Foundations of Empirical Software Engineering: The Legacy of Victor R. Basili

This book captures the main scientific contributions of Victor R. Basili, who has significantly shaped the field of empirical software engineering from its very start. He was the first to claim that software engineering needed to follow the model of other physical sciences and develop an experimental paradigm. By working on this postulate, he developed concepts that today are well known and widely used, including the Goal-Question-Metric method, the Quality-Improvement paradigm, and the Experience Factory. He is one of the few software pioneers who can aver that their research results are not just scientifically acclaimed but are also used as industry standards. On the occasion of his 65th birthday, celebrated with a symposium in his honor at the International Conference on Software Engineering in St. Louis, MO, USA in May 2005, Barry Boehm, Hans Dieter Rombach, and Marvin V. Zelkowitz, each a long-time collaborator of Victor R. Basili, selected the 20 most important research papers of their friend, and arranged these according to subject field. They then invited renowned researchers to write topical introductions. The result is this commented collection of timeless cornerstones of software engineering, hitherto available only in scattered publications

Submicron Systems Architecture: Semiannual Technical Report

No abstract available

Conference on the Programming Environment for Development of Numerical Software

Systematic approaches to numerical software development and testing are presented

Hydrometallurgical Simulation - A Viable Program Structure

In order to satisfy the increasingly sophisticated requirements for simulation in the metallurgical industry, this research focused on the development of data structures and algorithms general and extendable enough to accomodate all hydrometallurgical processes. The data structures' designed to describe process stream information were based on the concept of sub-streams (Britt-, 19SG) using the pi ex data structure (Evans, Joseph and Seider, 1977) inherent to the Pascal programming language. As sub-streams are combined to describe complete process streams, the data structures may be extended to describe any process stream by creating additional sub-streams as may be required. Algorithms for partitioning, tearing and ordering flow sheets based on the work of Tarjan (1972, 1973) and Lee and Rudd (1966) were designed and implemented. These algorithms are able to treat the large problem sizes associated with hydrometallurgical process flow sheets. The data structures and algorithms have been successfully combined into a powerful process simulator extendable to the general hydrometallurgical process description

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow

Visualizing the MPI Programs: Using Continuous Semantic Zooming

Programs depend on the entities. Their hierarchy varies with the complexity and as their utilization increases the complexity involved in hierarchy also increases. Visualization is a traditional method of representing complex entities to enhance the human understanding. Visualization of parallel programs is not a new concept. But, the approaches followed to obtain this goal of visualizing the Message Passing Interface (MPI) programs are unique in their own ways. There are no tools, which are capable of implementing all aspects of MPI programs in an efficient way. The main reason is the complexity of parallel programs. This thesis involves using Flatland [1], a virtual reality application and its implementation through a concept called Continuous Semantic Zooming (CSZ) [2]. It is hypothesized that this method of visualization can help naïve programmers, that is, people with little or no programming experience to understand the concept of MPI programming and also can serve the purpose of the experts in the fields of MPI programming to look deeper into the issues involving debugging and analyzing the MPI program behavior. The output generated as a trace file from a set of nine MPI programs is taken as an input for the visual representation. We focus on the design, data format, the results and experiences obtained from this project

Aerospace Applications of Microprocessors

An assessment of the state of microprocessor applications is presented. Current and future requirements and associated technological advances which allow effective exploitation in aerospace applications are discussed

Spacelab user implementation assessment study. (Software requirements analysis). Volume 2: Technical report

The engineering analyses and evaluation studies conducted for the Software Requirements Analysis are discussed. Included are the development of the study data base, synthesis of implementation approaches for software required by both mandatory onboard computer services and command/control functions, and identification and implementation of software for ground processing activities