Allahbaksh (AB) Asadullah

Management and maintenance of IT infrastructure resources such as hardware, software and the network is an integral part of software development and maintenance projects. Service management ensures that the tickets submitted by users, i.e. software developers, are serviced within the agreed resolution times. Failure to meet those times induces penalties on the service provider. To prevent a spurious penalty on the service provider, non-working hours such as waiting for user inputs are not… Show more

Management and maintenance of IT infrastructure resources such as hardware, software and the network is an integral part of software development and maintenance projects. Service management ensures that the tickets submitted by users, i.e. software developers, are serviced within the agreed resolution times. Failure to meet those times induces penalties on the service provider. To prevent a spurious penalty on the service provider, non-working hours such as waiting for user inputs are not included in the measured resolution time, that is, a service level clock pauses its timing. Nevertheless, the user interactions slow down the resolution process, that is, add to user experienced resolution time and degrade the user experience. Therefore, this work is motivated by the need to analyze and reduce user input requests in tickets' life cycle. Show less

Developers and researchers have been using crowdsourcing in a variety of fields related to software development and software engineering. Crowd based documentation is another yield of crowdsourcing where the coder community or workers document the software. In the present work, we have analyzed how crowdsourcing can be used for an API documentation. The study is based on the fact that good programmers write descriptive variables and method names and continue to do so for future references. A… Show more

Developers and researchers have been using crowdsourcing in a variety of fields related to software development and software engineering. Crowd based documentation is another yield of crowdsourcing where the coder community or workers document the software. In the present work, we have analyzed how crowdsourcing can be used for an API documentation. The study is based on the fact that good programmers write descriptive variables and method names and continue to do so for future references. A variety of tools such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, ETurk and DocIt were evaluated for the purpose. Among these, DocIt and ETurk were built in-house. The evaluation of the documentation was performed by experienced coders. This is a preliminary experiment which was performed in a controlled environment. Results were encouraging and help us to determine that in future crowd based documentation might help to reduce time to market and improve software quality. Show less

Process mining consists of mining event logs generated from business process execution supported by Information Systems (IS). Process mining of software repositories has diverse applications because vast data is generated during Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and archived in IS like Version Control System (VCS), Peer Code Review (PCR) System, Issue Tracking System (ITS), and mail archives. There is need to explore its applications on different repositories to aid managers in process… Show more

Process mining consists of mining event logs generated from business process execution supported by Information Systems (IS). Process mining of software repositories has diverse applications because vast data is generated during Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and archived in IS like Version Control System (VCS), Peer Code Review (PCR) System, Issue Tracking System (ITS), and mail archives. There is need to explore its applications on different repositories to aid managers in process management. We conduct two phase surveys and interviews with managers in a large, global, IT company. The first survey and in-person interviews identify the process challenges encountered by them that can be addressed by novel applications of process mining. We filter, group and abstract responses formulating 30 generic problem statements. On the basis of process mining type, we classify identified problems to eight categories such as control analysis, organizational analysis, conformance analysis, and preventive analysis. The second survey asks distinct participants the importance of solving identified problems. We evaluate proposed Net Importance Metric (NIM) using 1262 ratings from 43 participants. Combined analysis of NIM and first survey responses reveals that the problems mentioned by few practitioners in first survey are considered important by majority in the second survey. We elaborate on possible solutions and challenges for most frequent and important problems. We believe solving these validated problems will help managers in improving project quality and productivity. Show less

There are many heuristics to address 2-bin integer partition problem. The range (R) of the values in the data set and the number of element (N) in the data set are 2-parameters which determine the appropriate heuristics. By and large, for large N, Karmarkar-Karp(KK) heuristics offers solutions. For low values of N, Complete Karmarkar-Karp heuristics (CKK), Horowitz and Sahni (HS), Schroeppel and Shamir (SS), Brute-Force search (BF) offers solutions. However, our computations indicate that for R… Show more

There are many heuristics to address 2-bin integer partition problem. The range (R) of the values in the data set and the number of element (N) in the data set are 2-parameters which determine the appropriate heuristics. By and large, for large N, Karmarkar-Karp(KK) heuristics offers solutions. For low values of N, Complete Karmarkar-Karp heuristics (CKK), Horowitz and Sahni (HS), Schroeppel and Shamir (SS), Brute-Force search (BF) offers solutions. However, our computations indicate that for R > 10 12 and for a specific range of N, depending on R, (R = 10 14 , N = 60 to 150) the best existing heuristics (CKK) takes long or very long CPU time. We are proposing a different heuristic to address this scenario. The proposed heuristic in the paper uses depth-first (like KK) set differencing till N become 48 and from N = 48 to 1 it performs exhaustive search (like HS). For the above mentioned scenario, we found that this combination of strategies gives better and faster solution compared to CKK. Show less

