Today I was giving a speech at the 24th International Forum on COCOMO and Systems/Software Cost Modeling held at MIT in Cambridge, MA. I presented the intermediate results I achieved in the research for my master thesis, which is supervised by Dr. Stefan Wagner from TUM and Dr. Ricardo Valerdi from MIT. Here are the slides, as well as the abstract of the work.
Archive for the 'software' Category
In the summer term 2008, I took part in a seminar on software quality at the chair of Univ.-Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Manfred Broy, Technische Universität München. I did extensive research on software quality in general and wrote a paper on the Cost/Benefit aspects of Software Quality Assurance, which I want to present you. The paper points out several interesting aspects on how to optimize investments into various software quality assurance techniques and thus into software quality.
Because of the high quality of the papers written by the seminar participants, the seminar supervisors decided to officially publish the results as working paper of the Technische Universität München. You can find the link to the publication in the links-section at the end of this article.
Please feel free to share your thoughts on this paper.
Cost/Benefit-Aspects of Software Quality Assurance – Abstract:
Along with the ever more apparent importance and critically of software systems for modern societies, arises the urgent need to deal efficiently with the quality assurance of these systems. Even though the necessity of investments into software quality should not be underestimated, it seems economically unwise to invest seemingly random amounts of money into quality assurance. The precise prediction of the costs and benefits of various software quality assurance techniques within a particular project allows for economically sound decision-making.
This paper presents the cost estimation models COCOMO, its successor COCOMO II and COUALMO, which is a quality estimation model and has been derived from COCOMO II. Furthermore an analytical idealized model of defect detection techniques is presented. It provides a range of metrics: the return on investment rate (ROI) of software quality assurance for example. The method of ROI calculation is exemplified in this paper.
In conclusion an overview on the debate concerning quality and cost ascertaining in general will be given. Although today there are a number of techniques to verify the cost-effectiveness of quality assurance, the results are thus far often unsatisfactory. Since all known models make heavy use of empirically gained data, it is very important to question their results judiciously and avoid misreadings.
Download:
Cost/Benefit-Aspects of Software Quality Assurance
Continue reading ‘Cost/Benefit-Aspects of Software Quality Assurance’
In the last couple of weeks I have been working a lot with different databases which I had to connect to from Java. It is sometime stressful to look up the right format of the connection string to the database. Even though, these strings should, or are meant to be standardized, they are not.
I found this very helpful website ConnectionStrings.com which lists the connection strings for open-source as well as professional commercial databases. This list includes among others, the connection strings for Microsoft SQL Server 2008, MySQL, Oracle, IBM DB2, Informix, Postgre SQL, Caché, SQLite, …
I want to share this information with you, because it can save you a lot of time, looking up those strings in tutorials or in the documentation of the different databases. Continue reading ‘SQL Connection Strings’
In this blog post I will make some publicity for Michel´s project of a spellchecker for the luxembourgish language. This project now also contains a thesaurus database which you should extend by new words, if you find something missing (which you probably will, because the project is in an early stage 
)
But before I will try to formulate which improvements have been made and why it is better than before I just cite Michel’s blog post:
The new version of spellchecker.lu is online. After almost exactly two years after the initial release, the free spellchecker for Luxembourgish now has a new website, a nicer logo, an improved online checker as well as a thesaurus (synonym dictionary).
The online checker features the following improvements:
- A more intuitive interface
- A wordlist (also called ”dictionary”) of almost 500′000 words and word forms
- Improved correction of common mistakes (found in instant messaging)
- Improved correction of the so-called “Eifeler Regel” which is unique to Luxembourgish
- Easy-to-use feedback form
Visit spellchchecker.lu for more information.
Wie versprochen werde ich auch mal auf Deutsch bloggen, also hier mein erster deutscher Blogeintrag: Diese Woche habe ich mir ein neues Spielzeug gegönnt, das Nokia E51. Ich will an dieser Stelle nicht unbedingt über die Vorzüge des Nokia E51 referieren und das Handy im Detail erklären, vielmehr will ich ein kleines Tutorial bereit stellen, wie man einen VPN Client auf dem Nokia E51 installiert und wie man sich mit einem VPN Netz verbindet. Da ich für die Installation und Konfiguration des VPN-Clients keine ordentliche Beschreibung im Internet gefunden habe und einige Zeit investiert hab, dachte ich mir ich schreib dieses Turorial inkl. Screenshots um Ihnen die Installation zu erleichtern.
This post contains a downloadable version of my Bachelor Thesis I wrote to complete my studies in computer science at the Technical University Kaiserslautern. The thesis was conducted externally at the Product-Line Engineering Department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering in Kaiserslautern.
Continue reading ‘Evaluating the Architectural Coverage of Runtime Traces’
In this post, I present you a tiny program to send SMS messages through the internet:
SMSing is a simple client/server based application to send SMS text messages through the Internet using Clickatell as service provider. The application supports multiple users, credits, logging aso. In the current version, SMSing should not be used in a productive environment, but shall demonstrate how to use and combine different technologies to send SMS´s. Nevertheless SMSing is really interesting for people sending lots of SMS who are bored to type the text using the keyboard of their mobile phones and pay the high prices of their mobile providers. SMSing even allows you to send anonymous messages, or messages with fake sender-number.
