Software Formal Inspections Guidebook

The Software Formal Inspections Guidebook is designed to support the inspection process of software developed by and for NASA. This document provides information on how to implement a recommended and proven method for conducting formal inspections of NASA software. This Guidebook is a companion document to NASA Standard 2202-93, Software Formal Inspections Standard, approved April 1993, which provides the rules, procedures, and specific requirements for conducting software formal inspections. Application of the Formal Inspections Standard is optional to NASA program or project management. In cases where program or project management decide to use the formal inspections method, this Guidebook provides additional information on how to establish and implement the process. The goal of the formal inspections process as documented in the above-mentioned Standard and this Guidebook is to provide a framework and model for an inspection process that will enable the detection and elimination of defects as early as possible in the software life cycle. An ancillary aspect of the formal inspection process incorporates the collection and analysis of inspection data to effect continual improvement in the inspection process and the quality of the software subjected to the process

Compulsory Liability Insurance for Commercial Motor Vehicles

With its core in adaptability and change responsiveness, the Agile methodology has become a popular application of the project process within the often volatile environment of today’s software development projects. The Agile methodology emphasizes interaction between project roles over documentation and formal processes. This higher interaction increases the need for functioning information dissemination throughout the entire project process. The study was carried out at a small sized Swedish IT consultancy firm. The company wished to acquire a project management and planning software tool to support the entire project process and all involved project roles. However, awareness of areas in the project process in need of support was not entirely clear. Therefore, the objective of the study was to investigate the company’s application of the Agile project process and identify potential challenges. Furthermore, the objective was to investigate how a project management and planning software tool can support the Agile project process within software development. The thesis was carried out as an abductive case study, where qualitative data collection methods and literature studies were combined. As a result from the study, two main conclusions have been drawn. Firstly: requirements engineering, the customer role, communication, and knowledge transfer were concluded as prominent challenges in the project process in need of increased support. Secondly, a project management and planning software tool can support the project process by: increasing the communication and collaboration abilities, providing holistic and historical project overview, providing a single storage location, and providing structure. Furthermore, the study has also shown that the project management and planning software tool needs to interact with the Agile project process in order to provide successful support. As final contribution, the Interaction model was created. The model visualizes the main areas in which a project management and planning software tool must interact with the Agile process, in order to support the entire project process successfully.Genom dess anpassningsförmåga och förändringsmottaglighet har den Agila metodiken blivit en populär tillämpning för projektprocessen inom mjukvaruutveckling, en miljö där snabba förändringar tillhör vardagen. Den Agila metodiken framhäver interaktion mellan projektroller  framför  dokumentation  och  formella  processer,  vilket  ökar  behovet  av fungerande informationsspridning genom hela projektprocessen. Studien  har  utförts  hos  ett  mindre  svenskt  IT-konsultföretag,  vilket  önskade  att införskaffa en programvara för ett projektlednings- och planeringsverktyg som kan stötta hela  projektprocessen  och  alla  involverade  projektroller.  Medvetenheten  kring  de områden i projektprocessen som är i behov av stöd var däremot inte helt tydlig. Målet med   studien   var   därför   att   undersöka   företagets   tillämpning   av   den   Agila projektprocessen  och  identifiera  eventuella  utmaningar.  Vidare  var  målet  också  att undersöka hur en programvara för ett projektlednings- och planeringsverktyg kan stödja den Agila projektprocessen inom mjukvaruutveckling. Examensarbetet utfördes som en abduktiv fallstudie där flera kvalitativa datainsamlingsmetoder användes tillsammans med litteraturstudier. Som resultat av studien har två huvudslutsatser dragits. För det första; kravhantering, kundrollen, kommunikation  och  kunskapsöverföring  identifierades som framträdande utmaningar i projektprocessen i behov av ökat stöd. För det andra, att en programvara för ett projektlednings- och planeringsverktyg kan stödja projektprocessen genom att; förbättra  kommunikations-  och  samarbetsmöjligheterna,  ge  en  övergripande  och historisk projektöverblick, fungera som en gemensam lagringsplats och tillhandahålla struktur.  Vidare  har  studien  visat  att  en  programvara  för  ett  projektlednings-  och planeringsverktyg  måste  interagera  med  den  Agila  projektprocessen  för  att  ge  ett effektivt  stöd.  Som  ett  slutligt  bidrag  skapades  "the  Interaction  model",  vilken visualiserar huvudområdena inom vilka en programvara för ett  projektlednings- och planeringsverktyg måste interagera med projektprocessen för att ge ett fullt stöd till processen

Rapid Software Development Life Cycle in Small Projects

Small software projects are becoming more usual nowadays. Whether a small project is conducted privately or professionally, the management of the project and its phases is much easier with proper tools and frameworks. The research target of this thesis is to find out a proper life cycle model for small software projects. This thesis is conducted for Softwarehouse, a professional division of IT services in the University of Turku. The official guide for Scrum framework is adhered in software development but when it comes to formally managing various phases of a software project (planning, design, implementation, testing, reviewing etc.) there is room for improvement. Managing software projects with a proper set of tools and procedures would be beneficial as Softwarehouse works on many projects concurrently. The intended life cycle model has to be formal and heavy enough so that the benefits of agile project management can be received. However too rigid a model can be too arduous and exhausting to use, which could result in the decrease of Softwarehouse’s production volume. Therefore the model has to be light enough to maintain rapid software development and creative atmosphere within the Softwarehouse. This thesis begins by giving outline of existing software development life cycle models and followed by relevant literary exploration. After this the research case is explained in greater detail. These give the foundation and rationale to propose a suitable model. The model is experimented empirically and reviewed by partaking personnel. The results are reviewed and discussed. Finally topics for future research are suggested

