Towards Automated Performance Bug Identification in Python

Context: Software performance is a critical non-functional requirement, appearing in many fields such as mission critical applications, financial, and real time systems. In this work we focused on early detection of performance bugs; our software under study was a real time system used in the advertisement/marketing domain. Goal: Find a simple and easy to implement solution, predicting performance bugs. Method: We built several models using four machine learning methods, commonly used for defect prediction: C4.5 Decision Trees, Na\"{\i}ve Bayes, Bayesian Networks, and Logistic Regression. Results: Our empirical results show that a C4.5 model, using lines of code changed, file's age and size as explanatory variables, can be used to predict performance bugs (recall=0.73, accuracy=0.85, and precision=0.96). We show that reducing the number of changes delivered on a commit, can decrease the chance of performance bug injection. Conclusions: We believe that our approach can help practitioners to eliminate performance bugs early in the development cycle. Our results are also of interest to theoreticians, establishing a link between functional bugs and (non-functional) performance bugs, and explicitly showing that attributes used for prediction of functional bugs can be used for prediction of performance bugs

DevOps in Practice -- A preliminary Analysis of two Multinational Companies

DevOps is a cultural movement that aims the collaboration of all the stakeholders involved in the development, deployment and operation of soft-ware to deliver a quality product or service in the shortest possible time. DevOps is relatively recent, and companies have developed their DevOps prac-tices largely from scratch. Our research aims to conduct an analysis on practic-ing DevOps in +20 software-intensive companies to provide patterns of DevOps practices and identify their benefits and barriers. This paper presents the preliminary analysis of an exploratory case study based on the interviews to relevant stakeholders of two (multinational) companies. The results show the benefits (software delivery performance) and barriers that these companies are dealing with, as well as DevOps team topology they approached during their DevOps transformation. This study aims to help practitioners and researchers to better understand DevOps transformations and the contexts where the practices worked. This, hopefully, will contribute to strengthening the evidence regarding DevOps and supporting practitioners in making better informed decisions about the return of investment when adopting DevOps.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, conferenc

Poverty and Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean

This document surveys Bank lending operations designed to fight poverty and enhance social equity, with emphasis on recently approved projects with innovative components. It also surveys a broad range of poverty-related non-lending activities carried out by the Bank over the past two years. It includes a general framework for poverty reduction in Latin America and the Caribbean, specifying a number of areas of emphasis: enhancing opportunities for the poor; assets and markets; contributing to human development; improving the quality of life of the poor; social protection; and good governance and social inclusion.Poverty, Social Policy & Protection, Education, Health, Environmental Policy, poverty; inequality

Europeana communication bug: which intervention strategy for a better cooperation with creative industry?

Although Europeana as well as many GLAMs are very engaged - beside the main mission, i.e. spreading cultural heritage knowledge- in developing new strategies in order to make digital contents reusable for creative industry, these efforts have been successful just only in sporadic cases. A significant know how deficits in communication often compromises expected outcomes and impact. Indeed, what prevails is an idea of communication like an enhancement “instrument” intended on the one hand in purely economic (development) sense, on the other hand as a way for increasing and spreading knowledge. The main reference model is more or less as follows: digital objects are to be captured and/or transformed by digital technologies into sellable goods to put into circulation. Nevertheless, this approach risks neglecting the real nature of communication, and more in detail the one of digital heritage where it is strategic not so much producing objects and goods as taking part into sharing environments creation (media) by engaged communities, small or large they may be. The environments act as meeting and interchange point, and consequently as driving force of enhancing. Only in a complex context of network interaction on line accessible digital heritage contents become a strategic resource for creating environments in which their re/mediation can occur – provided that credible strategies exist, shared by stakeholders and users. This paper particularly describes a case study including proposals for an effective connection among Europeana, GLAMs and Creative Industry in the framework of Food and Drink digital heritage enhancement and promotion. Experimental experiences as the one described in this paper anyway confirm the relevance of up-to-date policies based on an adequate communication concept, on solid partnerships with enterprise and association networks, on collaborative on line environments, on effective availability at least for most of contents by increasing free licensing, and finally on grassroots content implementation involving prosumers audience, even if filtered by GLAMs

Migrating agile methods to standardized development practice

Situated process and quality frame-works offer a way to resolve the tensions that arise when introducing agile methods into standardized software development engineering. For these to be successful, however, organizations must grasp the opportunity to reintegrate software development management, theory, and practice

Alternative growth scenarios for Ugandan coffee to 2020:

Coffee is the most important export crop in Uganda and an important source of income among smallholder farmers in large parts of the country. The Robusta type dominates coffee production and Ugandan Robusta is demanded by roasters as a component in certain blends due to its special taste qualities. However, a combination of events outside and within Uganda, especially the collapse of world coffee prices in the late 1990s, are eroding farmer incomes and export revenues and threaten the long-term viability of the industry. In this context, the paper first investigates the challenges faced by the Ugandan coffee industry, namely the decline in the world coffee market, changes in procurement strategies among coffee importers, the rapidly expanding market for high quality and specialty coffees, and the spread of the coffee wilt disease and other farm-level productivity constraints. This leads us to examine possible development strategies for Ugandan coffee production: area expansion, quality improvement, and productivity increase. Using IFPRI's Dynamic Research Evaluation for Management (DREAM) model, different scenarios for each of these strategies are evaluated to show their potential impacts on Ugandan export prices, export revenues, and producer benefits. The simulation results show that Uganda would benefit relatively more by enhancing farm productivity and improving coffee quality. The economic benefits of increasing production through area expansion, on the other hand, would be significantly eroded by the negative effects on export prices, especially if other countries followed suit and accelerated their own growth in coffee production. These analyses focus on the potential benefits of alternate changes in Ugandan coffee production, while devoting less attention to how and at what costs such changes may be effected. Finally, it is suggested that because the world coffee market is so important to the Ugandan economy, and being the third biggest Robusta producer in the world, Uganda has a high stake and important role to play in international coordination efforts to raise and stabilize world coffee prices.Coffee industry Uganda, Commodity markets, exports, production possibilities, Prices,

The nature of small-scale farmer managed irrigation systems in North West Province, Sri Lanka and potential for aquaculture

RRAs were carried out in two Small Tank Cascade systems (STCs) of North West Province, Sri Lanka (less than 1000 ha total watershed area). A total of 21 tanks and 7 villages were investigated with primary emphasis on two upper watershed communities. The two systems differ primarily in their resource base; namely rainfall, natural forests and proximity to large scale perennial irrigation resources. [PDF contains 86 pages