Software Development Waste (SDW) is defined as any resource-consuming activity that does not add value to the client or the organization developing the software. SDW impacts the overall efficiency and productivity of a software project as the scale and size of the project grows. Although engineering leaders usually put in effort to minimize waste, the lack of definitive measures to track and manage SDW is a cause of concern. To address this gap, we propose five measures, namely Stale Forks, Project Diversification Index, PR Rejection Rate, Backlog Inversion Index, and Feature Fulfillment Rate to potentially identify unused artifacts, building the wrong feature/product, mismanagement of backlog types of SDW. We apply these measures on ten open-source projects and share our observations to apply them in practice for managing SDW.

The IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA) is the premier gathering of practitioners and researchers interested in software architecture, component-based software engineering, and quality aspects of complex software systems. The 21st IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2024) continued the tradition of a working conference, where attendees met and where software architects were able to explain the challenges they face and try to influence the future of the field. Interactive working sessions were the place where researchers met practitioners to identify opportunities to shape the future of our field.

Software practitioners use various methods in Requirements Engineering (RE) to elicit, analyze, and specify the requirements of enterprise products. The methods impact the final product characteristics and influence product delivery. Ad-hoc usage of the methods by software practitioners can lead to inconsistency and ambiguity in the product. With the notable rise in enterprise products, games, and so forth across various domains, Virtual Reality (VR) has become an essential technology for the future. The methods adopted for RE for developing VR products requires a detailed study. This article presents a mapping study on RE methods prescribed and used for developing VR applications including requirements elicitation, requirements analysis, and requirements specification. Our study provides insights into the use of such methods in the VR community and suggests using specific RE methods in various fields of interest. We also discuss future directions in RE for VR products.

Research in hardware and software support for Virtual Reality (VR) has significantly increased over the last decade. Given the software platform fragmentation and hardware volatility, there is an apparent disconnect among practitioners while building applications in the VR domain. This paper proposes a role-based model template as a meta-model to specify the bare minimum VR software system. We conducted a grounded-theory-based qualitative study on prevailing and phased-out VR SDKs and standards to propose this meta-model. This model template can help VR practitioners build open-source tools to develop, design, and test VR software systems.

With increasing computing power, capacity and internet connectivity, the ability to learn has crossed classroom boundaries in the form of online learning. The adoption rate and effectiveness of online learning continues to be an area of research. Collaborative and Cooperative (CoCo) learning involves a joint effort by students to understand and solve problems or tasks. Adoption of open source software has also increased with technology-aided collaboration and cooperation. Leveraging the practices of crowdsourced software development, we propose CoCo Learning approach for technical education using virtual labs. About 145 undergraduate engineering students from various institutes participated in our study for a period of one full semester. About 92% of the students conducted an average of 24 virtual experiments with this approach. Nearly 90% of the faculty from these institutes also confirmed that their students' understanding of courses has improved while delivering tangible software artifacts as outcomes.

Quality Models play a critical role in assuring quality and have evolved over 40+ years. They provide support for defining quality attributes, building and measuring the quality of the resulting product. Each quality model adopts a critical view on quality in terms of a set of model elements and relationships between them. This study aims to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art research on quality models with a focus on encompassing model elements and their support to architecting quality. The study was conducted using systematic mapping as the research methodology. A total of 238 primary papers were classified based on the type of research, standards usage, and publication trends. We identified that 17% (40) of papers belong to quality models. These 40 models were analyzed for the underlying meta-model elements and their support for a quality architecture using Bayer's reference architecture framework. The architecture phase mapping analysis shows that quality planning phase is 100% supported, quality assessment is 75% supported, quality documentation is included in 40% models and quality realization aspect is barely considered in 13% models. Quality realization happens through software processes and patterns, and it is necessary to evolve quality models and software process architectures that correlate quality definitions and quality realization mechanisms. Future research is expected in this direction.

Identifying dependency between various artifacts in a large scale software system is a non-trivial task.As the software evolves, multiple artifacts like files, docs, classes, database scripts, etc., are likely to undergo change concurrently.Such artifacts tend to have a dependency between them, otherwise referred to as logical coupling.Researchers have used Support and Confidence as an association rule based measurement to predict the levels of logical coupling among the software artifacts.However, employing a single change on a software artifact can span across various closely related changes when many code contributors are working on the same change.Thus it is important to preprocess and group these semantically related change-sets before identifying logical coupling.In this paper, we propose a method to identify logical coupling and group semantically related change sets.We evaluate our method on real-world git repositories and document our observations.

