arXiv subjects

Arthur-Jozsef Molnar

Publications and source records attributed to Arthur-Jozsef Molnar.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

Transitioning a Project-Based Course between Onsite and Online. An Experience Report

We present an investigation regarding the challenges faced by student teams across four consecutive iterations of a team-focused, project-based course in software engineering. The studied period includes the switch to fully online activities in the spring of 2020, and covers the return to face-to-face teaching two years later. We cover the feedback provided by over 1,500 students, collected in a free-text form on the basis of a survey. A qualitative research method was utilized to discern and examine the challenges and perceived benefits of a course that was conducted entirely online. We show that technical challenges remain a constant in project-based courses, with time management being the most affected by the move to online. Students reported that the effective use of collaborative tools eased team organization and communication while online. We conclude by providing a number of action points regarding the integration of online activities in face-to-face course unfolding related to project management, communication tools, the importance of teamwork, and of active mentor participation.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

Technological Platform for the Prevention and Management of Healthcare Associated Infections and Outbreaks

Hospital acquired infections are infections that occur in patients during hospitalization, which were not present at the time of admission. They are among the most common adverse events in healthcare around the world, leading to increased mortality and morbidity rates, prolonged hospitalization periods and considerable financial burden on both hospitals and patients. Preventive guidelines and regulations have been devised, however compliance to these is frequently poor and there is much room for improvement. This paper presents the prototype of an extensible, configurable cyber-physical system, developed under European Union funding, that will assist in the prevention of hospital infections and outbreaks. Integrating a wireless sensor network for the surveillance of clinical processes with configurable monitoring software built around a workflow engine as key component, our solution detects deviations from established hygiene practices and provides real-time information and alerts whenever an infection risk is discovered. The platform is described from both hardware and software perspective, with emphasis on the wireless network's elements as well as the most important software components. Furthermore, two clinical workflows of different complexity, which are included in the system prototype are detailed. The finalized system is expected to facilitate the creation and automated monitoring of clinical workflows that are associated with over 90% of hospital infections.

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arXiv2020

Intelligent Luminaire based Real-time Indoor Positioning for Assisted Living

This paper presents an experimental evaluation on the accuracy of indoor localisation. The research was carried out as part of a European Union project targeting the creation of ICT solutions for older adult care. Current expectation is that advances in technology will supplement the human workforce required for older adult care, improve their quality of life and decrease healthcare expenditure. The proposed approach is implemented in the form of a configurable cyber-physical system that enables indoor localization and monitoring of older adults living at home or in residential buildings. Hardware consists of custom developed luminaires with sensing, communication and processing capabilities. They replace the existing lighting infrastructure, do not look out of place and are cost effective. The luminaires record the strength of a Bluetooth signal emitted by a wearable device equipped by the monitored user. The system's software server uses trilateration to calculate the person's location based on known luminaire placement and recorded signal strengths. However, multipath fading caused by the presence of walls, furniture and other objects introduces localisation errors. Our previous experiments showed that room-level accuracy can be achieved using software-based filtering for a stationary subject. Our current objective is to assess system accuracy in the context of a moving subject, and ascertain whether room-level localization is feasible in real time.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

Cyber-Physical Platform for Preeclampsia Detection

Hypertension-related conditions are the most prevalent complications of pregnancy worldwide. They manifest in up to 8% of cases and if left untreated, can lead to serious detrimental effects. Early detection of their sudden onset can help physicians alleviate the condition and improve outcomes for both would-be mother and baby. Today's prevalence of smartphones and cost-effective wearable technology provide new opportunities for individualized medicine. Existing devices promote heart health, they monitor and encourage physical activity and measure sleep quality. This builds interest and encourages users to require more advanced features. We believe these aspects form suitable conditions to create and market specialized wearable devices. The present paper details a cyber-physical system built around an intelligent bracelet for monitoring hypertension-related conditions tailored to pregnant women. The bracelet uses a microfluidic layer that is compressed by the blood pressing against the arterial wall. Integrated sensors register the waveform and send it to the user's smartphone, where the systolic and diastolic values are determined. The system is currently developed under European Union research funding, and includes a software server where data is stored and further processing is carried out through machine learning.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

