http://www.computer.org/software IEEE Software's mission is to build the community of leading and future software practitioners. The magazine delivers reliable, useful, leading-edge software development information to keep engineers and managers abreast of rapid technology change. The authority on translating software theory into practice, the magazine positions itself between pure research and pure practice, transferring ideas, methods, and experiences among researchers and engineers. Peer-reviewed articles, topical interviews, and columns by seasoned practitioners illuminate all aspects of the industry, including process improvement, project management, development tools, software maintenance, Web applications and opportunities, testing, usability, and much more. en-us Sat, 25 May 2013 10:00:50 GMT http://csdl.computer.org/common/images/logos/software.gif List of recently published journal articles http://www.computer.org/software http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2013.69 For over 15 years, researchers at the Collaborative Software Development Laboratory at the University of Hawaii have looked for analytics that aid in understanding and improving the process and products of software development. In this paper, we apply the metaphor of "searching under the streetlight" to our work and that of other researchers in the field, and discuss what it implies for future research and development in this area. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2013.69 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2013.70 Educating software engineers is a long-standing challenge. This paper addresses this issue examining the overlap between the software engineering educational standards (SE 2004 and GSwE 2009) and one of the most well-known software process improvement models (CMM-Dev). The resulting data are useful to both industry and academy for improving SE practice. The software industry can take advantage of these results when setting up process improvement goals and training programs. Academia can use the findings to round out SE core knowledge in undergraduate and graduate programs. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2013.70 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2013.67 Performance is a critical component of customer satisfaction with network based applications. Unfortunately, evaluating the performance of collaborative software that operates in extremely heterogeneous environments is difficult to do accurately using traditional techniques such as modeling workloads or testing in controlled environments. In an attempt to evaluate performance of an application “in the wild” during development, we deploy early versions of the software, collecting performance data from application users for key usage scenarios. Our analysis package produces a number of visualizations to help development teams to identify and prioritize performance issues. Our approach has helped teams focus on performance early in the development cycle and enabled them to evaluate their progress, identify defects, and estimate timelines. We present our approach, discuss its deployment and impact, and outline future improvements. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2013.67 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2013.46 The Java 7 platform has included the invokedynamic opcode in its virtual machine. This new feature allows the programmer to define, and dynamically change, the linkage of method call sites, maintaining the platform optimizations. We have developed a library that allows using this new JVM feature from the Java programming language. We present a comprehensive evaluation of invokedynamic performance and how to use the developed library to optimize real Java applications, including two mature dynamic languages. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2013.46 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2013.45 We present a brief survey on the evolution and state-of-the-art of user interface (UI) development technology. We examine the last two decades and provide a short insight into how UI technology evolved, shaped by the desktop, web, and mobile eras. From the technology mainstream, we explain form-oriented, template-based, object-oriented, hybrid, and declarative frameworks. We also address model-driven and generic approaches. The focus of this paper is on a framework of UI development concerns and how these have been addressed in each analyzed technology or group of technologies. At the end, we give a summary of current issues and future directions of UI development in general. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2013.45 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2013.22 Architecture evaluation is an important activity in the software engineering lifecycle that ensures that the architecture satisfies the stakeholders' expectations. Additionally, risks and issues can be uncovered before they cause tremendous costs later in the lifecycle. Unfortunately, architecture evaluation is not regularly practiced in industry. In this paper, we present DCAR (Decision-Centric Architecture Review), an architecture evaluation method that uses architecture decisions as first class entities. DCAR uncovers and evaluates the rationale behind the most important architecture decisions, considering the entire context, in which the decisions were made. Furthermore, it is lightweight and can be performed during or after the design was finalized. Experiences in large industrial projects have shown that full-scale DCAR evaluations, including reporting, can be conducted in less than five person-days, while producing satisfying results for the stakeholders. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2013.22 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2013.21 Software solution providers face numerous pitfalls when using standardized SOA-based solutions. Once cause for pitfalls is variability between customer organizations. For example, in local e-government, variability occurs because of the autonomy of municipalities when implementing national laws. This autonomy results in variations in business processes in different municipalities, which then cause variability in information systems that implement business processes. In this article we report pitfalls that we observed in Dutch e-government, an example of a variability-intensive environment. Furthermore, we present best practices that help deal with these pitfalls and organize the best practices in an architecture pattern. Applying the pattern in more than 20 Dutch municipalities led to successful SOA implementations. As pitfalls are not only applicable to e-government, the proposed pattern can also be applied in other domains to deal with the pitfalls. