SHF: EAGER: A first empirical test of low ceremony evidence for assessing quality attributes

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

Every aspect of modern society, ranging from health care to national defense, depends on the availability of affordable, reliable software. The availability of this software, in turns, depends on helping software engineers to find high-quality components that they can assemble into finished software. Web sites currently provide access to millions of components that perform vital operations related to networking, graphics, data processing, and thousands of other functions. However, software engineers lack a validated, reliable method for selecting high-quality components that they can reuse in new software applications. Lacking such a method, software engineers sometimes use components that turn out, in retrospect, to be extremely difficult to reuse. This difficulty, in turn, increases the time required to create software, the cost of that software, and the potential for subtle bugs. This research project is expected to provide a validated, reliable model for quickly assessing the reusability of components. This method will make use of "low-ceremony evidence" (LCE): information that characterizes different aspects of component quality yet is incremental, often informal, potentially context-dependent, and frequently contradictory. Examples of LCE include reviews, bug reports, and download counts of components. While each piece of LCE provides only an incomplete perspective into a component's quality, preliminary work suggests that the synthesis of LCE can be highly informative about component quality. This new research project (1) will use factor analysis to determine which pieces of LCE are mutually consistent, yielding scales for assessing one or more aspects of quality such as reusability, and (2) will statistically test how well these scales are correlated with the actual empirical difficulty that software engineers report with reusing those components. The resulting validated scales are expected to be useful for automatically assessing the quality of components in online websites. This would make it possible in future work to develop enhanced search engines enabling software engineers to quickly find high-quality components that they can use to create the software that society needs.