Yuanfang Cai's Homepage

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Drexel University. My broad research area is software engineering, and my specific interests include formal software design modeling and analysis, software economics, software evolution and modularity. My primary research goal is to develop design representations and automated, quantitative analysis techniques to reason about design structure and related outcomes early in the development process.

Recent Publications:

Improving the Efficiency of Dependency Analysis in Logical Decision Models. Sunny Wong and Yuanfang Cai. In Proceedings of the 24th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), November 2009. (acceptance rate 17%)

Design Rule Hierarchies and Parallelism in Software Development Tasks. Sunny Wong, Yuanfang Cai, Giuseppe Valetto, Georgi Simeonov, and Kanwarpreet Sethi. In Proceedings of the 24th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), November 2009. (acceptance rate 17%)

From Retrospect to Prospect: Assessing Modularity and Stability From Software Architecture. Kanwarpreet Sethi, Yuanfang Cai, Sunny Wong, Alessandro Garcia, and Claudio Sant'Anna. In Proceedings of the Joint 8th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture and 3rd European Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA/ECSA), Working Session. September 2009.

Predicting Change Impact from Logical Models. Sunny Wong and Yuanfang Cai. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), September 2009. (short paper)

Modular Aspect-oriented Design with XPIs. Kevin Sullivan, William Griswold, Hridesh Rajan, Yuanyuan Song, Yuanfang Cai, Macneil Shonle, and Nishit Tewari, To appear in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) (Accepted April, 2009)

Automatic Modularity Conformance Checking. Sunny Huynh, Yuanfang Cai, Yuanyuan Song and Kevin Sullivan, In Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2008), Leipzig, Germany, May 2008 (Acceptance rate: 15%).

Analyzing the Evolution of Large-Scale Software Systems using Design Structure Matrices and Design Rule Theory: Two Exploratory Cases. Matthew J. LaMantia, Yuanfang Cai, Alan D. MacCormack and John Rusnak. In Proceedings of the 7th Working IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Software Architectures (WICSA7), page 83-92. Vancouver, BC, Canada, 18 – 22 February 2008 (Acceptance rate: 26%).

Coordination Implications of Software Architecture in a Global Software Development Project. Alberto Avritzer, Daniel Paulish and Yuanfang Cai. In Proceedings of the 7th Working IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Software Architectures (WICSA7), page 107-116. Vancouver, BC, Canada, 18 – 22 February 2008 (Acceptance rate: 26%).

A Framework and Tool Supports for Testing Modularity of Software Design. Yuanfang Cai, Sunny Huynh, and Tao Xie. To appear in Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2007), page 441-444. Atlanta, Georgia, November 2007 (Acceptance rate: 25%).

An Evolution Model for Software Modularity Assessment. Yuanfang Cai and Sunny Huynh. To appear in the ICSE Workshop on Assessment of Contemporary Modularization Techniques (ACoM 2007), Minneapolis, MN, May 22, 2007.

An Evolutionary Approach to Software Modularity Analysis. Sunny Huynh. andYuanfang Cai .To appear in the fifth ICSE Workshop on Software Quality (WoSQ 2007), Minneapolis, MN, May 22, 2007.

Modularity Analysis of Logical Design Models, Yuanfang Cai and Kevin Sullivan
Proceedings of 21th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. Tokyo, JAPAN, September 18-22, 2006 (Acceptance rate: 18%).

Modularity in Design: Formal Modeling and Automated Analysis, Yuanfang Cai and Kevin Sullivan. Dissertation. August 2006

Modular Software Design with Crosscutting Interfaces William G. Griswold, Kevin Sullivan, Yuanyuan Song, Macneil Shonle, Nishit Tewari, Yuanfang Cai and Hridesh Rajan, IEEE Software, Special Issue on Aspect-Oriented Programming, January/February 2006.

Simon: A Tool for Logical Design Space Modeling and Analysis. Yuanfang Cai and Kevin Sullivan
Proceedings of 20th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. Page 329-332. Long Beach,California, USA, November 2005.

Information Hiding Interfaces for Aspect-oriented Design. Kevin Sullivan, William G. Griswold, Yuanyuan Song, Yuanfang Cai, Macneil Shonle, Nishit Tewari, Hridesh Rajan Proceedings of the 10th European Software Engineering Conference held jointly with 13th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering ESEC/FSE-13. Page 166-175. Lisbon, Portugal, September 2005.

The Structure and Value of Modularity in Design. Kevin Sullivan, William G. Griswold, Yuanfang Cai and Ben Hallen. Proceedings of the 8th European Software Engineering Conference held jointly with 9th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering ESEC/FSE-9. Page 99-108. Vienna, Austria, September 2001.

Background:

I received my Ph.D. in 2006, M.S. in 2002, advised by Professor Sullivan, in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia.
I received my B.S. in Computer Science from Xidian University in 1996, advised by Professor Gong.
Before I came to the US in 2000, I worked for North China Institute of Computing Technology, one of the top computer research institutions in China.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." ---Alan Kay.

"Fundamental is the building block of fun." --- A dancing girl.