Characterization and Classification of Collaborative Tools

Traditionally, collaboration has been a means for organizations to do their work. However, the context in which they do this work is changing, especially in regards to where the work is done, how the work is organized, who does the work, and with this the characteristics of collaboration. Software development is no exception; it is itself a collaborative effort that is likewise affected by these changes. In the context of both open source software development projects and communities and organizations that develop corporate products, more and more developers need to communicate and liaise with colleagues in geographically distant places about the software product they are conceiving, designing, building, testing, debugging, deploying and maintaining. Thus, work teams face sizeable collaborative challenges, for which they have need of tools that they can use to communicate and coordinate their Work efficiently

Unsupervised Holistic Image Generation from Key Local Patches

We introduce a new problem of generating an image based on a small number of key local patches without any geometric prior. In this work, key local patches are defined as informative regions of the target object or scene. This is a challenging problem since it requires generating realistic images and predicting locations of parts at the same time. We construct adversarial networks to tackle this problem. A generator network generates a fake image as well as a mask based on the encoder-decoder framework. On the other hand, a discriminator network aims to detect fake images. The network is trained with three losses to consider spatial, appearance, and adversarial information. The spatial loss determines whether the locations of predicted parts are correct. Input patches are restored in the output image without much modification due to the appearance loss. The adversarial loss ensures output images are realistic. The proposed network is trained without supervisory signals since no labels of key parts are required. Experimental results on six datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably on challenging objects and scenes.Comment: 16 page

A holistic approach for ameliorating the effect of ‘valley of death’ in technology assimilation

Technology assimilation is an increasingly important topic in modern manufacturing industries. Successful technology assimilation not only supports the development of better products, but also can provide a competitive edge in fast-moving markets, such as the automotive industry. Technology assimilation is a complex process, with a high failure rate, with technologies that seem promising in the research phase, failing to be assimilated into the final product. This high failure rate for technology assimilation is costly, in both time and other resources, and so has resulted in the effect of the Valley of Death . Tools and methods for technology assessment are essential enablers of successful product development, a process that requires collaboration from both engineering and business professionals to be successful.This thesis presents research that was aimed at ameliorating the Valley of Death effect during technology assimilation, particularly in the environment of the automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). The research was undertaken in close collaboration with Jaguar Land Rover Limited. Such collaboration provided first-hand information and direct engagement that supported and enabled this research.A review of the relevant theoretical concepts and the process of technology assimilation was undertaken, with a focus on the tools and methods that have been applied. The literature review resulted in an identification of the gaps and challenges among current technology assimilation approaches. This work also resulted in a conceptual model being developed to represent three different viewpoints that it is argued are essential to understand for successful technology assimilation, namely: Natural Technological Viewpoint, Social Technological Viewpoint and Human Technological Viewpoint. These three viewpoints were then further elaborated in a Hexahedron Model of Technology, alongside consideration of technology assimilation complexity, capability of technology and the contribution of a potential technology, allowing six different perspectives to be considered during the process of assessing if a specific technology is suitable for assimilation into a complex product.In this thesis, the Hexahedron Model of Technology, as the name suggests, allows consideration of six different facets for successful technology assimilation, and can be further elaborated to include more aspects of technology based on the future work. This model can also support an enterprise to understand how to develop the technology in a direction that might increase the likelihood of successful assimilation.The approach to technology assimilation presented in the thesis first sets out a Technology Assessment Framework and methods for populating and applying it. The Hexahedron Model of Technology provides a structural platform for assessing the subjective factors that need to be considered during technology assimilation in a structured way. This process helps to reduce the number of technologies that are considered for assimilation; by pre-eliminating some relatively weak technologies and taking forward only those more likely to succeed. A Technology Refinement and Modification Algorithm was then developed that provides suggestions, at a high-level, for the direction for technology improvement to help make the technology better match the requirements. This algorithm hence helps to further increase the chances of successful technology assimilation.The Technology Assessment Framework and Technology Refinement and Modification Algorithm were applied to two case studies. One of these cases was conducted to demonstrate the process of the proposed approach whereas the other one was part of a real-world project in collaboration with the Jaguar Land Rover Limited. Overall, this research demonstrates a two-step holistic approach to technology assimilation that first reduces the number of technologies considered for assimilation and then establishes the direction for development of new technology to improve the likelihood of successful technology assimilation.</div

