Software Engineering Laboratory Series: Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Software Engineering Workshop

The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) is an organization sponsored by NASA/GSFC and created to investigate the effectiveness of software engineering technologies when applied to the development of application software. The activities, findings, and recommendations of the SEL are recorded in the Software Engineering Laboratory Series, a continuing series of reports that includes this document

Network reputation-based quality optimization of video delivery in heterogeneous wireless environments

The mass-market adoption of high-end mobile devices and increasing amount of video traffic has led the mobile operators to adopt various solutions to help them cope with the explosion of mobile broadband data traffic, while ensuring high Quality of Service (QoS) levels to their services. Deploying small-cell base stations within the existing macro-cellular networks and offloading traffic from the large macro-cells to the small cells is seen as a promising solution to increase capacity and improve network performance at low cost. Parallel use of diverse technologies is also employed. The result is a heterogeneous network environment (HetNets), part of the next generation network deployments. In this context, this thesis makes a step forward towards the “Always Best Experience” paradigm, which considers mobile users seamlessly roaming in the HetNets environment. Supporting ubiquitous connectivity and enabling very good quality of rich mobile services anywhere and anytime is highly challenging, mostly due to the heterogeneity of the selection criteria, such as: application requirements (e.g., voice, video, data, etc.); different device types and with various capabilities (e.g., smartphones, netbooks, laptops, etc.); multiple overlapping networks using diverse technologies (e.g., Wireless Local Area Networks (IEEE 802.11), Cellular Networks Long Term Evolution (LTE), etc.) and different user preferences. In fact, the mobile users are facing a complex decision when they need to dynamically select the best value network to connect to in order to get the “Always Best Experience”. This thesis presents three major contributions to solve the problem described above: 1) The Location-based Network Prediction mechanism in heterogeneous wireless networks (LNP) provides a shortlist of best available networks to the mobile user based on his location, history record and routing plan; 2) Reputation-oriented Access Network Selection mechanism (RANS) selects the best reputation network from the available networks for the mobile user based on the best trade-off between QoS, energy consumptions and monetary cost. The network reputation is defined based on previous user-network interaction, and consequent user experience with the network. 3) Network Reputation-based Quality Optimization of Video Delivery in heterogeneous networks (NRQOVD) makes use of a reputation mechanism to enhance the video content quality via multipath delivery or delivery adaptation

Software Engineering Laboratory Series: Collected Software Engineering Papers

The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) is an organization sponsored by NASA/GSFC and created to investigate the effectiveness of software engineering technologies when applied to the development of application software. The activities, findings, and recommendations of the SEL are recorded in the Software Engineering Laboratory Series, a continuing series of reports that includes this document

An open source software selection process and a case study

In this study, I design an empirical open source software selection process, which reuses some ideas from Commercial Off-the-Shelf selection methods and addresses the characteristics of the open source software. Basically, it consists of three basic steps: identification, screening and evaluation. The identification step is to find all possible alternatives to open source software that can meet the high level requirements. The next step is screening, in which the refined requirements are applied to filter the alternatives. The evaluation step is based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process, in which the alternatives are inspected from functional suitability, source code, support strength and popularity. In more detail, under functionality suitability criterion, alternatives to open source software are evaluated in viewing of how much functionality can fit in with the functional user requirements. The source code of the alternatives is evaluated from six criteria: programming language, code size, code comment, code intra-module complexity and code inter-module complexity. The evaluation of support strength depends on the evaluation of field support and support resources. The field support includes commercial support and community support. The community support specifically refers to the direct responses from the community to the support requests. Aside from field support, open source software projects also provide various support-related resources such as, documents, wiki, blog, etc. To determine the popularity of the alternatives, I evaluate them from software use, development participation and web popularity. In the case study, I utilize the process to select the best open source unified modeling language tool from the ten alternatives for the software development process. After the screening phase, the four competitive alternatives, BOUML, ArgoUML, UMLet and Violet, are evaluated from functionality, source code, support strength and popularity criteria. The evaluation result indicates that ArgoUML is the best tool for the requirement. The case study demonstrates the effectiveness of the selection process. Various important attributes of open source software are taken into consideration systematically and the final decision is reached based on comprehensive investigation and analysis. The process provides an operable solution to the open source selection problem in practice

Digital Media and Textuality: From Creation to Archiving

Due to computers' ability to combine different semiotic modes, texts are no longer exclusively comprised of static images and mute words. How have digital media changed the way we write and read? What methods of textual and data analysis have emerged? How do we rescue digital artifacts from obsolescence? And how can digital media be used or taught inside classrooms? These and other questions are addressed in this volume that assembles contributions by artists, writers, scholars and editors. They offer a multiperspectival view on the way digital media have changed our notion of textuality

Digital Media and Textuality

Due to computers' ability to combine different semiotic modes, texts are no longer exclusively comprised of static images and mute words. How have digital media changed the way we write and read? What methods of textual and data analysis have emerged? How do we rescue digital artifacts from obsolescence? And how can digital media be used or taught inside classrooms? These and other questions are addressed in this volume that assembles contributions by artists, writers, scholars and editors such as Dene Grigar, Sandy Baldwin, Carlos Reis, and Frieder Nake. They offer a multiperspectival view on the way digital media have changed our notion of textuality

State of the art for the systematic construction and analysis of i* models for assessing COTS-based systems development

This document presents the state of the art related with the systematic construction and analysis of i* models for assessing COTS-based systems development. The fist section presents an overview of the Component-Based Systems (CBS) development processes. As components are part of the architecture of the system, the second section introduces the evaluation of software architectures. The i* framework has been proved useful on the representation and evaluation of software architectures, including those containing COTS, the third section presents the i* framework and some other requirements engineering techniques. As the i* framework is agent-oriented, and so, the fourth section presents an overview of agent-oriented paradigm. Finally, as CBS development is an activity that seldom takes place from the scratch, we can tackle it as a process reengineering activity, because of that, section 5 outline the main issues in business process reengineering.Postprint (published version

Digital Media and Textuality

Due to computers' ability to combine different semiotic modes, texts are no longer exclusively comprised of static images and mute words. How have digital media changed the way we write and read? What methods of textual and data analysis have emerged? How do we rescue digital artifacts from obsolescence? And how can digital media be used or taught inside classrooms? These and other questions are addressed in this volume that assembles contributions by artists, writers, scholars and editors such as Dene Grigar, Sandy Baldwin, Carlos Reis, and Frieder Nake. They offer a multiperspectival view on the way digital media have changed our notion of textuality