FINAL YEAR INDIVIDUAL PROJECTS
Parallel Evolutionary Algorithms
The need to improve the scalability of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) has motivated the research on Parallel Genetic Algorithms (PGAs), and different technologies and approaches have been proposed. This project will focus on investigating, designing and evaluating new technologies (e.g., Hadoop, Spark) for PGAs in the context of Software Engineering.
Read more: F. Ferrucci, P. Salza, F. Sarro, "Using Hadoop MapReduce for Parallel Genetic Algorithms: A Comparison of the Global, Grid and Island Models", Evolutionary Computation Journal (2017) Article pre-printSoftware Development Effort Estimation
Software development effort is considered the dominant cost of software projects, thus effort estimation is a critical activity for planning and monitoring software project development and for delivering the product on time and within budget. The research projects related to this topic regard the definition and empirical evaluation of multi-objective search-based approach for building novel estimation models.
Read more: F. Sarro, A. Petrozziello, M. Harman, "Multi-Objective Effort Estimation", in Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2016), pp. 619-630. Article pre-printData Imputation Methods for Software Engineering Tasks
Historical software project datasets have been utilized together with machine learning algorithms for various software engineering classification tasks. Unfortunately, the missing values in datasets have negative impacts on the estimation accuracy of such approaches and therefore, could lead to inconsistent results. This project will focus on investigating, designing and evaluating the effectiveness of data imputation methods in the context of Software Engineering.
Read more: J. Huang, J. W. Keung, F. Sarro, Y.-F. Li, Y.T. Yu, W.K. Chan and H. Sun, "Cross-validation based k nearest neighbor imputation for software quality datasets: An empirical study". Journal of Systems and Software. Article pre-printSoftware Defect Prediction
Software defect prediction has been an active subject of research since the 1990s. However, despite many proposals for different fault prediction techniques, only our previous study has used the information available from the testing phase in order to improve the performance of predictive models. This project will investigate other metrics useful to improve the accuracy of the estimates.
Read more: D. Bowes, T. Hall, M. Harman, Y.Jia, F. Sarro, F. Wu "Mutation-aware Fault Prediction", in Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, (ISSTA 2016), pp. 330-341 Article pre-printSoftware Size Measurement
This project will look at the definition and the empirical evaluation of 2nd generation functional metrics for sizing modern software products.
Read more: S. Di Martino, F. Ferrucci, C. Gravino, F. Sarro, "Web Effort Estimation: Function Points Analysis vs. COSMIC", Information and Software Technology (2016), pp. 90-109, DOI : 10.1016/j.infsof.2015.12.001. Article pre-printPredictive Analytics for Mobile Apps and App Stores
App development is an increasingly innovative and lucrative software industry. The projects in this area will focus on the analysis and understanding of mobile app store ecosystems and their key mechanisms impacting software engineering tasks.
Read more: W. Martin, F. Sarro, M. Harman, Y. Jia, Y. Zhang, "A Survey on App Store Analysis for Software Engineering" IEEE Journal of Transactions on Software Engineering (2017). Article pre-print