Software Development in the Post-PC Era: Towards Software Development as a Service

Abstract. Software systems affect all aspects of our modern life andare revolutionizing the way we live. Over the years, software developmenthas evolved to meet the needs of new types of applications and toembrace new technological disruptions. Today, we witness the rise of mobilitywhere the role of the conventional high-specification PC is declining.Some refer to this era as the Post-PC era. This technological shift,powered by a key enabling technology - cloud computing, has opened new opportunities for human advancement (e.g. the Internet of Things).Consequently, the evolving landscape of software systems drives the need for new methods for conceiving them. Such methods need to a) address the challenges and requirements of this era and b) embrace the benefitsof new technological breakthroughs. In this paper, we list the characteristics of the Post-PC era from the software development perspective. In addition, we describe three motivating trends of software development processes. Then, we derive a list of requirements for the future software development approach from the characteristics of the Post-PC era and from the motivating trends. Finally, we propose a reference architecturefor cloud-based software process enactment as an enabler for Software Development as a Service (SDaaS). The architecture is thefirst step to address the needs that we have identified

iQuit : HP in the Post-PC Era

Throughout the years, scholars and researchers have focused on the fundamental question of how firms manage to develop and sustain competitive advantages in rapidly changing environments. Going further than established theories, the Dynamic Capabilities view emerged as an attempt to better explain how firms can cope with exogenous shocks, through four distinct dimensions. In this dissertation, I have developed a teaching case, which aims to illustrate the Dynamic Capabilities theory and its real-life implications. The selected company is Hewlett-Packard, which was confronted with a technological shock that transformed the PC industry. The company did not successfully adapt and this has led to tumbling results and falling hopes for the future of the still world leading PC maker. Throughout this case, it will be evident the company’s lack of Dynamic Capabilities and how that has affected its final fate

Facts, trends and challenges in modern software development

The IT industry is not new to change and evolution, however, we are now in an era of two fundamental waves of IT changes. First, the post-PC era, where mobile devices and tablet-like devices are giving end-users the ability to consume information when they want it and where they want it. Second, the post-server era where companies no longer need to neither buy nor provision servers in their own data centres but instead rent the compute resources as needed. This twin change has direct consequences to how end-users consume software, how that software is produced, and how it is delivered.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Eversion, Ecology, Touch, and Rain: A Post-Pc Rhetoric

The post-PC era of computing offers digital rhetors an opportunity to innovate their inventional approaches. The new era is one in which an ecology of networked, distributed, sensor-based devices amplify our perceptions of self and world by changing the ecological relations that define our connections to our techno-social environments. By extending Casey Boyle’s posthuman practice of rhetorical invention to the new computational era, rhetoricians can develop digital interactive projects that move participants by amplifying the choric bases of their perceptions of self and world

Lenovo-IBM: Bridging Cultures, Languages, and Time Zones Becoming a Global Player (C)

This case completes the trilogy and attempts to answer the open questions raised in the A and B Cases. It offers a retrospective of the events since the IBM-Lenovo merger in 2005 until August 2012. The main focus is on the period between the global financial crisis and mid-2012. The case describes the frequent changes at the top management level and highlights the leadership issues involved in making Lenovo a global leader in the PC industry. An industry and market overview reveals that while Lenovo was attempting to deal with internal issues during the post-merger integration phase it lost market share to competitors. A series of strategic changes, organizational restructurings, and changes in organizational culture paved the way for a new era in Lenovo's history, marked by strong financial performance, product innovation, and promising growth.Series: WU Case Serie

Relational Leadership, DevOps, and The Post-PC Era: Toward a Practical Theory for 21st Century Technology Leaders

This theoretically oriented scholarly personal narrative (SPN) explored how the constructionist view of relational leadership might be applied in a post-PC technological era marked by fast-paced innovation and an always on technology organization and infrastructure. Through reflecting on my personal and professional experience, I hope to offer the reflective scholar-practitioner new ways of thinking, present relational practices and suggest ways of being a leader participating in the fast-paced technology driven world. This new way of being combined both relational leadership and new DevOps practices that reduce organizational friction, break down departmental silos, and increase employee engagement in technology operations. Through this inquiry, I uncovered several practices and ways of being that are grounded in philosophical, theoretical, and social domains. In challenging the taken-for-granted reality of managing technology, I am attempting to produce practices for higher performance, humane, sustainable, and inspiring corporate information technology (IT) departments. The electronic version of this Dissertation is at AURA, http://aura.antioch.edu/etds/ and OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/et

Relational Leadership, DevOps, and The Post-PC Era: Toward a Practical Theory for 21st Century Technology Leaders

This theoretically oriented scholarly personal narrative (SPN) explored how the constructionist view of relational leadership might be applied in a post-PC technological era marked by fast-paced innovation and an always ontechnology organization and infrastructure. Through reflecting on my personal and professional experience, I hope to offer the reflective scholar-practitioner new ways of thinking, present relational practices and suggest ways of being a leader participating in the fast-paced technology driven world. This new way of being combined both relational leadership and new DevOps practices that reduce organizational friction, break down departmental silos, and increase employee engagement in technology operations. Through this inquiry, I uncovered several practices and ways of being that are grounded in philosophical, theoretical, and social domains. In challenging the taken-for-granted reality of managing technology, I am attempting to produce practices for higher performance, humane, sustainable, and inspiring corporate information technology (IT) departments. For information regarding full-text access, please contact the author at: [email protected]