With more than a trillion web pages, there is a plethora of content available for consumption. Search Engine queries invariably lead to overwhelming information, parts of it relevant and some others irrelevant. Often the information provided can be conflicting, ambiguous, and inconsistent contributing to the loss of credibility of the content. In the past, researchers have proposed approaches for credibility assessment and enumerated factors influencing the credibility of web pages. In this work, we detailed a WEBCred framework for automated genre-aware credibility assessment of web pages. We developed a tool based on the proposed framework to extract web page features instances and identify genre a web page belongs to while assessing it's Genre Credibility Score ( GCS). We validated our approach on `Information Security' dataset of 8,550 URLs with 171 features across 7 genres. The supervised learning algorithm, Gradient Boosted Decision Tree classified genres with 88.75% testing accuracy over 10 fold cross-validation, an improvement over the current benchmark. We also examined our approach on `Health' domain web pages and had comparable results. The calculated GCS correlated 69% with crowdsourced Web Of Trust ( WOT) score and 13% with algorithm based Alexa ranking across 5 Information security groups. This variance in correlation states that our GCS approach aligns with human way ( WOT) as compared to algorithmic way (Alexa) of web assessment in both the experiments.

The increasing usage of smart-phones has resulted in mobile applications replacing or supplementing traditional web-based applications. Given the limitations of the form factor in smartphones, usability can be considered as one of the important attributes that determine the success of a mobile application. The measures available for assessing the usability of mobile applications tend to focus more on human aspects and less on the functional aspects of usability. As part of this paper, we propose a usability evaluation framework to identify functional usability issues specific to mobile applications. This framework uses usability guidelines and code analysis to improve the usability of a mobile application. As a proof of concept, we have built an end-to-end system using the framework to validate and verify usability issues in Android mobile applications. We also generate code recommendations to implement failed usability guidelines.

Virtual Labs allow performance of experiments without real world instrumentation needs. Most of these virtual experiments are simulation based and developed using proprietary or Open Source simulation, Adobe Flash, and other client side software. The procedural steps involved in conducting these experiments are hardwired and require software modification for enhancements or alignment to the course structure. We propose a model based approach that eases development of virtual experiments without dependency on software programmers for any changes. We demonstrate our model driven based approach on Chemical Sciences labs of Virtual Labs, a Government of India initiative. With our model driven based approach, the effort for new experiment development or FOSS conversion of existing experiments that were using outdated technologies is less than a person day as compared to more than a person month.

Ontologies have emerged as a common way of representing knowledge.Recently, people with minimal domain background or ontology engineering are developing ontologies, leading to a corpus of informal and under-evaluated ontologies.Existing ontology evaluation approaches require rigorous application of formal methods and knowledge of domain experts that can be cumbersome or tedious.We propose a lightweight approach for evaluating sufficiency of ontologies based on Natural Language Processing techniques.The approach consists of verifying the extent of coverage of concepts and relationships of ontologies against words in domain corpus.As a case study, we applied our approach to evaluate sufficiency of ontology in two example domains -Education (Curriculum) and Security (Phishing).We show that our approach yields promising results, is less effort intensive and is comparable with existing evaluation methods.

Special issue on software

Peer code review and inspection is a quality improvementsoftware engineering activity consisting of systematicexamination of source code. While peer code review is commonlyused in industrial and open-source software projects, it is seldomtaught or practiced in undergraduate level Software Engineeringcourses. We conduct a study on the use of peer code reviewin a sophomore level introductory Software Engineering courseconsisting of more than 200 students and present our experiences,findings and challenges. We use Bitbucket's (a free code distributedversion control system hosting site for Git and Mercurial)in-built code-review system and web-based hosting service. Weextract the peer code review comments using Bitbucket API fordetecting coding standard or compliance violation and identificationof defects (number and type) by reviewers. We also conducta survey on the benefit of peer code review activity on peercohesion and communication. Our experiments and survey revealthat employing peer code review in an undergraduate class hasseveral learning benefits such as improvement in coding skills,program comprehension abilities, knowledge of coding standard,and compliance and peer communication

Integrated software products are complex in design. They are prone to defects caused by integrated and non-integrated modules of the entire integrated software suite. In such software products, a small proportion of defects are fixed as soon as they are reported. Rest of the defects are targeted for fixes in future product release cycles. Among such targeted defects, most of them seem to be insignificant and innocuous in the current version but have the potential to become acute in future versions. In this paper, we propose an approach to study defect dependency of the reported defect using a dependency metric. Identifying the dependency of a defect in an integrated product suite can help the product stake-owners to prioritize them and help improve software quality.

