Managing Knowledge in Open Source Software Test Process

The increasing adoption and use of Open Source Software (OSS) motivates study of its development. This chapter explores the state-of-the art in OSS development processes, in general, and OSS testing processes, in particular. A conceptual model for software Testing Knowledge Management (TKM) that aims to provide an understanding of the testing domain is introduced. The TKM model is informed by earlier studies and guided by international testing standards. Moreover, the TKM model is equipped with different forms of knowledge, reusable across software projects. Using the TKM model as an integrative conceptual model enables understanding of how knowledge life cycle stages are mapped onto the test process of OSS, what type of knowledge is created at each stage, and how knowledge is converted from one stage to another. The chapter is supported by representative examples of OSS that are mature and currently in widespread use.

Understanding Requirement Engineering Practices

Requirement engineering is a main task in software process. In Software Engineering literature, many best practices and guidelines are present to construct quality software. However, adoption of such uniform guidelines is not in practice across the globe. In this chapter, the authors discuss requirement engineering practices followed in Pakistani small- and medium-scale enterprises. In order to understand work practices the authors conducted a survey and analyzed the responses. They found that cost and budgeting is one of the major issues of Pakistani industry: higher management is not willing to invest to adopt state-of-the-art standardized practices. This situation can be improved by enhancing public private partnerships to get desired quality software in the local IT industry.

ONTO-KMS-TEC

Knowledge management tools have been used in higher educational institutions for years to improve the effectiveness of teaching methodologies. Knowledge management in pedagogical includes processes of knowledge discovery, capture, storage, retrieval, sharing, and understanding. According to Pundt and Bishr, knowledge management aims at facilitating knowledge flow and utilization across every beneficeiary, such as faculty members and students. An ontology can be used to support knowledge retrieval, store, and sharing domain knowledge. The framework and the case studies described in this chapter detail how the knowledge of an engineering subject can be effectively retrieved, stored, and shared among the teachers and the students.

Effort, Time, and Staffing in Continually Evolving Open-Source Projects

Scheduling and staffing are important management activities in software projects. In closed-source software development, the relationships among development effort, time, and staffing have been well established and validated: the development effort determines the development time and the best number of developers that should be allocated to the project. However, there has been no similar research reported in open-source projects. In this chapter, the authors study the development effort, development time, and staffing in an open-source project, the Linux kernel project. Specifically, they investigate the power law relations among development effort, development time, and the number of active developers in the Linux kernel project. The authors find the power law relations differ from one branch to another branch in the Linux kernel project, which suggests different kinds of management and development styles might exist in different branches of the Linux kernel project. The empirical knowledge of software development effort obtained in this study could help project management and cost control in both open-source communities and closed-source industries.

Using KMS as a Tool to Improve Decision Making Process

Knowledge plays a central role in the decision making process, and it provides a better foundation for managers to make high quality decisions. On the other hand, having the right knowledge at the right time to make the right decision is becoming a competitive weapon utilized by organizations to achieve sustained competitive advantage and other strategic goals. Based on that, it is important for organizations to manage their knowledge (organization intellectual asset) in a more effective and efficient way in order to gain such benefits. This chapter explores knowledge management and decision-making processes and its general concepts, reviews several conceptual frameworks of knowledge management that affect the decision making process proposed in the literature, and demonstrates several knowledge-management practices in software development processes. Conclusions and proposed future work are stated at the end of the chapter.

Demonic Fuzzy Relational Calculus

In this chapter, the authors categorize methods that are used to formally specify and verify software requirements. They discuss several formal method-related subjects such as calculus fuzzy and relational calculus.

Knowledge-Based Code Clone Approach in Embedded and Real-Time Systems

Even though human beings are using computers in their day-to-day activities, the terms embedded and real-time systems have received much attention only in the last few years, and they have become an inevitable part of our daily activities. The most evident and highlighted feature of embedded systems is the consideration of time. The significance of time constraints in designing each and every feature of embedded systems has made the software and hardware of embedded systems more complicated and entirely different from ordinary systems. Due to these reasons, several challenges exist in developing and maintaining embedded and real time software. Increase in complexity of the embedded system code increases the chance of occurrence of defects in the embedded software. Failure to deliver the software within the stipulated time, economic constraints faced during the development and the maintenance phase, inadequate testing, design of improper code and its reuse are some of the issues faced during the embedded system software development phase. In this chapter, the authors suggest a knowledge-based approach in managing the issues that arise during the coding and testing phase of embedded and real-time software. Program slicing is used to detect the code clones present in the embedded software, and a knowledge repository of code clones is created. This code clone knowledge repository is utilized during the coding and testing phase of real-time and embedded software, which in turn improves the whole software development process.

Knowledge Management and Semantic Web Services

Information reliability and automatic computation are two important aspects that are continuously pushing the Web to be more semantic. Information uploaded to the Web should be reusable and extractable automatically to other applications, platforms, etc. Several tools exist to explicitly markup Web content. The Web services may also have a positive role on the automatic processing of Web contents, especially when they act as flexible and agile agents. However, Web services themselves should be developed with semantics in mind. They should include and provide structured information to facilitate their use, reuse, composition, query, etc. In this chapter, the authors focus on evaluating state-of-the-art semantic aspects and approaches in Web services. Ultimately, this contributes to the goal of Web knowledge management, execution, and transfer.

A Software System for Grading Diabetic Retinopathy by Analyzing Retinal Images

Medical imaging is very popular and is vital in designing Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) for various diseases such as tumor detection using MRI. Diabetic retinopathy is an eye disease that is caused by the increase of insulin in blood in diabetic patients. It can cause total blindness if not detected and treated in time. The disease affects human retina and shows different signs on retinal surface as time passes. In this chapter, the authors present a software based on novel algorithms for early detection of diabetic retinopathy. It detects dark (Microaneurysms, Haemorrhages) and bright (hard exudates, cotton wool spots) lesions from retinal image. The algorithms consist of retinal image preprocessing, main component extraction, detection of candidate lesions, feature extraction, and finally classification using modified m-mediods based classifier. The proposed system is evaluated using publicly available retinal image databases, and results demonstrate the validity of proposed system.

The Distribution of Testing Activities in Web Services and SOA Environment

Testing in Web services and SOA environment can be far more distributed in comparison with testing stand-alone or traditional applications. This is because such systems are composed of several hybrid components. These include Web servers and their related components, server side applications, communication services, and client side Web services. In this chapter, the authors focus on challenges and opportunities for software testing in SOA environment. They divide testing activities based on three classifications: testing activities that are going to be similar to those in traditional software development environments, testing activities that will be less usable or popular in SOA, and testing activities that will evolve significantly to adapt to the new environment. The authors believe that most generic testing activities are going to stay in any new software development environment. However, their importance, significance, challenges, and difficulties are going to be dependent on the subject environment. Some tasks will be easier to implement and test and others will either be un-applicable or difficult to test and implement in comparison with testing in traditional software development environments.