Indoor Localization Techniques Within a Home Monitoring Platform

This paper details a number of indoor localization techniques developed for real-time monitoring of older adults. These were developed within the framework of the i-Light research project that was funded by the European Union. The project targeted the development and initial evaluation of a configurable and cost-effective cyber-physical system for monitoring the safety of older adults who are living in their own homes. Localization hardware consists of a number of custom-developed devices that replace existing luminaires. In addition to lighting capabilities, they measure the strength of a Bluetooth Low Energy signal emitted by a wearable device on the user. Readings are recorded in real time and sent to a software server for analysis. We present a comparative evaluation of the accuracy achieved by several server-side algorithms, including Kalman filtering, a look-back heuristic as well as a neural network-based approach. It is known that approaches based on measuring signal strength are sensitive to the placement of walls, construction materials used, the presence of doors as well as existing furniture. As such, we evaluate the proposed approaches in two separate locations having distinct building characteristics. We show that the proposed techniques improve the accuracy of localization. As the final step, we evaluate our results against comparable existing approaches.

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arXiv2020

Evaluation of Software Product Quality Metrics

Computing devices and associated software govern everyday life, and form the backbone of safety critical systems in banking, healthcare, automotive and other fields. Increasing system complexity, quickly evolving technologies and paradigm shifts have kept software quality research at the forefront. Standards such as ISO's 25010 express it in terms of sub-characteristics such as maintainability, reliability and security. A significant body of literature attempts to link these subcharacteristics with software metric values, with the end goal of creating a metric-based model of software product quality. However, research also identifies the most important existing barriers. Among them we mention the diversity of software application types, development platforms and languages. Additionally, unified definitions to make software metrics truly language-agnostic do not exist, and would be difficult to implement given programming language levels of variety. This is compounded by the fact that many existing studies do not detail their methodology and tooling, which precludes researchers from creating surveys to enable data analysis on a larger scale. In our paper, we propose a comprehensive study of metric values in the context of three complex, open-source applications. We align our methodology and tooling with that of existing research, and present it in detail in order to facilitate comparative evaluation. We study metric values during the entire 18-year development history of our target applications, in order to capture the longitudinal view that we found lacking in existing literature. We identify metric dependencies and check their consistency across applications and their versions. At each step, we carry out comparative evaluation with existing research and present our results.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

A Study of Maintainability in Evolving Open-Source Software

Our study is focused on an evaluation of the maintainability characteristic in the context of the long-term evolution of open-source software. According to well established software quality models such as the ISO 9126 and the more recent ISO 25010, maintainability remains among key quality characteristics alongside performance, security and reliability. To achieve our objective, we selected three complex, widely used target applications for which access to their entire development history and source code was available. To enable cross-application comparison, we restricted our selection to GUI-driven software developed on the Java platform. We focused our examination on released versions, resulting in 111 software releases included in our case study. These covered more than 10 years of development for each of the applications. For each version, we determined its maintainability using three distinct quantitative models of varying complexity. We examined the relation between software size and maintainability and studied the main drivers of important changes to software maintainability. We contextualized our findings using manual source code examination. We also carried out a finer grained evaluation at package level to determine the distribution of maintainability issues within application source code. Finally, we provided a cross-application analysis in order to identify common as well as application-specific patterns.