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2013.21 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2012.171 Agile processes seek just-enough requirements. However, this focus on simple software solutions can be at the expense of ones that meet more creative requirements. To explore alternatives, this paper reports the extension of one agile process with creativity techniques in a project in a large media organization. Domain experts ranked the requirements generated with the process as more novel than baseline epics from the product backlog of the same project, while usefulness of the requirements increased overall after incubation over the duration of a sprint. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2012.171 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2012.132 The AJAX model of development for Web applications has rapidly gained a lot of popularity because of its promise of bringing the richness and responsiveness of desktop applications to the web. AJAX implementations are fundamentally different from other web implementations in main respect - they make asynchronous requests for parts of the web page. Techniques routinely used for performance testing of traditional web applications need to be modified and enhanced to suit the needs of AJAX- based applications. With the help of general example, we examined the unique challenges of carrying out performance testing of AJAX based applications and offer approach and tools for overcoming them. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2012.132 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2012.131 Component-based development is a relatively new paradigm for software development, compared to more established approaches such as object-oriented analysis and design. In this study, we examine the ease of reuse perceptions of analysts in modeling business systems using a library of components vis-à-vis a library of objects. We designed and administered a survey to assess the “ease of reuse” of the two types of assets. We found that IT professionals perceive components to be much easier to reuse than objects. They also expressed significantly higher satisfaction with components and, by a large majority, preferred reusing components to reusing objects. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2012.131 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2012.112 We present a framework to assist programmers in the coding of access control aspects in Java applications. The framework provides a transparent way of managing security aspects in enterprise level applications, including legacy ones. It has been embedded within the open source Integrated Development Environment Eclipse, and it has been used experimentally on several case studies, one of which is described in this paper. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2012.112 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2012.111 Defect density is the ratio between number of defects and software size. In evolutionary product development, to properly assess the defect density, one needs a strong tool and rigid process support, so that defects can be traced to the offending source code. In addition, one has to wait for field defects after the product is deployed. To ease its calculation in practice, we approximate the lifetime number of defects against the software by the number of defects reported in the same development period even if the defects are against previous releases; and we use aggregated code churn to measure the software size. We apply the proposed method to two development projects in medical imaging that involved three geographical locations (sites) with about 30 software engineers and 1.354 million lines of code in the released products. The results of applying the approach to our case study suggest the approach have some merits and validity. We discussed our results in the distributed development context and related our findings to other reports. Our method is simple and operable and can be used by others with situations similar to ours. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2012.111 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2012.75 Time-to-market is a crucial factor in increasing market share in the consumer electronics (CE) market. Furthermore, fierce competition in the market tends to sharply lower the prices of brand-new CE products as soon as they are released. Software-intensive embedded system design methods such as hardware/software co-design have been studied with the goal of reducing development lead-time by designing hardware and software simultaneously. Many researchers, however, concentrate on static design methods—in which design remains unchanged once determined. To survive this deadly market competition, a dynamic design strategy that takes various market conditions into account is needed for software-intensive embedded systems. In this paper, a sustainable embedded software lifecycle planning (SESLIP) process based on the evolution of embedded software is proposed. The SESLIP process provides a dynamic method for both selecting product lifecycle design alternatives and generating a profit-maximizing transition plan that covers the entire lifecycle of a product. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2012.75 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2012.73 This article describes lessons from examining a sample of several hundred support tickets for the Hadoop ecosystem, a widely-used group of "big data" storage and processing systems. We give a taxonomy of errors and describe how they are addressed by supporters today. We show that misconfigurations are the dominant cause of failures. We describe these misconfigurations in detail. Using these failure reports, we identify some of the design "anti-patterns" and missing platform features that contribute to the problems we observed. We offer advice to developers about how to build more robust distributed systems. We also advise users and administrators how to avoid some of the rough edges we found. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2012.73 http://www.computer.org/portal/site/software/ IEEE Software http://www.computer.org/portal/site/software/