Why Do Developers Reject Refactorings in Open-Source Projects?

Refactoring operations are behavior-preserving changes aimed at improving source code quality. While refactoring is largely considered a good practice, refactoring proposals in pull requests are often rejected after the code review. Understanding the reasons behind the rejection of refactoring contributions can shed light on how such contributions can be improved, essentially benefiting software quality. This article reports a study in which we manually coded rejection reasons inferred from 330 refactoring-related pull requests from 207 open-source Java projects. We surveyed 267 developers to assess their perceived prevalence of these identified rejection reasons, further complementing the reasons. Our study resulted in a comprehensive taxonomy consisting of 26 refactoring-related rejection reasons and 21 process-related rejection reasons. The taxonomy, accompanied with representative examples and highlighted implications, provides developers with valuable insights on how to ponder and polish their refactoring contributions, and indicates a number of directions researchers can pursue toward better refactoring recommenders.

Improving bioinformatics software quality through incorporation of software engineering practices

Background Bioinformatics software is developed for collecting, analyzing, integrating, and interpreting life science datasets that are often enormous. Bioinformatics engineers often lack the software engineering skills necessary for developing robust, maintainable, reusable software. This study presents review and discussion of the findings and efforts made to improve the quality of bioinformatics software. Methodology A systematic review was conducted of related literature that identifies core software engineering concepts for improving bioinformatics software development: requirements gathering, documentation, testing, and integration. The findings are presented with the aim of illuminating trends within the research that could lead to viable solutions to the struggles faced by bioinformatics engineers when developing scientific software. Results The findings suggest that bioinformatics engineers could significantly benefit from the incorporation of software engineering principles into their development efforts. This leads to suggestion of both cultural changes within bioinformatics research communities as well as adoption of software engineering disciplines into the formal education of bioinformatics engineers. Open management of scientific bioinformatics development projects can result in improved software quality through collaboration amongst both bioinformatics engineers and software engineers. Conclusions While strides have been made both in identification and solution of issues of particular import to bioinformatics software development, there is still room for improvement in terms of shifts in both the formal education of bioinformatics engineers as well as the culture and approaches of managing scientific bioinformatics research and development efforts.

Evaluation of Determinants of Software Quality in Offshored Software Projects

Successful offshoring engagements of Indian software vendors is increasingly dependent upon the quality of the projects delivered rather than cost considerations. However, delivering quality software is reliant on effective management of various organizational, technological and people aspects. This research is to identify and evaluate the determinants of quality on software projects delivered by vendors through offshoring. Data related to recently completed projects were collected through a survey of 440 project managers from Indian vendors. Based on structural equation modeling, the authors analyze the influence determinants on specific product quality attributes. It is found that, out of six determinants, technical infrastructure and process maturity have significant influence on most of the attributes of quality in offshored IS projects from India. The authors provide a set of implications for practice and directions for further research.

The Influence of the Application of Agile Practices in Software Quality Based on ISO/IEC 25010 Standard

Agile practices are activities or procedures that are applied during the software development process in order to improve its quality and productivity. The objective of this study is to determine the influence of agile practices on software quality. For this purpose, a model composed of 4 groups of agile practices and 8 quality characteristics according to the ISO/IEC 25010 standard has here been proposed. The results of 146 questionnaires addressed to people involved in the software development process show that the application of agile engineering and project management practices have a significant positive influence on the quality attribute functionality. On the other hand, project management practices have a low impact on the quality characteristics of compatibility, portability, security, and usability.

Software Quality Evaluation by Cocomo II With NN and SVM

Cost, time and quality projection are the crucial aspects in software development process. Incorrect estimations can cause losses which in turn may lead to irreversible damage. It is generally perceived that a imperfectly estimated project always results in a substandard quality due to the efforts being wrongly directed. Firstly Effort Estimation is calculated by actual effort and proposed Effort. That Effort evaluation of 500 NASA projects, after that evaluation is done by four parameters Standard Error, Standard Deviation, Mean Absolute Error, Root Mean Square Error. The author amalgamated the robustness of COCOMO-II with that of Neural Network NN and Support Vector Machine SVM .Quality Which we evaluate that is quality Evaluation of Semantic Web Application. In the last checks the majority of all four parameters for software quality assessment.

