No abstract

Program slicing is a well-known technique that has been broadly applied to a variety of software engineering areas, such as understanding, debugging, testing and others. Although slicing programs written in a high-level language have been widely studied in literatures, very little work is involved in slicing formal specifications. In this paper we put forward a method of specification slicing. First, we analyze dependences in Z and introduce a new kind of dependence, i.e. logic dependence. Second, schema dependence graphs and specification dependence graphs are developed. On the basis of both graphs, a method of slicing specifications is given. Finally, a small but realistic example is illustrated.

Currently, more and more research results on measuring class diagrams have been developed in literatures. In order to study these metrics systematically and deeply, this paper analyzes and compares some typical metrics for UML class diagrams from different viewpoints, different types of relationships, different types of metric values, complexity, and theoretical and empirical validation. Finally, the authors discuss their advantages and disadvantages as well as the existing problems and the prospects.

In this letter, on the basis of Frequent Pattern(FP) tree, the support function to update FP-tree is introduced, then an Incremental FP (IFP) algorithm for mining association rules is proposed. IFP algorithm considers not only adding new data into the database but also reducing old data from the database. Furthermore, it can predigest five cases to three cases. The algorithm proposed in this letter can avoid generating lots of candidate items, and it is high efficient.

Many software systems built in recent years have been developed using the UML and, in some cases, they already need adaptive maintenance in order to satisfy market and customer needs. Thus a strong emphasis on analysis metrics for software development is necessary. Analysis metrics play an important role in helping developers understand software and, hence, improve software quality and developer productivity. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence for supporting the role of the structure complexity metrics for UML class diagrams , specifically Zhou's metric. Our results, based on data related with bank information system, indicate that the metric is basically consistent with human beings' intuitions.