R. Jeffery

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at UNSW Sydney

As platform ecosystems are growing by platform users' data, the importance of data governance has been highlighted. In particular, how to share control and decision rights with platform users are regarded as significant design issues since the role of them is increasing. Platform context should be considered when designing data governance in platfo...

Recently, platform ecosystem has received attention as a key business concept. Sustainable growth of platform ecosystems is enabled by platform users supplying and/or demanding content from each other: e.g. Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. The importance and value of user data in platform ecosystems is accentuated since platform owners use and sell th...

Size and effort estimation is a significant challenge for the management of large-scale formal verification projects. We report on an initial study of relationships between the sizes of artefacts from the development of seL4, a formally-verified embedded systems microkernel. For each API function we first determined its COSMIC Function Point (CFP)...

Project stakeholders can have different perceptions of risks and how they should be mitigated, but these differences are not always well understood and managed. This general issue occurs in Off-the-shelf (OTS)-based custom software development projects, which use and integrate OTS software in the development of specialized software for an individua...

Background- Risks associated with a software project have the potential to affect all stakeholders. Today much software makes use of off-the-shelf (OTS) components. A better understanding of OTS-derived software risks will help to define responsibilities for these risks, and also to avoid them. Aim- Our objective is to identify, classify and compar...

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Software inspections, reviews, and walkthroughs have become a standard process component in many software development domains. Maturity level 3 of the CMM-I requires establishment of peer reviews [12] and substantial sustained improvements in quality and productivity have been reported as a result of using reviews ([16], [21], [22], [27]). The NSF...

Software process modeling has become an essential technique for managing software development processes. However, purely quantitative process modeling requires a detailed understanding and accurate measurement of software process, which relies on reliable and precise history data. This paper presents a semi-quantitative process modeling approach to...

The ecosystem within the lending industry and beyond is a ULS system. Existing business data and process centric standards have very limited governing power over the quality and evolution of such ULS systems. We have helped to develop an initial reference architecture and associated development guidelines for a lending industry e-business standard,...

Software process simulation models hold out the promise of improving project planning and control. However, quantitative models require a very detailed understanding of the software process. In particular, process knowledge needs to be represented quantitatively which requires extensive, reliable software project data. When such data is lacking, qu...

Management of architecture knowledge is vital for improving an organization's architectural capabilities. Despite the recognition of the importance of capturing and reusing architecture knowledge, there is no suitable support mechanism. We have developed a conceptual framework to provide appropriate guidance and tool support for making tacit or inf...

Quality is a key issue in the development of software products. Although the literature acknowledges the importance of the design phase of software lifecycle and the effects of the design process and intermediate products on the final product, little progress has been achieved in addressing the quality of designs. This is partly due to difficulties...

This paper reports on the first phase of an empirical research project concerning methods to assess the quality of the information in software measurement products. Two measurement assessment instruments are developed and deployed in order to generate two sets of analyses and conclusions. These sets will be subjected to an evaluation of their infor...

In this paper, we present an approach to improve the software architecture evaluation process by systematically extracting and appropriately documenting architecturally significant information from software architecture and design patterns; we are interested in only two pieces of information found in software patterns: general scenarios and archite...

Fostering innovation is the key to survival in today's IT business and is exemplified by introducing new technologies and methods to improve the development processes. We present a follow-up case study of technology transfer in a small software organisation. A new software estimation technique, Web-CoBRA was introduced to a small software company t...

Behavioural theory predicts that interventions that improve individual reviewers' expertise also improve the performance of the group in Software Development Technical Reviews (SDTR) [C. Sauer et al.,(2000)]. This includes improvements both in individual's expertise in the review process, as well as their ability to find defects and distinguish tru...

Software architecture evaluation has been proposed as a means to achieve quality attributes such as maintainability and reliability in a system. The objective of the evaluation is to assess whether or not the architecture lead to the desired quality attributes. Recently, there have been a number of evaluation methods proposed. There is, however, li...

In the original theory of group performance in software development technical reviews there was no consideration given to the influence of the inspection process, inspection performance, or the inspected artifact, on the structure of the theoretical model. We present an extended theoretical model, along with discussion and justification for compone...

Software architecture evaluation is an effective means of addressing quality related issues quite early in the software development lifecycle. Scenario-based approaches to evaluate architecture usually involve a large number of stakeholders, who need to be collocated for evaluation sessions. Collocating a large number of stakeholders is an expensiv...

Web development projects are certainly different from traditional software development projects and hence require differently tailored measures for accurate effort estimation. We investigate the suitability of a newly proposed size measure for Web development projects: Web objects. Web objects have been specifically developed for sizing Web applica...

A great benefit of software inspections is that they can be applied at almost any stage of the software development life cycle. We document a large-scale experiment conducted during an entity relationship (ER) model inspection meeting. The experiment was aimed at finding empirically validated answers to the question "which reading technique has a m...

In this paper, we investigate the application of the COBRA™ method (Cost Estimation, Benchmarking, and Risk Assessment) in a new application domain, the area of web development. COBRA combines expert knowledge with data on a small number of projects to develop cost estimation models, which can also be used for risk analysis and benchmarking purpose...

