:: Term Paper ::
TERM PAPER 2003: My Best View of A Topic in Software Engineering
Topic: A maintenance practice used with real-time communication software
Name : Yong Chee Loong S10
Identify Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution with SC207
In the journal, they mentioned about using UML to explain the preparation
of an initial small program which include using class diagram, test cases,
sequence charts and SDL diagram.
Various methods like the incremental and sandwiched method of the black box
testing have also been used to test. The journal also mentioned making use
of the metrics data for making software quality predication and project estimation.
New Contribution made to the field of software engineering
There have been quite a number of contributions made to the field in which
was mentioned in the journal. Lam and Looms have proposed using the EVE(
evolution engineering ) meta- model to capture the sets of modeling concepts
in requirement evolution, including change, impact, risks and viewpoints.
Schwille has also proposed using models for both products and process characteristic
in the Software Configuration Management , SCM. His approach named Concert
provides building blocks for developing project-specific models. Tsivkin
also came up with the calculation necessary to compare the two method, “all
in one” and “incremental” for transferring a project to
quality assurance.
What is the most interesting is that Yamaura had suggested that main difficulties
of Quality Assurance are cultural reasons rather than procedural and he actually
propose using people of different countries og different cultural background
to achieve high QA. The writers of the journal actually tried using a mixture
of people from different countries and true enough, the QA turn out to be
more effective.
Techniques
The techniques used in the journal are that by first explaining generally
about the context of the whole journal and explained to the various finding
of the related work to the topic of the journal . In this, they explained
on the different problem faced when trying to maintain the real- time communication
systems.
They have make use of the example of STROM telecom of Russia to explain the
various problem while trying to maintain and upgraded their system as well
as fixing all the bugs of their program and dealing with the feedback for
the customers of the telecom in faults and failure. Then from there, the
journal went deeper into the processes of maintenance and let us have a deeper
look at the maintenance of the system through detailed explanation , examples
and most importantly graphical diagram which aid us in having a better understanding
of the whole system working. Then they got into detail like the software
prediction procedure and give us an overview of various methods used to predict
the quality of the new software update by calculations and followed by a
software quality prediction example to let us have a greater understanding
the whole picture after the explanation.
Author Year Article Some decription How does it relate to your main article
Tsivkin 1996 Applying cost analysis to routine software maintenance procedure
Purely theoretical models of the software development and maintenance processes
Calculation on the two methods : “All in one” and “incremental”
Yamura 1997 Can a software project be like Einstein? On his idea of difficulties
on QA There are a lot of explanations on QA accessing.
Relationship of the techniques to lab project
Although the content and main idea of the topic had no relevant relationship with my lab project as the subject of the journal are talking about real- time communication and our lab project are not anything close to it but a lot of their concepts, ideas and methods mentioned in the journal like debugging and cost estimation are very relevant when we need to debugged our programs and to estimate the time and works required for our project. We have also managed to learned a lot from the journal about software maintenance like software maintenance is a customer-and-log-driven process.
My opinion on the improvement of the article
The journal should have mentioned something on the interest and potential value to management and practitioners which is a refinement of the fault-prone module prediction to the source code level and to predict the likely source code line with the problem or bug. The journal description of the practice cannot help us in localizing the bugs.
My opinion on the notations/diagrams
In my opinion, I think that the journal should have given us more diagrams
and graphical explanation to further emphasis on some of the concepts or
words explanation as visual explanation together with words description will
enhance a reader’s comprehension of the journal.
SPECIFIC COMMENTS
Software project: The project is on the software maintenance process where
the prediction process is shown to be intergrated.
Process: The process is the testing of the application of the real-time distributed
system which have been installed and fully operational.
Platform: Platform independent as the issue is about real-time communication
software maintenance and any programming languages can be chosen to depending
on the chosen lauguage initially.
People: Software developers and IT industries/companies are the 2 parties
closely related to the software testing techniques.
Product: A new programme to upgrade or to fix a problem.
Comments on the results presented in the paper
In my opinion, I think the journal reading have been very useful in the future of the software maintenance as it had covered a lot of details on a lot of stuffs like calculation, ways of maintenance and it had also abstract a lot of famous software engineers from different countries ‘s theory and idea and some were even tried and agreed. However I think more study should have been done on the localizing of the bugs in the programme as after all the methods and ways that was mentioned to prevent them or minimized them, not much have been mentioned on how to locate the bugs in the very old parts of the code. Although the newer code have been snowballing on top of the old one and working quite fine, it doesn’t mean that the bugs do not exist in the older parts, it is just that they have not been exposed.