commands. The experiment result shows that the waiting time can be determined dynamically and automatically, so that testers do not have to manually add waiting commands thereby reducing the time and error of artificial discrimination. The proposed mechanisms were implemented as parts of the SideeX open source web testing software and have been further adopted by the new Selenium IDE and Katalon Recorder. Currently, over 60,000 web testers around the world run the mechanisms.

Microservice architecture (MSA) is an emerging software architectural style, which differs fundamentally from the monolithic, layered architecture. MSA is based on microservices to provide several advantages, such as autonomy, composability, scalability, and fault-tolerance. However, how to manage complex "call" relationships between microservices is still a big issue that needs to be addressed. In this paper, we propose an approach for assisting the development of MSA-based systems, referred to as GMAT (Graph-based Microservice Analysis and Testing). GMAT can automatically generate "Service Dependency Graph (SDG)" to analyze and visualize the dependency relationships between microservices. Using GMAT, people are able to detect anomalies by analyzing risky service invocation chains in early stage of development, and trace the linkages between services when developing a new version of a target system. Experiments show that GMAT is able to work well for both small-scale and large-scale MSA-based systems.

Recently, there is a trend on developing mobile applications based on service-oriented architecture in numerous application domains, such as telematics and smart home. Although efforts have been made on developing composite SOAP services, little emphasis has been put on invoking and composing a combination of SOAP, non-SOAP, and non-Web services into a composite process to execute complex tasks on various mobile devices. Main challenges are two-fold: one is how to invoke and compose heterogeneous Web services with various protocols and content types, including SOAP, RESTful, and OSGi services; and the other is how to integrate non-Web services, like Web contents and mobile applications, into a composite service process. In this work, we propose an approach to invoking and composing SOAP, non-SOAP, and non-Web services with two key features: an extended BPEL engine bundled with adapters to enable direct invocation and composition of SOAP, RESTful and OSGi services based on Adapter pattern; and two transformation mechanisms devised to enable conversion of Web contents and Android activities into OSGi services. In the experimental evaluations, we demonstrate network traffic and turnaround time of our approach are better than those of the traditional ones.

Recently, as more and more mobile devices embedded with intelligent software become part of our daily lives, Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) has gained increasing attention in the development of services for such devices. However, services residing in OSGi platforms are devised specifically for the platforms' local bundles. Although several works have enhanced OSGi with various communication mechanisms that enable remote service invocations, two crucial issues pertaining to mobile computing remain to be addressed: One is limited resources of mobile devices, and the other is unstable links experienced with mobile devices. To address these two issues, we propose an itinerary-based mobile agent approach with four major features: To implement mobile agents as OSGi bundles to deliver distributed OSGi services with lower resource consumption; to extend WSDL and WS-BPEL to help developers design mobile agent itineraries; to provide an opportunistic service matchmaking mechanism allowing mobile agents to adapt to context changes at runtime; and to devise asynchronous communication mechanism to enable reliable mobile agent transmissions among mobile devices with dynamic IP addresses and intermittent connection to the Internet. Through experimental evaluations, we demonstrate that both network traffic and turnaround time of our approach are better than those of client-server ones.

Aspect-oriented approaches have resulted in a great impact on the processing of system properties during the development of software systems. However, a systematic way for eliciting early aspects from requirements is still underdeveloped to better integrate early aspects with the analysis results. As an attempt towards the investigation of the interactions among goals, scenarios, and early aspects, we proposed, in this work, a goal-driven approach to the discovery of early aspects by means of a bidding process that organizes goals into goal clusters for discovering aspectual candidates by exploring the interactions among goals and use cases. By introducing early aspects, the goal-driven approach can be further enhanced to deal with the crosscutting properties in the analysis stage of software development. The proposed approach is illustrated using the problem domains of meeting scheduler system.

The main purpose of this paper is to provide a snapshot of the current status of our two-phase-eight-year nation-wide effort in improving the software engineering education in Taiwan. In the first phase of this program (2004 - 2008), the number of universities that regularly offer software engineering courses grew from 63 to 92 while the number of offered courses grew from 159 to 406. The main objective of the second phase (2010 - 2014) was set to establish and implement the core competences of software engineering in our module programs. Seven capabilities are identified to form the SE core competences, including think computationally, teamwork in software development and maintenance, build abstractions and perform problem domain decompositions, analyze and model complex systems involved various domains, develop, review and verify complex systems involved various domains, create user-friendly interfaces based on user experiences, and manage and evolve large-scale design and development efforts. Multiple actions have also been taken to enhance the core competences of students in ICT-related programs in Taiwan, including developing practical course material, holding training courses for the educators, providing onsite lecturing support, and delivering industrial-oriented practical courses.

Delivering distributed telematics services has gained increasing attention in mobile computing and advanced traveler information fields. In this paper, to design and implement telematics applications, OSGi technology is exploited to support interoperability of various telematics services. Moreover, we propose a mobile agent approach to enabling the delivery of distributed OSGi services, which can gain better performance when applying it to mobile devices with limited resources and unstable connections. An application of telematics services, which assists drivers in reporting accident events when accident occurs and warns them of traffic accidents or jams on their planned routes is developed. In this application, OSGi is adopted as a service platform to manage services provided by diverse devices, while mobile agents are employed to migrate across multiple devices to access required services.