Our activities in software engineering typically fall into one of three categories, (1) to invent new phenomena, (2) to understand existing phenomena, and (3) to facilitate inspirational education. This paper explores the place of empirical software engineering in the first two of these activities. In this exploration evidence is drawn from the emp...

This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of an experience repository in a small software organisation. The experience repository was developed and installed as part of an ongoing software process improvement effort and uses software process to structure experience and make it available for reuse. The experience repository is ac...

The authors investigate the accuracy of cost estimates when applying most commonly used modeling techniques to a large-scale industrial data set which is professionally maintained by the International Software Standards Benchmarking Group (ISBSG). The modeling techniques applied are ordinary least squares regression (OLS), analogy based estimation,...

For many years now software process improvement (SPI) has been recognised as an effective way for companies to improve the quality of the software they produce and the productivity with which they work. Much work has gone into developing and selling improvement paradigms, assessment methods, modelling languages, tools and technologies. The challeng...

The purpose of the paper is two fold. Firstly, to inform the Australian software engineering community of the European Fifth Framework research structure and the involvement of an Australian partner in a fifth framework project, CORONET. Secondly to describe the CORONET project. CORONET develops a new approach for software engineering training in k...

Once processes have been defined and improved in a company it is vital that the processes are effectively communicated to process participants. Traditionally this has been done with limited success using paper-based guides. The net enables coordinated process support for distributed teams of developers and co-located workers in a way that has not b...

This paper describes an experiment that investigated the effects on design productivity and quality of displaying design constraint violations or design errors to the designer when using a case tool for early lifecycle system design. A laboratory experiment was conducted in which the design activity was carried out using an instrumented tool that...

Describes the development of an experience factory in an Australian organization involved in the field of telecommunications. Information structures were well developed and used in the daily work of the organization. This included the use of network technology as well as the personal interaction between department members. Highly motivated personne...

This paper presents the results of a survey of members of the Australian Software Metrics Association which was carried out to establish the state of practice of software metrics in Australia. The mailed survey asked for data on the extent of collection of metrics in ten categories covering software size, organizational characteristics, effort, qua...

Abstract This paper describes the development of an experience factory in an Australian organization Information structures were well developed and used in the daily work of the organization This included the use of network technology as well as the personal interaction between department members Highly motivated personnel drove improvement via new...

The most successful software measurement programs are ones in which researcher, practitioner, and customer work hand in hand to meet goals and solve problems. But such collaboration is rare. The authors explore the gaps between these groups and point toward ways to bridge them

In seeking to improve software, companies are finding out how much is involved in measuring it. They are also learning that the more integral software measurement is to the company’s underlying business strategy, the more likely it is to succeed. or successful product and process definition, implementation, and evolution, developers increasingly lo...

It is widely accepted that software development technical reviews (SDTRs) are a useful technique for finding defects in software products. The normative SDTR literature assumes that group reviews are better than individual reviews. Recent debates centre around the need for review meetings. This paper presents the findings of a replicated experiment...

This paper reports on a laboratory experiment on the use of decomposition strategies in software requirements inspections. The experiment follows on from the work of (Porter et al., 1995) who compared the use of scenarios with ad hoc and checklist techniques, finding (among other things) that the scenario technique was superior. This experiment com...

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This study derives and validates an empirical effort estimation model for graphical user interface (GUI) systems. It investigates the relationship between the effort to code and unit test GUI systems and the numbers of different types of widgets (e.g., text boxes, check boxes, list boxes) designed in those systems. The study focuses on systems impl...

This study derives and validates an empirical effort estimation model for graphical user interface (GUI) systems. It investigates the relationship between the effort to code and unit test GUI systems and the numbers of different types of widgets (e.g., text boxes, check boxes, list boxes) designed in those systems. The study focuses on systems impl...

A new approach to complexity metrics is described based not on empirical analysis of the final product, viz. the code, but on an understanding of the cognitive processes of the analyst or programmer as they approach and undertake the challenges of program development, modification and debugging. The resulting metric, the Cognitive Complexity Model,...

The need for metrics and measurement as a part of the software quality improvement process has been recognized in the literature and in software quality standards. Methods for establishing appropriate metrics such as GQM have been developed and suggestions have been made in the literature for the successful implementation of such measurement initia...

The need for metrics programs as a part of the improvement process for software development and enhancement has been recognized in the literature. Suggestions have been made for the successful implementation of such programs but little empirical research has been conducted to verify these suggestions. This paper looks at the results of three metric...

The factors which influence program size and program development time have been investigated across three dissimilar organisations. Data on a total of 93 COBOL programs has been collected and analysed. Eighteen variables covering the characteristics of the program, programmer and programming environment were recorded. Program size and program devel...

This report discusses the early project choices in experimental methods available to the researchers and the reasons for the designs that were chosen to explore the impact of constraints on early lifecycle analysis and design quality and productivity. A total of five experiments have been conducted and one feature analysis. The reasons for the rese...