INES - National Institute of Science and Technology for Software Engineering

Instituto Nacional para Engenharia de Software opens Research Laboratory at UFRN

The National Institute for Software Engineering, INES, launches an associated research laboratory at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte. Initially, the laboratory will be equipped with 10 workstations among Macs and PCs. This laboratory will provide infrastructure to INES projects that are coordinated by the UFRN research group, ForAll.

Reform of the Laboratory of INES in CIN/UFPE

The project “Software Productivity Laboratory Network ” reform Laboratory of Software Engineering group in CIn/UFPE

The reform would benefit all projects of INES that run on the CIn.

INES at WICSA

INES researchers will participate at  Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture 2009 & European Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA).

The conference, the main one in the software architecture area, the project members will present the paper Experimenting a Process to Design Product Line Architectures, from Ednaldo Dilorenzo, Eduardo Almeida and Silvio Meira. The paper will be presented at 2nd Workshop on Empirical Assessment in Software Architecture.

This activity is part of the project  “An Investigation of Methods, Processes, Tools, and Metrics for the Development of Software Product Lines (SPL)” — in portuguese, Uma Investigação de Processos, Ferramentas e Métricas para o Desenvolvimento de Linhas de Produto de Software.

INES at SBLP, SBES-Tools, and OOPSLA Student Research Competition

The INES project “Evolution and Refactoring tools” published the following papers:

• Gustavo Soares, Rohit Gheyi, Tiago Massoni, Márcio Cornélio e Diego Cavalcanti. Generating Unit Tests for Checking Program Refactorings. In XIII Brazilian Symposium on Programming Languages - SBLP’09, Gramado-RS, Brazil, 2009.
• Gustavo Soares, Diego Cavalcanti, Rohit Gheyi, Tiago Massoni, Dalton Serey e Márcio Cornélio. SafeRefactor – Tool for Checking Refactoring Safety. In XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, XVI Tools Session, Fortaleza, Brazil, 2009.
• Diego Cavalcanti. Improving Safety when Refactoring Aspect-Oriented Programs. Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications (Student Research Competition), United States, 2009.

INES at SBES 2009 (Tools Session)

INES researchers will participate at tools session during the Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering. The tool: BAST: A Tool for Bug Report Analysis and Search, presents an initial solution for the CR duplicated problem.

This activity is part of the project  “An Investigation of Methods, Processes, Tools, and Metrics for the Development of Software Product Lines (SPL)” — in portuguese, Uma Investigação de Processos, Ferramentas e Métricas para o Desenvolvimento de Linhas de Produto de Software.

More details on the publication:

• Cavalcanti, Y. C.; Cunha, C. E. A.; Almeida, E. S.; Meira, S. R. L. BAST: A Tool for Bug Report Analysis and Search , 23rd Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, Tools Session, Fortaleza, Brazil, 2009.

Social Networks as a Knowledge Management Tool for Software Development

On enterprises, a change also called the thrid industrial revolution is happening. This change represents a turn to the knowledge based economy, where knowledge is the most important asset, surpassing traditional resources like earth, capital and work. This collective knowledge and its management contribute the a continued improvement of productivity, raising the enterprise competitiveness.

Knowledge comes from the environment, because it comes form interaction between people and this environment, modifying both during these interactions. Knowledge resides on the mind, behaviour, perception and interaction of people, which is called tacit knowledge. The knowledge which is easily captured, formalized and documented is called explicit knowledge. In general, knowledge management processes focuses on explicit knowledge, which represents only 10% to 20% of all enterprise knowledge. The other 80% to 90% os knowledge is tacit and can not be processed by traditional information systems.

Social networks are tools that help to manage explicit knowledge, and also support people interaction. Because they are usually informal, non-structured and non-hierarchized, the information and knowledge lifecycle allows the social network members to express themselves in a really natural way, reducing the existing barriers of formalizing knowledge.

This project has as main objective to provide the needed mechanisms for using social networks environments as the main Knowledge Management Tool for enterprises and its software development projects. Aiming to achieve this goal, a social networks platform will be extended in order to provide the criation and management of software development projects. Knowledge Management processes will be researched and adapted to help defining a process which fits better to the proposed domain. In addition, a set of metrics and tools will be proposed, implemented, deployed and analysed in order to better support the defined process and evaluate its efficiency.

Engenharia de Software Baseada em Evidências

A evolução e disseminação da engenharia de software experimental tem produzido um grande aumento na disponibilidade de dados e evidências experimentais na área. Esse projeto desenvolverá metodologias de combinação e extração de evidências secundárias em engenharia de software experimental, assim como a construção de conhecimento experimental sobre estas atividades. As açoes estão divididas em dois grandes grupos: (1) desenvolvimento de metodologias e (2) aplicação das metodologias desenvolvidas.

Project An Investigation of Methods, Processes, Tools, and Metrics for the Development of Software Product Lines (SPL)

The project goal is to investigate and define a set of processes for software product lines development, as well as support tools, cases studies, experiments and metrics for industrial use.

Project “Evolution and Refactoring tools”

Software changes often bring elevated costs for the development team. Since the majority of domains nowadays depend of software, it must have its operations fully synchronized with the business it automates. Examples of evolutionary activities include bug correction, addition of new functionalities or improving software quality without modifying its behavior. Refactoring, for instance, aims at improving a software project without modifying its observable behavior. Tool usage, then, becomes vital in the context of evolution tasks, since they are commonly error-prone and time consuming. Besides that, evolution costs are high, which reasons why automating its tasks has such high potential of decreasing production and adapting software costs. This may be noticed in different evolution contexts:

• Refactoring: IDEs such as Eclipse and Netbeans have useful tools for automated refactorings;

• New requirements adaption: tools for change-impact analysis;

• Bug correction: debuggers and, again, impact analysis tools.

This projects aims at contributing for improving the process of software development, especially evolution issues, emphasizing their automation through tools developed following rigorous software engineering techniques. This way, we want to enable significant productivity and quality improvements in the final software development teams result, especially preventive maintenance.

Participators: UFCG, UFPE, UFS, UPE

Definition of a Software Development Testbed

The successful transfer of technology knowledge from academia to industry takes an average of 18 years. Systematic empirical studies tend to expedite this process and consequently reduce the gap between academia and industry.

The aim of this project is to contribute to the Software Engineering advance and, specifically, to develop a methodology for building an environment to support empirical studies planning and execution. These experiments will form a series of scientific evidences aiming to support decision making whether using new technologies that seams promising, for example, aspect-oriented software development.

In particular, this project will develop a methodology for creating a Testbed in order to produce information that will be useful to researchers searching for evaluation of proposed methodologies, techniques, processes and tools. Using the testbed, researchers will select among a set of applications, properly documented, with different versions available, and a set of associated artifacts, which can be used to perform experiments. These experiments will help to clarify the benefits and drawbacks of using a technique, process or tool associated with a particular context. The methodology should guide the development of an environment, which will bring together several empirical experiments. They should have a well-defined structure, specific metrics and predetermined application contexts.

Moreover, by performing different experiments over a same (large) set of applications, the results might also be correlated, giving more strength to the scientific evidences. The purpose is to give better decision making support. In particular, this project will initially focused at aspect-oriented software development. Among the fields of applications for the first version, are included software product lines, information systems, mobile applications, among others.