Evaluation of DCI Architectural Style for Feature-Oriented Software Development

Developers often spend large amounts of time working on implementing complex func-tions and features. Increment of the implemented features will result in growth of the complexity. Therefore, it is important to restrict the list of functional requirements to those that have value to the user or client and to ensure that requirements are phrased in a language that the user or client can understand. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) was expected to help programmers to decrease the complexity by introducing class and object concepts, but the hope is not totally realized. A new approach called Data-Context-Interaction (DCI) has been proposed as a solution. Thus, in this thesis I study DCI in order to understand if DCI can effectively and efficiently support Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD) in terms of adding a new feature and removing an old feature. The main goal of this work was to investigate the feasibility of DCI for software development practice where new features can flexibly added and removed. Through a comprehensive literature study and implementation of messaging example in both JavaScript and C#, my research has concluded that DCI is a useful paradigm but it is not applicable for all programming languages. Furthermore, it is not a suitable paradigm for all the possible use case scenarios

DCI-arkkitehtuuri - askel kohti ylläpidettävää olio-ohjelmointia

Ohjelmistokehityksessä järjestelmien ylläpidettävyys on sen yksi tärkeimmistä ominaisuuksista. Tutkielmassa perehdytään DCI-arkkitehtuuriin, joka on uudenlainen olio-ohjelmointitapa. Arkkitehtuurin on tarkoitus parantaa olioperustaisten järjestelmien ylläpidettävyyttä perinteiseen olio-ohjelmointiin verrattuna. DCI-arkkitehtuuri painottaa ohjelmoinnissa lean-ajatteluun ja ketterään kehitykseen kooditasolla. Tutkielmassa tarkastellaan DCI-arkkitehtuuria ja arvioidaan sitä arkkitehtuurin mukaisesti luodun laajan peliesimerkin avulla. Pelin arkkitehtuuria arvioidaan ketterän kehityksen ja lean-ajattelun näkökulmista. Ketterä kehitys painottaa nopeuteen ohjelmistokehityksessä ja sen suhteen peliä arvioidaan erilaisilla kompleksisuusmittareilla sekä konkreettisen muutoksen toteuttamisella. Lean-ajattelun näkökulmasta arkkitehtuurin arviointi perustuu siitä johtuvaan ylimääräisen koodiin, toteutetun koodin arvoon ja arkkitehtuurin jäykkyyteen. Tutkielman tulosten perusteella DCI-arkkitehtuuri tuki lean-ajattelua ja ketterää kehitystä. Tutkielmassa käytettyjen olio-ohjelmoinnin kompleksisuusmittareiden tulokset osoittautuivat kuitenkin kyseenalaisiksi, sillä mittareita ei ole suunniteltu DCI-arkkitehtuuria silmällä pitäen ja arkkitehtuuri ei täytä niiden määritelmiä kokonaan. DCI-arkkitehtuurin käyttö ei aiheuttanut ongelmia pelin toteutuksessa, joten sen tutkimista tulisi jatkaa tarkemmin reaalimaailman pienten ja keskisuurten ohjelmistoprojektien tapaustutkimuksilla

Driving Sustainability through Engineering Management and Systems Engineering

Despite the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenge of realizing sustainability across the triple bottom line of social, environmental, and economic development remains an urgent priority. If anything, it is now imperative that we work towards achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the global challenges are significant. Many of the societal challenges represent complex problems that require multifaceted solutions drawing on multidisciplinary approaches. Engineering management involves the management of people and projects related to technological or engineering systems—this includes project management, engineering economy, and technology management, as well as the management and leadership of teams. Systems engineering involves the design, integration, and management of complex systems over the full life cycle—this includes requirements capture, integrated system design, as well as modelling and simulation. In addition to the theoretical underpinnings of both disciplines, they also provide a range of tools and techniques that can be used to address technological and organisational complexity. The disciplines of engineering management and systems engineering are therefore ideally suited to help tackle both the challenges and opportunities associated with realising a sustainable future for all. This book provides new insights on how engineering management and systems engineering can be utilised as part of the journey towards sustainability. The book includes discussion of a broad range of different approaches to investigate sustainability through utilising quantitative, qualitative and conceptual methodologies. The book will be of interest to researchers and students focused on the field of sustainability as well as practitioners concerned with devising strategies for sustainable development

