Sharif Digital Repository

Previously, we have proposed a computational model for decision-making in crisis situations called C-RPD (Computational Recognition Primed Decision). In this paper, a software development process customized for Crisis Situations Decision-Making Systems (CSDMSs) is proposed. Agile processes can skillfully manage uncertainty in software requirements and some of their features like incremental development can solve some problems in developing CSDMSs. However, these processes do not provide comprehensive solutions for issues like the lack of enough knowledge about CSDMSs, very rapid changes, urgent need to overcome security challenges, high development unpredictability, and the performance test.... 

Agent-oriented software products are becoming increasingly complicated, and the competitive market is forcing the producers to reduce time-to-market and increase the quality of the software produced. Therefore, developers have come to realize the need for more reliable and efficient agent-oriented software development processes (methodologies) which address the specific needs of each and every project. Software Process Lines provide a solution to this problem by using Process Line Engineering concepts for instantiating bespoke software processes. This research focuses on developing a software process line for Requirements Engineering (RE) in the context of agent-oriented software... 

Process-centered Software Engineering Environments, or PSEEs, are intended for the definition, modification, and enactment of software process models, they thus bring software development processes into effect. Even though research efforts in process-centered software engineering abound, PSEE technology has not received the attention that it deserves. In order to create a concise but effective and practically applicable evaluation framework for PSEEs, this paper first presents a survey of PSEEs and highlights the current state of the art of the technology. The PSEEs which have been reviewed herein have been regarded as software systems, and as such, have been characterized in terms of their... 

Exceptions are an indispensable part of the software development process. However, developers usually rely on imprecise results from a web search to resolve exceptions. More specifically, they should personally take into account the context of an exception, then, choose and adapt a relevant solution to solve the problem. In this paper, we present Exception Tracer, an Eclipse plug in that helps developers to resolve exceptions with respect to the stack trace in Java programs. In particular, Exception Tracer automatically provides candidate solutions to an exception by mining software systems in the Source Forge, as well as listing relevant discussions about the problem from the Stack Overflow... 

Context: Feature model is an appropriate and indispensable tool for modeling similarities and differences among products of the Software Product Line (SPL). It not only exposes the validity of the products’ configurations in an SPL but also changes in the course of time to support new requirements of the SPL. Modifications made on the feature model in the course of time raise a number of issues. Useless enlargements of the feature model, the existence of dead features, and violated constraints in the feature model are some of the key problems that make its maintenance difficult. Objective: The initial approach to dealing with the above-mentioned problems and improving maintainability of the... 

Situational Method Engineering (SME)1approaches help construct bespoke software development processes according to the specifications of the project at hand, but they are time-consuming and costly. A Software Process Line (SPrL) tackles this problem by allowing software processes to be constructed for specific project situations through reusing core process assets. Model-Driven Development (MDD) has been used for automating SPrL Engineering (SPrLE); however, existing model-driven SPrLE methods are deficient as to their coverage of key MDD features. We propose a novel model-driven SPrLE approach that aims to address these shortcomings; it can be regarded as a framework that specifies the... 

Method Engineering (ME) is based on the notion that no two software development projects are identical, and hence, the same development process is never executed twice. The need therefore arises for custom-built software development methodologies that are tailored to fit the specific project situation at hand, thus giving rise to the various Situational Method Engineering (SME) approaches currently in use. A process pattern is a description of a recurring development process fragment that can be used as a building block for engineering development processes. Software development process patterns are extensively used in SME, mainly as process components assembled together to form bespoke... 

Existence of crosscutting concerns in software requirements often intensifies complexity of software development process. Modeling and analyzing of these concerns in the software architecture decrease possibility of finding tangled and complex components in the ultimate design. Aspect oriented ADLs have emerged to overcome this problem; however, imposing radical changes to existing architectural modeling methods is not easily acceptable by architects. In this paper, we present a method to enhance conventional software architecture description languages through utilization of aspect features with special focuses on non-functional requirements (NFRs). © 2007 IEEE  

Context: It is well-known that the use of formal methods in the software development process results in high-quality software products. Having specified the software requirements in a formal notation, the question is how they can be transformed into an implementation. There is typically a mismatch between the specification and the implementation, known as the specification-implementation gap. Objective: This paper introduces a set of translation functions to fill the specification-implementation gap in the domain of database applications. We only present the formal definition, not the implementation, of the translation functions. Method: We chose Z, SQL and Delphi languages to illustrate our... 

Model-Driven Development (MDD) is a promising approach to software development, mainly due to the pivotal role of models in its process, and the high potential it provides for automated model/software generation. Since software processes can themselves be considered as software, any technique or approach applied in the context of software development is also of potential use in the development of software development processes. Accordingly, the MDD approach can potentially be applied in the context of Situational Method Engineering (SME) - a branch devoted to the study of developing bespoke software development processes and methods based on the specific characteristics of the development... 

Nowadays, software product line is an approach to reduce costs of software development, decrease time to market, and increase capabilities of reuse in designing and exploiting software development processes. Moreover, other quality attributes of the project domain should be considered to enhance quality of the product. Meanwhile, taking advantage of software product line makes developers capable of estimating development costs and time to market in a more realistic way. However, old approaches to estimate cost of development and foresee time to market are not suitable enough for software product line. In this paper, some important business parameters and a way to calculate cost and time to... 

It is well known that the use of formal methods in the software development process results in a high-quality software product. However, since formal approaches are just reasoning mechanisms, they do not offer defined ordered steps and guidance for moving between them. Refinement is a technique for moving between specifications but it bears very little resemblance to the real process of software design. An automatic translator from a specification language to an executable code would be highly useful in maximizing the benefits of formal methods. In the domain of database applications, we propose a rule-based algorithm to translate software requirements written in Z specifications to... 

Due to the enlargement and complexity of software systems and the need for maintenance and update, success of systems depends strongly on their architecture. Software architecture has been a key element in software development process in two past decades. Therefore, choosing the correct architecture is a critical issue in software engineering domain, with respect to the extremely extension of architecturedriven designs. Moreover, software architecture selection is a multi-criteria decision-making problem in which different goals and objectives should be considered. In this paper, a Decision Support System (DSS) has been designed which provides software architects with more precise and... 

Complexity of the software development process is often increased by actuality of crosscutting concerns in software requirements; moreover, Software security as a particular non-functional requirement of software systems is often addressed late in the software development process. Modeling and analyzing of these concerns and especially security in the software architecture facilitate detecting architectural vulnerabilities, decrease costs of the software maintenance, and reduce finding tangled and complex components in the ultimate design. Aspect oriented ADLs have emerged to overcome this problem; however, imposing radical changes to existing architectural modeling methods is not easily...