1,351,570 research outputs found
Architectural reflection for software evolution
Software evolution is expensive. Lehman identifies several
problems associated with it: Continuous adaptation, increasing complexity, continuing growth, and declining quality. This paper proposes that a reflective software engineering environment will address these problems by employing languages and techniques from the software
architecture community.
Creating a software system will involve manipulating a collection of views, including low-level code views and high-level architectural views which will be tied together using reflection. This coupling will allow the development environment to automatically identify inconsistencies between the views, and support software engineers in managing architectures during evolution.
This paper proposes a research programme which will result in a software engineering environment which addresses problems of software evolution and the maintenance of consistency between architectural views of a software system
Software engineering activities at SEI (Software Engineering Institute)
Prototyping was shown to ease system specification and implementation, especially in the area of user interfaces. Other prototyping approaches do not allow for the evolution of the prototype into a production system or support maintenance after the system is fielded. A set of goals is presented for a modern user interface environment and Serpent, a prototype implementation that achieves these goals, is described
Analysis of methods
Information is one of an organization's most important assets. For this reason the development and maintenance of an integrated information system environment is one of the most important functions within a large organization. The Integrated Information Systems Evolution Environment (IISEE) project has as one of its primary goals a computerized solution to the difficulties involved in the development of integrated information systems. To develop such an environment a thorough understanding of the enterprise's information needs and requirements is of paramount importance. This document is the current release of the research performed by the Integrated Development Support Environment (IDSE) Research Team in support of the IISEE project. Research indicates that an integral part of any information system environment would be multiple modeling methods to support the management of the organization's information. Automated tool support for these methods is necessary to facilitate their use in an integrated environment. An integrated environment makes it necessary to maintain an integrated database which contains the different kinds of models developed under the various methodologies. In addition, to speed the process of development of models, a procedure or technique is needed to allow automatic translation from one methodology's representation to another while maintaining the integrity of both. The purpose for the analysis of the modeling methods included in this document is to examine these methods with the goal being to include them in an integrated development support environment. To accomplish this and to develop a method for allowing intra-methodology and inter-methodology model element reuse, a thorough understanding of multiple modeling methodologies is necessary. Currently the IDSE Research Team is investigating the family of Integrated Computer Aided Manufacturing (ICAM) DEFinition (IDEF) languages IDEF(0), IDEF(1), and IDEF(1x), as well as ENALIM, Entity Relationship, Data Flow Diagrams, and Structure Charts, for inclusion in an integrated development support environment
An occam Style Communications System for UNIX Networks
This document describes the design of a communications system which provides occam style communications primitives under a Unix environment, using TCP/IP protocols, and any number of other protocols deemed suitable as underlying transport layers. The system will integrate with a low overhead scheduler/kernel without incurring significant costs to the execution of processes within the run time environment. A survey of relevant occam and occam3 features and related research is followed by a look at the Unix and TCP/IP facilities which determine our working constraints, and a description of the T9000 transputer's Virtual Channel Processor, which was instrumental in our formulation. Drawing from the information presented here, a design for the communications system is subsequently proposed. Finally, a preliminary investigation of methods for lightweight access control to shared resources in an environment which does not provide support for critical sections, semaphores, or busy waiting, is made. This is presented with relevance to mutual exclusion problems which arise within the proposed design. Future directions for the evolution of this project are discussed in conclusion
Consciousness as information system of the human body
Starting from the observation of the binary character YES/NOT of our decisions in
relation to the information received from the environment, determining both our life and specie
evolution by adaptation, it is defined the info-creational field and thought as an information
operator on this field, allowing to describe the individual EGO as a receiver and producer
information system, based on an operational and a programmed informational subsystem.
Consciousness appears thus be an integrated information system which allows the adaptation to
the environment and survival of specie, supported by informed matter (physical body) to
maintain functionality of the whole. On this basis, there were identified two main informational
circuits of the human body controlled by the consciousness: (i) the attitude as a short-time
reaction circuit allowing the immediate adaptation to the environment; (ii) the informational
genetic transmission as a large-time process assuring both the evolution by the transference of
the new adaptation characteristics to the next generations and the survival of the specie.
Observing the anti-entropic nature of the information activity mobilized to support the living
structure, there were identified the anti-entropic, antigravitational and reverse temporal arrow
features that the thought could access under special focusing conditions, similar to those of
antimatter, explaining the paranormal capacities like premonition, psychotherapy, telekinesis
and levitation, particularly the cloud dissipation, induced/supported by the mind power
Support for collaborative component-based software engineering
Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described.
This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject.
In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice.
Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects.
Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools).
Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying,
assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing.
Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation,
empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further
advances
Composition of quantum operations and products of random matrices
Spectral properties of evolution operators corresponding to random maps and
quantized chaotic systems strongly interacting with an environment can be
described by the ensemble of non-hermitian random matrices from the real
Ginibre ensemble. We analyze evolution operators Psi=Psi_s...Psi_1 representing
the composition of s random maps and demonstrate that their complex eigenvalues
are asymptotically described by the law of Burda et al. obtained for a product
of s independent random complex Ginibre matrices. Numerical data support the
conjecture that the same results are applicable to characterize the
distribution of eigenvalues of the s-th power of a random Ginibre matrix.
Squared singular values of Psi are shown to be described by the Fuss-Catalan
distribution of order s. Results obtained for products of random Ginibre
matrices are also capable to describe the s-step evolution operator for a model
deterministic dynamical system - a generalized quantum baker map subjected to
strong interaction with an environment.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figure
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