Browsing by Author "Asgari, Sima"
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Item High Dependability Computing Program: Evolving a Dependability Requirements Elicitation and Modeling Framework Based on Use(2006-11) Donzelli, Paolo; Shull, Forrest; Asgari, Sima; Basili, VictorCorrectly identifying and expressing dependability requirements for software systems has wide-ranging consequences for planning and conducting software development as well as for the final system success. Yet crucial difficulties exist, many stemming from the fact that definitions of “dependable” will vary not only from system to system, but will be perceived differently by different stakeholders of the same system. UMD is a requirements engineering framework for eliciting and modeling dependability requirements that has been devised, to mitigate such difficulties. In this report, we introduce UMD and describe an empirical study designed to shed some light on the feasibility of the ideas behind UMD and to identify which aspects of the framework could be improved, in the perspective that software technology transfer from research to industrial use should proceed iteratively and empirically. Subjects in the study consisted of 7 students in a graduate-level class. Empirical qualitative and quantitative results show that the UMD approach is feasible but also allowed us to identify important missing aspects, confirming our assumption that it was not yet mature enough for a rigorous industrial study. The contributions of this study have been twofold: Demonstrating the usefulness of the tech transfer approach which we have followed as well as the feasibility of the UMD approach.Item A Pilot Study to Evaluate Development Effort for High Performance Computing(2004-04) Basili, Victor R.; Asgari, Sima; Hochstein, Lorin; Hollingsworth, Jeffrey K.; Shull, Forrest; Zelkowitz, Marvin V.The ability to write programs that execute efficiently on modern parallel computers has not been fully studied. In a DARPA-sponsored project, we are looking at measuring the development time for programs written for high performance computers (HPC). To attack this relatively novel measurement problem, our goal is to initially measure such development time in student programming to evaluate our own experimental protocols. Based on these results, we will generate a set of feasible experimental methods that can then be applied with more confidence to professional expert programmers. This paper describes a first pilot study addressing those goals. We ran an observational study with 15 students in a graduate level High Performance Computing class at the University of Maryland. We collected data concerning development effort, developer activities and chronology, and resulting code performance, for two programming assignments using different HPC development approaches. While we did not find strong correlations between the expected factors, the primary outputs of this study are a set of experimental lessons learned and 12 wellformed hypotheses that will guard future study.