Automating Requirements Traceability: Two Decades of Learning from KDD

This paper summarizes our experience with using Knowledge Discovery in Data (KDD) methodology for automated requirements tracing, and discusses our insights.Comment: The work of the second author has been supported in part by NSF grants CCF-1511117 and CICI 1642134; 4 pages; in Proceedings of IEEE Requirements Engineering 201

Integrated change and knowledge management system - development and evaluation

Knowledge is often generated as part of the change and dependency management (CDM) process. Given that knowledge has become a fundamental resource for organizations, it is imperative that any new knowledge generated from CDM is captured and disseminated. In energy retrofits, inadequate management of changes and dependencies could have negative impacts on building energy performance. This paper presents the development and evaluation of an Integrated Change and Knowledge Management System (ICKMS) in this scope. It discusses the use case, requirements, information exchanges, and the system architecture. ICKMS can be used in projects to manage changes and dependencies, track change histories, and capture lessons learned from changes. The proposed ICKMS eliminates the gap between CDM and knowledge management (KM) activities, and prevents loss of potential knowledge in CDM processes. The use of the integrated system in construction projects is expected to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of simultaneously managing changes, dependencies and knowledge

Maps of Lessons Learnt in Requirements Engineering

Both researchers and practitioners have emphasized the importance of learning from past experiences and its consequential impact on project time, cost, and quality. However, from the survey we conducted of requirements engineering (RE) practitioners, over 70\% of the respondents stated that they seldom use RE lessons in the RE process, though 85\% of these would use such lessons if readily available. Our observation, however, is that RE lessons are scattered, mainly implicitly, in the literature and practice, which obviously, does not help the situation. We, therefore, present ``maps” of RE lessons which would highlight weak (dark) and strong (bright) areas of RE (and hence RE theories). Such maps would thus be: (a) a driver for research to ``light up” the darker areas of RE and (b) a guide for practice to benefit from the brighter areas. To achieve this goal, we populated the maps with over 200 RE lessons elicited from literature and practice using a systematic literature review and survey. The results show that approximately 80\% of the elicited lessons are implicit and that approximately 70\% of the lessons deal with the elicitation, analysis, and specification RE phases only. The RE Lesson Maps, elicited lessons, and the results from populating the maps provide novel scientific groundings for lessons learnt in RE as this topic has not yet been systematically studied in the field

Target and (Astro-)WISE technologies - Data federations and its applications

After its first implementation in 2003 the Astro-WISE technology has been rolled out in several European countries and is used for the production of the KiDS survey data. In the multi-disciplinary Target initiative this technology, nicknamed WISE technology, has been further applied to a large number of projects. Here, we highlight the data handling of other astronomical applications, such as VLT-MUSE and LOFAR, together with some non-astronomical applications such as the medical projects Lifelines and GLIMPS, the MONK handwritten text recognition system, and business applications, by amongst others, the Target Holding. We describe some of the most important lessons learned and describe the application of the data-centric WISE type of approach to the Science Ground Segment of the Euclid satellite.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, Proceedngs IAU Symposium No 325 Astroinformatics 201

Integration of Interactive Voice Response Unit and Outage Management System

This project provides a technical solution that integrates the Interactive Voice Response Unit (IVR) and the Outage Management System (OMS) for the Public Service Company. The IVR system is introduced because its automatic call logging functionality can process a large volume of phone calls from the customers reporting electrical service problems. This is a major improvement over the current Trouble Call Center (TCC) infrastructure that has a limited number of agents handling a relatively small number of customer calls. Because OMS can receive more calls, it then can predict the outage locations and causes more accurately, dispatch more repair crews on time, and restore outages quicker. As a result, the company benefits greatly on its customer relationship and revenue generation. The goal of this project is to provide a simpler and less costly approach to the integration of IVR and OMS than the conventional integration approach provided by the IVR vender. The proposed solution utilizes the existing interface application between TCC and OMS. An adapter will be developed to communicate between IVR and the TCC-OMS interface. The adapter consists of a set of database tables and stored procedures. Compared with the vender\u27s full integration approach from IVR to OMS, this proposed simple solution provides significant savings on the cost and time of the interface development as well as the system maintenance and upgrade

Software Engineers Response to Public Crisis: Lessons Learnt from Spontaneously Building an Informative COVID-19 Dashboard

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak quickly spread around the world, resulting in over 240 million infections and 4 million deaths by Oct 2021. While the virus is spreading from person to person silently, fear has also been spreading around the globe. The COVID-19 information from the Australian Government is convincing but not timely or detailed, and there is much information on social networks with both facts and rumors. As software engineers, we have spontaneously and rapidly constructed a COVID-19 information dashboard aggregating reliable information semi-automatically checked from different sources for providing one-stop information sharing site about the latest status in Australia. Inspired by the John Hopkins University COVID-19 Map, our dashboard contains the case statistics, case distribution, government policy, latest news, with interactive visualization. In this paper, we present a participant's in-person observations in which the authors acted as founders of https://covid-19-au.com/ serving more than 830K users with 14M page views since March 2020. According to our first-hand experience, we summarize 9 lessons for developers, researchers and instructors. These lessons may inspire the development, research and teaching in software engineer aspects for coping with similar public crises in the future

CS Circles: An In-Browser Python Course for Beginners

Computer Science Circles is a free programming website for beginners that is designed to be fun, easy to use, and accessible to the broadest possible audience. We teach Python since it is simple yet powerful, and the course content is well-structured but written in plain language. The website has over one hundred exercises in thirty lesson pages, plus special features to help teachers support their students. It is available in both English and French. We discuss the philosophy behind the course and its design, we describe how it was implemented, and we give statistics on its use.Comment: To appear in SIGCSE 201