Identifying and improving reusability based on coupling patterns

Open Source Software (OSS) communities have not yet taken full advantage of reuse mechanisms. Typically many OSS projects which share the same application domain and topic, duplicate effort and code, without fully leveraging the vast amounts of available code. This study proposes the empirical evaluation of source code folders of OSS projects in order to determine their actual internal reuse and their potential as shareable, fine-grained and externally reusable software components by future projects. This paper empirically analyzes four OSS systems, identifies which components (in the form of folders) are currently being reused internally and studies their coupling characteristics. Stable components (i.e., those which act as service providers rather than service consumers) are shown to be more likely to be reusable. As a means of supporting replication of these successful instances of OSS reuse, source folders with similar patterns are extracted from the studied systems, and identified as externally reusable components

A taxonomy of asymmetric requirements aspects

The early aspects community has received increasing attention among researchers and practitioners, and has grown a set of meaningful terminology and concepts in recent years, including the notion of requirements aspects. Aspects at the requirements level present stakeholder concerns that crosscut the problem domain, with the potential for a broad impact on questions of scoping, prioritization, and architectural design. Although many existing requirements engineering approaches advocate and advertise an integral support of early aspects analysis, one challenge is that the notion of a requirements aspect is not yet well established to efficaciously serve the community. Instead of defining the term once and for all in a normally arduous and unproductive conceptual unification stage, we present a preliminary taxonomy based on the literature survey to show the different features of an asymmetric requirements aspect. Existing approaches that handle requirements aspects are compared and classified according to the proposed taxonomy. In addition,we study crosscutting security requirements to exemplify the taxonomy's use, substantiate its value, and explore its future directions

Dismantling and personalising task-sharing psychosocial interventions for common mental disorders: a study protocol for an individual participant data component network meta-analysis.

INTRODUCTION Common mental disorders, including depression, anxiety and related somatic health symptoms, are leading causes of disability worldwide. Especially in low-resource settings, psychosocial interventions delivered by non-specialist providers through task-sharing modalities proved to be valid options to expand access to mental healthcare. However, such interventions are usually eclectic multicomponent interventions consisting of different combinations of evidence-based therapeutic strategies. Which of these various components (or combinations thereof) are more efficacious (and for whom) to reduce common mental disorder symptomatology is yet to be substantiated by evidence. METHODS AND ANALYSIS Comprehensive search was performed in electronic databases MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO and the Cochrane Register of Controlled Trials-CENTRAL from database inception to 15 March 2023 to systematically identify all randomised controlled trials that compared any single component or multicomponent psychosocial intervention delivered through the task-sharing modality against any active or inactive control condition in the treatment of adults suffering from common mental disorders. From these trials, individual participant data (IPD) of all measured outcomes and covariates will be collected. We will dismantle psychosocial interventions creating a taxonomy of components and then apply the IPD component network meta-analysis (IPD-cNMA) methodology to assess the efficacy of individual components (or combinations thereof) according to participant-level prognostic factors and effect modifiers. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION Ethics approval is not applicable for this study since no original data will be collected. Results from this study will be published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at relevant conferences

Building a Digital Textile Portfolio: A Proposed Taxonomy

Creating a web-based digital textile portfolio can help students secure a position in a textile design related field by instantaneously providing easy access of their work to potential employers. Thoroughly explaining each step of the process accompanied by images and videos can help employers understand a student\u27s thought process and capabilities. Our presentation will include an example of a digital textile printing portfolios developed through use of the taxonomy and evaluations of a portfolio via web-distributed surveys to industry professionals

A Review of the Literature on Configuration Management Tools

Configuration management tools help administrators in defining and automating system configurations. With cloud computing, host numbers are likely to grow. IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offerings with pay-per-use pricing models make fast and effective deployment of applications necessary. Configuration management tools address both challenges. In this paper, the existing research on this topic is reviewed comprehensively. Readers are provided with a descriptive analysis of the published literature as well as with an analysis of the content of the respective research works. The paper serves as an overview for researchers who are new to the topic. Furthermore, it serves to identify work related to an intended research field and identifies research gaps. Practitioners are provided with a means to identify solutions to their organizational problems

Improving accountability in recommender systems research through reproducibility

Reproducibility is a key requirement for scientific progress. It allows the reproduction of the works of others, and, as a consequence, to fully trust the reported claims and results. In this work, we argue that, by facilitating reproducibility of recommender systems experimentation, we indirectly address the issues of accountability and transparency in recommender systems research from the perspectives of practitioners, designers, and engineers aiming to assess the capabilities of published research works. These issues have become increasingly prevalent in recent literature. Reasons for this include societal movements around intelligent systems and artificial intelligence striving toward fair and objective use of human behavioral data (as in Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, or Human–Computer Interaction). Society has grown to expect explanations and transparency standards regarding the underlying algorithms making automated decisions for and around us. This work surveys existing definitions of these concepts and proposes a coherent terminology for recommender systems research, with the goal to connect reproducibility to accountability. We achieve this by introducing several guidelines and steps that lead to reproducible and, hence, accountable experimental workflows and research. We additionally analyze several instantiations of recommender system implementations available in the literature and discuss the extent to which they fit in the introduced framework. With this work, we aim to shed light on this important problem and facilitate progress in the field by increasing the accountability of researchThis work has been funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (reference: PID2019-108965GB-I00