Driving Sustainability through Engineering Management and Systems Engineering

Despite the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenge of realizing sustainability across the triple bottom line of social, environmental, and economic development remains an urgent priority. If anything, it is now imperative that we work towards achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the global challenges are significant. Many of the societal challenges represent complex problems that require multifaceted solutions drawing on multidisciplinary approaches.Engineering management involves the management of people and projects related to technological or engineering systems—this includes project management, engineering economy and technology management, as well as the management and leadership of teams. Systems engineering involves the design, integration and management of complex systems over the full life cycle—this includes requirements capture and integrated system design, as well as modelling and simulation. In addition to the theoretical underpinnings of both disciplines, they also provide a range of tools and techniques that can be used to address technological and organisational complexity. The disciplines of engineering management and systems engineering are therefore ideally suited to help tackle both the challenges and the opportunities associated with realising a sustainable future for all.This book provides new insights on how engineering management and systems engineering can be utilised as part of the journey towards sustainability. The book includes a discussion of a broad range of different approaches to investigate sustainability through utilising quantitative, qualitative and conceptual methodologies. The book will be of interest to researchers and students focused on the field of sustainability as well as practitioners concerned with devising strategies for sustainable development

Towards a philosophical understanding of agile software methodologies : the case of Kuhn versus Popper

This dissertation is original in using the contrasting ideas of two leading 20th century philosophers of science, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, to provide a philosophical understanding, firstly, of the shift from traditional software methodologies to the so-called Agile methodologies, and, secondly, of the values, principles and practices underlying the most prominent of the Agile methodologies, Extreme Programming (XP). This dissertation will take a revisionist approach, following Fuller—the founder of social epistemology—in reading Popper against Kuhn's epistemological hegemony. The investigations in this dissertation relate to two main branches of philosophy— epistemology and ethics. The epistemological part of this dissertation compares both Kuhn and Popper's alternative ideas of the development of scientific knowledge to the Agile methodologists' ideas of the development of software, in order to assess the extent to which Agile software development resembles a scientific discipline. The investigations relating to ethics in this dissertation transfer concepts from social engineering—in particular, Popper's distinction between piecemeal and utopian social engineering—to software engineering, in order to assess both the democratic and authoritarian aspects of Agile software development and management. The use of Kuhn's ideas of scientific revolutions and paradigm shift by several leading figures of the Agile software methodologies—most notably, Kent Beck, the leader of the most prominent Agile software methodology, Extreme Programming (XP)—to predict a fundamental shift from traditional to Agile software methodologies, is critically assessed in this dissertation. A systematic investigation into whether Kuhn's theory as a whole, can provide an adequate account of the day-to-day practice of Agile software development is also provided. As an alternative to the use of Kuhn's ideas, the critical rationalist philosophy of Karl Popper is investigated. On the one hand, this dissertation assesses whether the epistemological aspects of Popper's philosophy—especially his notions of falsificationism, evolutionary epistemology, and three worlds metaphysics—provide a suitable framework for understanding the philosophical basis of everyday Agile software development. On the other hand, the aspects of Popper's philosophy relating to ethics, which provide an ideal for scientific practice in an open society, are investigated in order to determine whether they coincide with the avowedly democratic values of Agile software methodologies. The investigations in this dissertation led to the following conclusions. Firstly, Kuhn's ideas are useful in predicting the effects of the full-scale adoption of Agile methodologies, and they describe the way in which several leaders of the Agile methodologies promote their methodologies; they do not, however, account for the detailed methodological practice of Agile software development. Secondly, several aspects of Popper's philosophy, were found to be aligned with several aspects of Agile software development. In relation to epistemology, Popper's principle of falsificationism provides a criterion for understanding the rational and scientific basis of several Agile principles and practices, his evolutionary epistemology resembles the iterative-incremental design approach of Agile methodologies, and his three worlds metaphysical model provides an understanding of both the nature of software, and the approach advocated by the Agile methodologists' of creating and sharing knowledge. In relation to ethics, Popper's notion of an open society provides an understanding of the rational and ethical basis of the values underlying Agile software development and management, as well as the piecemeal adoption of Agile software methodologies.Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2009.Computer Scienceunrestricte