India has 790+ million active mobile connections and 80.57 million smartphone users. However, as per Reserve Bank of India, the number of transactions performed using smartphone based mobile banking applicationsis less than 12% of the overall banking transactions. One of the major reasons for such low numbers is the usability of the mobile banking app. In this paper, we focus on usability issues related tomobile banking apps and propose a Mobile App Usability Index (MAUI) for enhancing the usability of a mobile banking app. The proposed Index has been validatedwith mobile banking channel managers, chief information security officers, etc.

Traditional engineering disciplines like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, metallurgical engineering have focused on the design of artifacts. However most the modern day software engineering course with in the undergraduate-computing curriculum focuses on teaching software processes rather than design of software artifacts. This paper argues the need for introducing software product engineering, i.e., a course that extensively deals with design of software artifacts in undergraduate computing curriculum. At a broader level, we also argue the need for more undergraduate software engineering programs in India.

In aspect-oriented modeling (AOM), a design is described using a set of design views. It is sometimes necessary to compose the views to obtain an integrated view that can be analyzed by tools. Analysis can uncover conflicts and interactions that give rise to undesirable emergent behavior. Design models tend to have complex structures and thus manual model composition can be arduous and error- prone. Tools that automate significant parts of model composition are needed if AOM is to gain industrial acceptance. One way of providing automated support for composing models written in a particular language is to define model composition behavior in the metamodel defining the language. In this paper we show how this can be done by extending the UML metamodel with behavior describing symmetric, signature-based composition of UML model elements. We also describe an implementation of the metamodel that supports systematic composition of UML class models.

To manage the development of cooperative information systems that support the dynamics and mobility of modern businesses, separation of concern mechanisms and abstractions are needed. Model driven development (MDD) approaches utilize abstraction and transformation to handle complexity. In MDD, specifying transformations between models at various levels of abstraction can be a complex task. Specifying transformations for pervasive system services that are tangled with other system services is particularly difficult because the elements to be transformed are distributed across a model. This paper presents an aspect oriented model driven framework (AOMDF) that facilitates separation of pervasive services and supports their transformation across different levels of abstraction. The framework facilitates composition of pervasive services with enterprise services at various levels of abstraction. The framework is illustrated using an example in which a platform independent model of a banking service is transformed to a platform specific model.

Model driven development (MDD) tackles software complexity through the use of models. However, managing relationships and specifying transformations between models at various levels of abstraction are complex tasks. System models tangled with concerns such as security and middleware make it difficult to develop complex systems and specify model transformations. This paper presents an MDD framework that uses aspect oriented techniques to facilitate separation of concerns. We argue that using the framework will simplify both the model development task and the task of specifying transformations. The conceptual model of the framework is presented and illustrated using distributed transactions at the PIM and PSM levels.

In model driven development (MDD), specifying transformations between models at various levels of abstraction can be a complex task. Specifying transformations for pervasive system features that are tangled with other system features is particularly difficult because the elements to be transformed are distributed across a model. This paper presents an aspect oriented model driven framework (AOMDF) that facilitates separation of pervasive features and supports their transformation across different levels of abstraction. The framework is illustrated using an example in which a platform independent model of a banking application is transformed to a platform specific model.

Access control features are often spread across and tangled with other functionality in a design. This makes modifying and replacing these features in a design difficult. Aspect-oriented modeling (AOM) techniques can be used to support separation of access control concerns from other application design concerns. Using an AOM approach, access control features are described by aspect models and other application features are described by a primary model. Composition of aspect and primary models yields a design model in which access control features are integrated with other application features. In this paper, we present, through an example, an AOM approach that supports verifiable composition of behaviors described in access control aspect models and primary models. Given an aspect model, a primary model, and a specified property, the composition technique produces proof obligations as the behavioral descriptions in the aspect and primary models are composed. One has to discharge the proof obligations to establish that the composed model has the specified property.

Distributed Java applications represent a large growth area in software. Validating such applications using information from runtime interactions is a challenge. We propose techniques for visualizing interactions, specifying and verifying assertions, and checking conformance of the implementation with its design. Our work helps in making the debugging and testing activities more systematic.