Function Point Analysis (FPA) is a widely used technique for measuring software size. It measures software functionality from the user's perspective, usually based on a requirements description. In many software processes, these requirements are represented by UML models. Although there have been attempts to automate the measurement process, FPA counting requires a considerable amount of interpretation which, to be reliable, should be made by experts. On the other hand, fully manual counting methods usually fail to keep synchronized with the requirements model, since requirements frequently change during the development cycle. This paper describes an approach for counting FPA and a compliant tool. This approach makes use of UML requirement models. The tool, called ReMoFP (Requirement Model Function Point counter), leaves all the counting decisions to the analyst, but supports him by ensuring consistency with the requirements represented in the models. The ReMoFP was developed by a software development laboratory in Brazil, and helped it to improve counting productivity, consistency, and maintainability.
An important component of most SoftwareEngineering courses is the software development team project. For most Software Engineering courses, the software development project provides to undergraduate students their best opportunity to learn about the "realworld" of software development, including team work, understanding client's requirements, quality assurance, project management, and so on. The software development project in an undergraduate environment provides several benefits, but it also poses considerable challenge in fairly and accurately evaluating its results and applying the lessons learned in its improvement. In this article, we discuss issues and practices for improving the team project from the perspective of an introductory Software Engineering course at Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. We provide a contextualized evaluation, based on artifact defects produced by students. Ours results reinforces the belief that an understanding of cause-effect defects relationships offers a simple and low-cost method for improving the Software Engineering course and team project.
Interest in evaluating Business Process Modeling Languages has widespread, in part due to the increase of the number of languages available for this purpose. Several works on the evaluation of BPMLs are available. Their evaluation are mainly based on perspectives centered in modeling experts. In this paper, we address the readability perspective of two BPMLs (UML 2.0 and BPMN) for people not familiar with process modeling. The UML can be tailored for purposes beyond software modeling and offers Activity Diagrams for business process modeling. BPMN was designed for modeling business process and has a primary goal of being understandable by all business stakeholders. We compared undergraduates (freshmen) understanding of business process modeled in BPMN and UML 2.0 Activity Diagrams. Our results are interesting, since we were able to find that these two languages do not have significant differences, despite BPMN readability design goals.
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