Knowledge-based reusable software synthesis system

The Eli system, a knowledge-based reusable software synthesis system, is being developed for NASA Langley under a Phase 2 SBIR contract. Named after Eli Whitney, the inventor of interchangeable parts, Eli assists engineers of large-scale software systems in reusing components while they are composing their software specifications or designs. Eli will identify reuse potential, search for components, select component variants, and synthesize components into the developer's specifications. The Eli project began as a Phase 1 SBIR to define a reusable software synthesis methodology that integrates reusabilityinto the top-down development process and to develop an approach for an expert system to promote and accomplish reuse. The objectives of the Eli Phase 2 work are to integrate advanced technologies to automate the development of reusable components within the context of large system developments, to integrate with user development methodologies without significant changes in method or learning of special languages, and to make reuse the easiest operation to perform. Eli will try to address a number of reuse problems including developing software with reusable components, managing reusable components, identifying reusable components, and transitioning reuse technology. Eli is both a library facility for classifying, storing, and retrieving reusable components and a design environment that emphasizes, encourages, and supports reuse

Software Reuse across Robotic Platforms: Limiting the effects of diversity

Robots have diverse capabilities and complex interactions with their environment. Software development for robotic platforms is time consuming due to the complex nature of the tasks to be performed. Such an environment demands sound software engineering practices to produce high quality software. However software engineering in the robotics domain fails to facilitate any significant level of software reuse or portability. This paper identifies the major issues limiting software reuse in the robotics domain. Lack of standardisation, diversity of robotic platforms, and the subtle effects of environmental interaction all contribute to this problem. It is then shown that software components, fuzzy logic, and related techniques can be used together to address this problem. While complete software reuse is not possible, it is demonstrated that significant levels of software reuse can be obtained. Without an acceptable level of reuse or portability, software engineering in the robotics domain will not be able to meet the demands of a rapidly developing field. The work presented in this paper demonstrates a method for supporting software reuse across robotic platforms and hence facilitating improved software engineering practices

Contract Aware Components, 10 years after

The notion of contract aware components has been published roughly ten years ago and is now becoming mainstream in several fields where the usage of software components is seen as critical. The goal of this paper is to survey domains such as Embedded Systems or Service Oriented Architecture where the notion of contract aware components has been influential. For each of these domains we briefly describe what has been done with this idea and we discuss the remaining challenges.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233

Sensemaking on the Pragmatic Web: A Hypermedia Discourse Perspective

The complexity of the dilemmas we face on an organizational, societal and global scale forces us into sensemaking activity. We need tools for expressing and contesting perspectives flexible enough for real time use in meetings, structured enough to help manage longer term memory, and powerful enough to filter the complexity of extended deliberation and debate on an organizational or global scale. This has been the motivation for a programme of basic and applied action research into Hypermedia Discourse, which draws on research in hypertext, information visualization, argumentation, modelling, and meeting facilitation. This paper proposes that this strand of work shares a key principle behind the Pragmatic Web concept, namely, the need to take seriously diverse perspectives and the processes of meaning negotiation. Moreover, it is argued that the hypermedia discourse tools described instantiate this principle in practical tools which permit end-user control over modelling approaches in the absence of consensus

Software Engineering as Instrumentation for the Long Tail of Scientific Software

The vast majority of the long tail of scientific software, the myriads of tools that implement the many analysis and visualization methods for different scientific fields, is highly specialized, purpose-built for a research project, and has to rely on community uptake and reuse for its continued development and maintenance. Although uptake cannot be controlled over even guaranteed, some of the key factors that influence whether new users or developers decide to adopt an existing tool or start a new one are about how easy or difficult it is to use or enhance a tool for a purpose for which it was not originally designed. The science of software engineering has produced techniques and practices that would reduce or remove a variety of barriers to community uptake of software, but for a variety of reasons employing trained software engineers as part of the development of long tail scientific software has proven to be challenging. As a consequence, community uptake of long tail tools is often far more difficult than it would need to be, even though opportunities for reuse abound. We discuss likely reasons why employing software engineering in the long tail is challenging, and propose that many of those obstacles could be addressed in the form of a cross-cutting non-profit center of excellence that makes software engineering broadly accessible as a shared service, conceptually and in its effect similar to shared instrumentation.Comment: 4 page

Interface and Interaction Design Patterns for Intercultural Collaboration

This paper reports about on-going research into interaction design patterns in intercultural remote collaboration. It proposes that interaction and interface design patterns help to communicate and generate new design knowledge in supporting intercultural teamwork. It describes methods used to observe and develop design patterns in collocated, remote and blended collaborative learning and design contexts, and reports preliminary findings of interface and interaction design patterns, which support intercultural remote collaboration

Levels of control during a collaborative carrying task

Three experiments investigated the effect of implementing low-level aspects of motor control for a collaborative carrying task within a VE interface, leaving participants free to devote their cognitive resources to the higher-level components of the task. In the task, participants collaborated with an autonomous virtual human in an immersive virtual environment (VE) to carry an object along a predefined path. In experiment 1, participants took up to three times longer to perform the task with a conventional VE interface, in which they had to explicitly coordinate their hand and body movements, than with an interface that controlled the low-level tasks of grasping and holding onto the virtual object. Experiments 2 and 3 extended the study to include the task of carrying an object along a path that contained obstacles to movement. By allowing participants' virtual arms to stretch slightly, the interface software was able to take over some aspects of obstacle avoidance (another low-level task), and this led to further significant reductions in the time that participants took to perform the carrying task. Improvements in performance also occurred when participants used a tethered viewpoint to control their movements because they could see their immediate surroundings in the VEs. This latter finding demonstrates the superiority of a tethered view perspective to a conventional, human'seye perspective for this type of task

Ada and the rapid development lifecycle

JPL is under contract, through NASA, with the US Army to develop a state-of-the-art Command Center System for the US European Command (USEUCOM). The Command Center System will receive, process, and integrate force status information from various sources and provide this integrated information to staff officers and decision makers in a format designed to enhance user comprehension and utility. The system is based on distributed workstation class microcomputers, VAX- and SUN-based data servers, and interfaces to existing military mainframe systems and communication networks. JPL is developing the Command Center System utilizing an incremental delivery methodology called the Rapid Development Methodology with adherence to government and industry standards including the UNIX operating system, X Windows, OSF/Motif, and the Ada programming language. Through a combination of software engineering techniques specific to the Ada programming language and the Rapid Development Approach, JPL was able to deliver capability to the military user incrementally, with comparable quality and improved economies of projects developed under more traditional software intensive system implementation methodologies

Outsourcing and acquisition models comparison related to IT supplier selection decision analysis

This paper presents a comparison of acquisition models related to decision analysis of IT supplier selection. The main standards are: Capability Maturity Model Integration for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ), ISO / IEC 12207 Information Technology / Software Life Cycle Processes, IEEE 1062 Recommended Practice for Software Acquisition, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) guide. The objective of this paper is to compare the previous models to find the advantages and disadvantages of them for the future development of a decision model for IT supplier selection