As mobile agents reside on on-board units or mobile devices and act on behalf of drivers, it imposes a strong demand to devise mechanisms for protecting the algorithms that are exclusively coded in mobile agents for different drivers. Although contactless smart cards are widely used as a means to protecting personal information, it is still a challenge to protect the whole code of a mobile agent in a limited storage. In this paper, we propose a tool, called jExtractor, by which the private or sensitive data coded in a Java-based mobile agent can be extracted and moved to a contactless smart card, and can further be read from the card and merged to be the original mobile agent. Moreover, we use 30,000 Java classes as samples to validate jExtractor. In the experimental result, 79.4% of the sample classes can successfully be extracted and moved to Mifare Standard S50 (1K) smart card with our strictest configuration level.

Recently, the growing popularity of requirements engineering attracts an increasing attention on requirements traceability and change impact analysis, which also imposes a great demand for a systematic approach in developing software systems to handling traceability relations and requirements changes in an automatic manner. In this work, a goal-driven requirements traceability approach is proposed to develop and manage requirements changes along three dimensions: (1) to develop software and manage requirements based on the goal-driven use case (GDUC) approach, (2) to establish and maintain the traceability relation with a design structure matrix (DSM) to derive the traceability tree, and (3) to analyze requirements change impacts through the partitioning of DSM into blocks to serve as a basis for calculating use case points. The proposed approach is illustrated by a benchmark problem domain of a meeting scheduler system. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Recently, a trend to use reputation model for selecting service providers becomes evident in the area of electronic commerce. Most of the effort have been made on providing a reliability value associated with the predicted reputation to interpret how reliable is the reputation. However, the predicted reputation will become ineffective with a low reliability value. Rather than providing a reliability of a reputation, in this paper, we propose a reputation model, called Risk-Enabled reputAtion modeL (REAL), by introducing the notion of risks to better interpret the recent performance of a service provider in e-commerce. The proposed approach has been validated as a better model to reflect a service provider's recent performance than given by the extant on-line auctions sites or the models using the technique of adopting mean values.

As open multi-agents systems are getting increasing attentions in building large-scale software systems, the study on agent organizations - a building block of multi-agents systems, becomes a promising research track. Roles as a first class citizen in agent organizations impose an imperious demand for dealing with the major challenge: how agents bind roles in the formation of agent organizations in which agents can dynamically enter or leave the organizations. This challenge can be further decomposed into four issues: how to discover agents distributed over various organizations, how to select reliable agents to bind roles, how to enable agents to cooperate in roles binding, and how to unbind roles as agents leave an organization. The focus of this paper is on an extension to Contract Net protocol with reputation model to address these four issues related to the life cycle of dynamic role binding, called Agent-centric Contract Net Protocol (ACNP), as a negotiation mechanism that agents can adopt to establish agent organizations at run time through roles binding.

Service-Orientated Computing (SOC) has become a main trend in software engineering that promotes the construction of applications based on the notion of services. SOC has recently attracted the researchers' attention and has been adopted industry-wide. However, service composition that enables one to aggregate existing services into a new composite service is still a highly complex and critical task in service-oriented technology. To enhance availability of composite services, we propose a discovery-based service composition framework to better integrate component services in both static and dynamic manner, including (1) to devise a notion of service availability especially for composition; (2) to develop a dynamic service composition (DSC) pattern for addressing the issues of service availability; and (3) to extend Contract Net Protocol (ECNP) to coordinate service discovery, composition and invocation based on the composite pattern. The main benefit of the proposed approach is better availability through attaching multiple candidate services for future binding.

As the number of agents increases rapidly on the Internet, discovering appropriate service agents with required capabilities for request agents becomes a crucial issue in multi-agent systems. Two major discovering approaches have been developed: centralized matchmaking approaches and distributed bidding approaches. However, the former approaches may suffer the problem of middle agent overload and can not reflect the dynamic characteristic of agent capabilities, while the later has the problems of the overhead for maintaining contact lists of service agents in each request agent and sending ineffective CFP messages to non-qualified service agents. To address the above problems, in this paper, we propose a CNP-based bidding mechanism based on Possibilistic Petri Nets that facilitates request agents to find preferred service agents. Moreover, our mechanism provides more flexible match that not only supports exact match but also takes the degree of satisfaction into account.

The notion of organizations is getting increasing attentions for building open multi-agent systems by mimicking the collaboration of human beings for achieving the organization objectives. However, there is little support in the existing approaches to dealing with the issues of dynamic role binding towards building an agent organization in which roles and agents are designed by different designers. The main challenge is how to determine that an agent is capable of assuming a role and to build the relation between the role and the agent. As an attempt towards the investigation of the relationship between agents and roles, we propose an approach, called AgentJ a Java-based agent platform, to dealing with the issues by extending object-oriented programming with the following main features: (1) a role specification and a role matching mechanism are devised to determine whether an incoming agent is capable of assuming a role; and (2) the binding relation between agent and role is established through a role binding mechanism.