Regression testing is applied to a modified program to ensure no new errors are introduced in previously tested code. This testing is computationally intensive and time consuming. Hence, Regression Test Selection (RTS) techniques are used to select necessary test cases for testing the modified program. The test cases selected from the test suite should potentially identify same errors as identified by running the complete test suite. The existing RTS techniques address only the web services and… Show more

Regression testing is applied to a modified program to ensure no new errors are introduced in previously tested code. This testing is computationally intensive and time consuming. Hence, Regression Test Selection (RTS) techniques are used to select necessary test cases for testing the modified program. The test cases selected from the test suite should potentially identify same errors as identified by running the complete test suite. The existing RTS techniques address only the web services and standalone applications. In this paper, we present a technique to select regression test cases for web based Java applications. Majority of the web applications follow Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The server side components are often distributed and work independently on different nodes. Testing these components is difficult and time consuming. The distributed and batch nature of application leads to major challenges in testing them effectively. We list out some of these challenges and present our tool SoRTEA (Selection of Regression Test for Enterprise Application), which addresses few of them in selection of the regression test cases. Show less

Plenty of open source libraries and frameworks are available for developers these days for reuse in their projects. However the difficulty in finding and reusing the correct API among the hundreds of available APIs far outweighs the advantage of saving time. The problem is acute in enterprise code base. Online forums like Stack Overflow are no help for enterprise source code as they are closed in nature. We have developed a tool called E-Xplore that addresses this issue by letting the… Show more

Plenty of open source libraries and frameworks are available for developers these days for reuse in their projects. However the difficulty in finding and reusing the correct API among the hundreds of available APIs far outweighs the advantage of saving time. The problem is acute in enterprise code base. Online forums like Stack Overflow are no help for enterprise source code as they are closed in nature. We have developed a tool called E-Xplore that addresses this issue by letting the programmers search in large source code base and browse them effectively. The tool also provides related artifacts in the form of result clustering. We evaluated E-Xplore with other tools via user study with developers working on an enterprise banking system with more than 10 million lines of code. A set of common tasks was given to the developers with and without the tool. We observed that the tool offered appreciable time and effort benefits in large scale software system development and maintenance. In this paper we describe the tool and its features which help develop and maintain source code effectively. Show less

Distributed and collaborative software development has increased the popularity of source code repositories like GitHub. With the number of projects in such code repositories exceeding millions, it is important to identify the domains to which the projects belong. A domain is a concept or a hierarchy of concepts used to categorize a project. We have proposed a model to cluster projects in a code repository by mining the latent co-development network. These identified clusters are mapped to… Show more

Distributed and collaborative software development has increased the popularity of source code repositories like GitHub. With the number of projects in such code repositories exceeding millions, it is important to identify the domains to which the projects belong. A domain is a concept or a hierarchy of concepts used to categorize a project. We have proposed a model to cluster projects in a code repository by mining the latent co-development network. These identified clusters are mapped to domains with the help of a taxonomy which we constructed using the metadata from an online Question and Answer (Q&A) website. To demonstrate the validity of the model, we built a prototype for semantic search on source code repositories. In this paper, we outline the proposed model and present the early results. Show less

Research agencies and organizations work on algorithms and techniques to reduce Operational and Capital Expenditure. They move to Cloud to transform the Capital Expenditure (Capex) to Operational Expenditure (Opex). They use the cloud to crunch large amounts of commercial and social data. This paper proposes a heuristic approach to reduce the operational cost of virtual machines (VMs) running Hadoop. The heuristic is simple and effective, it scales the number of Hadoop nodes based on the type… Show more

Research agencies and organizations work on algorithms and techniques to reduce Operational and Capital Expenditure. They move to Cloud to transform the Capital Expenditure (Capex) to Operational Expenditure (Opex). They use the cloud to crunch large amounts of commercial and social data. This paper proposes a heuristic approach to reduce the operational cost of virtual machines (VMs) running Hadoop. The heuristic is simple and effective, it scales the number of Hadoop nodes based on the type and size of the job submitted. We validate our heuristic with Hadoop word-count example on different data samples. Our implementation is independent of the cloud provider. Hence, the heuristic is applicable to both private and public cloud. Show less

