39882874
A comparison of measurement and defect characteristics of new and legacy software systems
Abstract This paper compares the quality characteristics of a large legacy software system and a new one. Defect fixes applied to specific modules during testing are used as the direct quality metric. Indirect quality indicators used in this paper include software metrics of various product and process attributes, including design, size, change, and complexity. We analyze and compare the measurement results by examining their individual distributions, the correlations between defects and quality indicators, and tree-based models linking defects to quality indicators. In both these systems, most of the defects are found to be concentrated on relatively few high-defect modules, which points to the need for appropriate risk identification techniques so that defect removal effort can be focused on those high-defect modules for effective quality improvement. In addition, defects in the legacy system are more closely related to change and data complexity metrics; while defects in the new system are more closely related to various design metrics. These results demonstrate different measurement characteristics for these two types of software systems, and suggest that different quality analysis and improvement methods may be more appropriate and effective for different kinds of software systems.
33942395
Measuring and Modeling Usage and Reliability for Statistical Web Testing
Statistical testing and reliability analysis can be used effectively to assure quality for Web applications. To support this strategy, we extract Web usage and failure information from existing Web logs. The usage information is used to build models for statistical Web testing. The related failure information is used to measure the reliability of Web applications and the potential effectiveness of statistical Web testing. We applied this approach to analyze some actual Web logs. The results demonstrated the viability and effectiveness of our approach.
10468208
Measurement and defect modeling for a legacy software system
This paper analyzes the quality of a large-scale legacy software system using selected metrics. Quality measurements include defect information collected during product development and in-field operation. Other software metrics include measurements on various product and process attributes, including design, size, change, and complexity. Preliminary analyses revealed the high degree of skew in our data and a weak correlation between defects and software metrics. Tree-based models were then used to uncover relationships between defects and software metrics, and to identify high-defect modules together with their associated measurement characteristics. As results presented in tree forms are natural to the decision process and are easy to understand, tree-based modeling is shown to be suitable for change solicitation and useful in guiding remedial actions for quality improvement.
8007887
An application of decision theory for the evaluation of software prototypes
Abstract There is a need to quantify management decision making in software development. To this end, this article presents an application of concepts from economic decision theory to an aspect of this problem currently under study by many in the software engineering community—how to prototype a design and evaluate the effectiveness of this prototype. The role of prototyping as an experimental tool is analyzed and techniques for defining what to prototype and when it is cost effective are introduced. We demonstrate some of these decision theory techniques to define a model that management can use to select solutions from a set of alternative designs.
37559798
Measurement and continuous improvement of software reliability throughout software life-cycle
Abstract Software reliability is one of the most important aspects of software quality. However, most of the existing techniques focus on the system testing and other late stages of development life-cycle. Therefore, they are not effective for early problem identification and reliability improvement. This paper describes our recent work in establishing predictive linkage between software reliability and other entities that we can measure and control early in the development cycle, and using such predictive relations to drive continuous reliability improvement.
5796465
A hierarchical strategy for testing Web-based applications and ensuring their reliability
After examining the specific problems of testing and quality assurance for Web-based applications, we propose a strategy by integrating existing testing techniques and reliability analyses in a hierarchical framework. This strategy combines various usage models for statistical testing to perform high level testing and to guide selective testing of critical and frequently used subparts or components using traditional coverage-based structural testing. Reliability analysis and risk identification form an integral part of this strategy to help assure and improve the overall reliability for Web-based applications. Some preliminary results are included to demonstrate the general viability and effectiveness of our approach.
10434536
Identifying Linear Causal Effects
This paper concerns the assessment of linear cause-effect relationships from a combination of observational data and qualitative causal structures. The paper shows how techniques developed for identifying causal effects in causal Bayesian networks can be used to identify linear causal effects, and thus provides a new approach for assessing linear causal effects in structural equation models. Using this approach the paper develops a systematic procedure for recognizing identifiable direct causal effects.
25090129
Comments on "A translation- and scale-invariant adaptive wavelet transform"
Xiong et al. presented a translationand scale-invariant adaptive wavelet transform. We show that their renormalized signal (pre-wavelet transform) is already translation- and scale-invariant. Thus, it is not just invariant under the wavelet transform. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for renormalized signals to be affine transform invariant.
31406629
Fingerprint Matching with Registration Pattern Inspection
The "registration pattern" between two fingerprints is the optimal registration of each part of one fingerprint with respect to the other fingerprint. Registration patterns generated from imposter's matching attempts are different from those patterns from genuine matching attempts, although they may share some similarities in the aspect of minutiae. In this paper, we present an algorithm that utilizes minutiae, associate ridges and orientation fields to determine the registration pattern between two fingerprints and match them. The proposed matching scheme has two stages. An offline, training stage, derives a genuine registration pattern base from a set of genuine matching attempts. Then, an online matching stage registers the two fingerprints and determines the registration pattern. Only if the pattern makes a genuine one, a further fine matching is conducted. The genuine registration pattern base was derived using a set of fingerprints extracted from the NIST Special Database 24. The algorithm has been tested on the second FVC2002 database. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.
31563264
Fingerprint Minutiae Matching with Orientation and Ridge
An important step in automatic fingerprint identification system (AFIS) is fingerprint matching. The task of fingerprint matching is to verify whether two fingerprints are coming from same finger. In this paper we detail and discuss the fingerprint matching algorithm. A minutia matching algorithm is proposed which modified the algorithm presented by Jain et al. In this algorithm, in order to reduce the effect of noise and false minutiae, block orientation and ridge information are introduced into the minutiae-based matching algorithm in a simple but reliable way. Ridge information which is some sampled points in the ridge are used to align two fingerprints, in order to avoid misalign two fingerprints, we use block orientation to correct the ridge alignment. Experiments on the database FVC2002 show the performance.
16586772
A new state-space approach for super-resolution image sequence reconstruction
Super-resolution imaging is to overcome the inherent limitations of image acquisition to create high-resolution images from their low-resolution counterparts. In this paper, a novel state-space approach is proposed to incorporate the temporal correlations among the low-resolution observations into the framework of the Kalman filtering. The proposed approach exploits both the temporal correlations information among the high-resolution images and the temporal correlations information among the low-resolution images to improve the quality of the reconstructed high-resolution sequence. Experimental results show that the proposed framework is superior to bi-linear interpolation, bi-cubic spline interpolation and the conventional Kalman filter approach, due to the consideration of the temporal correlations among the low-resolution images.