Early identification of crosscutting concerns with the Language Extended Lexicon

Large-scale software applications are complex systems that involve a myriad of different concerns. Ideally, these concerns should be organized into separated and different modules, but often some of these concerns overlap and crosscut each other. Such a situation is problematic, as concerns are tangled and scattered into different modules; thus, design and source code become difficult to produce and maintain. The Modularity community has been addressing crosscutting concerns by developing techniques based on separation of concerns. This separation must be done as early as possible during software construction to obtain a more modular and consequently better maintainable software, where evolution is performed with less effort and the possibility of introducing unforeseen mistakes is minimal. In this paper, we propose a strategy to identify crosscutting concerns at requirements level, i.e., at early stages in the software development process, by using the Language Extended Lexicon.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

Assessing composition in modeling approaches

Modeling approaches are based on various paradigms, e.g., aspect-oriented, feature-oriented, object-oriented, and logic-based. Modeling approaches may cover requirements models to low-level design models, are developed for various purposes, use various means of composition, and thus are difficult to compare. However, such comparisons are critical to help practitioners know under which conditions approaches are most applicable, and how they might be successfully generalized and combined to achieve end-to-end methods. This paper reports on work done at the 2nd International Comparing Modeling Approaches (CMA) workshop towards the goal of identifying potential comprehensive modeling methodologies with a particular emphasis on composition: (i) an improved set of comparison criteria; (ii) 19 assessments of modeling approaches based on the comparison criteria and a common, focused case study

Socialising Big Data: From concept to practice

The working paper is a report on an ESRC-fundedproject, Socialising Big Data, that sought to address problematic conceptions of Big Data in popular discourse such as the ‘data deluge’ and the tendency to reduce the term to definitions such as the oft-cited‘3 Vs’. Instead, building on how social scientists have conceived of things, methods and data as having social and cultural lives, the project sought to identify the normative, political and technical imperatives and choices that come to shape Big Data at various momentsin its social lives. Recognising that Big Data involves distributed practices across a range of fields, the project experimentedwith collaboratories as a method for bringing together and engaging with practitioners acrossthree different domains –genomics, national statistics and waste management. In this way it explored how relations between data are also simultaneously relations between people and that it is through such relations that a shared literacyand social framework for Big Datacan be forged

Identificación temprana de características transversales en el lenguaje de la aplicación capturado con el Léxico Extendido del Lenguaje

En este trabajo de tesis presentamos una estrategia para identificar las características transversales utilizando el Léxico Extendido del Lenguaje (LEL). La estrategia identifica características transversales en una forma similar a la que son identificados en los requerimientos. Sin embargo, mientras las técnicas tradicionales se basan en las acciones, la estrategia propuesta se basa en estados (aunque también utiliza sustantivos y acciones). Debido a que la construcción del LEL se realiza tempranamente en el proceso de desarrollo del software, la estrategia propuesta detecta características transversales tan temprano como es posible y esto redunda en beneficios al evitar el retrabajo que pudiera ocasionar la detección a mitad del desarrollo. El lenguaje que utiliza para representar el conocimiento de la aplicación (LEL) posee buena expresividad, pero por sobre todo, utiliza el lenguaje conversacional sin utilizar ningún tipo de formalismo, lo cual redunda en beneficios para ser utilizado por todas las personas que participan del desarrollo de software. En esta tesis se muestra tanto la aplicabilidad como la efectividad de la estrategia propuesta. La aplicabilidad se ilustra a través de 3 ejemplos del mundo real. Se describe una pequeña aplicación bancaria que se utiliza para ejemplificar la estrategia y su aplicación. También se describen dos casos de estudios sobre aplicaciones de mediana magnitud. Ambos casos de estudios están basados en aplicaciones reales. Uno de ellos es una aplicación de control antievasión de impuestos y la otra es un portal web que publica noticias. Además, la presente tesis también describe un experimento que se llevó a cabo con el fin de mostrar la efectividad de la estrategia. El experimento fue planteado suficientemente realista y con una población de 20 sujetos como para obtener un muestreo de resultados suficiente. Por último, la tesis describe una herramienta que permite asistir en la aplicación de la estrategia propuesta.Facultad de Informátic

