Open Source Tools to Support Teaching Agile Software Development

Learning agile software development methodologies are important due to the popularity of agility in software industry. Agile software development has several practices and each practice needs specific tools to work with. Fortunately, there are plenty of open source tools to support working with the agile practices. However, each tool is a separate tool and there is no information about the interrelation of those open source tools. In this paper we propose a set of open source tools to support agile software development course. We start from identifying the principles and practices of agile software development and continue with examining open source tools that fit with agile practices. The relationship between the open source tools is also determined, based on their functionalities

Extension to UML-B Notation and Toolset

The UML-B notation has been created as an attempt to combine the success and ease of use of UML, with the verification and rigorous development capabilities of formal methods. However, the notation currently only supports a basic diagram set. To address this we have, in this project, designed and implemented a set of extensions to the UML-B notation that provide a much fuller software engineering experience, critically making UML-B more appealing to industry partners. These extensions comprise five new diagram types, which are aimed at supplying a broader range of design capabilities, such as conceptual Use-Case design and future integration with the ProB animator tool

Model-driven Engineering IDE for Quality Assessment of Data-intensive Applications

This article introduces a model-driven engineering (MDE) integrated development environment (IDE) for Data-Intensive Cloud Applications (DIA) with iterative quality enhancements. As part of the H2020 DICE project (ICT-9-2014, id 644869), a framework is being constructed and it is composed of a set of tools developed to support a new MDE methodology. One of these tools is the IDE which acts as the front-end of the methodology and plays a pivotal role in integrating the other tools of the framework. The IDE enables designers to produce from the architectural structure of the general application along with their properties and QoS/QoD annotations up to the deployment model. Administrators, quality assurance engineers or software architects may also run and examine the output of the design and analysis tools in addition to the designer in order to assess the DIA quality in an iterative process

Automatic continuous testing to speed software development

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 147-152).Continuous testing is a new feature for software development environments that uses excess cycles on a developer's workstation to continuously run regression tests in the background, providing rapid feedback about test failures as source code is edited. It is intended to reduce the time and energy required to keep code well-tested, and to prevent regression errors from persisting uncaught for long periods of time. The longer that regression errors are allowed to linger during development, the more time is wasted debugging and fixing them once they are discovered. By monitoring and measuring software projects, we estimate that the wasted time, consisting of this preventable extra fixing cost added to the time spent running tests and waiting for them to complete, accounts for 10-15% of total development time. We present a model of developer behavior that uses data from past projects to infer developer beliefs and predict behavior in new environments -in particular, when changing testing methodologies or tools to reduce wasted time. This model predicts that continuous testing would reduce wasted time by 92-98%, a substantial improvement over other approaches we evaluated, such as automatic test prioritization and changing manual test frequencies. A controlled human experiment indicates that student developers using continuous testing were three times more likely to complete a task before the deadline than those without, with no significant effect on time worked.(cont.) Most participants found continuous testing to be useful and believed that it helped them write better code faster. 90% would recommend the tool to others. We show the first empirical evidence of a benefit from continuous compilation, a popular related feature. Continuous testing has been integrated into Emacs and Eclipse. We detail the functional and technical design of the Eclipse plug-in, which is publicly beta-released.by David Saff.S.M

Eclipsing Binaries From the CSTAR Project at Dome A, Antarctica

The Chinese Small Telescope ARray (CSTAR) has observed an area around the Celestial South Pole at Dome A since 2008. About $20,000$ light curves in the i band were obtained lasting from March to July, 2008. The photometric precision achieves about 4 mmag at i = 7.5 and 20 mmag at i = 12 within a 30 s exposure time. These light curves are analyzed using Lomb--Scargle, Phase Dispersion Minimization, and Box Least Squares methods to search for periodic signals. False positives may appear as a variable signature caused by contaminating stars and the observation mode of CSTAR. Therefore the period and position of each variable candidate are checked to eliminate false positives. Eclipsing binaries are removed by visual inspection, frequency spectrum analysis and locally linear embedding technique. We identify 53 eclipsing binaries in the field of view of CSTAR, containing 24 detached binaries, 8 semi-detached binaries, 18 contact binaries, and 3 ellipsoidal variables. To derive the parameters of these binaries, we use the Eclipsing Binaries via Artificial Intelligence (EBAI) method. The primary and the secondary eclipse timing variations (ETVs) for semi-detached and contact systems are analyzed. Correlated primary and secondary ETVs confirmed by false alarm tests may indicate an unseen perturbing companion. Through ETV analysis, we identify two triple systems (CSTAR J084612.64-883342.9 and CSTAR J220502.55-895206.7). The orbital parameters of the third body in CSTAR J220502.55-895206.7 are derived using a simple dynamical model.Comment: 41 pages, 12 figures; published online in ApJ