Supporting Multiple Stakeholders in Agile Development

Agile software development practices require several stakeholders with different kinds of expertise to collaborate while specifying requirements, designing and modeling software, and verifying whether developers have implemented requirements correctly. We studied 112 requirements engineering (RE) tools from academia and the features of 13 actively maintained behavior-driven development (BDD) tools, which support various stakeholders in specifying and verifying the application behavior. Overall, we found that there is a growing tool specialization targeted towards a specific type of stakeholders. Particularly with BDD tools, we found no adequate support for non-technical stakeholders —- they are required to use an integrated development environment (IDE) —- which is not adapted to suit their expertise. We argue that employing separate tools for requirements specification, modeling, implementation, and verification is counter-productive for agile development. Such an approach makes it difficult to manage associated artifacts and support rapid implementation and feedback loops. To avoid dispersion of requirements and other software-related artifacts among separate tools, establish traceability between requirements and the application source code, and streamline a collaborative software development workflow, we propose to adapt an IDE as an agile development platform. With our approach, we provide in-IDE graphical interfaces to support non-technical stakeholders in creating and maintaining requirements concurrently with the implementation. With such graphical interfaces, we also guide non-technical stakeholders through the object-oriented design process and support them in verifying the modeled behavior. This approach has two advantages: (i) compared with employing separate tools, creating and maintaining requirements directly within a development platform eliminates the necessity to recover trace links, and (ii) various natively created artifacts can be composed into stakeholder-specific interactive live in-IDE documentation. These advantages have a direct impact on how various stakeholders collaborate with each other, and allow for rapid feedback, which is much desired in agile practices. We exemplify our approach using the Glamorous Toolkit IDE. Moreover, the discussed building blocks can be implemented in any IDE with a rich-enough graphical engine and reflective capabilities

Supporting multiple stakeholders in agile development

Agile software development practices require several stakeholders with different kinds of expertise to collaborate while specifying requirements, designing, and modelling software, and verifying whether developers have implemented requirements correctly. We studied 112 requirements engineering (RE) tools from academia and the features of 13 actively maintained behavior-driven development (BDD) tools, which support various stakeholders in specifying and verifying the application behavior. Overall, we found that there is a growing tool specialization targeted towards a specific type of stakeholders. Particularly with BDD tools, we found no adequate support for non-technical stakeholders-- they are required to use an integrated development environment (IDE)-- which is not adapted to suit their expertise. We argue that employing separate tools for requirements specification, modelling, implementation, and verification is counterproductive for agile development. Such an approach makes it difficult to manage associated artifacts and support rapid implementation and feedback loops. To avoid dispersion of requirements and other software-related artifacts among separate tools, establish traceability between requirements and the application source code, and streamline a collaborative software development workflow, we propose to adapt an IDE as an agile development platform. With our approach, we provide in-IDE graphical interfaces to support non-technical stakeholders in creating and maintaining requirements concurrently with the implementation. With such graphical interfaces, we also guide non-technical stakeholders through the object-oriented design process and support them in verifying the modelled behavior. This approach has two advantages: (i) compared with employing separate tools, creating, and maintaining requirements directly within a development platform eliminates the necessity to recover trace links, and (ii) various natively created artifacts can be composed into stakeholder-specific interactive live in-IDE documentation. These advantages have a direct impact on how various stakeholders collaborate with each other, and allow for rapid feedback, which is much desired in agile practices. We exemplify our approach using the Glamorous Toolkit IDE. Moreover, the discussed building blocks can be implemented in any IDE with a rich-enough graphical engine and reflective capabilities

Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2020, which was planned to be held during June 8-12, 2020, at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was postponed until an undetermined date. XP is the premier agile software development conference combining research and practice. It is a hybrid forum where agile researchers, academics, practitioners, thought leaders, coaches, and trainers get together to present and discuss their most recent innovations, research results, experiences, concerns, challenges, and trends. Following this history, for both researchers and seasoned practitioners XP 2020 provided an informal environment to network, share, and discover trends in Agile for the next 20 years. The 14 full and 2 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: agile adoption; agile practices; large-scale agile; the business of agile; and agile and testing

ICAPS 2012. Proceedings of the third Workshop on the International Planning Competition

