Spacecraft software training needs assessment research

The problems were identified, along with their causes and potential solutions, that the management analysts were encountering in performing their jobs. It was concluded that sophisticated training applications would provide the most effective solution to a substantial portion of the analysts' problems. The remainder could be alleviated through the introduction of tools that could help make retrieval of the needed information from the vast and complex information resources feasible

Engineering Automation for Reliable Software Interim Progress Report (10/01/2000 - 09/30/2001)

Prepared for: U.S. Army Research Office P.O. Box 12211 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2211The objective of our effort is to develop a scientific basis for producing reliable software that is also flexible and cost effective for the DoD distributed software domain. This objective addresses the long term goals of increasing the quality of service provided by complex systems while reducing development risks, costs, and time. Our work focuses on "wrap and glue" technology based on a domain specific distributed prototype model. The key to making the proposed approach reliable, flexible, and cost-effective is the automatic generation of glue and wrappers based on a designer's specification. The "wrap and glue" approach allows system designers to concentrate on the difficult interoperability problems and defines solutions in terms of deeper and more difficult interoperability issues, while freeing designers from implementation details. Specific research areas for the proposed effort include technology enabling rapid prototyping, inference for design checking, automatic program generation, distributed real-time scheduling, wrapper and glue technology, and reliability assessment and improvement. The proposed technology will be integrated with past research results to enable a quantum leap forward in the state of the art for rapid prototyping.U. S. Army Research Office P.O. Box 12211 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-22110473-MA-SPApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

ICSEA 2021: the sixteenth international conference on software engineering advances

The Sixteenth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances (ICSEA 2021), held on October 3 - 7, 2021 in Barcelona, Spain, continued a series of events covering a broad spectrum of software-related topics. The conference covered fundamentals on designing, implementing, testing, validating and maintaining various kinds of software. The tracks treated the topics from theory to practice, in terms of methodologies, design, implementation, testing, use cases, tools, and lessons learnt. The conference topics covered classical and advanced methodologies, open source, agile software, as well as software deployment and software economics and education. The conference had the following tracks: Advances in fundamentals for software development Advanced mechanisms for software development Advanced design tools for developing software Software engineering for service computing (SOA and Cloud) Advanced facilities for accessing software Software performance Software security, privacy, safeness Advances in software testing Specialized software advanced applications Web Accessibility Open source software Agile and Lean approaches in software engineering Software deployment and maintenance Software engineering techniques, metrics, and formalisms Software economics, adoption, and education Business technology Improving productivity in research on software engineering Trends and achievements Similar to the previous edition, this event continued to be very competitive in its selection process and very well perceived by the international software engineering community. As such, it is attracting excellent contributions and active participation from all over the world. We were very pleased to receive a large amount of top quality contributions. We take here the opportunity to warmly thank all the members of the ICSEA 2021 technical program committee as well as the numerous reviewers. The creation of such a broad and high quality conference program would not have been possible without their involvement. We also kindly thank all the authors that dedicated much of their time and efforts to contribute to the ICSEA 2021. We truly believe that thanks to all these efforts, the final conference program consists of top quality contributions. This event could also not have been a reality without the support of many individuals, organizations and sponsors. We also gratefully thank the members of the ICSEA 2021 organizing committee for their help in handling the logistics and for their work that is making this professional meeting a success. We hope the ICSEA 2021 was a successful international forum for the exchange of ideas and results between academia and industry and to promote further progress in software engineering research

SERVICE-BASED AUTOMATION OF SOFTWARE CONSTRUCTION ACTIVITIES

The reuse of software units, such as classes, components and services require professional knowledge to be performed. Today a multiplicity of different software unit technologies, supporting tools, and related activities used in reuse processes exist. Each of these relevant reuse elements may also include a high number of variations and may differ in the level and quality of necessary reuse knowledge. In such an environment of increasing variations and, therefore, an increasing need for knowledge, software engineers must obtain such knowledge to be able to perform software unit reuse activities. Today many different reuse activities exist for a software unit. Some typical knowledge intensive activities are: transformation, integration, and deployment. In addition to the problem of the amount of knowledge required for such activities, other difficulties also exist. The global industrial environment makes it challenging to identify sources of, and access to, knowledge. Typically, such sources (e.g., repositories) are made to search and retrieve information about software unitsand not about the required reuse activity knowledge for a special unit. Additionally, the knowledge has to be learned by inexperienced software engineers and, therefore, to be interpreted. This interpretation may lead to variations in the reuse result and can differ from the estimated result of the knowledge creator. This makes it difficult to exchange knowledge between software engineers or global teams. Additionally, the reuse results of reuse activities have to be repeatable and sustainable. In such a scenario, the knowledge about software reuse activities has to be exchanged without the above mentioned problems by an inexperienced software engineer. The literature shows a lack of techniques to store and subsequently distribute relevant reuse activity knowledge among software engineers. The central aim of this thesis is to enable inexperienced software engineers to use knowledge required to perform reuse activities without experiencing the aforementioned problems. The reuse activities: transformation, integration, and deployment, have been selected as the foundation for the research. Based on the construction level of handling a software unit, these activities are called Software Construction Activities (SCAcs) throughout the research. To achieve the aim, specialised software construction activity models have been created and combined with an abstract software unit model. As a result, different SCAc knowledge is described and combined with different software unit artefacts needed by the SCAcs. Additionally, the management (e.g., the execution of an SCAc) will be provided in a service-oriented environment. Because of the focus on reuse activities, an approach which avoids changing the knowledge level of software engineers and the abstraction view on software units and activities, the object of the investigation differs from other approaches which aim to solve the insufficient reuse activity knowledge problem. The research devised novel abstraction models to describe SCAcs as knowledge models related to the relevant information of software units. The models and the focused environment have been created using standard technologies. As a result, these were realised easily in a real world environment. Softwareengineers were able to perform single SCAcs without having previously acquired the necessary knowledge. The risk of failing reuse decreases because single activities can be performed. The analysis of the research results is based on a case study. An example of a reuse environmenthas been created and tested in a case study to prove the operational capability of the approach. The main result of the research is a proven concept enabling inexperienced software engineers to reuse software units by reusing SCAcs. The research shows the reduction in time for reuse and a decrease of learning effort is significant