scholarly journals Evaluating Software Engineering Processes in Commercial and Community Open Source Projects

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony I. Wasserman ◽  
Eugenio Capra
Keyword(s):  
Software Engineering ◽  
Open Source

scholarly journals Leveraging Final Degree Projects for Open Source Software Contributions

Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 1181
Author(s):  
Juanan Pereira
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Software Engineering ◽  
Computer Science ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Communication Skills ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Real World ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Multiple Challenges ◽  
Final Degree

(1) Background: final year students of computer science engineering degrees must carry out a final degree project (FDP) in order to graduate. Students’ contributions to improve open source software (OSS) through FDPs can offer multiple benefits and challenges, both for the students, the instructors and for the project itself. This work reports on a practical experience developed by four students contributing to mature OSS projects during their FDPs, detailing how they addressed the multiple challenges involved, both from the students and teachers perspective. (2) Methods: we followed the work of four students contributing to two established OSS projects for two academic years and analyzed their work on GitHub and their responses to a survey. (3) Results: we obtained a set of specific recommendations for future practitioners and detailed a list of benefits achieved by steering FDP towards OSS contributions, for students, teachers and the OSS projects. (4) Conclusion: we find out that FDPs oriented towards enhancing OSS projects can introduce students into real-world, practical examples of software engineering principles, give them a boost in their confidence about their technical and communication skills and help them build a portfolio of contributions to daily used worldwide open source applications.

scholarly journals Detecting Uninitialized Variables in C++ with the Clang Static Analyzer

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristóf Umann ◽  
Zoltán Porkoláb
Keyword(s):  
Software Engineering ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Programming Languages ◽  
Static Analysis ◽  
Common Source ◽  
Initial Value ◽  
Analysis Techniques ◽  
Specific Variable ◽  
Prototype Tool ◽  
Run Time

Uninitialized variables have been a source of errors since the beginning of software engineering. Some programming languages (e.g. Java and Python) will automatically zero-initialize such variables, but others, like C and C++, leave their state undefined. While laying aside initialization in C and C++ might be a performance advantage if an initial value can't be supplied, working with such variables is an undefined behavior, and is a common source of instabilities and crashes. To avoid such errors, whenever meaningful initialization is possible, it should be used. Tools for detecting these errors run time have existed for decades, but those require the problematic code to be executed. Since in many cases the number of possible execution paths are combinatoric, static analysis techniques emerged as an alternative. In this paper, we overview the technique for detecting uninitialized C++ variables using the Clang Static Analyzer, and describe various heuristics to guess whether a specific variable was left in an undefined state intentionally. We implemented a prototype tool based on our idea and successfully tested it on large open source projects.

Incorporating Free/Open-Source Data and Tools in Software Engineering Education

2014 ◽  
pp. 431-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liguo Yu ◽  
David R. Surma ◽  
Hossein Hakimzadeh
Keyword(s):  
Software Engineering ◽  
Open Source ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Software Engineering Education ◽  
Open Source Data ◽  
Source Data ◽  
Development Processes ◽  
Upper Level ◽  
Development Methods ◽  
Free Open Source

Software development is a fast-changing area. New methods and new technologies emerge all the time. As a result, the education of software engineering is generally considered not to be keeping pace with the development of software engineering in industry. Given the limited resources in academia, it is unrealistic to purchase all the latest software tools for classroom usage. In this chapter, the authors describe how free/open-source data and free/open-source tools are used in an upper-level software engineering class at Indiana University South Bend. Depending on different learning objectives, different free/open-source tools and free/open-source data are incorporated into different team projects. The approach has been applied for two semesters, where instructor’s experiences are assembled and analyzed. The study suggests (1) incorporating both free/open-source tools and free/open-source data in a software engineering course so that students can better understand both development methods and development processes and (2) updating software engineering course regularly in order to keep up with the advance of development tools and development methods in industry.

