Ra'Fat Al-Msie'deen

Ra'Fat Al-Msie'deen

The idea of smart cities (SCs) has gained substantial attention in recent years. The SC paradigm aims to improve citizens' quality of life and protect the city's environment. As we enter the age of next-generation SCs, it is important to explore all relevant aspects of the SC paradigm. In recent years, the advancement of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has produced a trend of supporting daily objects with smartness, targeting to make human life easier and more comfortable. The paradigm of SCs appears as a response to the purpose of building the city of the future with advanced features. SCs still face many challenges in their implementation, but increasingly more studies regarding SCs are implemented. Nowadays, different cities are employing SC features to enhance services or the residents quality of life. This work provides readers with useful and important information about Amman Smart City.

Ra'Fat Al-Msie'deen

Most of open-source software systems become available on the internet today. Thus, we need automatic methods to label software code. Software code can be labeled with a set of keywords. These keywords in this paper referred as software labels. The goal of this paper is to provide a quick view of the software code vocabulary. This paper proposes an automatic approach to document the object-oriented software by labeling its code. The approach exploits all software identifiers to label software code. The paper presents the results of study conducted on the ArgoUML and drawing shapes case studies. Results showed that all code labels were correctly identified.

Ra'Fat Al-Msie'deen, Anas H. Blasi, Mohammed A. Alsuwaiket

Requirements engineering process intends to obtain software services and constraints. This process is essential to meet the customer's needs and expectations. This process includes three main activities in general. These are detecting requirements by interacting with software stakeholders, transferring these requirements into a standard document, and examining that the requirements really define the software that the client needs. Functional requirements are services that the software should deliver to the end-user. In addition, functional requirements describe how the software should respond to specific inputs, and how the software should behave in certain circumstances. This paper aims to develop a software requirements specification document of the electronic IT news magazine system. The electronic magazine provides users to post and view up-to-date IT news. Still, there is a lack in the literature of comprehensive studies about the construction of the electronic magazine software specification and design in conformance with the contemporary software development processes. Moreover, there is a need for a suitable research framework to support the requirements engineering process. The novelty of this paper is the construction of software specification and design of the electronic magazine by following the Al-Msie'deen research framework. All the documents of software requirements specification and design have been constructed to conform to the agile usage-centered design technique and the proposed research framework. A requirements specification and design are suggested and followed for the construction of the electronic magazine software. This study proved that involving users extensively in the process of software requirements specification and design will lead to the creation of dependable and acceptable software systems.

Ra'Fat AL-msie'deen, Anas H. Blasi

Software companies usually develop a set of product variants within the same family that share certain functions and differ in others. Variations across software variants occur to meet different customer requirements. Thus, software product variants evolve overtime to cope with new requirements. A software engineer who deals with this family may find it difficult to understand the evolution scenarios that have taken place over time. In addition, software identifier names are important resources to understand the evolution scenarios in this family. This paper introduces an automatic approach called Juana's approach to detect the evolution scenario across two product variants at the source code level and identifies the common and unique software identifier names across software variants source code. Juana's approach refers to common and unique identifier names as a software identifiers map and computes it by comparing software variants to each other. Juana considers all software identifier names such as package, class, attribute, and method. The novelty of this approach is that it exploits common and unique identifier names across the source code of software variants, to understand the evolution scenarios across software family in an efficient way. For validity, Juana was applied on ArgoUML and Mobile Media software variants. The results of this evaluation validate the relevance and the performance of the approach as all evolution scenarios were correctly detected via a software identifiers map.

Ra'Fat Al-Msie'deen

Legacy software documents are hard to understand and visualize. The tag cloud technique helps software developers to visualize the contents of software documents. A tag cloud is a well-known and simple visualization technique. This paper proposes a new method to visualize software documents, using a tag cloud. In this paper, tags visualize in the cloud based on their frequency in an alphabetical order. The most important tags are displayed with a larger font size. The originality of this method is that it visualizes the contents of JavaDoc as a tag cloud. To validate the JavaDocCloud method, it was applied to NanoXML case study, the results of these experiments display the most common and uncommon tags used in the software documents.

Ra'Fat Al-Msie'deen

Software artifacts visualization helps software developers to manage the size and complexity of the software system. The tag cloud technique visualizes tags within the cloud according to their frequencies in software artifacts. A font size of the tag within the cloud indicates its frequency within a software artifact, while the color of a tag within the cloud uses just for aesthetic purposes. This paper suggests a new approach (SoftCloud) to visualize software artifacts as a tag cloud. The originality of SoftCloud is visualizing all the artifacts available to the software program as a tag cloud. Experiments have conducted on different software artifacts to validate SoftCloud and demonstrate its strengths. The results showed the ability of SoftCloud to correctly retrieve all tags and their frequencies from available software artifacts.

