Through out the software development process, it is unavoidable to have risk. However, risk is not totally bad to us.

"Risk in itself is not bad; risk is essential to progress, and failure is often a key part of learning. But we must learn to balance the possible negative consequences of risk against the potential benefits of its associated opportunity."

[Van Scoy, Roger L. Software Development Risk: Opportunity, Not Problem. Software Engineering Institute, CMU/SEI-92-TR-30, ADA 258743, September 1992]

Visit the SEI Risk Management Overview and you will get more familiar with some principles for risk management.

Risk Management Overview
- posted by Ken @ 11:50 AM

 
While I was searching for tools to check coding standard for my FYP, I found an open source tool, JCSC, to do this. I've tried it, and it really response with useful information on coding stardard violation and metrics on my code. For those who are writing JAVA, this tool will absolutely imporve your software quality in terms of coding standard and metrics.
- posted by Ken @ 1:09 PM

 
While I was preparing for the lecture this week, I found several informative web sites on software metrics and would like to share with you.

In the Taxonomy of Structural Software Metrics section of this page, the traditional software metrics are classified into categories. It give some definition and constriant on the categories.
http://web.cs.mun.ca/~ulf/gloss/complex.html

Since OO methodology is becoming more and more popular, a set of OO software metrics is defined. You can find the detail definitions on these OO software metrics.
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/qualazur/$swmesu2.htm

This is another page on OO software metrics. It interests me because it explain the difference between OO and traditional metrics.
http://www.ipipan.gda.pl/~marek/objects/TOA/moose.html

With the above web pages, you would be more familiar with software metrics. However, when you are performing software measurement, there are 10 traps for you to avoid. Click the link below and learn how to avoid those traps.
http://www.processimpact.com/articles/mtraps.html

Hope you enjoy these sites.
- posted by Ken @ 1:22 PM

 
Newly invented MDA, OCL and UML2.0 are marked to be the core components of the future software engineering. These 3 components are said to be able to combine and perform code generation task.

What is MDA, OCL and UML2.0?
How can they work together?
Is there any tool helping us in using these components?

We can find the answer in this web site. This web site briefly introduce MDA, OCL and UML, how they interact and some tools related to them.

http://www.klasse.nl/english/overig/index.html
- posted by Ken @ 4:32 PM

 
According to the definition by IEEE, quality assurance is "A planned and systematic pattern of all actions necessary to provide adequate confidence that an item or product conforms to established techical requirements". Thus, a software quality assurance plan (SQAP) is the plan for these actions in the software development process.

IEEE also define a standard for SQAP to provide uniform and minimum requirements for presentation and content of SQAP. With the standard by IEEE, SQAP looks very well planned and would really help in the software quality. However, I found an interesting comment by a student who generated a SQAP for his final project.
http://www.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis565/projects/tanana.ppt
He thought that SQAP useful if related IEEE standards where applied. However, SQAP is so complex that its documentation overhead would out weight its value.
- posted by Ken @ 11:05 AM