Parallel Distributed Grammar Engineering for Practical Applications

Based on a detailed case study of parallel grammar development distributed across two sites, we review some of the requirements for regression testing in grammar engineering, summarize our approach to systematic competence and performance profiling, and discuss our experience with grammar development for a commercial application. If possible, the workshop presentation will be organized around a software demonstration

Inherently flexible software

Software evolution is an important and expensive consequence of software. As Lehman's First Law of Program Evolution states, software must be changed to satisfy new user requirements or become progressively less useful to the stakeholders of the software. Software evolution is difficult for a multitude of different reasons, most notably because of an inherent lack of evolveability of software, design decisions and existing requirements which are difficult to change and conflicts between new requirements and existing assumptions and requirements. Software engineering has traditionally focussed on improvements in software development techniques, with little conscious regard for their effects on software evolution. The thesis emphasises design for change, a philosophy that stems from ideas in preventive maintenance and places the ease of software evolution more at the centre of the design of software systems than it is at present. The approach involves exploring issues of evolveability, such as adaptability, flexibility and extensibility with respect to existing software languages, models and architectures. A software model, SEvEn, is proposed which improves on the evolveability of these existing software models by improving on their adaptability, flexibility and extensibility, and provides a way to determine the ripple effects of changes by providing a reflective model of a software system. The main conclusion is that, whilst software evolveability can be improved, complete adaptability, flexibility and extensibility of a software system is not possible, hi addition, ripple effects can't be completely eradicated because assumptions will always persist in a software system and new requirements may conflict with existing requirements. However, the proposed reflective model of software (which consists of a set of software entities, or abstractions, with the characteristic of increased evolveability) provides trace-ability of ripple effects because it explicitly models the dependencies that exist between software entities, determines how software entities can change, ascertains the adaptability of software entities to changes in other software entities on which they depend and determines how changes to software entities affect those software entities that depend on them

-ilities Tradespace and Affordability Project – Phase 3

One of the key elements of the SERC’s research strategy is transforming the practice of systems engineering and associated management practices – “SE and Management Transformation (SEMT).” The Grand Challenge goal for SEMT is to transform the DoD community’s current systems engineering and management methods, processes, and tools (MPTs) and practices away from sequential, single stovepipe system, hardware-first, document-driven, point- solution, acquisition-oriented approaches; and toward concurrent, portfolio and enterprise- oriented, hardware-software-human engineered, model-driven, set-based, full life cycle approaches.This material is based upon work supported, in whole or in part, by the U.S. Department of Defense through the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (ASD(R&E)) under Contract H98230-08- D-0171 (Task Order 0031, RT 046).This material is based upon work supported, in whole or in part, by the U.S. Department of Defense through the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (ASD(R&E)) under Contract H98230-08- D-0171 (Task Order 0031, RT 046)

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A HIGHLY MODIFIABLE RETAIL E-COMMERCE WEBSITE

The availability, modifiability, and performance of retail e-commerce websites(RECWEB) is greatly impacted by seasonal constraints. For many RECWEB, half of the calendar year is comprised of holidays and seasons. Spikes in website traffic and transactions can lower availability, modifiability, and performance of a RECWEB. This can result in downtime, customer abandonment, and ultimately lost revenue. This research focuses the modifiability aspects of the problem. During holiday and seasonal periods, enhancements to a RECWEB are generally not feasible. Enhancements put availability and performance at risk. In addition, most human resources are dedicated managing content changes. RECWEB are less modifiable then other systems because enhancements are only feasible for half of the calendar year. Furthermore, the scope of an enhancement must fit within a six month time box. This research provides pilot project for testing, designing, and implementing a highly modifiable RECWEB. The approach is to automate seasonal content changes. The cost savings on human resources can be reallocated to enhancements work. In addition, enhancements can simulate holiday seasons further in advance. The result is enhancement deployment is more feasible throughout the calendar year

Managing Requirement Volatility in an Ontology-Driven Clinical LIMS Using Category Theory. International Journal of Telemedicine and Applications

Requirement volatility is an issue in software engineering in general, and in Web-based clinical applications in particular, which often originates from an incomplete knowledge of the domain of interest. With advances in the health science, many features and functionalities need to be added to, or removed from, existing software applications in the biomedical domain. At the same time, the increasing complexity of biomedical systems makes them more difficult to understand, and consequently it is more difficult to define their requirements, which contributes considerably to their volatility. In this paper, we present a novel agent-based approach for analyzing and managing volatile and dynamic requirements in an ontology-driven laboratory information management system (LIMS) designed for Web-based case reporting in medical mycology. The proposed framework is empowered with ontologies and formalized using category theory to provide a deep and common understanding of the functional and nonfunctional requirement hierarchies and their interrelations, and to trace the effects of a change on the conceptual framework.Comment: 36 Pages, 16 Figure

Patterns of Change: Can modifiable software have high coupling?

There are few aspects of modern life that remain unaffected by software, and as our day-to-day challenges change, so too must our software. Software systems are complex, and as they grow larger and more interconnected, they become more difficult to modify due to excessive change propagation. This is known as the ripple effect. The primary strategies to mitigate it are modular design, and minimization of coupling, or between-module interaction. However, analysis of complex networks has shown that many are scale-free, which means that they contain some components that are highly connected. The presence of scale-free structure implies high coupling, which suggests that software systems may be hard to modify because they suffer from the ripple effect. In this thesis, a large corpus of open-source software systems is analysed to determine whether software systems are scale-free, whether scale-free structure results in high coupling, and whether high coupling results in ripple effects that propagate change to a large proportion of classes. The results show that all systems in the corpus are scale-free and that that property results in high coupling. However, analysis of system evolution reveals that existing code is modified infrequently and that there is rarely sufficient evidence to be confident that ripple effects involving a high proportion of classes have actually occurred. This thesis concludes first that while it is desirable to avoid excessive interconnectivity, it is difficult to completely eliminate high coupling; and second, that the presence of high coupling does not necessarily imply poor system design

Quantifying Impact of Cyber Actions on Missions or Business Processes: A Multilayer Propagative Approach

Ensuring the security of cyberspace is one of the most significant challenges of the modern world because of its complexity. As the cyber environment is getting more integrated with the real world, the direct impact of cybersecurity problems on actual business frequently occur. Therefore, operational and strategic decision makers in particular need to understand the cyber environment and its potential impact on business. Cyber risk has become a top agenda item for businesses all over the world and is listed as one of the most serious global risks with significant financial implications for businesses. Risk analysis is one of the primary tools used in this endeavor. Impact assessment, as an integral part of risk analysis, tries to estimate the possible damage of a cyber threat on business. It provides the main insight into risk prioritization as it incorporates business requirements into risk analysis for a better balance of security and usability. Moreover, impact assessment constitutes the main body of information flow between technical people and business leaders. Therefore, it requires the effective synergy of technological and business aspects of cybersecurity for protection against cyber threats. The purpose of this research is to develop a methodology to quantify the impact of cybersecurity events, incidents, and threats. The developed method addresses the issue of impact quantification from an interdependent system of systems point of view. The objectives of this research are (1) developing a quantitative model to determine the impact propagation within a layer of an enterprise (i.e., asset, service or business process layer); (2) developing a quantitative model to determine the impact propagation among different layers within an enterprise; (3) developing an approach to estimate the economic cost of a cyber incident or event. Although there are various studies in cybersecurity risk quantification, only a few studies focus on impact assessment at the business process layer by considering ripple effects at both the horizontal and vertical layers. This research develops an approach that quantifies the economic impact of cyber incidents, events and threats to business processes by considering the horizontal and vertical interdependencies and impact propagation within and among layers