35577154
Tool support for software measurement, analysis and improvement
This paper presents our strategy, implementation, and experience with tool support for software measurement, analysis, and quality improvement in a commercial software development environment. The activities that need to be supported include: 1) gathering software product and process measurements, 2) analyzing measurement data, and 3) using the results to assess and improve software quality. We employed existing internal tools, commercial off-the-shelf tools, and new tools that we developed to gather and analyze data, and presented results. These tools were tailored to fit the application environments and were integrated through common rules, multiple purpose tools, and utility programs. This approach has been used successfully in supporting software measurement and quality improvement for several large commercial software products developed in the IBM Software Solutions Toronto Laboratory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
16987100
Measuring Prime Program Complexity
Abstract This paper uses the prime program decomposition of a program as the basis for a measure that closely correlates with our intuitive notion of program complexity. This measure is based upon the information theory ideas of randomness and entropy such that results about structured programming, data abstractions, and other programming paradigms can be stated in quantitative terms, and empirical means can be used to validate the assumptions used to develop the model. As a graph-based model, it can be applied to several graphical examples as extensions not otherwise available to source-code based models. This paper introduces the measure, derives several properties for it, and gives some simple examples to demonstrate that the measure is a plausible approximation of our notions concerning structured programming.
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.
37244
Data Hiding in Film Grain
This paper presents a data hiding technique based on a new compression enhancement called Film Grain Technology. Film grain is a mid-frequency noise-like pattern naturally appearing in imagery captured on film. The Film Grain Technology is a method for modeling and removing the film grain, thus enhancing the compression efficiency, and then using the model parameters to create synthetic film grain at the decoder. We propose slight modifications to the decoder that enable the synthetic film grain to represent metadata available at the decoder. We examine a number of implementation approaches and report results of fidelity and robustness experiments.
16178189
Super-resolution Imaging Using Grid Computing
The super-resolution (SR) imaging is to overcome the inherent limitations of the image acquisition systems to produce high-resolution images from their low-resolution counterparts. In our recent work, the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique has been successfully developed and shown as a promising stochastic approach for addressing the SR problem. However, the MCMC SR approach requires substantial amounts of computational resources, for it not only needs to generate a huge number of samples, but also requires an exhaustive search for obtaining an optimal prior image model. To tackle the above computation challenge, Grid computing is introduced for tackling the SR problem in this paper. The computationally- intensive MCMC SR task is broke down into a set of independent and small sub-tasks, which are further distributed and implemented in the grid computing environment. Their respective results are finally assembled to produce a high-resolution image as the final result of the entire MCMC SR task. Experiments are conducted to show that grid computing can effectively accelerating the execution time of the MCMC SR algorithm.
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.
12486810
A new class of biorthogonal wavelet systems for image transform coding
We construct general biorthogonal Coifman wavelet systems, a new class of compactly supported biorthogonal wavelet systems with vanishing moments equally distributed for a scaling function and wavelet pair. A time-domain design method is employed and closed-form expressions for the impulse responses and the frequency responses of the corresponding dual filters are derived. The resulting filter coefficients are all dyadic fractions, which is an attractive feature in the realization of multiplication-free discrete wavelet transform. Even-ordered systems in this family are symmetric, which correspond to linear-phase dual filters. In particular, three filterbanks (FBs) in this family are systematically verified to have competitive compression potential to the 9-7 tap biorthogonal wavelet FB by Cohen et al., which is currently the most widely used one in the field of wavelet transform coding. In addition, the proposed FB's have much smaller computational complexity in terms of floating-point operations required in transformation, and therefore indicate a better tradeoff between compression performance and computational complexity.