Software change impact analysis (CIA) methods enable developers to understand potential impacts of a code change so that the change can be executed confidently without affecting reliability of the software. However, existing CIA approaches do not support CIA for all source code granularities. Additionally, they lack support for inter-granular change impact queries and hidden dependencies. This paper introduces Augur, an automated static code analysis-based CIA approach that addresses these shortcomings. Augur infers and maintains semantic and environment dependencies along with data and control dependencies between source code entities across granularities. Additionally, Augur uses Change Impact Query Language, a novel query language for impact analysis proposed in this paper, to support inter-granular CIA queries with batch querying feature. Augur has been realized as a Visual Studio extension called Augur-Tool. We have conducted quantitative evaluation on two open-source and two industrial projects to assess the accuracy of the tool. Results from the evaluation indicate that Augur provides CIA with high accuracy (average precision 55% and average recall 85%).

Siemens Corporate Development Center Asia Australia (CT DC AA) develops and maintains software applications for the Industry, Energy, Healthcare, and Infrastructure & Cities sectors of Siemens. The critical nature of these applications necessitates a high level of software design quality. A survey of software architects indicated a low level of satisfaction with existing design assessment practices in CT DC AA and highlighted several shortcomings of existing practices. To address this, we have developed a design assessment method called MIDAS (Method for Intensive Design ASsessments). MIDAS is an expert-based method wherein manual assessment of design quality by experts is directed by the systematic application of design analysis tools through the use of a three view-model consisting of design principles, project-specific constraints, and an “ility”-based quality model. In this paper, we describe the motivation for MIDAS, its design, and its application to three projects in CT DC AA. We believe that the insights from our MIDAS experience not only provide useful pointers to other organizations and practitioners looking to assess and improve software design quality but also suggest research questions for the software engineering community to explore.

Siemens Corporate Development Center India (CT DC IN) develops software applications for the industry, energy, health-care, and infrastructure & cities sectors of Siemens. These applications are typically critical in nature and require software practitioners who have considerable competency in the area of software engineering. To enhance the competency of engineers, CT DC IN has introduced an internal curriculum titled “FOundation CUrriculum for Software engineers” (FOCUS) which is an adapted version of IEEE's SWEBOK curriculum. The FOCUS program has been used to train more than 500 engineers in the last three years. In this experience report, we describe the motivation for FOCUS, how it was structured to address the specific needs of CT DC IN, and how the FOCUS program was rolled out within the organization. We also provide results obtained from a survey of the FOCUS participants, their managers, and FOCUS trainers that was conducted to throw light on the effectiveness of the program. We believe the insights from the survey results provide useful pointers to other organizations and academic institutions that are planning to adopt a SWEBOK-based curriculum.

REpresentational State Transfer (REST) guided the creation and expansion of the modern web. What began as an internet-scale distributed hypermedia system is now a vast sea of shared and interdependent services. However, despite the expressive power of REST, not all of its benefits are consistently realized by working systems. To resolve the dissonance between the promise of REST and the reality of fielded systems, we critically examine numerous web architectures. Our investigation yields a set of extensions to REST, an architectural style called Computational REST (CREST), that not only offers additional design guidance, but pinpoints, in many cases, the root cause of the apparent dissonance between style and implementation. Furthermore, CREST explains emerging web architectures (such as mashups) and points to novel computational structures.

Decentralized applications are composed of distributed entities that directly interact with each other and make local autonomous decisions in the absence of a centralized coordinating authority. Such decentralized applications, where entities can join and leave the system at any time, are particularly susceptible to the attacks of malicious entities. Each entity therefore requires protective measures to safeguard itself against these entities. Trust management solutions serve to provide effective protective measures against such malicious attacks. Trust relationships help an entity model and evaluate its confidence in other entities towards securing itself. Trust management is, thus, both an essential and intrinsic ingredient of decentralized applications. However, research in trust management has not focused on how trust models can be composed into a decentralized architecture. The PACE architectural style, described previously [21], provides structured and detailed guidance on the assimilation of trust models into a decentralized entity's architecture. In this paper, we describe our experiments with incorporating four different reputation-based trust models into a decentralized application using the PACE architectural style. Our observations lead us to conclude that PACE not only provides an effective and easy way to integrate trust management into decentralized applications, but also facilitates reuse while supporting different types of trust models. Additionally, PACE serves as a suitable platform to aid the evaluation and comparison of trust models in a fixed setting towards providing a way to choose an appropriate model for the setting.

Distributed applications that lack a central, trustworthy authority for control and validation are properly termed decentralized. Multiple, independent agencies, or "partners", cooperate to achieve their separate goals. Issues of trust are paramount for designers of such partners. While the research literature has produced a variety of trust technology building blocks, few have attempted to articulate how these various technologies can regularly be composed to meet trust goals. This paper presents a particular, event-based, architectural style, PACE, that shows where and how to incorporate various types of trust-related technologies within a partner, positions the technologies with respect to the rest of the application, allows variation in the underlying network model, and works in a dynamic setting. Initial experiments with variants of two sample decentralized applications developed in the PACE style reveal the virtues of dealing with all aspects of application structure and trust in a comprehensive fashion.