Improving Software Quality through Effective Decision Support

通过有效的决策支持提高软件质量

• 批准号: RGPIN-2022-03139
• 负责人: Murphy, Gail
• 金额: $ 4.66万
• 依托单位: University of British Columbia
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2022-01-01 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=749880
• 关键词: Improving; Software; Quality; through; Effective

Software is considered to be of high-quality if it functions correctly and exhibits a variety of non-functional requirements, such as being performant, secure and easy to change. High-quality software benefits users who can focus on their work rather than battling with buggy or slow software. High-quality software benefits the development organizations who create the software by shortening development schedules and by lowering software maintenance costs. A critical factor that has been shown to have an impact on software quality is the design of the software. Although evidence indicates that inappropriate design choices and design flaws lead to lower software quality, there is little support to help software developers make appropriate design choices that lead to high-quality software. The long-term objective of this research program is to assist software developers to make informed and appropriate design decisions as they work that lead to the production of higher-quality software. This research will enable design information about a software project, that has typically been invisible and inaccessible, to be externalized and to be available for supporting informed decision-making within a project, for improving development approaches through analysis of design trends across projects, and for supporting the education of good design practices. Three objectives are planned for the research program. First, we will seek to externalize design decisions for a system through the development of algorithms and tools to mine and represent design decisions from a project's artifact history, such as from pull requests and code reviews. Where appropriate, we will associate these decisions with code impacted by the decision. The goal for this objective is to enable a repository of externalized design information to be built from a variety of open source projects. Second, we will seek to automatically identify the context of a developer's work as they work to enable the provision of intelligent design advice. We will develop algorithms and techniques to automatically form a developer's work context to enable useful design recommendations. Third, we will show that it is possible to create useful design recommendation tools that lead to the development of higher-quality software. We will leverage the work from the first two objectives to provide this intelligent design advice at particular intervention points during development, such as code reviews. We will experimentally show that the recommendations have a desired effect on software quality.

如果软件功能正常，并表现出各种非功能要求，如可执行、安全和易于更改，则被认为是高质量的。高质量的软件使用户受益，他们可以专注于自己的工作，而不是与有漏洞或速度慢的软件作斗争。高质量的软件通过缩短开发进度和降低软件维护成本，使创建软件的开发组织受益。已证明对软件质量有影响的一个关键因素是软件的设计。尽管有证据表明，不适当的设计选择和设计缺陷会导致软件质量下降，但很少有支持帮助软件开发人员做出适当的设计选择，从而获得高质量的软件。该研究计划的长期目标是帮助软件开发人员在工作中做出明智和适当的设计决策，从而生产出更高质量的软件。这项研究将使关于软件项目的设计信息能够外部化，并可用于支持项目内的知情决策，通过分析项目间的设计趋势来改进开发方法，以及支持良好设计做法的教育。这项研究计划有三个目标。首先，我们将寻求通过开发算法和工具来外部化系统的设计决策，以从项目的构件历史中挖掘和表示设计决策，例如从拉请求和代码审查。在适当的情况下，我们会将这些决策与受决策影响的代码相关联。这个目标的目标是能够从各种开源项目中构建一个外部化的设计信息存储库。其次，我们将寻求在开发人员提供智能设计建议的过程中自动识别他们的工作上下文。我们将开发算法和技术来自动形成开发人员的工作环境，以实现有用的设计建议。第三，我们将展示创建有用的设计推荐工具来开发更高质量的软件是可能的。我们将利用前两个目标中的工作，在开发过程中的特定干预点(如代码审查)提供此智能设计建议。我们将通过实验证明，这些建议对软件质量具有预期的效果。