Using active database for management of requirements change

Software system development projects experience numerous changes during their life cycle. These changes are inevitable and driven by several factors including changes to a system\u27s environment and changes of customers\u27 needs. Requirements change has been reported as the major contributing factor for poor quality or even failures of software projects. This indicates that management of requirements change still remains a challenging problem in software development. A critical part of the requirements change management process is impact analysis. To carry out impact assessment, traceability information is needed. Over two decades, requirements traceability has been an important research topic in software research, but the actual practice of maintaining traceability information is not always entirely successful. In this thesis, a new traceability technique was presented for mapping dynamic behaviors of requirements into Active Databases. The technique keeps requirements and their related artifacts synchronized with respect to their states. It automatically maintains traceability links between requirements and related artifacts when a requirement is changed. This approach can not only efficiently handle basic and necessary traceability functions, but also centralize reactive behavior by using Active Database to ensure no one bypass traceability policies.Dept. of Computer Science. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .G42. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, page: 1401. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005

Changing Light: a plethora of digital tools as slides gasp their last?

The title 'Changing Light' reflects the enormous changeover from analogue slides to digital images, both a cultural shift and a physical shift down to the change in light from the smoky beams of dual slide projectors piercing the dark of a classroom, to the bright white classrooms of the digital age. The evidence for the 'death of slides' has been mounting for a number of years and reported by visual resources curators in the US and the UK. In 2005 JISC funded AHDS Visual Arts to report on 'the effects of the digital image revolution on the UK arts education community'; the Association of Curators of Art and Design Images (ACADI), the Association of Art Historians (AAH), and the Art Libraries Society (ARLIS/UK & Ireland) contributed significantly to the Digital Picture initiative. However some of the issues highlighted by the final report are yet to be addressed such as provision of copyright-cleared digital images for use in education. This paper considers what arts education stands to lose from the 'death of slides' in the context of digital images and the plethora of digital presentation tools. As well as a change in light, there is a change from the physical tangible slide technology to the virtual digital image and computing in the cloud

Situating emotional experience

Psychological construction approaches to emotion suggest that emotional experience is situated and dynamic. Fear, for example, is typically studied in a physical danger context (e.g., threatening snake), but in the real world, it often occurs in social contexts, especially those involving social evaluation (e.g., public speaking). Understanding situated emotional experience is critical because adaptive responding is guided by situational context (e.g., inferring the intention of another in a social evaluation situation vs. monitoring the environment in a physical danger situation). In an fMRI study, we assessed situated emotional experience using a newly developed paradigm in which participants vividly imagine different scenarios from a first-person perspective, in this case scenarios involving either social evaluation or physical danger. We hypothesized that distributed neural patterns would underlie immersion in social evaluation and physical danger situations, with shared activity patterns across both situations in multiple sensory modalities and in circuitry involved in integrating salient sensory information, and with unique activity patterns for each situation type in coordinated large-scale networks that reflect situated responding. More specifically, we predicted that networks underlying the social inference and mentalizing involved in responding to a social threat (in regions that make up the “default mode” network) would be reliably more active during social evaluation situations. In contrast, networks underlying the visuospatial attention and action planning involved in responding to a physical threat would be reliably more active during physical danger situations. The results supported these hypotheses. In line with emerging psychological construction approaches, the findings suggest that coordinated brain networks offer a systematic way to interpret the distributed patterns that underlie the diverse situational contexts characterizing emotional life

Pattern languages in HCI: A critical review

This article presents a critical review of patterns and pattern languages in human-computer interaction (HCI). In recent years, patterns and pattern languages have received considerable attention in HCI for their potential as a means for developing and communicating information and knowledge to support good design. This review examines the background to patterns and pattern languages in HCI, and seeks to locate pattern languages in relation to other approaches to interaction design. The review explores four key issues: What is a pattern? What is a pattern language? How are patterns and pattern languages used? and How are values reflected in the pattern-based approach to design? Following on from the review, a future research agenda is proposed for patterns and pattern languages in HCI

Multimedia courseware: Never mind the quality how much will it cost to develop?

This paper evaluates multimedia courseware costing techniques such as the US Airforce Interactive Courseware Method (Golas, 1993), CBT Analyst (Kearsley, 1985), CEAC (Schooley, 1988) and MEEM (Marshall, Samson, Dugard, & Scott, 1994) against the data from ten multimedia courseware developments. The Relative Error and Mean Absolute Relative Error (MARE) are calculated to allow comparison of the different methods

Emergent requirements for supporting introductory programming

The problems associated with learning and teaching first year University Computer Science (CS1) programming classes are summarized showing that various support tools and techniques have been developed and evaluated. From this review of applicable support the paper derives ten requirements that a support tool should have in order to improve CS1 student success rate with respect to learning and understanding

Control, Process Facilitation, and Requirements Change in Offshore Requirements Analysis: The Provider Perspective

Process, technology, and project factors have been increasingly driving organizations to offshore early software development phases, such as requirements analysis. This emerging trend necessitates greater control and process facilitation between client and vendor sites. The effectiveness of control and facilitation has, however, not been examined within the context of requirements analysis and change. In this study, we examine the role of control and facilitation in managing changing requirements and on success of requirements gathering in the Indian offshore software development environment. Firms found that control by client-site coordinators had a positive impact on requirements analysis success while vender site-coordinators did not have similar influence. Process facilitation by client site-coordinators affected requirements phase success indirectly through control. The study concludes with recommendations for research and practice