An Intelligent Citizen-Centric Oriented Model for Egovernance: A Uae Case Study

Tremendous advancements in information and communication technology, coupled with the usability of smart mobile devices, have brought enormous growth in the appeal of high-quality government services. This appeal has, in turn, encouraged governments to deploy services to citizens using electronic channels. Worldwide, governments have recognized the need to deliver better-integrated services to the public to meet their expectations. Therefore, the transition from the conventional modes of delivering government services to an electronic format involves substantial considerations in the operational aspects of services delivery and drastic changes in existing core business systems across governmental public institutions. The concepts of eGovernance and smart services have emerged as new ways to deliver such services to meet citizens’ demands by developing tools and setting practical standards for services delivery. These tools comprise process reengineering and the setting of guidelines, establishment of policies, delegating of authority, and continued monitoring of performance and control. From a research perspective, there is a need to identify the several factors that constitute online and mobile services delivery in the UAE and measure the adoption of these services by the public. Extant literature includes very few studies that evaluate the delivery of online and mobile services in the context of eGovernance. This study highlights these gaps in the field and conducted research in the UAE to address them. The major aim of this research is to develop and validate a citizen-centric oriented model, which examines factors that affect people’s acceptance of eGovernance services within governmental public sector organizations such as health and education. This research adopted mixed methods for data collection, including a quantitative survey and qualitative semi-structured interviews.     To test the proposed model, the research adopted structural equation modelling (SEM), which is a powerful tool that considers a confirmatory approach rather than an exploratory approach with regard to the data analysis. Second, the validated and evaluated model was used as a roadmap for eGovernance services adoption and implementation, in which new initiatives can be evaluated. Third, this research provides an intelligent system for evaluating eGovernance implementation across government entities. The proposed novel system features an intelligent login module as a service that enables users to access multiple public government services using secured unified entry access (UEA) through a single account. The users are only required to log in once to access many eGovernance services. In addition, the proposed system applied the model view controller (MVC), which is an exceedingly secure model, to leverage the system’s quality, efficiency, security, flexibility and reusability. The system applied a collaborative filtering technique to improve the delivery of eGovernance services, measuring entities’ performance and ranking government organizations. Finally, this research provides recommendations for future works, including the validation of the developed model in other countries, consideration of G2B and G2E digital services and approaches to solving world systems’ technical challenges pertinent to big data, data sparsity, cold start and scalability

Challenges and Opportunities in Applied System Innovation

This book introduces and provides solutions to a variety of problems faced by society, companies and individuals in a quickly changing and technology-dependent world. The wide acceptance of artificial intelligence, the upcoming fourth industrial revolution and newly designed 6G technologies are seen as the main enablers and game changers in this environment. The book considers these issues not only from a technological viewpoint but also on how society, labor and the economy are affected, leading to a circular economy that affects the way people design, function and deploy complex systems

Design and Management of Manufacturing Systems

Although the design and management of manufacturing systems have been explored in the literature for many years now, they still remain topical problems in the current scientific research. The changing market trends, globalization, the constant pressure to reduce production costs, and technical and technological progress make it necessary to search for new manufacturing methods and ways of organizing them, and to modify manufacturing system design paradigms. This book presents current research in different areas connected with the design and management of manufacturing systems and covers such subject areas as: methods supporting the design of manufacturing systems, methods of improving maintenance processes in companies, the design and improvement of manufacturing processes, the control of production processes in modern manufacturing systems production methods and techniques used in modern manufacturing systems and environmental aspects of production and their impact on the design and management of manufacturing systems. The wide range of research findings reported in this book confirms that the design of manufacturing systems is a complex problem and that the achievement of goals set for modern manufacturing systems requires interdisciplinary knowledge and the simultaneous design of the product, process and system, as well as the knowledge of modern manufacturing and organizational methods and techniques

Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing: The Human-Data-Technology Nexus

This is an open access book. It gathers the first volume of the proceedings of the 31st edition of the International Conference on Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing, FAIM 2022, held on June 19 – 23, 2022, in Detroit, Michigan, USA. Covering four thematic areas including Manufacturing Processes, Machine Tools, Manufacturing Systems, and Enabling Technologies, it reports on advanced manufacturing processes, and innovative materials for 3D printing, applications of machine learning, artificial intelligence and mixed reality in various production sectors, as well as important issues in human-robot collaboration, including methods for improving safety. Contributions also cover strategies to improve quality control, supply chain management and training in the manufacturing industry, and methods supporting circular supply chain and sustainable manufacturing. All in all, this book provides academicians, engineers and professionals with extensive information on both scientific and industrial advances in the converging fields of manufacturing, production, and automation

