Requirements for a software maintenance support environment

This thesis surveys the field of software maintenance, and addresses the maintenance requirements of the Aerospace Industry, which is developing inige projects, running over many years, and sometimes safety critical in nature (e.g. ARIANE 5, HERMES, COLUMBUS). Some projects are collaborative between distributed European partners. The industry will have to cope in the near and far future with the maintenance of these products and it will be essential to improve the software maintenance process and the environments for maintenance. Cost effective software maintenance needs an efficient, high quality and homogeneous environment or Integrated Project Support Environment (IPSE). Most IPSE work has addressed software development, and lias not fully considered the requirements of software maintenance. The aim of this project is to draw up a set of priorities and requirements for a Maintenance IPSE. An IPSE, however can only support a software maintenance method. The first stage of this project is to deline 'software maintenance best practice' addressing the organisational, managerial and technical aspects, along with an evaluation of software maintenance tools for Aerospace systems. From this and an evaluation of current IPSEs, the requirements for a Software Maintenance Support Environment are presented for maintenance of Aerospace software

Enhancement of computer system for applications software branch

Presented is a compilation of the history of a two-month project concerned with a survey, evaluation, and specification of a new computer system for the Applications Software Branch of the Software and Data Management Division of Information and Electronic Systems Laboratory of Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA. Information gathering consisted of discussions and surveys of branch activities, evaluation of computer manufacturer literature, and presentations by vendors. Information gathering was followed by evaluation of their systems. The criteria of the latter were: the (tentative) architecture selected for the new system, type of network architecture supported, software tools, and to some extent the price. The information received from the vendors, as well as additional research, lead to detailed design of a suitable system. This design included considerations of hardware and software environments as well as personnel issues such as training. Design of the system culminated in a recommendation for a new computing system for the Branch

Inverse software configuration management

Software systems are playing an increasingly important role in almost every aspect of today’s society such that they impact on our businesses, industry, leisure, health and safety. Many of these systems are extremely large and complex and depend upon the correct interaction of many hundreds or even thousands of heterogeneous components. Commensurate with this increased reliance on software is the need for high quality products that meet customer expectations, perform reliably and which can be cost-effectively and safely maintained. Techniques such as software configuration management have proved to be invaluable during the development process to ensure that this is the case. However, there are a very large number of legacy systems which were not developed under controlled conditions, but which still, need to be maintained due to the heavy investment incorporated within them. Such systems are characterised by extremely high program comprehension overheads and the probability that new errors will be introduced during the maintenance process often with serious consequences. To address the issues concerning maintenance of legacy systems this thesis has defined and developed a new process and associated maintenance model, Inverse Software Configuration Management (ISCM). This model centres on a layered approach to the program comprehension process through the definition of a number of software configuration abstractions. This information together with the set of rules for reclaiming the information is stored within an Extensible System Information Base (ESIB) via, die definition of a Programming-in-the- Environment (PITE) language, the Inverse Configuration Description Language (ICDL). In order to assist the application of the ISCM process across a wide range of software applications and system architectures, die PISCES (Proforma Identification Scheme for Configurations of Existing Systems) method has been developed as a series of defined procedures and guidelines. To underpin the method and to offer a user-friendly interface to the process a series of templates, the Proforma Increasing Complexity Series (PICS) has been developed. To enable the useful employment of these techniques on large-scale systems, the subject of automation has been addressed through the development of a flexible meta-CASE environment, the PISCES M4 (MultiMedia Maintenance Manager) system. Of particular interest within this environment is the provision of a multimedia user interface (MUI) to die maintenance process. As a means of evaluating the PISCES method and to provide feedback into die ISCM process a number of practical applications have been modelled. In summary, this research has considered a number of concepts some of which are innovative in themselves, others of which are used in an innovative manner. In combination these concepts may be considered to considerably advance the knowledge and understanding of die comprehension process during the maintenance of legacy software systems. A number of publications have already resulted from the research and several more are in preparation. Additionally a number of areas for further study have been identified some of which are already underway as funded research and development projects

Influence of hydraulic property correlation on predicted dense nonaqueous phase liquid source zone architecture, mass recovery and contaminant flux

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94685/1/wrcr9972.pd

A Potential Phytomedicine for Obesity from the Leaves of Dalbergia Sissoo Roxb using Zebrafish (Danio Rerio) - A Metabolomic Approach for Future Herbal Drug Development.

