Synergistically Employing User Stories and Use Cases in the Practice and Teaching of Systems Analysis and Design

Over the past three decades, user stories and use cases have become increasingly dominant systems analysis and design (SA&D) requirements techniques. Both support articulating functional requirements for software projects, although they evolved within different software development approaches—user stories from agile development and use cases from traditional software engineering—and they differ significantly in terms of their grammar, syntax, and the level of detail they can capture. As such, user stories and use cases are neither synonyms nor mutually exclusive alternatives. Rather, they can and should be complementary in the systems requirements process. Unfortunately, this mix of similarities and differences—coupled with a lack of formal standards for either—make understanding and synergistically employing user stories with use cases confusing and challenging for practitioners and students alike. To address this, this paper first provides a descriptive overview of the evolution of user stories, use cases, and their interrelationship. Second, it fills a gap in the literature by providing a prescriptive, detailed approach to employing user stories and use cases together. This prescriptive approach is illustrated via a comprehensive tutorial example, providing practitioners with actionable skills and SA&D teachers and students with a new pedagogical tool

A Brief History of the Object-Oriented Approach

Unlike other fads, the object-oriented paradigm is here to stay. The road towards an object-oriented approach is described and several object-oriented programming languages are reviewed. Since the object-oriented paradigm promised to revolutionize software development, in the 1990s, demand for object-oriented software systems increased dramatically; consequently, several methodologies have been proposed to support software development based on thatparadigm. Also presented are a survey and a classification schemefor object-oriented methodologies

Information management in work organization domain in network organizations

Tese de mestrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Location-based and contextual mobile learning. A STELLAR Small-Scale Study

This study starts from several inputs that the partners have collected from previous and current running research projects and a workshop organised at the STELLAR Alpine Rendevous 2010. In the study, several steps have been taken, firstly a literature review and analysis of existing systems; secondly, mobile learning experts have been involved in a concept mapping study to identify the main challenges that can be solved via mobile learning; and thirdly, an identification of educational patterns based on these examples has been done. Out of this study the partners aim to develop an educational framework for contextual learning as a unifying approach in the field. Therefore one of our central research questions is: how can we investigate, theorise, model and support contextual learning

Towards a Research Strategy on Learning & Teaching. Report of a study to assist HEFCE in the development of a long-term research and evaluation plan to underpin its policies on learning and teaching

The Council commissioned the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (CHERI) to conduct a scoping study to assist in the development of the Council’s longterm research and evaluation strategy for learning and teaching. Members of the project team have conducted interviews with a large number of HEFCE staff and with staff and representatives of other national bodies and higher education institutions, have scrutinised HEFCE research and evaluation reports, and have investigated the approaches and experiences of a number of other countries

Dagstuhl News January - December 2000

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic

Teaching Strategies and Ontologies for E-Learning

* The work is partially suported by Russian Foundation for Basic Studies (grant 02-01-00466).The paper presents one approach aimed at developing teaching strategies based on the principles of ontological engineering. The research framework is targeted on development of methodology and technology that will scaffold the process of knowledge structuring for e-learning. The structuring procedure is the kernel of ontology development. Ontologies that describe the main concepts of the domains are used both for teaching and assessment techniques. Special stress is put on visual design as a powerful learning mindtool. The examples are taken from the courses on the foundations of artificial intelligence and intelligent systems development. These courses are delivered by the authors in St.Petersburg State Polytechnical University at School of Computer Science and in Poland in the First Independent University

Towards Efficiency and Quality Assurance in Threat Analysis of Software Systems

Context: Security threats have been a growing concern in many organizations. Organizations developing software products strive to plan for security as soon as possible to mitigate such potential threats. In the design phase of the software development life-cycle, teams of experts routinely analyze the system architecture and design to nd potential security threats.Objective: The goal of this research is to improve on the performance of existing threat analysis techniques and support practitioners with automation and tool support. To understand the inner-workings of existing threat analysis methodologies we also conduct a systematic literature review examining 26 methodologies in detail. Our industrial partners conrm that existing techniques are labor intensive and do not provide quality guarantees about their outcomes.Method: We conducted empirical studies for building an in-depth understanding of existing techniques (Systematic Literature Review (SLR), controlled experiments). Further we rely on empirical case studies for ongoing validation of an attempted technique performance improvement.Findings: We have found that using a novel risk-rst approach can help reduce the labor while producing the same level of outcome quality in a shorter period of time. Further, we suggest that the key for a successful application of this approach is two fold. First, widening the analysis scope to end-to-end scenarios guides the analyst to focus on important assets. Second, appropriate model abstractions are required to manage the cognitive load of the human analysts. We have also found that reasoning about security in a formal setting requires extending the existing notations with security semantics. Further, minimal model extensions for doing so include security contracts for system nodes handling sensitive information. In such a setting, the analysis can be automated and can to some extent provide completeness guarantees.Future work: In the future, we plan to further study the analysis completeness guarantees. In particular, we plan to improve on the analysis automation and investigate complementary techniques for analysis completeness (namely informal pattern based techniques). We also plan to work on the disconnect between the planned and implemented security

06191 Abstracts Collection -- Rigorous Methods for Software Construction and Analysis

From 07.05.06 to 12.05.06, the Dagstuhl Seminar 06191 ``Rigorous Methods for Software Construction and Analysis\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Distributed Simulation of Heterogeneous and Real-time Systems

This work describes a framework for distributed simulation of cyber-physical systems (CPS). Modern CPS comprise large numbers of heterogeneous components, typically designed in very different tools and languages that are not or not easily composeable. Evaluating such large systems requires tools that integrate all components in a systematic, well-defined manner. This work leverages existing frameworks to facilitate the integration offers validation by simulation. A framework for distributed simulation is the IEEE High-Level Architecture (HLA) compliant tool CERTI, which provides the infrastructure for co-simulation of models in various simulation environments as well as hardware components. We use CERTI in combination with Ptolemy II, an environment for modeling and simulating heterogeneous systems. In particular, we focus on models of a CPS, including the physical dynamics of a plant, the software that controls the plant, and the network that enables the communication between controllers. We describe the Ptolemy extensions for the interaction with HLA and demonstrate the approach on a flight control system simulation