SAGA: A project to automate the management of software production systems

The Software Automation, Generation and Administration (SAGA) project is investigating the design and construction of practical software engineering environments for developing and maintaining aerospace systems and applications software. The research includes the practical organization of the software lifecycle, configuration management, software requirements specifications, executable specifications, design methodologies, programming, verification, validation and testing, version control, maintenance, the reuse of software, software libraries, documentation, and automated management

The Knowledge-Based Software Assistant: Beyond CASE

This paper will outline the similarities and differences between two paradigms of software development. Both support the whole software life cycle and provide automation for most of the software development process, but have different approaches. The CASE approach is based on a set of tools linked by a central data repository. This tool-based approach is data driven and views software development as a series of sequential steps, each resulting in a product. The Knowledge-Based Software Assistant (KBSA) approach, a radical departure from existing software development practices, is knowledge driven and centers around a formalized software development process. KBSA views software development as an incremental, iterative, and evolutionary process with development occurring at the specification level

An Adaptive Design Methodology for Reduction of Product Development Risk

Embedded systems interaction with environment inherently complicates understanding of requirements and their correct implementation. However, product uncertainty is highest during early stages of development. Design verification is an essential step in the development of any system, especially for Embedded System. This paper introduces a novel adaptive design methodology, which incorporates step-wise prototyping and verification. With each adaptive step product-realization level is enhanced while decreasing the level of product uncertainty, thereby reducing the overall costs. The back-bone of this frame-work is the development of Domain Specific Operational (DOP) Model and the associated Verification Instrumentation for Test and Evaluation, developed based on the DOP model. Together they generate functionally valid test-sequence for carrying out prototype evaluation. With the help of a case study 'Multimode Detection Subsystem' the application of this method is sketched. The design methodologies can be compared by defining and computing a generic performance criterion like Average design-cycle Risk. For the case study, by computing Average design-cycle Risk, it is shown that the adaptive method reduces the product development risk for a small increase in the total design cycle time.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figure

A method for tailoring the information content of a software process model

The framework is defined for a general method for selecting a necessary and sufficient subset of a general software life cycle's information products, to support new software development process. Procedures for characterizing problem domains in general and mapping to a tailored set of life cycle processes and products is presented. An overview of the method is shown using the following steps: (1) During the problem concept definition phase, perform standardized interviews and dialogs between developer and user, and between user and customer; (2) Generate a quality needs profile of the software to be developed, based on information gathered in step 1; (3) Translate the quality needs profile into a profile of quality criteria that must be met by the software to satisfy the quality needs; (4) Map the quality criteria to set of accepted processes and products for achieving each criterion; (5) Select the information products which match or support the accepted processes and product of step 4; and (6) Select the design methodology which produces the information products selected in step 5

Formal specification based prototyping

Rapid prototyping is an approach to software development which attempts to remedy some of the shortcomings of the linear life cycle model, e.g. its inability to cope with fuzzy requirements and system evolution. This thesis first presents a broad survey of rapid software prototyping. It describes the rationale behind the process, the applications of prototyping, and specific techniques which may be used to achieve them. We then describe a system, called EPROS, together with its methodology, which supports a number of prototyping techniques in a coherent framework. The system is comprehensive in its approach and covers the prototyping and development of both functional and human-computer interface aspects of software systems. The former is based on the execution of VDM-based formal specification notation META-IV; the latter is based on a textual representation of state transition diagrams. Dialogue development is further supported by a rich set of abstractions which allow interaction concepts to be specified and directly executed rather than implemented. EPROS is based on a wide spectrum language which supports the main phases of a software development process, namely specification, design, and implementation. Included in this notation is a meta abstraction facility which facilitates its extension by the programmer. The primary application of EPROS is for evolutionary prototyping, where a system is developed iteratively and gradually from the abstract to the detailed, while it undergoes use and while its capabilities evolve. EPROS copes with all the requirements of evolutionary prototyping, namely rapid development, intermediate deliveries and gradual evolution of the system towards the final product. The thesis also describes a number of case studies where the presented ideas are put in practice, and which provide data in support of the effectiveness of the described system

Efficient hardware architectures for MPEG-4 core profile

Efficient hardware acceleration architectures are proposed for the most demandingMPEG-4 core profile algorithms, namely; texture motion estimation (TME), binary motion estimation (BME)and the shape adaptive discrete cosine transform (SA-DCT). The proposed ME designs may also be used for H.264, since both architectures can handle variable block sizes. Both ME architectures employ early termination techniques that reduce latency and save needless memory accesses and power consumption. They also use a pixel subsampling technique to facilitate parallelism, while balancing the computational load. The BME datapath also saves operations by using Run Length Coded (RLC) pixel addressing. The SA-DCT module has a re-configuring multiplier-less serial datapath using adders and multiplexers only to improve area and power. The SA-DCT packing steps are done using a minimal switching addressing scheme with guarded evaluation. All three modules have been synthesised targeting the WildCard-II FPGA benchmarking platform adopted by the MPEG-4 Part9 reference hardware group

A conceptual model for megaprogramming

Megaprogramming is component-based software engineering and life-cycle management. Magaprogramming and its relationship to other research initiatives (common prototyping system/common prototyping language, domain specific software architectures, and software understanding) are analyzed. The desirable attributes of megaprogramming software components are identified and a software development model and resulting prototype megaprogramming system (library interconnection language extended by annotated Ada) are described