22nd International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling. June 25-29, 2012, Atibaia, Sao Paulo (Brazil). Proceedings of the 3rd the International Planning CompetitionThe Academic Advising Planning Domain / Joshua T. Guerin, Josiah P. Hanna, Libby Ferland, Nicholas Mattei, and Judy Goldsmith. -- Leveraging Classical Planners through Translations / Ronen I. Brafman, Guy Shani, and Ran Taig. -- Advances in BDD Search: Filtering, Partitioning, and Bidirectionally Blind / Stefan Edelkamp, Peter Kissmann, and Álvaro Torralba. -- A Multi-Agent Extension of PDDL3.1 / Daniel L. Kovacs. -- Mining IPC-2011 Results / Isabel Cenamor, Tomás de la Rosa, and Fernando Fernández. -- How Good is the Performance of the Best Portfolio in IPC-2011? / Sergio Nuñez, Daniel Borrajo, and Carlos Linares López. -- “Type Problem in Domain Description!” or, Outsiders’ Suggestions for PDDL Improvement / Robert P. Goldman and Peter KellerEn prens

Iron-Enhanced Mitigation of Viruses in Drinking Water

Waterborne viruses are ubiquitous in the environment and present a global threat to public health. Previous research has suggested that iron-based water treatment has promise as a low-cost, non-toxic means of virus mitigation. In particular, zero-valent and ferrous iron have shown evidence of inactivating bacteria and viruses. The purpose of this research was to elucidate the relationship between iron oxidation and virus inactivation and determine if iron-based inactivation can enhance two water treatment processes, electrocoagulation and electrooxidation, for virus mitigation. This research first investigated bacteriophage inactivation due to ferrous oxidation in batch tests using ferrous chloride salt. Ferrous iron oxidation correlated to bacteriophage inactivation, indicating that viruses can be inactivated as well as physically removed by ferrous iron coagulation. Greater inactivation was associated with both a higher ferrous iron dose and a slower rate of iron oxidation. Next, the importance of ferrous oxidation was determined for virus mitigation via iron electrocoagulation. Ferrous-based inactivation was an important fate of viruses in iron electrocoagulation. However, some bacteriophages showed far greater inactivation than human viruses. Physical removal was the dominant fate under most conditions for the three mammalian viruses tested, as well as bacteriophage ΦX174. This result casts doubt on the appropriateness of using common bacteriophages for research into iron-based water treatment technologies. However, most viruses did demonstrate some inactivation at low pH (pH 6).Finally, an electrocoagulation-electrooxidation treatment train was investigated to capitalize on the strengths of iron electrocoagulation. At typical coagulation doses (\u3c30 mg/L Fe), ferrous iron did not enhance electrooxidation with boron-doped diamond electrodes. Nevertheless, the electrocoagulation-electrooxidation treatment train was beneficial in model surface waters, though electrocoagulation alone achieved equal or better mitigation in model groundwaters. The electrocoagulation-electrooxidation system also outperformed conventional treatment (ferric salt coagulant and free chlorine disinfection) in model groundwaters

Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen

Conjunctive Water Use Planning with Water Quality Constraints in Tooele Valley, Utah

The need for more efficient water management is gaining recognition due to the increased cost of water supply, the growth in the demand for water, and greater environmental and social impacts of water programs. Conjunctive use of surfact and groundwater resources provides opportunities for increasing net benefits to the water users. Past conjunctive use studies, however, have usually not included water quality constraints. In Tooele valley, Utah, spatial variation of groundwater qualtity (total dissolved solids) is significant. The areas of good (400-500 mg/1), fair (500-1,000 mg/1), and poor (1,000-3,000 mg/1) quality groundwaters were identified in an earlier study by the USGS. The water quality dimension was incorporated into the conjunctive use planning to account for crop yield changes due to changes in salinity levels in irrigation water. The possibilities for increasing total net benefits by blending surface and groundwater of different qualities were examined by developing a linear programming optimization model. The optimization model provides for mixing the different qualities of water available for the cops to maximize benefits. It applies linear programming to the Tooele Valley water supply system and optimizes over three locations, four coprs, and five qualities of water of differing costs. The groundwater withdrawals at the locations dictated by the optimization model were input to the Tooele Valley groundwater simulation model developed by USGS to study the effects on the valley\u27s principal artesian aquifer. Economic analyses of the probable scenarios of future agricultural development in Tooele Valley did not suggest that extensive increases in groundwater with drawals will occur. Economic infeasibility of major increases in groundwater extraction is a limiting factor for agricultural development in most parts of the valley. Groundwater mining therefore does not seem like a major future problem. The areas where new wells can be drilled without interference causing technological diseconomies are indicated. Profitable application of blending technology to irrigated agriculture in Tooele Valley is not possible without making a drastic shift to some higher valued crop such as fruit trees. All surface water sources should be fully utilized before developing additional and expensive groundwater. Even though an additional 20,000 to 25,000 ac-ft of groundwater can be extracted without mining, there would be a high risk of destroying natural phreatophyte habitats and degradation of water quality in at least some parts of the artesian aquifer