About project
This project is aimed to study the application of motifs in the analysis of open source software. Motif is a term that comes from the graph theory and indicates building blocks that represent statistically significant sub-graphs. Based on the motifs, certain properties of software can be shown and thus could directly affect the software design and software structure. The motif application is today extremely widespread in various disciplines such as biology, medicine, electrical and other, which was an additional motivation to use motives in this project. The project has been launched in 2012, on the initiative of professor Tihana Galinac Grbac and with the realization of the graduate student of computer science Jean Petric.
The initiative
The main goal of motif application in software is better definition of software development process and possibility for automatization of some particular processes in software development. Although, computer science is relatively new discipline, the complexity of software is becoming an increasingly serious problem, and there is no doubt that the current methods are becoming inapplicable. Increasing complexity will lead to the question of quality and reliability of software, which will rapidly increase the costs of development in order to prevent these problems. However, such costs will not lead to increased quality and reliability, but would only temporarily solve the problem. Analysis of problems due to the complexity and understanding of the entire software development process can help in making specific methods that would successfully follow a new trend, and the motives might be the means by which that will be achieved.
Project realization
Application of motifs in open source software is realized through few stages. In doing so, the project phases are dynamic and constantly adjusted with respect to the results, new ideas etc. As part of this project, several important things have been realized:
- open source software were determined systematically
- rFind tool for processing open source software were realized
- rFind has processed selected software, and has adjusted data for motif detection tools
- mFinder and Kavosh tools are used for finding motifs in open source software
- collection and analysis of obtained data
Final results are expected soon, and then concrete conclusion will be made. Also, publication of results and rFind tool will be shown on web pages. Also, during the project many other ideas have been developed, so they will be material for continuation of this research.
Hrvatski