Defining and validating a multimodel approach for product architecture derivation and improvement

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41533-3_24Software architectures are the key to achieving the non-functional requirements (NFRs) in any software project. In software product line (SPL) development, it is crucial to identify whether the NFRs for a specific product can be attained with the built-in architectural variation mechanisms of the product line architecture, or whether additional architectural transformations are required. This paper presents a multimodel approach for quality-driven product architecture derivation and improvement (QuaDAI). A controlled experiment is also presented with the objective of comparing the effectiveness, efficiency, perceived ease of use, intention to use and perceived usefulness with regard to participants using QuaDAI as opposed to the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM). The results show that QuaDAI is more efficient and perceived as easier to use than ATAM, from the perspective of novice software architecture evaluators. However, the other variables were not found to be statistically significant. Further replications are needed to obtain more conclusive results.This research is supported by the MULTIPLE project (MICINN TIN2009-13838) and the Vali+D fellowship program (ACIF/2011/235).González Huerta, J.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE.; Abrahao Gonzales, SM. (2013). Defining and validating a multimodel approach for product architecture derivation and improvement. En Model-Driven Engineering Languages and Systems. Springer. 388-404. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41533-3_24S388404Ali-Babar, M., Lago, P., Van Deursen, A.: Empirical research in software architecture: opportunities, challenges, and approaches. 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Conf. on Automated Software Engineering, New York, USA, pp. 469–472 (2007)Buschmann, F., Meunier, R., Rohnert, H., Sommerlad, P., Stal, M.: Pattern-Oriented software architecture, vol. 1: A System of Patterns. Wiley (1996)Cabello, M.E., Ramos, I., Gómez, A., Limón, R.: Baseline-Oriented Modeling: An MDA Approach Based on Software Product Lines for the Expert Systems Development. In: 1st Asia Conference on Intelligent Information and Database Systems, Vietnam (2009)Carifio, J., Perla, R.J.: Ten Common Misunderstandings, Misconceptions, Persistent Myths and Urban Legends about Likert Scales and Likert Response Formats and their Antidotes. Journal of Social Sciences 3(3), 106–116 (2007)Clements, P., Northrop, L.: Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns. Addison-Wesley, Boston (2007)Czarnecki, K., Kim, C.H.: Cardinality-based feature modeling and constraints: A progress report. In: Int. Workshop on Software Factories, San Diego-CA (2005)Datorro, J.: Convex Optimization & Euclidean Distance Geometry. Meboo Publishing (2005)Davis, F.D.: Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and user acceptance of information technology. MIS Quarterly 13(3), 319–340 (1989)Douglass, B.P.: Real-Time Design Patterns: Robust Scalable Architecture for Real-Time Systems. Addison-Wesley, Boston (2002)Feiler, P.H., Gluch, D.P., Hudak, J.: The Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL): An Introduction. Tech. Report CMU/SEI-2006-TN-011. SEI, Carnegie Mellon University (2006)Gómez, A., Ramos, I.: Cardinality-based feature modeling and model-driven engineering: Fitting them together. In: 4th Int. Workshop on Variability Modeling of Software Intensive Systems, Linz, Austria (2010)Gonzalez-Huerta, J., Insfran, E., Abrahao, S.: A Multimodel for Integrating Quality Assessment in Model-Driven Engineering. In: 8th International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology (QUATIC 2012), Lisbon, Portugal, September 3-6 (2012)Gonzalez-Huerta, J., Insfran, E., Abrahao, S., McGregor, J.D.: Non-functional Requirements in Model-Driven Software Product Line Engineering. In: 4th Int. Workshop on Non-functional System Properties in Domain Specific Modeling Languages, Insbruck, Austria (2012)Guana, V., Correal, V.: Variability quality evaluation on component-based software product lines. In: 15th Int. Software Product Line Conference, Munich, Germany, vol. 2, pp. 19.1–19.8 (2011)Insfrán, E., Abrahão, S., González-Huerta, J., McGregor, J.D., Ramos, I.: A Multimodeling Approach for Quality-Driven Architecture Derivation. In: 21st Int. Conf. on Information Systems Development (ISD 2012), Prato, Italy (2012)ISO/IEC 25000:2005, Software Engineering. Software product Quality Requirements and Evaluation SQuaRE (2005)Kazman, R., Klein, M., Clements, P.: ATAM: Method for Architecture Evaluation (CMU/SEI-2000-TR-004, ADA382629). Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh (2000), http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/00.reports/00tr004.htmlKim, T., Ko, I., Kang, S., Lee, D.: Extending ATAM to assess product line architecture. In: 8th IEEE Int. Conference on Computer and Information Technology, Sydney, Australia, pp. 790–797 (2008)Kitchenham, B.A., Pfleeger, S.L., Hoaglin, D.C., Rosenber, J.: Preliminary Guidelines for Empirical Research in Software Engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 28(8) (2002)Kruchten, P.B.: The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction. Addison-Wesley (1999)Martensson, F.: Software Architecture Quality Evaluation. Approaches in an Industrial Context. Ph. D. thesis, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden (2006)Maxwell, K.: Applied Statistics for Software Managers. Software Quality Institute Series. Prentice-Hall (2002)Olumofin, F.G., Mišic, V.B.: A holistic architecture assessment method for software product lines. Information and Software Technology 49, 309–323 (2007)Perovich, D., Rossel, P.O., Bastarrica, M.C.: Feature model to product architectures: Applying MDE to Software Product Lines. In: IEEE/IFIP & European Conference on Software Architecture, Helsinki, Findland, pp. 201–210 (2009)Robertson, S., Robertson, J.: Mastering the requirements process. ACM Press, New York (1999)Roos-Frantz, F., Benavides, D., Ruiz-Cortés, A., Heuer, A., Lauenroth, K.: Quality-aware analysis in product line engineering with the orthogonal variability model. Software Quality Journal (2011), doi:10.1007/s11219-011-9156-5Saaty, T.L.: The Analytical Hierarchical Process. 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Multiple viewpoint modelling framework enabling integrated product-process design

