The article proposes comprehensive approach to personal diversity level assessment of involved developers in order to improve e ciency of multi-version software development. The approach allows to build project teams with prede ned level of diversity intentionally. A common conceptual scheme of the approach is elaborated, an appropriate criteria and metrics to estimate personal diversity of target software products diversity are given, and future research work is outlined as well.
approach, in Section 3 we outline rst implementation issues for this one, and in Section 4 the paper concludes with a short summary, and with outlook on the future research work to be done. 2
Conceptual Scheme of Human-centered Approach
to Assessment of Team Diversity in N-Version
Programming
One of the proven techniques of software diversi cation is N-version
programming (NVP). It assumes a development of N 2 independent software versions,
wherein all versions are supposed to satisfy the same initial system requirements.
Taking into account one of the well-known NVP work ows [
Provide a valid set of DDDs no yes
Are DDDs available?
Set NVP project infrastructure
Are DDTs available? yes no
Common NVP activities
yes Is DDTs deivneorusigfihc?ation level Is DFD level enough? yes
deNliVveSry
1. set up initial NVP projects infrastructure with selection of technological
parameters for choosing appropriate DDD; the process continuea until a
valid set of DDDs is available (see gure 1);
2. prove the condition, whether a number of DDTs needed is available, where
any DDT has to be considered as an additional dimension in DDD collection;
3. in case both DDD and DDTs are given, the common NVP-projects activities
can be executed, and a Distinct Failure Diversity (DFD) of software product
may be calculated using the appropriate metrics (see below);
4. if DFD value is acceptable (enough), then NVS product may be delivered,
otherwise Step 3 has to be repeated;
5. If DDTs are not available by checking on Step 2, the personal diversity
forming procedure has to be started in order to create new DDTs, and it requires
Personal diversity assessment to be provided using appropriate methods:
e.g., Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), or Myers-Briggs
Type Indicator (MBTI) [
The proposed DDT forming procedure is based on the hypothesis that
certain properties of any developer (age, social status, education degree, sex, etc.)
a ect projects diversi cation level in general. Moreover, such properties have an
in uence on software code they create [
First Implementation Issues for the Proposed Approach
Personal properties set of each software developer can be evaluated using the
MMPI method, which has 8 scales and assumes 16 di erent types of
personality[
In table 1 the value M varies depending on the speci c programming
languages which are used. An e ectiveness evaluation of DDT formation process
may be done with the help of reliability value at the current NVS development
iteration. The following formula may be used to calculate the DFD value [
Conclusions and Future Work In this paper we have presented the human-centered approach to the assessment of team diversity in N-version programming based on the hypothesis of existence a correlation between certain number of developers personal properties and their speci c programming styles. Therefore, the possibility of creation development teams with target diversi cation level can be provided. It a ects positively a software product diversi cation level in general, and consequently improves its reliability. Next steps in this research will be dealing with the following theoretical and practical tasks: 1. perform a more sophisticated investigation of personal diversity assessment methods and di erent metrics of developers programming styles; 2. provide a motivated choice of measurement method which should be used to determine the correlation between parameters mentioned above; 3. propose a formalized DDT forming procedure with a pre-de ned diversity level, e.g. using some linear programming methods; 4. design and implement the corresponding CASE-tool for automated execution of all steps in the elaborated DDTs forming procedure; 5. develop the methodology, and to perform a number of simulation experiments to check the workability and e ectiveness of the proposed approach in real-life software development.
The resolution of these issues is foreseen in the framework of the PhDresearch, which is planned for the period of years 2017-2020.