Understanding and Improving Continuous Experimentation : From A/B Testing to Continuous Software Optimization

Controlled experiments (i.e. A/B tests) are used by many companies with user-intensive products to improve their software with user data. Some companies adopt an experiment-driven approach to software development with continuous experimentation (CE). With CE, every user-affecting software change is evaluated in an experiment and specialized roles seek out opportunities to experiment with functionality. The goal of the thesis is to describe current practice and support CE in industry. The main contributions are threefold. First, a review of the CE literature on: infrastructure and processes, the problem-solution pairs applied in industry practice, and the benefits and challenges of the practice. Second, a multi-case study with 12 companies to analyze how experimentation is used and why some companies fail to fully realize the benefits of CE. A theory for Factors Affecting Continuous Experimentation (FACE) is constructed to realize this goal. Finally, a toolkit called Constraint Oriented Multi-variate Bandit Optimization (COMBO) is developed for supporting automated experimentation with many variables simultaneously, live in a production environment.The research in the thesis is conducted under the design science paradigm using empirical research methods, with simulation experiments of tool proposals and a multi-case study on company usage of CE. Other research methods include systematic literature review and theory building.From FACE we derive three factors that explain CE utility: (1) investments in data infrastructure, (2) user problem complexity, and (3) incentive structures for experimentation. Guidelines are provided on how to strive towards state-of-the-art CE based on company factors. All three factors are relevant for companies wanting to use CE, in particular, for those companies wanting to apply algorithms such as those in COMBO to support personalization of software to users' context in a process of continuous optimization

A tale of three systems : case studies on the application of architectural tactics for cyber-foraging

Cyber-foraging is a technique to enable mobile devices to extend their computing power and storage by offloading computation or data to more powerful servers located in the cloud or in single-hop proximity. In previous work, we developed a set of reusable architectural tactics for cyber-foraging systems. We define architectural tactics as design decisions that influence the achievement of a system quality. In this article we present the results of three case studies to validate the application of the tactics to promote their intended functional and non-functional requirements. The first two case studies focus on the identification of architectural tactics in existing cyber-foraging systems. The third case study focuses on the development of a new cyber-foraging system using the architectural tactics. The results of the case studies are an initial demonstration of the validity of the tactics, and the potential for taking a tactics-driven approach to fulfill functional and non-functional requirements for cyber-foraging systems. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Connecting the Edges: A Universal, Mobile-Centric, and Opportunistic Communications Architecture

The Internet has crossed new frontiers with access to it getting faster and cheaper. Considering that the architectural foundations of today's Internet were laid more than three decades ago, the Internet has done remarkably well until today coping with the growing demand. However, the future Internet architecture is expected to support not only the ever growing number of users and devices, but also a diverse set of new applications and services. Departing from the traditional host-centric access paradigm, where access to a desired content is mapped to its location, an information-centric model enables the association of access to a desired content with the content itself, irrespective of the location where it is being held. UMOBILE tailors the information-centric communication model to meet the requirements of opportunistic communications, integrating those connectivity approaches into a single architecture. By pushing services near the edge of the network, such an architecture can pervasively operate in any networking environment and allows for the development of innovative applications, providing access to data independent of the level of end-to-end connectivity availability

Practical requirements elicitation in modern product development: A multi-case study in discontinuous innovation

Practical modern product development, specifically rapid, lean efforts to create new disrupting or specialized products, face constraints that require modified requirements elicitation (RE) techniques. Requirements elicitation conventions have not been updated to address the challenges of these approaches, and industry practitioners lack the tools to select the most efficient techniques. This study examines the RE approaches performed by three resource-limited teams conducting discontinuous new product development through a multi-case study to identify gaps between the literature and practice, with suggestions to fill them. Our findings suggest modern RE practices and challenges closely reflect those found by studies on RE in agile development, highlighted by a limited variety of techniques and a focus on user feedback despite user unavailability, resulting in partially complete and validated requirements. We suggest further investigation into practical technique selection, development of technique metrics, and a technique selection literature review to practitioners prior to RE

