ICSE

Poor management can increase software costs more rapidly than any other factor, yet few studies have been made of poor management. One model suggests that poor management may arise from overly structured thinking on the part of software engineers who ...

What characterizes “healthy” or “satisfactory” software maintenance? How can we know it when we see it? This paper gives initial answers to these questions. We first argue the need for objectively measurable maintenance performance criteria in judging ...

Maintenance of software is a major problem that the data processing industry faces today. This paper describes MAP, a tool, that addresses the problems of software maintenance by helping programmers to understand their programs.

The Ada Language System (ALS) is a complete programming environment for the development of Ada programs. This paper discusses the design objectives of those portions of the ALS which support translation and execution of Ada programs, particularly the ...

Let P be an iterative program on domain D, with state S. A close look at the structure of the loop invariant of P reveals that P has a desirable self stabilizing property: If during the computation, an error causes the state to take a contaminated value ...

The Revision Control System (RCS) is a software tool that helps in managing multiple revisions of text. RCS automates the storing, retrieval, logging, identification, and merging of revisions, and provides access control. It is useful for text that is ...

This paper describes the concept of and a system for configuration control for evolutional software products, in which a wide spectrum of varied software products are being continuously evolved, along with rapid advancements in hardware technologies. ...

Due to modern technology, software will to an increasing extent be frozen into hardware. This is just one example for situations where bugs in the software are absolutely intolerable. Therefore programming must soon become a safe process of program ...

Experiments with quantitative assessment and prediction of software reliability are presented. The experiments are based on the analysis of the error and the complexity characteristics of a large set of programs. The first part of the study concerns the ...

Estimation of the size and time required for software development is probably the most difficult aspect of any project. Up to now, most estimates have been done subjectively by experts. These estimates are often inaccurate. In the midst of development, ...

Traces of numerical programs are used to examine their behavior in a paged virtual memory system. The working set policy is used for the replacement algorithm. It is found that the behavior of such programs is different from the behavior of other types ...

The requirements description which is proved to be correct is the key to the successful development of a reliable system. Since the adaptability of the requirements description language is obtained with a simple and extensible language structure, most ...

The syntax of a requirement specification description language should be similar to the language in which the users think. We have developed a system called JISDOS in which a user can describe his requirements using a formalized Japanese language. The ...

This paper illustrates an approach to designing software information systems. We have found this strategy to be sufficiently systematic and practically useful enough to merit exposition for a wider audience. The most novel aspect of our approach is how ...

This paper presents an overview of the TRW Software Productivity System (SPS), an integrated software support environment based on the Unix operating system, a wide range of TRW software tools, and a wideband local network. Section 2 summarizes the ...

We are currently implementing a system to help experienced programmers during the development, implementation and debugging of their programs. This system, built on top of a screen oriented structural editor, offers possibilities of attaching ...

This paper describes a research project aimed at building and studying prototype environments for Mathematical Software. The project is aimed at gaining actual measurements and experiences that should help solidify knowledge about how to build effective ...

This paper presents an overview of the results from “An Insider's Survey on Software Development”. The purpose of the survey was: to provide a vehicle for the communication of information on the usefulness and effectiveness of methodologies, tools, ...

Data on the history of seven systems was analysed to statistically test the 5 laws of software evolution proposed first by Belady and Lehman in 1976.

While there was some evidence supporting laws 1 and 2, laws 3-5 were not supported by the data. In the ...

Karl Popper has described the scientific method as “the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them”. Software Science has made “bold conjectures” in postulating specific relationships between various 'metrics' of ...

We present in this paper a pseudo functional language and a specification language both of which are designed to describe systems of synchronized processes with shared resources. The semantics of the pseudo functional language is defined by translating ...

We investigate equational inference rules for partial algebras and propose conditionally complete equational inference rules for partial algebras. Based on the results obtained from the investigation we propose a new algebraic specification technique ...

The view is adopted that software requirements involve the representation (modeling) of considerable real-world knowledge, not just functional specifications. A framework (RMF) for requirements models is presented and its main features are illustrated. ...

It is difficult to ensure consistency between a program's design and its implementation. An embedded design language (one superimposed on an implementation language) can help. This paper describes a particular embedded design language that was ...

A Module Package (AMP) is a preprocessor to a PASCAL compiler to support data encapsulation and modular system development. Experience with AMP in developing a software product at Amdahl Corporation has demonstrated its utility and robustness.

Experience in the development and maintenance of software leads to the design of methodologies for different phases of the software engineering process. Such methodologies attempt to usefully support the programmer's thought process for re-creating only ...

This paper examines a family of program test data selection criteria derived from data flow analysis techniques similar to those used in compiler optimization. It is argued that currently used path selection criteria which examine only the control flow ...

A Laboratory Support System (LSS) is provided in all No. 1A Electronic Switching System (ESS) test laboratories to support the ESS software development process. The LSS tools are utilized by the developers to accomplish ESS program database management, ...

The software quality index, SPQL (Software Product Quality Level), is proposed. The index indicates the software quality based on program test results and consists of two subindices: the test accuracy index and the test coverage index. The test accuracy ...

A minicomputer based data entry system recently developed at Bell Laboratories supports 73 transaction types and approximately 1000 fields. The user communicates with the system from a CRT terminal in field-by-field mode via a uniform interface. This ...