Modelação de aplicações SIG com aspectos

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaO aparecimento da internet desempenha um papel muito importante no significativo desenvolvimento que os Sistemas de Informação Geográfica (SIG) têm tido ao longo dos últimos anos. Os SIG tornaram-se sistemas mais acessíveis e fáceis de usar, e existem actualmente várias aplicações de SIG na Web que são acedidas por milhares de utilizadores, quer para resolução de problemas de cariz geográfico ou apenas para conhecer melhor o mundo. As aplicações SIG na Web, como qualquer outro sistema de software, têm de lidar com um vasto número de concerns (funcionais e não funcionais), para além dos concerns que são comuns nos SIG (concerns espaciais), como por exemplo, análise espacial ou escala. A forma mais eficiente de tratar estes concerns que são intrinsecamente transversais (do inglês crosscutting) é através da identificação e modularização dos mesmos, utilizando as técnicas de desenvolvimento orientado a aspectos. Isto permite que uma possível evolução do sistema tenha um impacto mais localizado, facilitando a evolução do sistema como um todo. Embora a modelação comportamental de um sistema de software seja essencial para se obter um programa bem estruturado, a modelação utilizada em aplicações SIG na Web é geralmente direccionada para o tratamento de dados geográficos. Tendo em conta todos estes factores, esta dissertação tem como objectivo aplicar e adaptar uma abordagem orientada a aspectos a aplicações SIG na Web. Esta abordagem permite a modelação comportamental da aplicação através da identificação, especificação e composição de crosscutting concerns (ou aspectos). O modelo proposto por esta abordagem será construído com base em modelos apresentados por abordagens já existentes na área de desenvolvimento de software orientado a aspectos

Stereotypes and human rights law

The scope of the book includes different stereotyping grounds – such as race, gender, and disability. Moreover, this book examines stereotyping approaches across a broad range of supranational human rights monitoring bodies, including the United Nations human rights treaty system as well as the regional systems that are most developed when it comes to addressing stereotypes: the Council of Europe and the inter-American system

Re-Placing the Term British Muslim: Discourse Difference and the Frontiers of Muslim Agency in Britain

The term “British Muslim” has over the last three decades become a familiar part of public discourse, to the extent that it is becoming naturalised as a neutral social descriptor rather than as an active or contested concept. This article examines the genealogy of the term in relation to three overlapping discourses: (i) state-led discourses of racialised citizenship (ii) tacit academic support for forms of civic nationalism and (iii) emergent Muslim agencies and mobilisations through the concept of “British Muslim”. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, the article interrogates the tension between determinism and agency contained within conceptions of British Muslimness. It is claimed that while the term “British Muslim” is implicated by public debates concerning racialised citizenship—and a corresponding academic response viz civic nationalism—there is a flourishing of Muslim imaginaries through the re-appropriation of British Muslimness. The article therefore offers new theoretical insights into the language concerning Muslim minorities and makes a series of methodological observations that are relevant for writing and research conducted in this field

Formal and quantitative approach to non-functional requirements modeling and assessment in software engineering

In the software market place, in which functionally equivalent products compete for the same customer, Non Functional Requirements (NFRs) become more important in distinguishing between the competing products. However, in practice, NFRs receive little attention relative to Functional Requirements (FRs). This is mainly because of the nature of these requirements which poses a challenge when taking the choice of treating them earlier in the software development. NFRs are subjective, relative and they become scattered among multiple modules when they are mapped from the requirements domain to the solution space. Furthermore, NFRs can often interact, in the sense that attempts to achieve one NFR can help or hinder the achievement of other NFRs at particular software functionality. Such an interaction creates an extensive network of interdependencies and tradeoffs among NFRs which is not easy to trace or estimate. This thesis contributes towards achieving the goal of managing the attainable scope and the changes of NFRs. The thesis proposes and empirically evaluates a formal and quantitative approach to modeling and assessing NFRs. Central to such an approach is the implementation of the proposed NFRs Ontology for capturing and structuring the knowledge on the software requirements (FRs and NFRs), their refinements, and their interdependencies. In this thesis, we also propose a change management mechanism for tracing the impact of NFRs on the other constructs in the ontology and vice-versa. We provide a traceability mechanism using Datalog expressions to implement queries on the relational model-based representation for the ontology. An alternative implementation view using XML and XQuery is provided as well. In addition, we propose a novel approach for the early requirements-based effort estimation, based on NFRs Ontology. The effort estimation approach complementarily uses one standard functional size measurement model, namely COSMIC, and a linear regression techniqu