SIGMETRICS

New programmers, some managers, and lots of users don't understand the advantages of a structured software life-cycle. However, only a single experience with coding while designing will convince any incipient software engineer that a controlled process ...

A future data processing historian may someday point to the 1970s as the deoade when business application systems began their adolescent growth period. We entered the 1970s with few truly on-line business systems, and many application designers did not ...

The essence of the commodities business is the ability to react quickly to evolving market conditions. Mocatta, a N.Y. based bullion dealer, is a firm which uses its Data Processing to provide both front office (trading) flexibility and back-office ...

This paper describes prototyping, a state-of-the-art methodology to assist a design team in making a through definition and analysis of new requirements, feasibility, alternative selections, workload impact, system and/or application specification, ...

Accurate specification of user requirements for interactive systems is especially difficult in an environment where the demand for information is intense, short-fused and largely unpredictable.

The Congressional Budget Office was created in 1975 by an ...

In this paper I describe the practical problems of designing a regression test set for an existing mini-computer operating system. The ideal regression test would test each function with all possible combinations of the options for each variation of the ...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the process by which a system's life cycle and its associated life cycle products are managed to ensure the quality and integrity of the system. We call this process configuration control. Although many of the ...

Have you or one of your programmers said: “The system ran yesterday; I only changed one line.” or “I spent my budget, but I'm not done.” or “I fixed that problem yesterday, but it's back now.” or “I thought it would be a nice feature for the operator, ...

The fundamental problems in the control of software are explored. The elements of control as they relate to communications is defined, and the implementation of these elements in solving the fundamental problems and achieving optimal control during a ...

At this very ACM workshop/symposium indicates, software quality is of great concern to both producers and users of software. It should be obvious to those who have attended the earlier sessions today and to those who will attend the sessions tomorrow ...

Automatable metrics of software quality appear to have numerous advantages in the design, construction and maintenance of software systems. While numerous such metrics have been defined, and several of them have been validated on actual systems, ...

Metrics of software quality have historically focused on code quality despite the importance of early and continuous quality evaluation in a software development effort. While software science metrics have been used to measure the psychological ...

There has appeared in the literature a great number of metrics that attempt to measure the effort or complexity in developing and understanding software(1). There have also been several attempts to independently validate these measures on data from ...

This paper discusses Bell Northern Research's experience in utilizing an extended set of test metrics for assuring the quality of software. The theory and use of branch and path class coverage is discussed and the reaction of users in described. This ...

An experiment was performed in which executable assertions were used in conjuction with search techniques in order to test a computer program automatically. The program chosen for the experiment computes a position on an orbit from the description of ...

A complete software testing process must concentrate on examination of the software characteristics as they may impact reliability. Software testing has largely been concerned with structural tests, that is, test of program logic flow. In this paper, a ...

Many people think of reliability as a devoutly wished for but seldom present attribute of a program. This leads to the idea that one should make a program as reliable as one possibly can. Unfortunately, in the real world software reliability is usually ...

An important problem of practical concern is to determine how much testing should be done before a system is considered ready for release. This decision, of course, depends on the model for the software failure phenomenon and the criterion used for ...

An assumption commonly made in early models of software reliability is that the failure rate of a program is a constant multiple of the number of bugs remaining. This implies that all bugs have the same effect upon the overall failure rate. The ...

Estimation of software reliability quantities has traditionally been on stable systems; i.e., systems that are completely integrated and are not undergoing design changes. Also, it is assumed that test results are completely inspected for failures. This ...

During the last decade, numerous studies have been undertaken to quantify the failure process of large scale software systems. (see for example, references 1-12.) An important objective of these studies is to predict software performance and use the ...

An assumption commonly made in early models of software reliability is that the failure rate of a program is a constant multiple of the number of faults remaining. This implies that all faults have the same effect upon the overall failure rate. The ...

This paper gives a model for computing the programming time. The results of tests with programs in APL, BASIC, and FORTRAN are also given and discussed.

An earlier paper presented a model based on software science metrics to give quantitative estimate of the number of bugs in a programming project at the time validation of the project begins. In this paper, we report the results from an attempt to ...

Experimental estimators are presented relating the expected number of software problem reports (B) in a software development project to

the overall reported professional effort (E) in “man months”

the number of subprograms (n)

the overall count of ...

The code itself is useless without adequate documentation. Besides that it is almost impossible to validate and verify code unless it is properly documented. Yet most of the attention of the past has been devoted to producing code and little to ...

This paper will examine the process used in the development of computer applications. The claim is made that the current methodology has serious deficiencies, but that a software development approach is becoming available to help address these problems.

This paper describes an application of Maurice Halstead's software theory to a real time switching system. The Halstead metrics and the software tool developed for computing them are discussed. Analysis of the metric data indicates that the level of the ...