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arXiv2020

Long-Term Evaluation of Technical Debt in Open-Source Software

Existing software tools enable characterizing and measuring the amount of technical debt at selective granularity levels. In this paper we aim to study the evolution and characteristics of technical debt in open-source software. We carry out a longitudinal study that covers the entire development history of several complex applications. We study how technical debt is introduced in software, as well as identify how developers handle its accumulation over the long term. We carried out our evaluation using three complex, open-source Java applications. All 110 released versions, covering more than 10 years of development history for each application were analyzed using SonarQube. We studied how the amount, composition and history of technical debt changed during development, compared our results across the studied applications and present our most important findings. For each application, we identified key versions during which large amounts of technical debt were added, removed or both. This had significantly more impact when compared to the lines of code or class count increases that generally occurred during development. Within each version, we found high correlation between file lines of code and technical debt. We observed that the Pareto principle was satisfied for the studied applications, as 20% of issue types generated around 80% of total technical debt. Early application versions showed greater fluctuation in the amount of existing technical debt. Application size appeared to be an unreliable predictor for the quantity of technical debt. Most debt was introduced in applications as part of milestone releases that expanded their feature set. We also discovered that technical debt issues persist for a long time in source code, and their removal did not appear to be prioritized according to type or severity.

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arXiv2020

Longitudinal Evaluation of Open-Source Software Maintainability

We present a longitudinal study on the long-term evolution of maintainability in open-source software. Quality assessment remains at the forefront of both software research and practice, with many models and assessment methodologies proposed and used over time. Some of them helped create and shape standards such as ISO 9126 and 25010, which are well established today. Both describe software quality in terms of characteristics such as reliability, security or maintainability. An important body of research exists linking these characteristics with software metrics, and proposing ways to automate quality assessment by aggregating software metric values into higher-level quality models. We employ the Maintainability Index, technical debt ratio and a maintainability model based on the ARiSA Compendium. Our study covers the entire 18 year development history and all released versions for three complex, open-source applications. We determine the maintainability for each version using the proposed models, we compare obtained results and use manual source code examination to put them into context. We examine the common development patterns of the target applications and study the relation between refactoring and maintainability. Finally, we study the strengths and weaknesses of each maintainability model using manual source code examination as the baseline.

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arXiv2017

Wireless Sensor Network based System for the Prevention of Hospital Acquired Infections

Hospital acquired infections are a serious threat to the health and well-being of patients and medical staff within clinical units. Many of these infections arise as a consequence of medical personnel that come into contact with contaminated persons, surfaces or equipment and then with patients, without following proper hygiene procedures. In this paper we present our ongoing efforts in the development of a wireless sensor network based cyber-physical system which aims to prevent hospital infections by increasing compliance to established hygiene guidelines. The solution, currently developed under European Union funding integrates a network of sensors for monitoring clinical workflows and ambient conditions, a workflow engine that executes encoded workflow instances and monitoring software that provides real-time information in case of infection risk detection. As a motivating example, we employ the workflow in the general practitioner's office in order to comprehensively present types of sensors and their positioning in the monitored location. Using the information collected by deployed sensors, the system is capable of immediately detecting infection risks and taking action to prevent the spread of infections.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2017

A Software Repository and Toolset for Empirical Research

This paper proposes a software repository model together with associated tooling and consists of several complex, open-source GUI driven applications ready to be used in empirical software research. We start by providing the rationale for our repository and criteria that guided us in searching for suitable applications. We detail the model of the repository together with associated artifacts and supportive tooling. We detail current applications in the repository together with ways in which it can be further extended. Finally we provide examples of how our repository facilitates research in software visualization and testing.

