Bücher der Reihe International Series in Software Engineering

also in: THE KLUWER INTERNATIONAL SERIES ON ASIAN STUDIES IN COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE, Volume 1

The great challenge of reverse engineering is recovering design information from legacy code: the concept recovery problem. This monograph describes our research effort in attacking this problem. It discusses our theory of how a constraint-based approach to program plan recognition can efficiently extract design concepts from source code, and it details experiments in concept recovery that support our claims of scalability. Importantly, we present our models and experiments in sufficient detail so that they can be easily replicated. This book is intended for researchers or software developers concerned with reverse engineering or reengineering legacy systems. However, it may also interest those researchers who are interested using plan recognition techniques or constraint-based reasoning. We expect the reader to have a reasonable computer science background (i.e., familiarity with the basics of programming and algorithm analysis), but we do not require familiarity with the fields of reverse engineering or artificial intelligence (AI). To this end, we carefully explain all the AI techniques we use. This book is designed as a reference for advanced undergraduate or graduate seminar courses in software engineering, reverse engineering, or reengineering. It can also serve as a supplementary textbook for software engineering-related courses, such as those on program understanding or design recovery, for AI-related courses, such as those on plan recognition or constraint satisfaction, and for courses that cover both topics, such as those on AI applications to software engineering. ORGANIZATION The book comprises eight chapters.

It is my belief that software engineers not only need to know software engineering methods and processes, but that they also should know how to assess them. Conse- quently, I have taught principles of experimentation and empirical studies as part of the software engineering curriculum. Until now, this meant selecting a text from another discipline, usually psychology, and augmenting it with journal or confer- ence papers that provide students with software engineering examples of experi- ments and empirical studies. This book fills an important gap in the software engineering literature: it pro- vides a concise, comprehensive look at an important aspect of software engineer- ing: experimental analysis of how well software engineering methods, methodologies, and processes work. Since all of these change so rapidly in our field, it is important to know how to evaluate new ones. This book teaches how to go about doing this and thus is valuable not only for the software engineering stu- dent, but also for the practicing software engineering professional who will be able to * Evaluate software engineering techniques. * Determine the value (or lack thereof) of claims made about a software engineer- ing method or process in published studies. Finally, this book serves as a valuable resource for the software engineering researcher.

Multimedia has two fundamental characteristics that can be expressed by the following formula: Multimedia = Multiple Media + Hypermedia. How can software engineering take advantage of these two characteristics? Will these two characteristics pose problems in multimedia systems design? These are some of the issues to be explored in this book. The first two chapters will be of interest to managers, software engineers, programmers, and people interested in gaining an overall understanding of multimedia software engineering. The next six chapters present multimedia software engineering according to the conceptual framework introduced in Chapter One. This is of particular use to practitioners, system developers, multimedia application designers, programmers, and people interested in prototyping multimedia applications. The next three chapters are more research-oriented and are mainly intended for researchers working on the specification, modeling, and analysis of distributed multimedia systems, but will also be relevant to scientists, researchers, and software engineers interested in the systems and theoretical aspects of multimedia software engineering. Multimedia Software Engineering can be used as a textbook in a graduate course on multimedia software engineering or in an undergraduate course on software design where the emphasis is on multimedia applications. It is especially suitable for a project-oriented course.

Non-Functional Requirements in Software Engineering presents a systematic and pragmatic approach to `building quality into' software systems. Systems must exhibit software quality attributes, such as accuracy, performance, security and modifiability. However, such non-functional requirements (NFRs) are difficult to address in many projects, even though there are many techniques to meet functional requirements in order to provide desired functionality. This is particularly true since the NFRs for each system typically interact with each other, have a broad impact on the system and may be subjective. To enable developers to systematically deal with a system's diverse NFRs, this book presents the NFR Framework. Structured graphical facilities are offered for stating NFRs and managing them by refining and inter-relating NFRs, justifying decisions, and determining their impact. Since NFRs might not be absolutely achieved, they may simply be satisfied sufficiently (`satisficed'). To reflect this, NFRs are represented as `softgoals', whose interdependencies, such as tradeoffs and synergy, are captured in graphs. The impact of decisions is qualitatively propagated through the graph to determine how well a chosen target system satisfices its NFRs. Throughout development, developers direct the process, using their expertise while being aided by catalogues of knowledge about NFRs, development techniques and tradeoffs, which can all be explored, reused and customized. Non-Functional Requirements in Software Engineering demonstrates the applicability of the NFR Framework to a variety of NFRs, domains, system characteristics and application areas. This will help readers apply the Framework to NFRs and domains of particular interest to them. Detailed treatments of particular NFRs - accuracy, security and performance requirements - along with treatments of NFRs for information systems are presented as specializations of the NFR Framework. Case studies of NFRs for a variety of information systems include credit card and administrative systems. The use of the Framework for particular application areas is illustrated for software architecture as well as enterprise modelling. Feedback from domain experts in industry and government provides an initial evaluation of the Framework and some case studies. Drawing on research results from several theses and refereed papers, this book's presentation, terminology and graphical notation have been integrated and illustrated with many figures. Non-Functional Requirements in Software Engineering is an excellent resource for software engineering practitioners, researchers and students.

Process Improvement in Practice - A Handbook for IT Companies is designed for small IT companies who wish to start with systematic improvement. Process Improvement in Practice - A Handbook for IT Companies is designed for a professional audience, composed of researchers and practitioners in industry.

Engineering tasks are supposed to achieve defined goals under certain project constraints. Especially in the area of testing a project planner is confronted with an abundance of testing techniques, but very little knowledge regarding their effects under varying project conditions.

This book brings together experts to discuss relevant results in software process modeling, and expresses their personal view of this field. It is designed for a professional audience of researchers and practitioners in industry, and graduate-level students.

This book brings together experts to discuss relevant results in software process modeling, and expresses their personal view of this field. It is designed for a professional audience of researchers and practitioners in industry, and graduate-level students.