Dynamic cities and creative clusters

The author focuses on how urban policies and the clustering of creative industries has influenced urban outcomes. The set of creative industries include those with output protectable under some form of intellectual property law. More specifically, this sub-sector encompasses software, multimedia, video games, industrial design, fashion, publishing, and research and development. The cities that form the basis for the empirical investigations are those where policy-induced transitions have been most evident, including Boston; San Francisco; San Diego; Seattle; Austin; Washington, D.C.; Dublin (Ireland); Hong Kong (China); and Bangalore (India). The key research questions are: 1) What types of cities are creative? 2) What locational factors are essential? 3) What are the common urban policy initiatives used by creative cities? The author explores the importance of the external environment for innovation and places it in the larger context of national innovation systems. Based on a study of development in Boston and San Diego, he isolates the factors and policies that have contributed to the local clustering of particular creative industries. In both cities, universities have played a major role in catalyzing the local economy by generating cutting-edge research findings, proactively collaborating with industries, and supplying the needed human capital. In addition, these two cities benefited from the existence of anchor firms and active industry associations that promoted fruitful university-industry links. Many cities in East Asia are aspiring to become the creative hubs of the region. But their investments tend to be heavily biased toward infrastructure provision. Although this is necessary, the heavy emphasis on hardware can lead to underinvestment in developing the talents and skills needed for the emergence of creative industries in these cities.Public Health Promotion,ICT Policy and Strategies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Decentralization,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,ICT Policy and Strategies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Educational Technology and Distance Education,Agricultural Research

Human-Computer Interaction

In this book the reader will find a collection of 31 papers presenting different facets of Human Computer Interaction, the result of research projects and experiments as well as new approaches to design user interfaces. The book is organized according to the following main topics in a sequential order: new interaction paradigms, multimodality, usability studies on several interaction mechanisms, human factors, universal design and development methodologies and tools

BCI Integration: Application Interfaces

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Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationWe propose a collective approach for harnessing the idle resources (cpu, storage, and bandwidth) of nodes (e.g., home desktops) distributed across the Internet. Instead of a purely peer-to-peer (P2P) approach, we organize participating nodes to act collectively using collective managers (CMs). Participating nodes provide idle resources to CMs, which unify these resources to run meaningful distributed services for external clients. We do not assume altruistic users or employ a barter-based incentive model; instead, participating nodes provide resources to CMs for long durations and are compensated in proportion to their contribution. In this dissertation we discuss the challenges faced by collective systems, present a design that addresses these challenges, and study the effect of selfish nodes. We believe that the collective service model is a useful alternative to the dominant pure P2P and centralized work queue models. It provides more effective utilization of idle resources, has a more meaningful economic model, and is better suited for building legal and commercial distributed services. We demonstrate the value of our work by building two distributed services using the collective approach. These services are a collective content distribution service and a collective data backup service

Architectures and Algorithms for Content Delivery in Future Networks

Traditional Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) built with traditional Internet technology are less and less able to cope with today’s tremendous content growth. Enhancing infrastructures with storage and computation capabilities may help to remedy the situation. Information-Centric Networks (ICNs), a proposed future Internet technology, unlike the current Internet, decouple information from its sources and provide in-network storage. However, content delivery over in-network storage-enabled networks still faces significant issues, such as the stability and accuracy of estimated bitrate when using Dynamic Adaptive Streaming (DASH). Still Implementing new infrastructures with in-network storage can lead to other challenges. For instance, the extensive deployment of such networks will require a significant upgrade of the installed IP infrastructure. Furthermore, network slicing enables services and applications with very different characteristics to co-exist on the same network infrastructure. Another challenge is that traditional architectures cannot meet future expectations for streaming in terms of latency and network load when it comes to content, such as 360° videos and immersive services. In-Network Computing (INC), also known as Computing in the Network (COIN), allows the computation tasks to be distributed across the network instead of being computed on servers to guarantee performance. INC is expected to provide lower latency, lower network traffic, and higher throughput. Implementing infrastructures with in-network computing will help fulfill specific requirements for streaming 360° video streaming in the future. Therefore, the delivery of 360° video and immersive services can benefit from INC. This thesis elaborates and addresses the key architectural and algorithmic research challenges related to content delivery in future networks. To tackle the first challenge, we propose algorithms for solving the inaccuracy of rate estimation for future CDNs implementation with in-network storage (a key feature of future networks). An algorithm for implementing in-network storage in IP settings for CDNs is proposed for the second challenge. Finally, for the third challenge, we propose an architecture for provisioning INC-enabled slices for 360° video streaming in next-generation networks. We considered a P4-enabled Software-Defined network (SDN) as the physical infrastructure and significantly reduced latency and traffic load for video streaming

Chapter BCI Integration: Application Interfaces

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