Categorizing Non-Functional Requirements Using a Hierarchy in UML.

Non-functional requirements (NFRs) are a subset of requirements, the means by which software system developers and clients communicate about the functionality of the system to be built. This paper has three main parts: first, an overview of how non-functional requirements relate to software engineering is given, along with a survey of NFRs in the software engineering literature. Second, a collection of 161 NFRs is diagrammed using the Unified Modelling Language, forming a tool with which developers may more easily identify and write additional NFRs. Third, a lesson plan is presented, a learning module intended for an undergraduate software engineering curriculum. The results of presenting this learning module to a class in Spring, 2003 is presented

Assessment of Modular Construction Utilization Across All Campuses of the University of North Carolina System

Modular building construction can benefit a project by reducing construction time, delivering a consistently high-quality product, and potentially saving the owner money. Modular works best for structures with many repetitive elements; for this reason, university dorms are prime candidates for modularization. Through a University of North Carolina (UNC)-wide survey and interviews with UNC decision makers this research shows that most UNC campuses have neither used nor considered this. Campuses that have not used, or that have not considered using, modular construction cite concerns about quality, conflicts with the existing campus standards, and questions about whether modular is acceptable to the NC State Construction Office standards as reasons for not pursuing modular. Mountaineer Hall is the only modular project and it was a positive experience for Appalachian State University (ASU). This research includes a case study comparing Mountaineer Hall and Summit Hall, both at ASU that illustrates potential advantages of modular. Construction on both residence halls began in 2010. Mountaineer Hall is a 118,434 square feet, 460-bed facility that cost $16,500,000 and was built in less than one year. Summit Hall is a 106,820 square feet, 333-bed facility that cost$31,000,000 and was built in two years

An Empirical Analysis of Internet Use on Smartphones: Characterizing Visit Patterns and User Differences

The original vision of ubiquitous computing was for computers to assist humans by providing subtle and fitting technologies in every environment. The iPhone and similar smartphones have provided continuous access to the internet to this end. In the current thesis, my goal was to characterize how the internet is used on smartphones to better understand what users do with technology away from the desktop. Naturalistic and longitudinal data were collected from iPhone users in the wild and analyzed to develop this understanding. Since there are two general ways to access the internet on smartphones—via native applications and a web browser—I describe usage patterns through each along with the influence of experience, the nature of the task and physical locations where smartphones were used on these patterns. The results reveal differences between technologies (the PC and the smartphone), platforms (native applications and the mobile browser), and users in how the internet was accessed. Findings indicate that longitudinal use of web browsers decreased sharply with time in favor of native application use, web page revisitation through browsers occurred very infrequently (approximately 25% of URLs are revisited by each user), bookmarks were used sparingly to access web content, physical location visitation followed patterns similar to virtual visitation on the internet, and Zipf distributions characterize mobile internet use. The web browser was not as central to smartphone use compared to the PC, but afforded certain types of activities such as searching and ad hoc browsing. In addition, users systematically differed from each other in how they accessed the internet suggesting different ways to support a wider spectrum of smartphone users

Complexity in daily life – a 3D-visualization showing activity patterns in their contexts

This article attacks the difficulties to make well informed empirically grounded descriptions and analyses of everyday life activity patterns. At a first glance, everyday life seems to be very simple and everybody has experiences from it, but when we try to investigate it from a scientific perspective, its complexity is overwhelming. There are enormous variations in interests and activity patterns among individuals, between households and socio-economic groups in the population. Therefore, and in spite of good intentions, traditional methods and means to visualize and analyze often lead to over-simplifications. The aim of this article is to present a visualization method that might inspire social scientists to tackle the complexity of everyday life from a new angle, starting with a visual overview of the individual's time use in her daily life, subsequently aggregating to time use in her household, further at group and population levels without leaving the individual out of sight. Thereby variations and complexity might be treated as assets in the interpretation rather than obstacles. To exemplify the method we show how activities in a daily life project are distributed among household members and between men and women in a population.household division of labour, time-geography, 3D method, visualization, diaries, everyday life, activity patterns. Complexity in daily life – a 3D-visualization showing activity patterns in their contexts

