An Empirical Study of Variations in COTS-based Software Development Processes in Norwegian IT Industry

title: Validation of New Theses on Off-the-Shelf Component Based Development
abstract: Using OTS (Off-The-Shelf) components in software development has become increasingly popular in the IT industry. OTS components can be either COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf), or OSS (Open-Source-Software) components. A recent study with seven structured interviews concluded with six theses, which contradicted widely accepted (or simply undisputed) insight. Since the sample size of that study was very small, it is necessary to investigate these theses in a larger and randomized sample. A state-of-the-practice survey in three countries — Norway, Italy, and Germany — has been performed to validate these new theses. Data from 133 OTS component-based projects has been collected. Results of this survey support four and contradict two of the initial theses. The supported theses are: OSS components were mainly used without modification in practice; custom code mainly provided additional functionality; formal OTS selection processes were seldom used; OTS component users managed to get required changes from vendors. The unsupported theses are: standard mismatches were more frequent than architecture mismatches; OTS components were mainly selected based on architecture compliance instead of function completeness.

title: Observations on versioning of off-the-shelf components in industrial projects (short paper)
abstract: Using OTS (Off-The-Shelf) components in software projects has become increasing popular in the IT industry. After project managers opt for OTS components, they can decide to use COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) components or OSS (Open Source Software) components. We have done a series of interviews and surveys to document and understand industrial practice with OTS-based development in Norwegian, German, and Italian IT industry. The perspective is that of a software architect or system integrator, not a developer or maintainer of such components. The study object is a completed development project using one or several OTS components. This paper reports on the versioning aspects of OTS components in such projects. We found that one third of the COTS components actually provided source code, in addition to all OSS components. However, OTS components were seldom modified (i.e. re-used "as-is"), even if source code was available. Although backward compatibility of new releases did not cause noticeable problems for a single OTS component, using several different OTS components in a project caused difficulties in maintenance planning of asynchronous releases and system integration of new releases. Several new research questions have been formulated based on the results of this study.

title: Evaluation strategies for automatic linguistic indexing of pictures
abstract: With the rapid technological advances in machine learning and data mining, it is now possible to train computers with hundreds of semantic concepts for the purpose of annotating images automatically using keywords and textual descriptions. We have developed a system, the automatic linguistic indexing of pictures (ALIP) system, using a 2-D multiresolution hidden Markov model. The evaluation of such approaches opens up challenges and interesting research questions. The goals of linguistic indexing are often different from those of other fields including image retrieval, image classification, and computer vision. In many application domains, computer programs that can provide semantically relevant keyword annotations are desired, even if the predicted annotations are different from those of the gold standard. In this paper, we discuss evaluation strategies for automatic linguistic indexing of pictures. We provide both objective and subjective evaluation methods. Finally, we report experimental results using our ALIP system.

title: Code-coverage guided prioritized test generation
abstract: With Internet applications spreading like wildfire, software testing is challenged with new topics related to the distributed nature of Web applications. We apply code based testing techniques to the testing of Web applications, specifically Java programs. Source code based automatic test generation is difficult because most previous methods use constraint satisfaction models as a solution, which is an NP complete problem [M. J. Gallagher et al. (1997)]. We present a method of guiding users through test case generations. Instead of automating the entire procedure, our method aims at generating a framework of test cases and providing instructions for users to instantiate the framework into actual executable test cases. An early experimental study of this method shows the effectiveness of this method.

title: Quality Evaluation in Flexible Machining Systems: A Flexible Fixture Case Study
abstract: Most of the studies in flexible manufacturing systems address the issues of flexibility, productivity, cost, etc. The impact of flexible lines on product quality is less studied. This paper presents a quantitative model based on Markov chain analysis to evaluate quality performance of a flexible machining system. A case study of flexible fixture is provided to illustrate the applicability of the method.

title: A framework of integrating gene relations from heterogeneous data sources: an experiment on Arabidopsis thaliana
abstract: One of the most important goals of biological investigation is to uncover gene functional relations. In this study we propose a framework for extraction and integration of gene functional relations from diverse biological data sources, including gene expression data, biological literature and genomic sequence information. We introduce a two-layered Bayesian network approach to integrate relations from multiple sources into a genome-wide functional network. An experimental study was conducted on a test-bed of Arabidopsis thaliana. Evaluation of the integrated network demonstrated that relation integration could improve the reliability of relations by combining evidence from different data sources. Domain expert judgments on the gene functional clusters in the network confirmed the validity of our approach for relation integration and network inference.

title: Toward bridging the annotation-retrieval gap in image search by a generative modeling approach
abstract: While automatic image annotation remains an actively pursued research topic, enhancement of image search through its use has not been extensively explored. We propose an annotation-driven image retrieval approach and argue that under a number of different scenarios, this is very effective for semantically meaningful image search. In particular, our system is demonstrated to effectively handle cases of partially tagged and completely untagged image databases, multiple keyword queries, and example based queries with or without tags, all in near-realtime. Because our approach utilizes extra knowledge from a training dataset, it outperforms state-of-the-art visual similarity based retrieval techniques. For this purpose, a novel structure-composition model constructed from Beta distributions is developed to capture the spatial relationship among segmented regions of images. This model combined with the Gaussian mixture model produces scalable categorization of generic images. The categorization results are found to surpass previously reported results in speed and accuracy. Our novel annotation framework utilizes the categorization results to select tags based on term frequency, term saliency, and a WordNet-based measure of congruity, to boost salient tags while penalizing potentially unrelated ones. A bag of words distance measure based on WordNet is used to compute semantic similarity. The effectiveness of our approach is shown through extensive experiments.