Browsing by Subject "Empirical studies"
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Item Open Access Are software engineers' responses to incomplete requirements related to project characteristics?(IEEE, 2009) Albayrak, Özlem; Albayrak, Duygu; Kiliç, T.Software requirements quality affects software product quality. For high-quality software products, software requirements must be complete. When faced with incomplete requirements, software engineers attempt to fill the requirements' gaps differently, either by getting feedback from the user or by making assumptions. Assumptions may be explicit or implicit. Explicit assumptions are preferable to implicit assumptions as explicit assumptions can be validated. We conduct an empirical study to determine whether the number of explicit assumptions made by software engineers is related to a project's characteristics. Using data from two CMMI Level 3 companies and 16 projects, we investigated the responses of 92 software engineers to the same incomplete software requirement. Our findings show possible relationships between projects' characteristics and the number of explicit assumptions. ©2009 IEEE.Item Open Access Incomplete software requirements and assumptions made by software engineers(IEEE, 2009) Albayrak, Özlem; Kurtoǧlu, Hülya; Biçakçi, M.Many software engineers make implicit assumptions when working with incomplete software requirements. To study assumptions made by software engineers while converting incomplete requirements to software design or to implementation phase deliverables, we conducted an experiment with 251 software engineers from eight companies. The results of this empirical study showed that how software engineers responded (using source code, pseudo code, or prototype) to an incomplete requirement significantly impacted the number of explicit assumptions they made. We studied relationships between the number of explicit assumptions and the engineers' experience and educational backgrounds. On average, non-computer-background engineers made more explicit assumptions than computerbackground graduates. We found a significant relationship between the engineers' experience and the number of explicit assumptions made. We discuss the results and their implications. © 2009 IEEE.Item Open Access Investigation of individual factors impacting the effectiveness of requirements inspections: a replicated experiment(Springer, 2014-02) Albayrak, Ö.; Carver, J. C.This paper presents a replication of an empirical study regarding the impact of individual factors on the effectiveness of requirements inspections. Experimental replications are important for verifying results and investigating the generality of empirical studies. We utilized the lab package and procedures from the original study, with some changes and additions, to conduct the replication with 69 professional developers in three different companies in Turkey. In general the results of the replication were consistent with those of the original study. The main result from the original study, which is supported in the replication, was that inspectors whose degree is in a field related to software engineering are less effective during a requirements inspection than inspectors whose degrees are in other fields. In addition, we found that Company, Experience, and English Proficiency impacted inspection effectiveness.Item Open Access One-dimensional partitioning for heterogeneous systems: theory and practice(Academic Press, 2008-11) Pınar, A.; Tabak, E. K.; Aykanat, CevdetWe study the problem of one-dimensional partitioning of nonuniform workload arrays, with optimal load balancing for heterogeneous systems. We look at two cases: chain-on-chain partitioning, where the order of the processors is specified, and chain partitioning, where processor permutation is allowed. We present polynomial time algorithms to solve the chain-on-chain partitioning problem optimally, while we prove that the chain partitioning problem is NP-complete. Our empirical studies show that our proposed exact algorithms produce substantially better results than heuristics, while solution times remain comparable. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Item Open Access Shortest unique substring query revisited(Springer, Cham, 2014) Ileri, Atalay Mert; Külekci, M.O.; Xu, B.We revisit the problem of finding shortest unique substring (SUS) proposed recently by Pei et al. (ICDE'13). We propose an optimal O(n) time and space algorithm that can find an SUS for every location of a string of size n and thus significantly improve their O(n 2) time complexity. Our method also supports finding all the SUSes covering every location, whereas theirs can find only one SUS for every location. Further, our solution is simpler and easier to implement and can also be more space efficient in practice, since we only use the inverse suffix array and the longest common prefix array of the string, while their algorithm uses the suffix tree of the string and other auxiliary data structures. Our theoretical results are validated by an empirical study that shows our method is much faster and more space-saving. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.Item Open Access A study to observe relations between software engineers' responses to incomplete requirements and requirements volatility(2009) Albayrak Ö.; Bicakci, M.; Bozkurt H.For high quality software, software requirements must be complete. In practice, not all software requirements are complete. In case of incomplete software requirements, software engineers fill in the requirements' gaps by getting feedback from the stakeholders or by making explicit or implicit assumptions. Explicit assumptions can be validated during analysis, while implicit assumptions validation is carried to design and implementation. Thus, compared to implicit assumption, explicit assumptions are better. Software requirements specifications change during different phases of project life-cycle. In an attempt to improve software development processes, we conducted an empirical study to search possible relationships between the number of implicit assumptions made by software engineers and requirements' volatility. This practice paper presents data from three completed projects at one CMMI level 3 company. Within the limit of our data set, our experience shows that possible relationships between projects' requirements volatility and the number of implicit assumptions are worth studying.