Intra-family time allocation to housework - French evidence

We analyse new time diary data from France to explore the relationship between economic variables and husbands’ share of housework time. Consistent with both bargaining and specialization models of the family, we find that the greater the husband’s share of labor income, the lower his share of housework time; the greater the wife’s market hours, the lower his housework time, but the larger his share of housework time. Treating market work as endogenous substantially lowers the size of these estimates, but they remain statistically significant. A parsimonious specification based on the specialization model generates estimates for housework share wage elasticities. The own wage elasticity of wives’ housework is -0.3 and the elasticity of husbands’ housework share with respect to wives’ wages is +0.25.Time allocation, intra-family, time use, home production, bargaining, elasticities

SOFTENG 2023: the ninth international conference on advances and trends in software engineering

The Ninth International Conference on Advances and Trends in Software Engineering (SOFTENG 2023), held between April 24th and April 28th, 2023, continued a series of events focusing on these challenging aspects for software development and deployment, across the whole life-cycle. Software engineering exhibits challenging dimensions in the light of new applications, devices, and services. Mobility, user-centric development, smart-devices, e-services, ambient environments, e-health and wearable/implantable devices pose specific challenges for specifying software requirements and developing reliable and safe software. Specific software interfaces, agile organization and software dependability require particular approaches for software security, maintainability, and sustainability. We take here the opportunity to warmly thank all the members of the SOFTENG 2023 technical program committee, as well as all the reviewers. The creation of such a high-quality conference program would not have been possible without their involvement. We also kindly thank all the authors who dedicated much of their time and effort to contribute to SOFTENG 2023. We truly believe that, thanks to all these efforts, the final conference program consisted of top-quality contributions. We also thank the members of the SOFTENG 2023 organizing committee for their help in handling the logistics of this event. We hope that SOFTENG 2023 was a successful international forum for the exchange of ideas and results between academia and industry and for the promotion of progress in the field of software engineering

The Design and Use of a Smartphone Data Collection Tool and Accompanying Configuration Language

Understanding human behaviour is key to understanding the spread of epidemics, habit dispersion, and the efficacy of health interventions. Investigation into the patterns of and drivers for human behaviour has often been facilitated by paper tools such as surveys, journals, and diaries. These tools have drawbacks in that they can be forgotten, go unfilled, and depend on often unreliable human memories. Researcher-driven data collection mechanisms, such as interviews and direct observation, alleviate some of these problems while introducing others, such as bias and observer effects. In response to this, technological means such as special-purpose data collection hardware, wireless sensor networks, and apps for smart devices have been built to collect behavioural data. These technologies further reduce the problems experienced by more traditional behavioural research tools, but often experience problems of reliability, generality, extensibility, and ease of configuration. This document details the construction of a smartphone-based app designed to collect data on human behaviour such that the difficulties of traditional tools are alleviated while still addressing the problems faced by modern supplemental technology. I describe the app's main data collection engine and its construction, architecture, reliability, generality, and extensibility, as well as the programming language developed to configure it and its feature set. To demonstrate the utility of the tool and its configuration language, I describe how they have been used to collect data in the field. Specifically, eleven case studies are presented in which the tool's architecture, flexibility, generality, extensibility, modularity, and ease of configuration have been exploited to facilitate a variety of behavioural monitoring endeavours. I further explain how the engine performs data collection, the major abstractions it employs, how its design and the development techniques used ensure ongoing reliability, and how the engine and its configuration language could be extended in the future to facilitate a greater range of experiments that require behavioural data to be collected. Finally, features and modules of the engine's encompassing system, iEpi, are presented that have not otherwise been documented to give the reader an understanding of where the work fits into the larger data collection and processing endeavour that spawned it