Managing knowledge for through life capability

In 2005 the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) published a White Paper in which it detailed its Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS) (UK MoD, 2005). The strategy involved a rapid transformation of UK defence towards a product-service, business-like paradigm through the adoption of Through Life Capability Management (TLCM). TLCM has since been succeeded by other initiatives. However, for organisations involved in the management of capability through life, the associated principles of operation as well as the challenges remain, including that of the management of knowledge. The confederated capability enterprise is a distributed knowledge system. Knowledge of the systems, for which a particular organisation has through-life management responsibility, may be distributed throughout an enterprise that comprises several commercial organisations as well as the customer. The bringing together of different components of capability and perspectives makes managing knowledge difficult. This is complicated further by the observation that in a decade one can expect a significant proportion of the manpower involved in a capability will have changed. Success in this type of environment requires a clear understanding of the value of particular knowledge within the organisation as well as effective knowledge management in the wider enterprise. Dstl and EPSRC have jointly funded this research which addresses management of knowledge for through life capability through modelling of the capability enterprise, a workshop on TLCM benefits and behaviours, a comparative case study at a commercial service company and the UK MoD including Dstl, and knowledge mapping within a specific exemplar capability. The results of the modelling illustrated the Systems of Systems (SoS) nature of the enterprise and the need to align capability and management processes across the enterprise. How well this can be achieved depends on the extent to which both the UK MoD and industry are willing to share, access and process information and knowledge. This would require trust between the individuals and organisations involved. The need for trust was emphasised in an international workshop where the participants discussed the behaviours that were required for the perceived benefits of TLCM to be realised. The workshop members highlighted trust in long term planning as industry seeks to manage skills and knowledge over time. ServiceCo provides communication and media services to customers globally. It comprises four customer-facing divisions and two operational units. The case which was based on interviews in one customer-facing and one operational unit revealed the following: •Focus on corporate values supports knowledge management behaviours across the organisation. •Succession planning is needed for all skills and knowledge that are critical or essential to the business. •Once the continual renewal of knowledge slows down and/or stops in an organisation, the knowledge is lost. The second case of the study was the Royal Navy Command Head Quarters and Dstl. Dstl is a trading fund that provides UK MoD and the wider UK government specialist Science & Technology services and operates and manages the Chief Scientific Advisor’s research programme. The case study revealed: •Security regulations and considerations impact significantly on effective management of knowledge. •Knowledge retrieval can be “hit and miss” as complicated filing structures and indexing practices are applied inconsistently, leading to individuals adopting a number of strategies to share knowledge. •Succession planning for people with rare skills is an issue that impacts business continuation. Comparison between the two cases showed that the two organisations experienced different problems but that the knowledge behaviours adopted by the individuals involved were essentially the same. This pointed to the need to address the issues associated with the management of knowledge as cultural and organisational in nature. Personal strategies to manage and share knowledge included individuals retaining copies of files on desktop hard drives and keeping paper copies in drawers; documents were emailed to ensure the intended audience would get it or be able to access it; and asking a colleague for advice on where to find out things. An important difference between knowledge management between the two organisations was that the UK MoD relied on processes due to the rapid change of personnel whereas the service company relied on personal relationships as people remained in the roles for longer. The knowledge mapping of “moving personnel and materiel using vehicles” revealed that each Line of Development (LoDs) has its own constituent (LoDs) indicating the requirement to manage organisational capability in order to deliver capability to customers. It also illustrated all the active knowledge that is required in order for the capability to be delivered. The research main contributions are: •Theoretical models for exploring the use of knowledge in acquisition projects over time •Comparing two organisations at separate ends of the organisational spectrum and identifying common organisational factors that influence the management of knowledge for through life capability •Recognising that the enterprise is a capability SoS. In order to successfully delivery capability, knowledge about and within the components needs to be managed. Other findings include: •Management of knowledge for TLCM puts the focus on managing knowledge for future capability requirements rather than on retention of knowledge products, bringing in aspects such as business continuation planning and consequently impacting on the organisation’s future development. •There is a strong relationship between knowledge conservation, human resource management and company policies. •Managing changes in design and/or function requires a good understanding of the different processes used within the various disciplines involved across the capability components and how they contribute to the final product and to each other. •An organisation’s goals and the manner in which it organises itself to achieve them with regard to the management of knowledge does not appear linked. Instead, focus falls on the organisational architecture and the human resource polices that it implies. •‘Knowing’ is an individual capability and also a social one; communities of practice and networking are necessary components of an organisation’s knowledge base. •Knowing whom to ask and where to look is in a knowledge retrieval perspective nearly as important as knowing what to look for. •“Individuals know while documents, processes and tools support knowing”. This emphasises the need for a close connection between humans and IT-based knowledge repositories. •The role of IT in knowledge management can either be to correlate knowledge in people’s heads to relevant projects or to correlate individuals and knowledge in relevant projects depending on the key questions asked in the management of knowledge within the organisation. •The role of IT in determining issues related to the relevance and location of documentation differs depending of the organisation’s reliance on face to face interactions between employees as a means for communicating this information. •The capability end user is in some instances hard to define. How the end user is defined determines where the SoS boundaries are defined. It is probably better to define the boundary as a broad fuzzy border. The indeterminacy implied by this view becomes a complexity issue for management of knowledge. •The impetus to manage knowledge and how is influenced legal requirements and by the organisation’s relationships with its stakeholders including the extent it is subject to external scrutiny. Based on the research, a number of recommendations are made