639,674 research outputs found
Detailed empirical studies of student information storing in the context of distributed design team-based project work
This paper presents the findings of six empirical case studies investigating the information stored by engineering design students in distributed team-based Global Design Projects. The aim is to understand better how students store distributed design information in order to prepare them for work in today‟s international and global context. This paper outlines the descriptive element of the work, the qualitative and quantitative research methods used and the results. It discusses the issues around the emergent themes of information storing; information storing systems; information storing patterns; and information strategy, making recommendations; establishing that there is a need for more prescriptive measures to supporting distributed design information management. This work will be of great value to industry also
Software design measures for distributed enterprise information systems
Enterprise information systems are increasingly being developed as distributed information systems. Quality attributes of distributed information systems, as in the centralised case, should be evaluated as early and as accurately as possible in the software engineering process. In particular, software measures associated with quality attributes of such systems should consider the characteristics of modern distributed technologies. Early design decisions have a deep impact on the implementation of distributed enterprise information systems and thus, on the ultimate quality of the software as an operational entity. Due to the fact that the distributed-software engineering process affords software engineers a number of design alternatives, it is important to develop tools and guidelines that can be used to assess and compare design artefacts quantitatively. This dissertation makes a contribution to the field of Software Engineering by proposing and evaluating software design measures for distributed enterprise information systems. In previous research, measures developed for distributed software have been focused in code attributes, and thus, only provide feedback towards the end of the software engineering process. In contrast, this thesis proposes a number of specific design measures that provide quantitative information before the implementation. These measures capture attributes of the structure and behaviour of distributed information systems that are deemed important to assess their quality attributes, based on the analysis of the problem domain. The measures were evaluated theoretically and empirically as part of a well defined methodology. On the one hand, we have followed a formal framework based on the theory of measurement, in order to carry out the theoretical validation of the proposed measures. On the other hand, the suitability of the measures, to be used as indicators of quality attributes, was evaluated empirically with a robust statistical technique for exploratory research. The data sets analysed were gathered after running several experiments and replications with a distributed enterprise information system. The results of the empirical evaluation show that most of the proposed measures are correlated to the quality attributes of interest, and that most of these measures may be used, individually or in combination, for the estimation of these quality attributes-namely efficiency, reliability and maintainability. The design of a distributed information system is modelled as a combination of its structure, which reflects static characteristics, and its behaviour, which captures complementary dynamic aspects. The behavioural measures showed slightly better individual and combined results than the structural measures in the experimentation. This was in line with our expectations, since the measures were evaluated as indicators of non-functional quality attributes of the operational system. On the other hand, the structural measures provide useful feedback that is available earlier in the software engineering process. Finally, we developed a prototype application to collect the proposed measures automatically and examined typical real-world scenarios where the measures may be used to make design decisions as part of the software engineering process
A self-organising awareness system for distributed software engineering
Software engineers and other collaborative disciplines rely on informal "out-of-band" communication for ef-
fective coordination of their activities, especially in agile methods. This type of communication is lost when development is distributed, with consequent deleterious effects on engineer effectiveness. In order to effectively support distributed software engineering, a replacement for this informal communication must be found.
Much previous research focussed on either synchronous awareness such as radar views and shared editors, where participants were distributed in space not time, or asynchronous awareness such as change notification, which
did not explicitly support concurrent activities. A unified approach is necessary to support software engineering.
Furthermore, requiring co-location of engineering teams is not possible in today's marketplace where development
is often outsourced, consequently a definite requirement for awareness tools to replace informal communication
exists.
To implement an awareness tool capable of providing awareness of activities distributed both in time (asyn-
chronous awareness) and space (synchronous awareness). The tool will not rely on a centralised reflector; instead
information will be distributed over a peer-to-peer network arranged using a self-organisation algorithm.
Consequently awareness information need not travel more than a few hops from its originating peer, reducing
network load and increasing relevance of information received. Unlike reflector-based CSCW systems, the network
will scale and will not have a single point of failure in the reflector. Furthermore, without the need to setup a
reflector, there is the capability for ad-hoc awareness, using low-complexity peer discovery by local broadcast for
example.
The tool will be integrated with the Eclipse development environment. The files a user is currently editing will
determine the data they are interested in and fuzzy similarity metrics will be used to compare the collections of
each peer in the network in order to drive the self-organisation process. To evaluate the success of self-organisation,
a simulation approach will be used before deploying the algorithms in the wild. To evaluate the effectiveness of
the awareness provision, initial deployment and controlled experiments will be conducted within the Distributed
Software Engineering group at the University of Lincoln and a later version of the tool will be trialled with existing
Eclipse user
Optimization of Gaussian Random Fields
Many engineering systems are subject to spatially distributed uncertainty,
i.e. uncertainty that can be modeled as a random field. Altering the mean or
covariance of this uncertainty will in general change the statistical
distribution of the system outputs. We present an approach for computing the
sensitivity of the statistics of system outputs with respect to the parameters
describing the mean and covariance of the distributed uncertainty. This
sensitivity information is then incorporated into a gradient-based optimizer to
optimize the structure of the distributed uncertainty to achieve desired output
statistics. This framework is applied to perform variance optimization for a
model problem and to optimize the manufacturing tolerances of a gas turbine
compressor blade
- …