V-Locate: Development of Web-Based Vulcanizing Shop Locator for 2nd District of Oriental Mindoro

Purpose–When traveling, getting a punctured tire is a common and inevitable problem that makesa vulcanizing shopbusinessindemand in the province. Vulcanizing shop repairs flat tires and sells a typical car and motorcycle needs.However, this small business was not tagged in the known navigation application.Thus, theproponents conceptualizeda Web-based application locatingthe nearest vulcanizing shops and motorcycle spare partsstores. The V-locate will not justprovidethe nearest shops and stores but also theinformation like theofferedproducts and services. The scope of the map on the said application is only limited to the areas within the 2ndDistrict of Oriental Mindoro.Method–The methodology used in development is Rapid Application Development (RAD),suitable for creating active phase software applications. To get the exact coordinates of every vulcanizing shop and spare parts store, the proponents used Geographical Positioning System (GPS) application. Several scripting languages,such asPHP and JavaScript, and theirframework and library, are used to develop the app.Results–The system was evaluated by 60 respondents consisting of faculty, drivers, and Rider's Club members conforming to ISO 25010 software quality standards. Theevaluation resultgot4.4for functional suitability, 4.4 for usability, 4.5 for security, and 4.3 for Performance Efficiency,which shows that the system is efficient and feasible for implementation.Conclusion–The vulcanizing shop in a province like Oriental Mindoro is ofgreat help to travelers when they meet unexpectedemergencies likehaving a flat tire. With that said, the development of the V-Locate application is essential for travelers in case they encounter such a mishap. Recommendations–For further improvement of the system, it is recommended to conduct beta testing and another evaluation using the remaining criteria of ISO 25010. Also,it is crucial towiden the scope of the map and make it offline.Research Implications–Once the system isfully implemented, it will ease the burden oftravelers in Oriental Mindoro to find repair shops in case of an emergency. Moreover, it also promotes and recognizes the existence of vulcanizing shops as a local business in the province.

Hybrid Particle Swarm and Ranked Firefly Metaheuristic Optimization-Based Software Test Case Minimization

Software testing is a valuable and time-consuming activity that aims to improve the software quality. Due to its significance, combinatorial testing focuses on fault identification by the interaction of small amount of input factors. But, deep testing is not sufficient due to time or resources availability. To select the optimal test cases with least computation time, Hybrid Multi Criteria Particle Swarm and Ranked Firefly Metaheuristic Optimization(HMCPW-RFMO) technique are introduced. Initially, the population of the test cases is randomly initialized. Then the fitness is calculated by the pairwise coverage, execution cost, fault detection capability and average execution frequency. RFM approach starts with ‘n’ fireflies. The light intensity of each firefly gets initialized.If the light intensity of one firefly is minor than the other one, it moves near the brighter one. Next, the rank is given to the firefly based on their light intensity. Lastly, the high ranked firefly is chosen as a global best solution.The result reveals that HMCPW-RFMO technique improves the software quality.

ESQuMo an Embedded Software Quality Model

Embedded systems are increasingly used in our daily life due to their importance. They are computer platforms consisting of hardware and software. They run specific tasks to realize functional and non functional requirements. Several specific quality attributes were identified as relevant to the embedded system domain. However, the existent general quality models do not address clearly these specific quality attributes. Hence, the proposition of quality models which address the relevant quality attributes of embedded systems needs more attention and investigation. The major goal of this paper is to propose a new quality model (called ESQuMo for Embedded Software Quality Model) which provides a better understanding of quality in the context of embedded software. Besides, it focuses the light on the relevant attributes of the embedded software and addresses clearly the importance of these attributes. In fact, ESQuMo is based on the well-established ISO/IEC 25010 standard quality model.

The Applicability of Process-Orientation to Software Development Projects

The progress in the digital single market (DSM) has been acknowledged as one of the 10 political priorities by the European Commission since 2015. It could contribute € 415 billion per year (GDP) to the economy of the 28 EU Member States and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Nowadays, the ICT sector and the European Digital Agenda have declared it as one of the seven pillars of the Europe 2020 strategy. In order to speed up the development of new information technology and its commercialisation, it is necessary to increase software quality aimed at accelerating and improving technology transfer, taking into account process quality management. The aim of this article is to give an overview of a new approach to producing an additional value of the software development projects to improve the technology transfer process.

Boosting the Competitiveness of Organizations With the Use of Software Engineering

Software has become the core of organizations in different domains because the capacity of their products, systems, and services have an increasing dependence on software. This fact highlights the research challenges to be covered by computer science, especially in the software engineering (SE) area. On the one way, SE is in charge of covering all the aspects related to the software development process from the early stages of software development until its maintenance and therefore is closely related to the software quality. On the other hand, SE is in charge of providing engineers able to provide technological-base solutions to solve industrial problems. This chapter provides a research work path focused on helping software development organizations to change to a continuous software improvement culture impacting both their software development process highlighting the human factor training needs. Results show that the implementation of best practices could be easily implemented if adequate support is provided.