Browsing by Author "Garousi, Vahid"

Now showing 1 - 14 of 14
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    A Methodology for Analyzing Cost and Cost-Drivers of Technical Software Documentation
    (2012-09-06) Sun, Bo; Ruhe, Günther; Garousi, Vahid
    Software documentation is an important impact factor to achieve high software maintainability, especially for those large-scale complex changing legacy systems. The question: “how much documentation is enough”, is concerned by organizations who are turning their software process to agile development that claims “just enough” documentation. It is therefore important to be able to understand the cost of documentation activities, and what are the underlying cost-drivers, in order to monitor, control and improve documentation practice. However, there is a general lack of such studies dedicated for software documentation cost and cost-drivers. To address this need, a systematic methodology is proposed to analyze cost and cost-drivers of technical software documentation. The methodology primarily consists of the definition of documentation cost and cost-driver metrics, mining software repositories with tool support for automatic measurements, and cost-driver analysis. The main contributions of this thesis are to provide a practical way to understand documentation cost from the perspectives of single document, one documentation type and each author, and to identify underlying cost-drivers towards documentation process improvement. Results from an initial validation from an industrial case study at NovAtel, a leading provider for a comprehensive line of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) products, are reported.
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    A Tester-Assisted Methodology for Test Redundancy Detection
    (2010-01-17) Koochakzadeh, Negar; Garousi, Vahid
    Test redundancy detection reduces test maintenance costs and also ensures the integrity of test suites. One of the most widely used approaches for this purpose is based on coverage information. In a recent work, we have shown that although this information can be useful in detecting redundant tests, it may suffer from large number of false-positive errors, that is, a test case being identified as redundant while it is really not. In this paper, we propose a semiautomated methodology to derive a reduced test suite from a given test suite, while keeping the fault detection effectiveness unchanged. To evaluate the methodology, we apply the mutation analysis technique to measure the fault detection effectiveness of the reduced test suite of a real Java project. The results confirm that the proposed manual interactive inspection process leads to a reduced test suite with the same fault detection ability as the original test suite.
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    Automated testing of an industrial supervisory control and data acquisition (scada) software system
    (2012) Jolly, Shahnewaz Amin; Garousi, Vahid
    This MSc project involved the application of two empirical software engineering approaches, case study and action research, during the systematic testing of a part of an evolving industrial SCADA software system. We performed black-box unit testing (BBUT) on this system according to the developers' requirement where we assess sect the behavior of 57 functions from the system-requirements perspective. Because of the inefficiency of a ailable te ting tools in our context, a customized BBUT tool, AutoBBUT, was developed. This was utilized as a part of this research to automatically generate NUnit test cases satisfying equivalence class partitioning, boundary value analysis and n-way testing. Afterward, we applied two white-box testing technique , code coverage measurement and mutation testing to verify and enhance the strength of these test cases. Finally, effectiveness of symbol and branch coverage was empirically evaluated based on their fault detection ability~ branch coverage was observed having more fault detection ability.
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    Cost-Benefit Analysis of Technical Software Documentation
    (2013-08-27) Zhi, Junji; Ruhe, Günther; Garousi, Vahid
    Software developers often spend a considerable amount of time and effort on writing or maintaining documentation. Therefore, it is necessary to assess how much the documentation actually costs and what it may pay back in return. In a Systematic Mapping (SM) literature study, we collected a set of 69 papers published from 1971-2011 and discovered that more empirical evidence is needed to support the cost-benefit analysis of software documentation. This thesis is intended to fill this gap. We propose Document Cost and Benefit Analyzer (DCBA), a methodology that can be used to comprehensively analyze the costs and benefits of software documentation in software maintenance. To validate DCBA, we report on a case study in which we applied the DCBA methodology to NovAtel Inc. We propose the Cost-Effectiveness Index (CEI) to assess the cost-effectiveness of software documents and explore the relationship between CEI and six other potential impacting factors. Also, we report on a controlled experiment in which 26 students participated. Finally, we propose an automatic visualization tool named DEVis to aid the document evolution analysis. Our findings include (1) Software documentation delays subjects’ completion of experimental tasks, yet helps improve the code quality and makes it easier for in-experienced maintainers to produce quality code, (2) Maintainers spent 10% of the total task time on reading documents in the experimental context, (3) Programming experience does not impact the benefits or costs of documents that maintainers encounter (4) Document type is a factor impacting the cost-effectiveness and other attributes, including the number of authors, the number of visitors, the number of revisions and document size, are not found significantly impacting the cost-effectiveness of documents, (5) Several document visit patterns exist, including Group-sharing, Publication and One-day-only patterns.
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    Introducing Automated Environment Configuration Testing in an Industrial Setting
    (2010) Pinheiro, Caryna; Garousi, Vahid; Maurer, Frank; Sillito, Jonathan
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    A Replicated Survey of Software Testing Practices in the Canadian Province of Alberta: What has Changed from 2004 to 2009?
    (2010) Garousi, Vahid; Varma, Tan
    Software organizations have typically de-emphasized the importance of software testing. In an earlier study in 2004, our colleagues reported the results of an Alberta-wide regional survey of software testing techniques in practice. Five years after that first study, the authors felt it is time to replicate the survey and analyze what has changed and what not from 2004 to 2009. This study was conducted during the summer of 2009 by surveying software organizations in the Canadian province of Alberta. The survey results reveal important and interesting findings about software testing Practices in Alberta, and point out what has changed from 2004 to 2009 and what not. Note that although our study is conducted in the province of Alberta, we have compared the results to few international similar studies, such as the ones conducted in the US, Turkey, Hong Kong and Australia, The study should thus be of interest to all testing professionals world-wide. Among the findings are the followings: (1) Almost all companies perform unit and system testing with a slight increase since 2004, (2) Automation of unit, integration and systems tests has increased sharply since 2004, (3) More organization are using observations and expert opinion to conduct usability testing, (4) The choices of test-case generation mechanisms have not changed much from 2004, (5) JUnit and IBM Rational tools are the most widely used test tools, (6) Alberta companies still face approximately the same defect-related economic issues as do companies in other jurisdictions, (7) Alberta software firms have improved their test automation capability since 2004, but there is still some room for improvement, and (8) Compared to 2004, more companies are spending more effort on pre-release testing.
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    Software process evaluation using a customizable pattern-based simulator
    (2008) Kermani, Keyvan Khosrovian; Pfahl, Dietmar; Garousi, Vahid
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    A Tester-Assisted Methodology for Test Redundancy Detection
    (Hindawi Publishing Corporation, 2010) Koochakzadeh, Negar; Garousi, Vahid
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    Testing and monitoring multi-agent systems for deadlock detection based on UML models
    (2009) Mani, Nariman; Far, Behrouz Homayoun; Garousi, Vahid
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    Tool support for automated traceability analysis in embedded software systems
    (2011) Wiederseiner, Christian; Garousi, Vahid; Smith, Michael Richard
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