Bridging the Academia-Industry Gap in Software Engineering

2014 ◽  
pp. 373-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie K. MacKellar ◽  
Mihaela Sabin ◽  
Allen B. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Software Engineering ◽  
Computer Science ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Real World ◽  
Software Application ◽  
Development Framework ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Approach To Teaching ◽  
Development Practice ◽  
Open Source Development

Too often, computer science programs offer a software engineering course that emphasizes concepts, principles, and practical techniques, but fails to engage students in real-world software experiences. The authors have developed an approach to teaching undergraduate software engineering courses that integrates client-oriented project development and open source development practice. They call this approach the Client-Oriented Open Source Software (CO-FOSS) model. The advantages of this approach are that students are involved directly with a client, nonprofits gain a useful software application, and the project is available as open source for other students or organizations to extend and adapt. This chapter describes the motivation, elaborates the approach, and presents the results in substantial detail. The process is agile and the development framework is transferrable to other one-semester software engineering courses in a wide range of institutions.

Learning Software Industry Practices with Open Source and Free Software Tools

2015 ◽  
pp. 997-1012
Author(s):  
Jagadeesh Nandigam ◽  
Venkat N Gudivada
Keyword(s):  
Software Engineering ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Software Metrics ◽  
Software Industry ◽  
Engineering Ethics ◽  
Software Tools ◽  
Free Software ◽  
Incremental Development ◽  
Standards Compliance ◽  
Learning Software

This chapter describes a pragmatic approach to using open source and free software tools as valuable resources to affect learning of software industry practices using iterative and incremental development methods. The authors discuss how the above resources are used in teaching undergraduate Software Engineering (SE) courses. More specifically, they illustrate iterative and incremental development, documenting software requirements, version control and source code management, coding standards compliance, design visualization, software testing, software metrics, release deliverables, software engineering ethics, and professional practices. The authors also present how they positioned the activities of this course to qualify it for writing intensive designation. End of semester course evaluations and anecdotal evidence indicate that the proposed approach is effective in educating students in software industry practices.

Incorporating Free/Open-Source Data and Tools in Software Engineering Education

2017 ◽  
pp. 206-216
Author(s):  
Liguo Yu ◽  
David R. Surma ◽  
Hossein Hakimzadeh
Keyword(s):  
Software Engineering ◽  
Open Source ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Software Engineering Education ◽  
Open Source Data ◽  
Source Data ◽  
Development Processes ◽  
Upper Level ◽  
Development Methods ◽  
Free Open Source

Software development is a fast-changing area. New methods and new technologies emerge all the time. As a result, the education of software engineering is generally considered not to be keeping pace with the development of software engineering in industry. Given the limited resources in academia, it is unrealistic to purchase all the latest software tools for classroom usage. In this chapter, the authors describe how free/open-source data and free/open-source tools are used in an upper-level software engineering class at Indiana University South Bend. Depending on different learning objectives, different free/open-source tools and free/open-source data are incorporated into different team projects. The approach has been applied for two semesters, where instructor's experiences are assembled and analyzed. The study suggests (1) incorporating both free/open-source tools and free/open-source data in a software engineering course so that students can better understand both development methods and development processes and (2) updating software engineering course regularly in order to keep up with the advance of development tools and development methods in industry.

How the FLOSS Research Community Uses Email Archives

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Squire
Keyword(s):  
Software Engineering ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Research Community ◽  
Email Message ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Broad Overview

Artifacts of the software development process, such as source code or emails between developers, are a frequent object of study in empirical software engineering literature. One of the hallmarks of free, libre, and open source software (FLOSS) projects is that the artifacts of the development process are publicly-accessible and therefore easily collected and studied. Thus, there is a long history in the FLOSS research community of using these artifacts to gain understanding about the phenomenon of open source software, which could then be compared to studies of software engineering more generally. This paper looks specifically at how the FLOSS research community has used email artifacts from free and open source projects. It provides a classification of the relevant literature using a publicly-available online repository of papers about FLOSS development using email. The outcome of this paper is to provide a broad overview for the software engineering and FLOSS research communities of how other researchers have used FLOSS email message artifacts in their work.

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