Modularization of a software system leads to software that is more understandable and maintainable. Hence it is important to assess the modularization quality of a given system. In this paper, we define metrics for quantifying the level of modularization in Scala and C# systems. We propose metrics for Scala systems, measuring modularization with respect to concepts like referential transparency, functional purity, first order functions etc., which are present in modern functional programming… Show more

Modularization of a software system leads to software that is more understandable and maintainable. Hence it is important to assess the modularization quality of a given system. In this paper, we define metrics for quantifying the level of modularization in Scala and C# systems. We propose metrics for Scala systems, measuring modularization with respect to concepts like referential transparency, functional purity, first order functions etc., which are present in modern functional programming languages. We also propose modularity metrics for C# systems in addition to the Object Oriented metrics that are existing in the literature. We validated our metrics, by applying them to popular open-source Scala Systems - Lift, Play, Akka and C# systems - ProcessHacker and Cosmos. Show less

Online Question and Answer websites for developers have emerged as the main forums for interaction during the soft-ware development process. The veracity of an answer in such websites is typically verified by the number of ‘upvotes’ that the answer garners from peer programmers using the same forum. Although this mechanism has proved to be extremely successful in rating the usefulness of the answers, it does not lend itself very elegantly to model the expertise of a user in a particular domain.… Show more

Online Question and Answer websites for developers have emerged as the main forums for interaction during the soft-ware development process. The veracity of an answer in such websites is typically verified by the number of ‘upvotes’ that the answer garners from peer programmers using the same forum. Although this mechanism has proved to be extremely successful in rating the usefulness of the answers, it does not lend itself very elegantly to model the expertise of a user in a particular domain. In this paper, we propose a model to rank the expertise of the developers in a target domain by mining their activity in different opensource projects. To demonstrate the validity of the model, we built a recommendation system for StackOverflow which uses the data mined from GitHub Show less

Business agility is the key driver for successful enterprises. This is very common in the service industry where service provider has to develop the service and keep it up to date with the technology and industry trends. We present a framework which we created to focus on business feature development at the client side (browser), isolating developers from rapid changes in UI technology. This allowed us for a quick movement to a new UI platform with minimal changes in the existing logic. We… Show more

Business agility is the key driver for successful enterprises. This is very common in the service industry where service provider has to develop the service and keep it up to date with the technology and industry trends. We present a framework which we created to focus on business feature development at the client side (browser), isolating developers from rapid changes in UI technology. This allowed us for a quick movement to a new UI platform with minimal changes in the existing logic. We demonstrate the importance of such a framework and the challenges faced during the framework development. We also reference some of the open platforms which have developed a framework similar to us and how they won over their competitors. Finally, we compare the cost of developing the framework with the cost of business agility. Show less

Cloud storage is a model of networked online storage where data is stored in virtualized pools of storage which are generally hosted by third parties. Access to cloud storage devices (also known as Storage-as-a-Service (IaaS) or Resource-as-a-Service (RaaS) are getting popular because of their anytime-anywhere flexibility and low cost. It is being used for the purpose of storing music files, statements, bills and other important documents, presentations etc. Organizations like Google, Amazon… Show more

Cloud storage is a model of networked online storage where data is stored in virtualized pools of storage which are generally hosted by third parties. Access to cloud storage devices (also known as Storage-as-a-Service (IaaS) or Resource-as-a-Service (RaaS) are getting popular because of their anytime-anywhere flexibility and low cost. It is being used for the purpose of storing music files, statements, bills and other important documents, presentations etc. Organizations like Google, Amazon, Rackspace, and Dropbox are providing space access to storage-on-cloud for multiple uses. Besides organizations the concept of RaaS is getting popular among end-users too. Typically a user scans his important documents and store on the subscribed storage space. This helps him to access his important documents in transit. We first present the key determinants that influence the diffusion of RaaS among the end-users. Further to this, a service model is proposed where the retail point of sale would automatically store the invoices and bills on end-user's cloud. This would reduce the chances of missed documents and unnecessary troubles of scanning. The proposed model would also help to save the printing and paper cost for the retailer as well as for the user, further contributing towards the environment and sustainability. Additionally whenever required the user can provide the access code of the particular bill to the concerned authority for any verifications and approvals. The user can just point to that URL and hence he/she need not print the bilss. This would prevent the production of frauds and forged bills. In the current study we are presenting an improved process flow chart and architecture model for the illustrated concept. This is followed by the architecture description of the proposed service model. Show less