Technology transfer: Transportation

The application of NASA derived technology in solving problems related to highways, railroads, and other rapid systems is described. Additional areas/are identified where space technology may be utilized to meet requirements related to waterways, law enforcement agencies, and the trucking and recreational vehicle industries

Construct by Contract: Construct by Contract: An Approach for Developing Reliable Software

This research introduces “Construct by Contract” as a proposal for a general methodology to develop dependable software systems. It describes an ideal process to construct systems by propagating requirements as contracts from the client’s desires to the correctness proof in verification stage, especially in everyday-used software like web applications, mobile applications and desktop application. Such methodology can be converted in a single integrated workspace as standalone tool to develop software. To achieve the already mentioned goal, this methodology puts together a collection of software engineering tools and techniques used throughout the software’s lifecycle, from requirements gathering to the testing phase, in order to ensure a contract-based flow. Construct by Contract is inclusive, regarding the roles of the people involved in the software construction process, including for instance customers, users, project managers, designers, developers and testers, all of them interacting in one common software development environment, sharing information in an understandable presentation according to each stage. It is worth to mention that we focus on the verification phase, as the key to achieve the reliability sought. Although at this point, we only completed the definition and the specification of this methodology, we evaluate the implementation by analysing, measuring and comparing different existing tools that could fit at any of the stages of software’s lifecycle, and that could be applied into a piece of commercial software. These insights are provided in a proof of concept case study, involving a productive Java Web application using struts framework

Whitepaper: The Value of Improving the Separation of Concerns

Microsoft's enterprise customers are demanding better ways to modularize their software systems. They look to the Java community, where these needs are being met with language enhancements, improved developer tools and middleware, and better runtime support. We present a business case for why Microsoft should give priority to supporting better modularization techniques, also known as advanced separation of concerns (ASOC), for the .NET platform, and we provide a roadmap for how to do so

A survey of the use of crowdsourcing in software engineering

The term 'crowdsourcing' was initially introduced in 2006 to describe an emerging distributed problem-solving model by online workers. Since then it has been widely studied and practiced to support software engineering. In this paper we provide a comprehensive survey of the use of crowdsourcing in software engineering, seeking to cover all literature on this topic. We first review the definitions of crowdsourcing and derive our definition of Crowdsourcing Software Engineering together with its taxonomy. Then we summarise industrial crowdsourcing practice in software engineering and corresponding case studies. We further analyse the software engineering domains, tasks and applications for crowdsourcing and the platforms and stakeholders involved in realising Crowdsourced Software Engineering solutions. We conclude by exposing trends, open issues and opportunities for future research on Crowdsourced Software Engineering

Software for physics of tau lepton decay in LHC experiments

Software development in high energy physics experiments offers unique experience with rapidly changing environment and variety of different standards and frameworks that software must be adapted to. As such, regular methods of software development are hard to use as they do not take into account how greatly some of these changes influence the whole structure. The following thesis summarizes development of TAUOLA C++ Interface introducing tau decays to new event record standard. Documentation of the program is already published. That is why it is not recalled here again. We focus on the development cycle and methodology used in the project, starting from the definition of the expectations through planning and designing the abstract model and concluding with the implementation. In the last part of the paper we present installation of the software within different experiments surrounding Large Hadron Collider and the problems that emerged during this process.Comment: Thesis submitted to Applied Computer Science Department in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MSc degree. This work is partially supported by EU Marie Curie Research Training Network grant under the contract No. MRTN-CT-2006-0355505, Polish Government grant N202 06434 (2008-2011) and EU-RTN Programme: Contract No. MRTN-CT-2006-035482 'Flavianet

Model-based Testing in Cloud Brokerage Scenarios

In future Cloud ecosystems, brokers will mediate between service providers and consumers, playing an increased role in quality assurance, checking services for functional compliance to agreed standards, among other aspects. To date, most Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) testing has been performed manually, requiring duplicated effort at the development, certification and deployment stages of the service lifecycle. This paper presents a strategy for achieving automated testing for certification and re-certification of SaaS applications, based on the adoption of simple state-based and functional specifications. High-level test suites are generated from specifications, by algorithms that provide the necessary and sufficient coverage. The high-level tests must be grounded for each implementation technology, whether SOAP, REST or rich-client. Two examples of grounding are presented, one into SOAP for a traditional web service and the other into Selenium for a SAP HANA rich-client application. The results demonstrate good test coverage. Further work is required to fully automate the grounding