Supporting UCM requirements evolution by means of formal concept analysis

Software evolution refers to the process of adapting software systems to modification request caused by requirements and technology changes that occur after the initial system delivery. Prior to implementing a requirements change, decision-makers must determine if a modification request is feasible and the cost associated with it. Traditional modification analysis approaches have focused mainly on the analysis of source code to determine the potential impact of a change. In this research, we present a novel approach to support modification analysis early in the software evolution lifecycle thus allowing management, who are not necessarily familiar with the detailed system implementation, to determine the impact associated with a modification request. In our research we develop several analysis techniques to support the system evolution at the requirements level, namely impact analysis at the requirements level, prediction of regression testing effort, feature interaction analysis including detecting potential bad smells of the requirements, in order to provide support for improving the comprehensibility and maintainability of requirements. In our approach, we combine Use Case Maps, as a notation to model requirements, with Formal Concept Analysis in order to explore the applicability of Formal Concept Analysis during modification analysis at the requirements level. We implemented a proof of concept tool and several case studies are presented to demonstrate the applicability of our methodology

Traceability approach for conflict dissolution in handling requirements crosscutting

Requirements crosscutting in software development and maintenance has gradually become an important issue in software engineering. There are growing needs of traceability support to achieve some possible understanding in requirements crosscutting throughout phases in software lifecycle. It is aimed to manage practical process in addressing requirements crosscutting at various phases in order to comply with industrial standard. However, due to its distinct nature, many recent works are focusing on identification, modularization, composition and conflict dissolution of requirements crosscutting which are mostly saturated at requirements level. These works fail to practically specify crosscutting properties for functional and nonfunctional requirements at requirements, analysis and design phases. Therefore, this situation leads to inability to provide sufficient support for software engineers to manage requirements crosscutting across the remaining development phases. This thesis proposes a new approach called the Identification, Modularization, Design Composition Rules and Conflict Dissolutions (IM-DeCRuD) that provides a special traceability to facilitate better understanding and reasoning for engineering tasks towards requirements crosscutting during software development and evolution. This study also promotes a simple but significant way to support pragmatic changes of crosscutting properties at requirements, analysis and design phases for medium sizes of software development and maintenance projects. A tool was developed based on the proposed approach to support four main perspectives namely requirements specification definition, requirements specification modification, requirements prioritization setting and graphics visualizing representation. Software design components are generated using Generic Modeling Environment (GME) with Java language interpreter to incorporate all these features. The proposed IM-DeCRuD was applied to an industrial strength case study of medium-scaled system called myPolicy. The tool was evaluated and the results were verified by some experts for validation and opinion. The feedbacks were then gathered and analyzed using DESMET qualitative method. The outcomes show that the IM-DeCRuD is applicable to address some tedious job of engineering process in handling crosscutting properties at requirements, analysis and design phases for system development and evolution

The Impact of Water Scarcity on Food, Bioenergy and Deforestation

We evaluate the impact of explicitly representing irrigated land and water scarcity in an economy-wide model on food prices, bioenergy production and deforestation both with and without a global carbon policy. The analysis develops supply functions of irrigable land from a water resource model resolved at 282 river basins and applies them within a global economy-wide model of energy and food production, land-use change and greenhouse gas emissions. The irrigable land supply curves are built on basin-level estimates of water availability, and the costs of improving irrigation efficiency and increasing water storage, and include other water requirements within each basin. The analysis reveals two key findings. First, explicitly representing irrigated land at has a small impact on food, bioenergy and deforestation outcomes. This is because this modification allows more flexibility in the expansion of crop land (i.e. irrigated and rainfed land can expand in different proportions) relative to when a single type of crop land is represented, which counters the effect of rising marginal costs for the expansion of irrigated land. Second, due to endogenous irrigation and storage responses, changes in water availability have small impacts on food prices, bioenergy production, land-use change and the overall economy, even with large scale (~150 exajoules) bioenergy production.Primary funding for this research was through a sponsored research agreement with BP. The authors also acknowledge support in the basic development of the Economic Projection and Policy Analysis model from the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which is funded by a consortium of industrial sponsors and Federal grants including core funding in support of basic research under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA‑XA‑83600001) and U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science (DE‑FG02‑94ER61937). For a complete list of sponsors see for complete list see http://globalchange.mit.edu/sponsors/current.html)