Mohammed Alsuwaiket, Anas H. Blasi, Ra'Fat Al-Msie'deen

Various studies have shown that students tend to get higher marks when assessed through coursework based assessment methods which include either modules that are fully assessed through coursework or a mixture of coursework and examinations than assessed by examination alone. There are a large number of educational data mining studies that preprocess data through conventional data mining processes including data preparation process, but they are using transcript data as they stand without looking at examination and coursework results weighting which could affect prediction accuracy. This paper proposes a different data preparation process through investigating more than 230000 student records in order to prepare students marks based on the assessment methods of enrolled modules. The data have been processed through different stages in order to extract a categorical factor through which students module marks are refined during the data preparation process. The results of this work show that students final marks should not be isolated from the nature of the enrolled modules assessment methods. They must rather be investigated thoroughly and considered during EDMs data preprocessing phases. More generally, it is concluded that educational data should not be prepared in the same way as other data types due to differences as data sources, applications, and types of errors in them. Therefore, an attribute, coursework assessment ratio, is proposed to be used in order to take the different modules assessment methods into account while preparing student transcript data. The effect of CAR on prediction process using the random forest classification technique has been investigated. It is shown that considering CAR as an attribute increases the accuracy of predicting students second year averages based on their first year results.

Ra'Fat Al-Msie'deen

Software visualization helps software engineers to understand and manage the size and complexity of the object-oriented source code. The tag cloud is a simple and popular visualization technique. The main idea of the tag cloud is to represent tags according to their frequency in an alphabetical order where the most important tags are highlighted via a suitable font size. This paper proposes an original approach to visualize software code using a tag cloud. The approach exploits all software identifier names to visualize software code as a tag cloud. Experiments were conducted on several case studies. To validate the approach, it is applied on NanoXML and ArgoUML. The results of this evaluation validate the relevance and the performance of the proposed approach as all tag names and their frequencies were correctly identified. The proposed tag cloud visualization technique is a helpful addition to the software visualization toolkit. The extracted tag cloud supports software engineers as they filter and browse data.

Ra'Fat Al-Msie'deen, Anas H. Blasi

Source code summarization is a process of generating summaries that describe software code, the majority of source code summarization usually generated manually, where the summaries are written by software developers. Recently, new automated approaches are becoming more useful. These approaches have been found to be effective in some cases. The main weaknesses of these approaches are that they never exploit code dependencies and summarize either the software classes or methods but not both. This paper proposes a source code summarization approach (Suncode) that produces a short description for each class and method in the software system. To validate the approach, it has been applied to several case studies. Moreover, the generated summaries are compared to summaries that written by human experts and to summaries that written by a state-of-the-art solution. Results of this paper found that Suncode summaries provide better information about code dependencies comparing with other studies. In addition, Suncode summaries can improve and support the current software documentation. The results found that manually written summaries were more precise and short as well.

Ra'Fat Al-Msie'deen, Anas H. Blasi

The Object-Oriented (OO) software system evolves over the time to meet the new requirements. Based on the initial release of software, the continuous modification of software code leads to software evolution. Software needs to evolve over the time to meet the new user's requirements. Software companies often develop variant software of the original one depends on customers' needs. The main hypothesis of this paper states that the software when it evolves over the time, its code continues to grow, change and become more complex. This paper proposes an automatic approach (Iris) to examine the proposed hypothesis. Originality of this approach is the exploiting of the software variants to study the impact of software evolution on the software metrics. This paper presents the results of experiments conducted on three releases of drawing shapes software, sixteen releases of rhino software, eight releases of mobile media software and ten releases of ArgoUML software. Based on the extracted software metrics, It has been found that Iris hypothesis is supported by the computed metrics.

Ra'Fat AL-msie'deen

Understanding or comprehending source code is one of the core activities of software engineering. Understanding object-oriented source code is essential and required when a programmer maintains, migrates, reuses, documents or enhances source code. The source code that is not comprehended cannot be changed. The comprehension of object-oriented source code is a difficult problem solving process. In order to document object-oriented software system there are needs to understand its source code. To do so, it is necessary to mine source code dependencies in addition to quantitative information in source code such as the number of classes. This paper proposes an automatic approach, which aims to document object-oriented software by visualizing its source code. The design of the object-oriented source code and its main characteristics are represented in the visualization. Package content, class information, relationships between classes, dependencies between methods and software metrics is displayed. The extracted views are very helpful to understand and document the object-oriented software. The novelty of this approach is the exploiting of code dependencies and quantitative information in source code to document object-oriented software efficiently by means of a set of graphs. To validate the approach, it has been applied to several case studies. The results of this evaluation showed that most of the object-oriented software systems have been documented correctly.