Obesity is a medical condition in which excess body fat has accumulated to the extent that it may have an adverse effect on health, leading to reduced life expectancy and/or increased health problems. This dissertation covers pharmacognostical, phytochemical and pharmacological studies with a modern metabolomic approach on the commonly available medicinal plant Dalbergia sissoo belonging to the family Fabaceae. The purpose is to link the traditional concepts like the role of herbal drugs, herbal products and certain phytochemicals for potential phytomedicine using modern scientific approaches. The objective is to examine the impact of enriched natural herbals on obesity which is one of the primary causes for the associated diseases like CVD risk, atherogenesis, diabetes, antioxidant potential, cancer, neurocognitive function and eye disease. Pharmacognostical parameters have been determined on the leaves inorder to substantiate and identify the plant for future work. This study establishes not only pharmacognostic and characterizations of leaves but also microscopic and fluorescences. These characteristics can be used further as identification and authentication parameters of the leaves

Exploring a Generalizable Machine Learned Solution for Early Prediction of Student At-Risk Status

Determining which students are at-risk of poorer outcomes -- such as dropping out, failing classes, or decreasing standardized examination scores -- has become an important area of both research and practice in K-12 education. The models produced from this type of predictive modeling research are increasingly used by high schools in Early Warning Systems to identify which students are at risk and intervene to support better outcomes. It has become common practice to re-build and validate these detectors, district-by-district, due to different data semantics and various risk factors for students in different districts. As these detectors become more widely used, however, a new challenge emerges in applying these detectors across a broad spectrum of school districts with varying availability of past student data. Some districts have insufficient high-quality past data for building an effective detector. Novel approaches that can address the complex data challenges a new district presents are critical for advancing the field. Using an ensemble-based algorithm, I develop a modeling approach that can generate a useful model for a previously unseen district. During the ensembling process, my approach, District Similarity Ensemble Extrapolation (DSEE), weights districts that are more similar to the Target district more strongly during ensembling than less similar districts. Using this approach, I can predict student-at-risk status effectively for unseen districts, across a range of grade ranges, and achieve prediction goodness but ultimately fails to perform better than the previously published Knowles (2015) and Bowers (2012) EWS models proposed for use across districts

Configuration management for a distributed and collaborative software development environment

Thesis (M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-106).In the face of changing technology, the world is becoming more global by the minute. This globalization has resulted in dispersed teams and collaborative opportunities, which offer value and depth to projects. Software development also reflects this globalization, as do all the processes involved in software development. It is important to understand these changes and how they affect not only the entire development process as a whole but also each individual part of the process. Configuration management is an integral part of the software development process. In order to perform good software development, it is imperative to understand and be able to implement proper configuration management. Thus, as configuration management is important to software development, it is also important to study the effects of how the changing context of software development toward distributed and collaborative environments affects configuration management. Not only does configuration management influence the transition to this type of environment, it also is quite affected by it. In this thesis, I aim to examine the impact of a distributed and collaborative development environment on configuration management. I will first give an overview of software engineering with respect to configuration management; next, I will provide and introduction to traditional configuration management, and in the following chapter, I will discuss distributed and collaborative configuration management as it exists today. Next, I will provide a case study of the ieCollab project, a project in which developers were dispersed and a great deal of collaboration occurred, and finally, I will discuss the future of collaborative and distributed configuration management.by Teresa Liu.M.Eng