Software-Metrics-and-Quality-Engineering

CSE 8314 (Fall, 2017): Homework #3

Two parts: (part 1a or part 1b) and part 2

Part 1-alternative 1a: Traditional Literature Research

Use the online
resources for software engineering/quality literature as your guide, search (I suspect that the majority will be “search” online, see option 1b below) some journals/magazines/proceedings sources to find some articles on software metrics and and related applications and analyses/modeling, and do the following:

• Browse through at least 3 recent (see below) periodical/proceeding issues where some of the relevant papers in the subject area appear.
• Classify and list related papers for each issue by the following topic areas:
  1. new metrics
  2. new application domains
  3. new models (new usage of metrics data)
  4. software quality engineering,
  5. other (metrics data collection/extraction/mining, tools, etc.)
• Be sure to glance through the abstracts because some titles may not be informative enough for your to make the above categorization.
• For sample reference listing, refer to either of our textbooks.
• If you plan to do a individual study presentation from these papers, please let me know of your desired candidate paper and presentation date.

Some specifics about your literature sources:

• When I say “recent”, it means no more than 10 years old under most circumstances, but typically within the last 5 years.
• Try to use different publications to achieve better diversity. I.e., Do not limit yourself to three issues of the same journal.
• Try to find at least one paper in each category.
• You may want to use some of the more recent papers from our textbooks and online papers/references as index into selected periodical/proceedings issues. However, this may work better for older issues instead of newer ones.

Part 1-alternative 1b: Online Literature Research

If you prefer to do a online literature research, you should satisfy all the above requirements except for the following:

• Instead of browsing 3 physical journal/proceedings issue, you may research on individual papers in each of the three categories defined above, and try to find at least 3 papers in each category.
• Try to stay with online version of “published” literature only. (I.e., not just some personal opinion, blog, etc., posted by individual web users.) One good source for such online publications/subscriptions is the SMU Library “Online Resources” link, which you can all access using your SMU ID card (Library barcode on back).
• When you use online sources, make sure you have access to at least the paper abstracts for this assignment, and the full papers for future ones.

Part 2: Summary and critique

Select one of the papers from Part 1 above, write a short summary of the paper and a critical analysis. Your critique may include, but not limited to, intellectual merit of the work (originality, rigor, etc.), practicality and impact on future application and additional research, relevance to our class and to your work. You summary/analysis/critique should be around 3 or 4 double-spaced pages of text.

If you find the paper/chapter interesting and useful, you might want to prepare a presentation as your individual study presentation. In that case, please let me know when you’d like to do the presentation (the earlier, the better).

It is OK to link your hw#3 to your project, i.e., finding something useful to your project. You may even include a short discussion of the paper(s) in your project report, but not to the extent of this homework assignment.

Also, a few points to pay attention to:

• The selected paper should be a published one and NOT a general survey paper.
• The summary should be your own summary, based on your understanding of the paper, not the authors’ summary/abstract.
• The analysis and critique is an important part of your essay (at least as important as your summary itself), which may include, among other things, an analysis based on what we covered in class on related topics, your subjective assessment of the paper, what you would do differently, practical impact of the reported work, possible followup research and/or applications of the reported work.
• Make it relevant to what you are doing at work.
• Give full citation details (for example reference listing, see either of our textbooks), and provide a copy of the original abstract. If the paper was not publicly available (e.g., internal report) or hard to track down (e.g., regional or industry specific conferences), you need to include a copy of the paper(s) with your homework submission.