Control, Process Facilitation, and Requirements Change in Offshore Requirements Analysis: The Provider Perspective

Process, technology, and project factors have been increasingly driving organizations to offshore early software development phases, such as requirements analysis. This emerging trend necessitates greater control and process facilitation between client and vendor sites. The effectiveness of control and facilitation has, however, not been examined within the context of requirements analysis and change. In this study, we examine the role of control and facilitation in managing changing requirements and on success of requirements gathering in the Indian offshore software development environment. Firms found that control by client-site coordinators had a positive impact on requirements analysis success while vender site-coordinators did not have similar influence. Process facilitation by client site-coordinators affected requirements phase success indirectly through control. The study concludes with recommendations for research and practice

The complexity of resolving conflicts on MAC

We consider the fundamental problem of multiple stations competing to transmit on a multiple access channel (MAC). We are given $n$ stations out of which at most $d$ are active and intend to transmit a message to other stations using MAC. All stations are assumed to be synchronized according to a time clock. If $l$ stations node transmit in the same round, then the MAC provides the feedback whether $l=0$, $l=2$ (collision occurred) or $l=1$. When $l=1$, then a single station is indeed able to successfully transmit a message, which is received by all other nodes. For the above problem the active stations have to schedule their transmissions so that they can singly, transmit their messages on MAC, based only on the feedback received from the MAC in previous round. For the above problem it was shown in [Greenberg, Winograd, {\em A Lower bound on the Time Needed in the Worst Case to Resolve Conflicts Deterministically in Multiple Access Channels}, Journal of ACM 1985] that every deterministic adaptive algorithm should take $\Omega(d (\lg n)/(\lg d))$ rounds in the worst case. The fastest known deterministic adaptive algorithm requires $O(d \lg n)$ rounds. The gap between the upper and lower bound is $O(\lg d)$ round. It is substantial for most values of $d$: When $d =$ constant and $d \in O(n^{\epsilon})$ (for any constant $\epsilon \leq 1$, the lower bound is respectively $O(\lg n)$ and O(n), which is trivial in both cases. Nevertheless, the above lower bound is interesting indeed when $d \in$ poly($\lg n$). In this work, we present a novel counting argument to prove a tight lower bound of $\Omega(d \lg n)$ rounds for all deterministic, adaptive algorithms, closing this long standing open question.}Comment: Xerox internal report 27th July; 7 page

Byzantine Approximate Agreement on Graphs

Consider a distributed system with n processors out of which f can be Byzantine faulty. In the approximate agreement task, each processor i receives an input value x_i and has to decide on an output value y_i such that 1) the output values are in the convex hull of the non-faulty processors\u27 input values, 2) the output values are within distance d of each other. Classically, the values are assumed to be from an m-dimensional Euclidean space, where m >= 1. In this work, we study the task in a discrete setting, where input values with some structure expressible as a graph. Namely, the input values are vertices of a finite graph G and the goal is to output vertices that are within distance d of each other in G, but still remain in the graph-induced convex hull of the input values. For d=0, the task reduces to consensus and cannot be solved with a deterministic algorithm in an asynchronous system even with a single crash fault. For any d >= 1, we show that the task is solvable in asynchronous systems when G is chordal and n > (omega+1)f, where omega is the clique number of G. In addition, we give the first Byzantine-tolerant algorithm for a variant of lattice agreement. For synchronous systems, we show tight resilience bounds for the exact variants of these and related tasks over a large class of combinatorial structures

Computer Science and Game Theory: A Brief Survey

There has been a remarkable increase in work at the interface of computer science and game theory in the past decade. In this article I survey some of the main themes of work in the area, with a focus on the work in computer science. Given the length constraints, I make no attempt at being comprehensive, especially since other surveys are also available, and a comprehensive survey book will appear shortly.Comment: To appear; Palgrave Dictionary of Economic