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arXiv2017

CRSTIP - An Assessment Scheme for Security Assessment Processes

Complex networked systems are an integral part of today's support infrastructures. Due to their importance, these systems become more and more the target for cyber-attacks, suffering a notable number of security incidents. Also, they are subject to regulation by national and international legislation. An operator of such an infrastructure or system is responsible for ensuring its security and correct functioning in order to satisfy customers. In addition, the entire process of risk and quality control needs to be efficient and manageable. This short paper introduces the Compliance, Risk Assessment and Security Testing Improvement Profiling (CRSTIP) scheme. CRSTIP is an evaluation scheme that enables assessing the maturity of security assessment processes, taking into consideration systematic use of formalisms, integration and tool-support in the areas of compliance assessment, security risk assessment and security testing. The paper describes the elements of the scheme and their application to one of the case studies of the RASEN research project.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2017

Live Visualization of GUI Application Code Coverage with GUITracer

The present paper introduces the initial implementation of a software exploration tool targeting graphical user interface (GUI) driven applications. GUITracer facilitates the comprehension of GUI-driven applications by starting from their most conspicuous artefact - the user interface itself. The current implementation of the tool can be used with any Java-based target application that employs one of the AWT, Swing or SWT toolkits. The tool transparently instruments the target application and provides real time information about the GUI events fired. For each event, call relations within the application are displayed at method, class or package level, together with detailed coverage information. The tool facilitates feature location, program comprehension as well as GUI test creation by revealing the link between the application's GUI and its underlying code. As such, GUITracer is intended for software practitioners developing or maintaining GUI-driven applications. We believe our tool to be especially useful for entry-level practitioners as well as students seeking to understand complex GUI-driven software systems. The present paper details the rationale as well as the technical implementation of the tool. As a proof-of-concept implementation, we also discuss further development that can lead to our tool's integration into a software development workflow.

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arXiv2017

JETracer - A Framework for Java GUI Event Tracing

The present paper introduces the open-source Java Event Tracer (JETracer) framework for real-time tracing of GUI events within applications based on the AWT, Swing or SWT graphical toolkits. Our framework provides a common event model for supported toolkits, the possibility of receiving GUI events in real-time, good performance in the case of complex target applications and the possibility of deployment over a network. The present paper provides the rationale for JETracer, presents related research and details its technical implementation. An empirical evaluation where JETracer is used to trace GUI events within five popular, open-source applications is also presented.

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arXiv2017

Preventing Hospital Acquired Infections Through a Workflow-Based Cyber-Physical System

Hospital acquired infections (HAI) are infections acquired within the hospital from healthcare workers, patients or from the environment, but which have no connection to the initial reason for the patient's hospital admission. HAI are a serious world-wide problem, leading to an increase in mortality rates, duration of hospitalisation as well as significant economic burden on hospitals. Although clear preventive guidelines exist, studies show that compliance to them is frequently poor. This paper details the software perspective for an innovative, business process software based cyber-physical system that will be implemented as part of a European Union-funded research project. The system is composed of a network of sensors mounted in different sites around the hospital, a series of wearables used by the healthcare workers and a server side workflow engine. For better understanding, we describe the system through the lens of a single, simple clinical workflow that is responsible for a significant portion of all hospital infections. The goal is that when completed, the system will be configurable in the sense of facilitating the creation and automated monitoring of those clinical workflows that when combined, account for over 90\% of hospital infections.

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arXiv2017

A Heuristic Process for GUI Widget Matching Across Application Versions

This paper introduces an automated heuristic process able to achieve high accuracy when matching graphical user interface widgets across multiple versions of a target application. The proposed implementation is flexible as it allows full customization of the process and easy integration with existing tools for long term graphical user interface test case maintenance, software visualization and analysis.

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arXiv2017

jSET - The Java Software Evolution Tracker

This paper introduces the Java Software Evolution Tracker, a visualization and analysis tool that provides practitioners the means to examine the evolution of a software system from a top to bottom perspective, starting with changes in the graphical user interface all the way to source code modifications.

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arXiv2017

An Initial Study on Ideal GUI Test Case Replayability

In this paper we investigate the effect of long-term GUI changes occurring during application development on the reusability of existing GUI test cases. We conduct an empirical evaluation on two complex, open-source GUI-driven applications for which we generate test cases of various lengths. We then assess the replayability of generated test cases using simulation on newer versions of the target applications and partition them according to the type of repairing change required for their reuse.

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