Hiszpańskie i niemieckie osiągnięcia w rozwoju energetyki odnawialnej: aspekt prawny

Certainly, the renewable energy sector in Poland should be the beneficiary of the European Union enlargement. It results from both the energy policy and EU law. Poland should adopt national law to the EU requirements in the field of renewable energy sources. Polish legislators may rest on other countries' experiences in this subject. We especially should take into consideration Spanish and German measures. Spanish and German mechanisms of support for renewable energy sources at the national level are very interesting solutions. Those measures are intended to help to attain objectives such as meeting the commitments given on climate change, environmentally sustainable security of supply, and promotion of renewable energy sources. The article is an analysis of Spanish and German support systems in view of the modification of Polish law in the field of renewable energy sources

National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling Program Evaluation: Final Report, Rounds 1 and 2

The National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling (NFMC) program is a special federal appropriation, administered by NeighborWorks (NW) America, to support a rapid expansion of foreclosure intervention counseling in response to the nationwide foreclosure crisis. As this is a federal appropriation, NW America must inform Congress and other entities of the NFMC program's progress. The Urban Institute (UI) was selected by NW America to evaluate the NFMC program. This report presents the final results from UI's evaluation of the first two rounds of the NFMC program (people receiving counseling in 2008 and 2009), including a detailed analysis of program outcomes first described in preliminary reports of November 2009 (Mayer et al.) and December 2010 (Mayer et al.). According to those reports, homeowners receiving NFMC counseling avoided entering foreclosure, successfully cured existing foreclosures, and obtained more favorable loan modifications. This report updates previous analyses and also includes revised models of several homeowner outcomes for NFMC clients counseled in 2008 and 2009. These new models use an improved comparison sample selection design, which addressed potential issues raised by reviewers of earlier analyses, and a better method for controlling for possible selection bias in the NFMC sample. The additional analyses in this report include models of non-modification cures, non-modification redefaults, and foreclosures avoided

Aligning a Service Provisioning Model of a Service-Oriented System with the ITIL v.3 Life Cycle

Bringing together the ICT and the business layer of a service-oriented system (SoS) remains a great challenge. Few papers tackle the management of SoS from the business and organizational point of view. One solution is to use the well-known ITIL v.3 framework. The latter enables to transform the organization into a service-oriented organizational which focuses on the value provided to the service customers. In this paper, we align the steps of the service provisioning model with the ITIL v.3 processes. The alignment proposed should help organizations and IT teams to integrate their ICT layer, represented by the SoS, and their business layer, represented by ITIL v.3. One main advantage of this combined use of ITIL and a SoS is the full service orientation of the company.Comment: This document is the technical work of a conference paper submitted to the International Conference on Exploring Service Science 1.5 (IESS 2015

A Code of Conduct for the Life Sciences: A Practical Approach

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Designing a novel virtual collaborative environment to support collaboration in design review meetings

Project review meetings are part of the project management process and are organised to assess progress and resolve any design conflicts to avoid delays in construction. One of the key challenges during a project review meeting is to bring the stakeholders together and use this time effectively to address design issues as quickly as possible. At present, current technology solutions based on BIM or CAD are information-centric and do not allow project teams to collectively explore the design from a range of perspectives and brainstorm ideas when design conflicts are encountered. This paper presents a system architecture that can be used to support multi-functional team collaboration more effectively during such design review meetings. The proposed architecture illustrates how information-centric BIM or CAD systems can be made human- and team-centric to enhance team communication and problem solving. An implementation of the proposed system architecture has been tested for its utility, likability and usefulness during design review meetings. The evaluation results suggest that the collaboration platform has the potential to enhance collaboration among multi-functional teams