Issues in making courseware exploitable and issues in making exploitable courseware

Part 1 of the paper, ‘Issues in making courseware exploitable’, is about dealing with the legacy of large volumes of incompatible non‐integrated courseware which are currently being generated within initiatives such as the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP). We suggest strategies for allowing end‐users to apply courseware management techniques belatedly to current courseware developments, thereby offering ways of making the emerging courseware more exploitable than it otherwise would be. Part 2 of the paper, ‘Issues in making exploitable courseware’, takes a forward‐looking approach which recognizes that future courseware development efforts must pre‐empt these problems of incompatibility and non‐integration. Courseware development must mature to the stage where it makes use of courseware design standards, embraces a host of essential lessons from conventional software development, and recognizes the importance of courseware management issues

Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances

AUTOMATED SOFTWARE METRICS, REPOSITORY EVALUATION AND SOFTWARE ASSET MANAGEMENT: NEW TOOLS AND PERSPECTIVES FOR MANAGING INTEGRATED COMPUTER AIDED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (I-CASE)

Automated collection of software metrics in computer aided software engineering (CASE) environments opens up new avenues for improving the management of software development operations, as well as shifting the focus of management's control efforts from "software projectâ to "software assets" stored in a centralized repository. Repository evaluation, a new direction for software metrics research in the 1990s, promises a fresh view of software development performance for a range of responsibility levels. We discuss the automation of function point and code reuse analysis in the context of an integrated CASE (I-CASE) environment deployed at a large investment bank in New York City. The development of an automated code reuse analysis tool prompted us to re-think how to measure and interpret code reuse in the I-CASE environment. The metrics we propose describe three dimensions of code reuse -- leverage, value and classification -- and we examine the value of applying them on a project and a repository-wide basis.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Understanding and supporting large-scale requirements management

Large market-driven software companies face new challenges in requirements engineering and management that emerged due to their recent extensive growth. At the same time, the pressure generated by competitors’ and users’ expectations demands being more competitive, creative and flexible to more quickly respond to a rapidly changing market situation. In the pursuit of staying competitive in this context, new ideas on how to improve the current software engineering practice are requested to help maintaining the engineering efficiency while coping with growing size and complexity of requirements engineering processes and their products. This thesis focuses on understanding and supporting large-scale requirements management for developing software products to open markets. In particular, this thesis focuses on the following requirements management activities in the mentioned context, namely: scope management, variability management and requirements consolidation. The goals of the research effort in this thesis are to provide effective methods in supporting mentioned requirements management activities in a situation when the size of them and their complexity require large time and skills efforts. Based on empirical research, where both quantitative and qualitative approaches were utilized, this thesis reports on possible improvements for managing variability and presents visualization techniques to assist scope management for large-scale software product development contexts. Both reported ideas are empirically evaluated in case studies in a large-scale context. Additionally, the benefits of using linguistic methods for requirements consolidation are investigated in a replicated experimental study based on a relevant industry scenario

Software Development Process Change Management: Implementation of ASDM

Agile software development methodologies have been receiving a lot of attention in recent times. Although doubts have been cast on the efficacy of these methods for very large projects, some of the techniques and practices they advocate are very appealing and are being seriously considered by many organizations. It is our contention that many of these practices are antithetical to the orthodoxy of prevailing software approaches. In particular, nontrivial reconfigurations of organizational form, management practices, and workflows have to be undergone to successfully integrate agile principles into existing software development practices. This paper draws on the organizational change management literature to argue that the nature of change involved is resonant of the efforts to introduce Business Process Reengineering (BPR) in organizations. The magnitude of the change as well as the implications of migrating to agile methodologies is also presented

When agility meets a project portfolio: A study of success factors in large organisations

The iterative nature of agile methods combined with high levels of team and customer interactions and continuously changing IT and software development project requirements make the management of agile project portfolios very complex. To date, the mechanisms under which project portfolio management adapts to these complexities and achieves portfolio success have not been thoroughly investigated. This study explores the notion of success and its impacting factors in large organisations\u27 portfolios of agile IT and software development projects. Using a multiple case study design, we analysed the agile project portfolios of seven large organisations. We identified four success criteria and 15 success factors and categorised them into a unique agile portfolio success framework. Some of these criteria and factors are unique to agile project portfolios. The framework contributes to agile and project management literature by conceptualising the notion of success in portfolios of agile projects while revealing a set of factors that affect the relationship between an agile portfolio with its subcomponents and the surrounding environment. The framework supports managers and practitioners in large organisations in reflecting on their agility efforts to achieve higher success rates in their agile portfolios

Open Standard, Open Source and Peer to Peer Methods for Collaborative Product Development and Knowledge Management

Tools such as product data management (PDM) and its offspring product lifecycle management (PLM) enable collaboration within and between enterprises. Large enterprises have invariably been the target of software vendors for development of such tools, resulting in large entralized applications. These are beyond the means of small to medium enterprises (SME). Even after these efforts had been made, large enterprises face numerous difficulties with PLM. Firstly, enterprises evolve, and an evolving enterprise needs an evolving data management system. With large applications, such configuration changes have to be made at the server level by dedicated staff. The second problem arises when enterprises wish to collaborate with a large number of suppliers and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) customers. Current applications enable collaboration using business-to-business (B2B) protocols. However, these do not take into account that disparate enterprises do not have unitary data models or workflows. This is a strong factor in reducing the abilities of large enterprises to participate in collaborative project

Monitoring and control technologies for bioregenerative life support systems/CELSS

The development of a controlled Ecological Life Support System (CELSS) will require NASA to develop innovative monitoring and control technologies to operate the different components of the system. Primary effort over the past three to four years has been directed toward the development of technologies to operate a biomass production module. Computer hardware and software required to operate, collect, and summarize environmental data for a large plant growth chamber facility were developed and refined. Sensors and controls required to collect information on such physical parameters as relative humidity, temperature, irradiance, pressure, and gases in the atmosphere; and PH, dissolved oxygen, fluid flow rates, and electrical conductivity in the nutrient solutions are being developed and tested. Technologies required to produce high artificial irradiance for plant growth and those required to collect and transport natural light into a plant growth chamber are also being evaluated. Significant effort was directed towards the development and testing of a membrane nutrient delivery system required to manipulate, seed, and harvest crops, and to determine plant health prior to stress impacting plant productivity are also being researched. Tissue culture technologies are being developed for use in management and propagation of crop plants. Though previous efforts have focussed on development of technologies required to operate a biomass production module for a CELSS, current efforts are expanding to include technologies required to operate modules such as food preparation, biomass processing, and resource (waste) recovery which are integral parts of the CELSS