Nowadays, companies have to cope with numerous constraints at organisational and technical levels in order to improve their competitiveness edges such as productivity, efficiency, and flexibility. Integrated product-process design becomes more and more complex to manage because of increasingly customized products related to various stakeholders and concerns geographically distributed. It is still represents a huge challenge, especially in the early phases of product development process. In such a context, the management of information within integrated product-process design highlights needs in a consistent engineering model that enables product lifecycle management (PLM) integration. The paper presents a novel multiple viewpoint framework called multiple viewpoint assembly oriented, considering product design and assembly process domains in the broader context of concurrent engineering and PLM. The proposed framework describes the consistency, the propagation of information change, and mechanisms of views generation among the product lifecycle stages in order to support assembly oriented design philosophy. A new modelling language called System Modeling Language is used to describe the proposed model from a systems engineering point of view. The implementation of the model in a Web-service called PEGASUS as an application for PLM systems is describe

Designing Reusable Systems that Can Handle Change - Description-Driven Systems : Revisiting Object-Oriented Principles

In the age of the Cloud and so-called Big Data systems must be increasingly flexible, reconfigurable and adaptable to change in addition to being developed rapidly. As a consequence, designing systems to cater for evolution is becoming critical to their success. To be able to cope with change, systems must have the capability of reuse and the ability to adapt as and when necessary to changes in requirements. Allowing systems to be self-describing is one way to facilitate this. To address the issues of reuse in designing evolvable systems, this paper proposes a so-called description-driven approach to systems design. This approach enables new versions of data structures and processes to be created alongside the old, thereby providing a history of changes to the underlying data models and enabling the capture of provenance data. The efficacy of the description-driven approach is exemplified by the CRISTAL project. CRISTAL is based on description-driven design principles; it uses versions of stored descriptions to define various versions of data which can be stored in diverse forms. This paper discusses the need for capturing holistic system description when modelling large-scale distributed systems.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure and 1 table. Accepted by the 9th Int Conf on the Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE'14). Lisbon, Portugal. April 201