KDE web logs for research

[A. Gunes Koru]

Hi Dirk and everybody,

Our main research falls into the areas of software quality,
reliability, testing, and measurement. If you have time, you can visit
my web page and my advisor's web page (http://engr.smu.edu/~gkoru and
http://engr.smu.edu/~tian).

In the last couple of years, we found that actually there are lots of
similarities between www and software. So far, web failures has been very
commonly related to hardware or network failures. However, there are lots
of "software-like" failures too (broken links, etc.). We started to apply
our knowledge in software testing and reliability to this area. However,
we could only analyze web logs that belong to the School of Engineering at
SMU. We basically work on the following sub-areas.

1. Modeling the web usage information using hierarchical markov chains and
guiding the focused statistical web testing efforts to improve the quality
and reliability.

2. Categorizing the web failures according to the failure characteristics
(failure type, types of files involved) and using this information as a
guidance in web testing.

3. Applying well known software reliability models to the web.

We have obtained positive results in all of the areas above and published
our results. For example, the latest paper we got accepted was this (let
me know if you are interested in reading):

==
Jeff Tian, Li Ma, Zhao Li, and A. Gunes Koru.  "A Hierarchical Strategy
for Testing Web-Based Applications and Ensuring their Reliability" . In
COMPSAC 27th: First IEEE International Workshop on Web Based Systems and
Applications(WEBSA). Dallas, TX, November 2003.
==

We also have some new ideas such as applying traditional software metrics
to web to predict quality and reliability, etc..

However, as I mentioned before, the web logs are our primary data source
and it is not easy to obtain them. Our school web logs are OK, however we
would like to look at different application domains to generalize and
verify our results. We would appreciate if you could help us with that.

I hope I could answer your questions. Please let me know if you have
additional questions and /or comments.

Best Regards,

A. Gunes Koru






On Thu, 7 Aug 2003, Dirk Mueller wrote:

> On Mit, 06 Aug 2003, A. Gunes Koru wrote:
> 
> > I thought that since KDE is an organization about an open source project, 
> > maybe it could be possible to obtain such data from KDE. Of course, the 
> > shared data will be used only for research purposes.
> 
> _which_ research topic do you have in mind?
> 
> 
> -- 
> Dirk
>