A component-based virtual engineering approach to PLC code generation for automation systems

In recent years, the automotive industry has been significantly affected by a number of challenges driven by globalisation, economic fluctuations, environmental awareness and rapid technological developments. As a consequence, product lifecycles are shortening and customer demands are becoming more diverse. To survive in such a business environment, manufacturers are striving to find a costeffective solution for fast and efficient development and reconfiguration of manufacturing systems to satisfy the needs of changing markets without losses in production. Production systems within automotive industry are vastly automated and heavily rely on PLC-based control systems. It has been established that one of the major obstacles in realising reconfigurable manufacturing systems is the fragmented engineering approach to implement control systems. Control engineering starts at a very late stage in the overall system engineering process and remains highly isolated from the mechanical design and build of the system. During this stage, control code is typically written manually in vendor-specific tools in a combination of IEC 61131-3 languages. Writing control code is a complex, time consuming and error-prone process. [Continues.

Digital transformation in the financial services sector: new business models and value creation

This cumulative dissertation contributes to the field of digital transformation in the financial services sector by providing a synthesis of a set of peer-reviewed scientific articles aimed toward advancing the understanding of the value of innovation in the digital transformation of business models in the financial services sector. With this aim in mind, this dissertation focuses on three main research topics related to the field of digital transformation in financial services, whereby the first research topic addresses the digital transformation of the financial system driven by the integration of business and process innovations. To support the subsequent implementation of strategic responses based on the complexity and scope of the digital transformation required in the financial services industry, a holistic analysis of the macroeconomic and sector-specific influencing factors underlying the digital transformation in the financial services industry is presented. Furthermore, since the integration of innovations in primary or secondary business processes leads to both positive and negative consequential impacts, the ambivalent effect of the integration of digital innovations on advisory work in traditional financial institutions are further examined. The second research topic addresses the structural transformation of the financial sector inherent to the consolidation and long-term sustainability of financial technology (FinTech) companies, through the identification and empirical classification of the success factors intrinsic to the different FinTech business models. Subsequently, given that the incorporation of digital innovations into business processes not only challenges how traditional financial service providers capture and generate business value, but also how they engage with their customers to deliver value, the third research topic first explores, from a technological perspective, the digitalization of the customer interface leveraged by digital communication innovations such as chatbots, and subsequently examines the implementation of chatbots within the context of the financial industry.Diese kumulative Dissertation zielt darauf ab, einen Beitrag zum Bereich der digitalen Transformation im Finanzdienstleistungssektor zu leisten, indem sie eine Synthese einer Reihe von begutachteten wissenschaftlichen Artikeln liefert, die darauf abzielen, das Verständnis für den Wert von Innovationen bei der digitalen Transformation von Geschäftsmodellen im Finanzdienstleistungssektor zu fördern. Mit diesem Ziel vor Augen konzentriert sich diese Dissertation auf drei Hauptforschungsthemen im Bereich der digitalen Transformation im Finanzdienstleistungssektor. Das erste Forschungsthema befasst sich mit der digitalen Transformation des Finanzsystems, die durch die Integration von Geschäfts- und Prozessinnovationen vorangetrieben wird. Um die anschließende Umsetzung strategischer Maßnahmen zu unterstützen, die auf der Komplexität und dem Umfang der in der Finanzdienstleistungsbranche erforderlichen digitalen Transformation basieren, wird in dieser Arbeit eine ganzheitliche Analyse der branchenspezifischen Einflussfaktoren für die digitale Transformation in der Finanzdienstleistungsbranche vorgestellt. Da die Integration von Innovationen in primäre und sekundäre Geschäftsprozesse sowohl zu positiven als auch zu negativen Folgewirkungen führt, werden außerdem die ambivalenten Auswirkungen der Integration digitaler Innovationen auf die Beratungsarbeit in traditionellen Finanzinstituten näher untersucht. Das zweite Forschungsthema befasst sich mit dem strukturellen Wandel des Finanzsektors, der mit der Konsolidierung und langfristigen Nachhaltigkeit von Finanztechnologieunternehmen (FinTech) einhergeht, indem die Erfolgsfaktoren der verschiedenen FinTech-Geschäftsmodelle identifiziert und empirisch klassifiziert werden. Da die Einbindung digitaler Innovationen in die Geschäftsprozesse nicht nur die Art und Weise in Frage stellt, wie traditionelle Finanzdienstleister Geschäftswerte erfassen und generieren, sondern auch, wie sie mit ihren Kunden in Kontakt treten, um Werte zu schaffen, untersucht das dritte Forschungsthema zunächst aus technologischer Sicht die Digitalisierung der Kundenschnittstelle, die durch digitale Kommunikationsinnovationen wie Chatbots ermöglicht wird, und untersucht anschließend die Implementierung von Chatbots im Kontext der Finanzbranche