Earticle

Maintenance is one of the key phases of software development life cycle, for long term effective use of any software. It can become very lengthy and costly for large software systems, especially when subsystem boundaries are not clearly defined. System evolution, lack of up to date documentation and high turn over rate of software professionals (leading to non availability of original designers of the software systems) can complicate the system structure many folds by making the subsystem boundaries ambiguous. Automated software module clustering helps software professionals to recover high-level structure of the system by decomposing the system into smaller manageable subsystems, containing interdependent modules. We treat software clustering as an optimization problem and propose a technique to get near optimal decompositions of relatively independent subsystems, containing interdependent modules. We propose the use of self adaptive Evolution Strategies to search a large solution space consisting of modules and their relationships. We compare our proposed approach with a widely used genetic algorithm based approach on a number of test systems. Our proposed approach shows considerable improvement in terms of quality and effectiveness and consistency of the solutions for all tests cases.

When developing or analyzing communication network protocols, it is often necessary to study pathological scenarios that may cause protocol performance problems. In this regard, it is well known that detailed protocol simulations are indispensable complements to formal protocol analysis and a number of powerful simulation environments are now available to facilitate such simulations. However to identify key performance characteristics or pathological scenarios, detailed tracing of the actual or simulated protocol executions is required, leading to large quantities of mostly irrelevant data. To find the interesting event sequences, the nature of the events must either be known (so that an automated search can be made for such known events), or the data must be searched more exhaustively. Such searching of detailed simulation trace data for pathological scenarios is tedious and error-prone. EVGATOR is a protocol visualization tool developed at the University of Florida College of Engineering (Gator Engineering) in collaboration with Intellon Corporation, that allows scan trace data quickly and to easily identify pathological situations. EVGATOR is flexible and configurable to display key trace data as space time diagrams with color coding for local protocol states. The juxtaposition and sequence of states can easily reveal problems in a protocol. By incorporating variable time resolution, most of the trace can be examined quickly at a high level, and the interesting segments can then be scrutinized in greater detail. EVGATOR was developed while designing a new generation of high speed Powerline communication protocols as the successor to the HomePlug 1.0 14 Mbps standard, and proved to be of enormous utility in that process. EVGATOR is freely available from the University of Florida, where the tool is undergoing continuous development to make it adaptable for visualization general network protocols.

The issue of conflicts among aspects is not new, however the handling of conflicts is still an open problem. First, the detection of conflicts is a manual task in most of the AOP tools. Second, in general the resolution of conflicts is enclosed to order-schemes. The handling of conflicts can be problematical if the programming tool does not supply suitable structures and specific mechanisms. MEDIATOR is an environment programming that extends Java language to support AOP, with specific and flexible mechanisms to manage conflicts among aspects. The detection of conflicts is an automatic process and the resolution of them is implemented by explicit and symbolic rules.

This research work proposes an idea on the design framework of the IT support for the judiciary system in Thailand. We have performed an in-depth study of the court workflow at the Central Intellectual Property and International Trade Court (CIPITC). Case Management System (CMS) and Web services concepts were applied. We also considered the practicality of system deployment at the civil courts in Thailand. The court authorities were requested to participate in the usability evaluation of the design framework and the software prototype. The evaluation was conducted in three domains: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. The analysis and discussion were then presented as a part of our results.

Requirements elicitation is the important activity in requirements engineering process and it involves in discovering needs, capturing and gathering software requirements from the stakeholders. However, there are few problems faced by requirements engineer in order to carry out requirements elicitation process. The requirements elicitation is lacking in terms of various issues; stakeholders involvement, support tool and complete documentation so as to achieve on time delivery. This process becomes easier if the requirements engineer and the other stakeholders shared a preferred method even though they are in distributed places, geographically. In our case, the requirements engineer (courseware developer) and other stakeholders (schoolteachers) agreed to use Focus Group Discussion (FGD). Therefore, a prototype of Focus Group Discussion for requirements elicitation tool, FGD-RElicit is proposed to assist all stakeholders involved and aims to tackle some of the difficulties in conducting requirements elicitation process. FGD-RElicit is aimed to improve the requirements elicitation process, enhances the software requirements specification (SRS), and feasibly produce much better software. This paper presents the multi viewpoint approach adopted, FGD-RElicit details feature, evaluation and the results of its application in a case study.

The benefits of formal specification methodologies in software development have been identified and well researched. Their use in mainstream software development, however, continues to face a stiff resistance. A prominent reason for this resistance is the fact that there are generally not enough supporting tools to facilitate the development of software from formal specifications. This paper reports on the development of supporting tools for developing software from formal specifications in Real-Time Process Algebra (RTPA). An RTPA to Java Code Generator (RJCG) tool is developed, which combines the functionalities of the syntax checker, lexical analyzer, type checker, semantic analyzer and code generator in facilitating the development of Java code from a formal specification in RTPA. The paper demonstrates that the same concrete grammar rules combined with semantic actions can facilitate the development of a tool with multiple functionalities.