Flexible Global Software Development (GSD): Antecedents of Success in Requirements Analysis

Globalization of software development has resulted in a rapid shift away from the traditional collocated, on-site development model, to the offshoring model. Emerging trends indicate an increasing interest in offshoring even in early phases like requirements analysis. Additionally, the flexibility offered by the agile development approach makes it attractive for adaptation in globally distributed software work. A question of significance then is what impacts the success of offshoring earlier phases, like requirements analysis, in a flexible and globally distributed environment? This article incorporates the stance of control theory to posit a research model that examines antecedent factors such as requirements change, facilitation by vendor and client site-coordinators, control, and computer-mediated communication. The impact of these factors on success of requirements analysis projects in a “flexible” global setting is tested using two quasi-experiments involving students from Management Development Institute, India and Marquette University, USA. Results indicate that formal modes of control significantly influence project success during requirements analysis. Further, facilitation by both client and vendor site coordinators positively impacts requirements analysis success

COMAND - A Distributed Configuration Management Framework

Software development is becoming a more and more distributed process, which urgently needs supporting tools in the field of configuration management, software process/w orkflow management, communication and problem tracking. In this paper we present a new distributed software configuration management framework COMAND. It offers high availabilit y through replication and a mechanism to easily change and adapt the project structure to new business needs. To better understand and formally prove some properties of COMAND, we have modeled it in a formal technique based on distributed graph transformations. This formalism provides an intuitive rule-based description technique mainly for the dynamic behavior of the system on an abstract level. We use it here to model the replication subsystem

Formal Methods Case Studies for DO-333

RTCA DO-333, Formal Methods Supplement to DO-178C and DO-278A provides guidance for software developers wishing to use formal methods in the certification of airborne systems and air traffic management systems. The supplement identifies the modifications and additions to DO-178C and DO-278A objectives, activities, and software life cycle data that should be addressed when formal methods are used as part of the software development process. This report presents three case studies describing the use of different classes of formal methods to satisfy certification objectives for a common avionics example - a dual-channel Flight Guidance System. The three case studies illustrate the use of theorem proving, model checking, and abstract interpretation. The material presented is not intended to represent a complete certification effort. Rather, the purpose is to illustrate how formal methods can be used in a realistic avionics software development project, with a focus on the evidence produced that could be used to satisfy the verification objectives found in Section 6 of DO-178C

The Moderating Influence of Inherent Project Risk on the Relationship between Project Planning and Perceived Project Success

Project planning is considered to be a critical success factor for project success. However, recent literature questions whether planning has similar importance in various project contexts. This research investigates the effectiveness of project planning on project success in various project risk contexts of software development projects. A survey based research design was used to collect data to test the proposed model. The results reveal that various inherent project risks can moderate the effects of project planning on project success and in different ways for various success measures. More specifically, the results indicate that project planning makes a greater contribution to project success when there is a low level of inherent project risk and its positive impact on project success diminishes when there is a high level of inherent project risk. The results of this study contribute to a more acute understanding of the contingency approach to software project risk management. Practical implications of these results suggest that project managers should put more emphasis on less detailed formal planning in high risk project situations in order to meet project success

Software Development and Testing: Approach and Challenges in a distributed HEP Collaboration

In developing the ATLAS [1] Trigger and Data Acquisition (TDAQ) software, the team is applying the iterative waterfall model, evolutionary process management, formal software inspection, and lightweight review techniques. The long preparation phase, with a geographically widespread development team required that the standard techniques be adapted to this HEP environment. The testing process is receiving special attention. Unit tests and check targets in nightly project builds form the basis for the subsequent software project release testing. The integrated software is then being run on computing farms that give further opportunites for gaining experience, fault finding, and acquiring ideas for improvement. Dedicated tests on a farm of up to 1000 nodes address the large-scale aspect of the project. Integration test activities on the experimental site include the special purpose-built event readout hardware. Deployment in detector commissioning starts the countdown towards running the final ATLAS experiment. These activities aim at both understanding and completing the complex system, and help in forming a team whose members have a variety of expertise, working cultures, and professional backgrounds

Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances

Structure of a Formal User Model for Construction Information Retrieval

Information science researchers and developers have spent many years addressing the problem of retrieving the exact information needed and using it for analysis purposes. In informationseeking dialogues, the user, i.e. construction project manager or supplier, often asks questions about specific aspects of the tasks they want to perform. But most of the time it is difficult for the software systems to unambiguously understand their overall intentions. The existence of information tunnels (Tannenbaum 2002) aggravates this phenomenon. This study includes a detailed case study of the material management process in the construction industry. Based on this case study, the structure of a formal user model for information retrieval in construction management is proposed. This prototype user model will be incorporated into the system design for construction information management and retrieval. This information retrieval system is a user-centered product based on the development of a user configurable visitor mechanism for managing and retrieving project information without worrying too much about the underlying data structure of the database system. An executable UML model combined with OODB is used to reduce the ambiguity in the user's intentions and to achieve user satisfaction