Student Film Festival 2012 Playbill

Providence College Department of Theatre, Dance & Film Angell Blackfriars Theatre Student Film Festival 2012 Films by current PC students Wednesday, May 2nd @ 6pm INTRODUCTORY REMARKS, Rev. Kenneth Gumbert, O.P. COMPETING FILMS: John Smith ‘13, The Tale of Two Spuds Nick Widmer ‘12, The Parts of Himself Kelly Vail ‘14, How to Get a Date Katherine Gonzalez ‘12, Youth Voices Dan Laberge ‘12, Impossible Soul Patrick McGrath ‘12, Brendan Frail: Forever a Friar Jorge Lucas ‘12, Homonculove Billy Nawrocki ‘12, One Minute Rachel Ball ‘12 & Meg Conway ‘12, Tuesday Alex Cacheco ‘12, Bioterrorism: The Post 9/11 Era Emily Croke ‘12, A Silent Epidemic JURY DELIBERATIONS: Jorge Lucas \u2712, Page Zero AWARDS PRESENTATIONS, Rev. Kenneth Gumbert, O.P.https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/sff_2012_pubs/1001/thumbnail.jp

Software development in the post-PC era : towards software development as a service

PhD ThesisEngineering software systems is a complex task which involves various stakeholders and requires planning and management to succeed. As the role of software in our daily life is increasing, the complexity of software systems is increasing. Throughout the short history of software engineering as a discipline, the development practises and methods have rapidly evolved to seize opportunities enabled by new technologies (e.g., the Internet) and to overcome economical challenges (e.g., the need for cheaper and faster development). Today, we are witnessing the Post-PC era. An era which is characterised by mobility and services. An era which removes organisational and geographical boundaries. An era which changes the functionality of software systems and requires alternative methods for conceiving them. In this thesis, we envision to execute software development processes in the cloud. Software processes have a software production aspect and a management aspect. To the best of our knowledge, there are no academic nor industrial solutions supporting the entire software development process life-cycle(from both production and management aspects and its tool-chain execution in the cloud. Our vision is to use the cloud economies of scale and leverage Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) to integrate production and management aspects into the development process. Since software processes are seen as workflows, we investigate using existing Workflow Management Systems to execute software processes and we find that these systems are not suitable. Therefore, we propose a reference architecture for Software Development as a Service (SDaaS). The SDaaS reference architecture is the first proposal which fully supports development of complex software systems in the cloud. In addition to the reference architecture, we investigate three specific related challenges and propose novel solutions addressing them. These challenges are: Modelling & enacting cloud-based executable software processes. Executing software processes in the cloud can bring several benefits to software develop ment. In this thesis, we discuss the benefits and considerations of cloud-based software processes and introduce a modelling language for modelling such processes. We refer to this language as EXE-SPEM. It extends the Software and Systems Process Engineering (SPEM2.0) OMG standard to support creating cloudbased executable software process models. Since EXE-SPEM is a visual modelling language, we introduce an XML notation to represent EXE-SPEM models in a machine-readable format and provide mapping rules from EXE-SPEM to this notation. We demonstrate this approach by modelling an example software process using EXE-SPEM and mapping it to the XML notation. Software process models expressed in this XML format can then be enacted in the proposed SDaaS architecture. Cost-e cient scheduling of software processes execution in the cloud. Software process models are enacted in the SDaaS architecture as workflows. We refer to them sometimes as Software Workflows. Once we have executable software process models, we need to schedule them for execution. In a setting where multiple software workflows (and their activities) compete for shared computational resources (workflow engines), scheduling workflow execution becomes important. Workflow scheduling is an NP-hard problem which refers to the allocation of su cient resources (human or computational) to workflow activities. The schedule impacts the workflow makespan (execution time) and cost as well as the computational resources utilisation. The target of the scheduling is to reduce the process execution cost in the cloud without significantly a ecting the process makespan while satisfying the special requirements of each process activity (e.g., executing on a private cloud). We adapt three workflow scheduling algorithms to fit for SDaaS and propose a fourth one; the Proportional Adaptive Task Schedule. The algorithms are then evaluated through simulation. The simulation results show that the our proposed algorithm saves between 19.74% and 45.78% of the execution cost, provides best resource (VM) utilisation and provides the second best makespan compared to the other presented algorithms. Evaluating the SDaaS architecture using a case study from the safety-critical systems domain. To evaluate the proposed SDaaS reference architecture, we instantiate a proof-of-concept implementation of the architecture. This imple mentation is then used to enact safety-critical processes as a case study. Engineering safety-critical systems is a complex task which involves multiple stakeholders. It requires shared and scalable computation to systematically involve geographically distributed teams. In this case study, we use EXE-SPEM to model a portion of a process (namely; the Preliminary System Safety Assessment - PSSA) adapted from the ARP4761 [2] aerospace standard. Then, we enact this process model in the proof-of-concept SDaaS implementation. By using the SDaaS architecture, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach and its applicability to di erent domains and to customised processes. We also demonstrate the capability of EXE-SPEM to model cloud-based executable processes. Furthermore, we demonstrate the added value of the process models and the process execution provenance data recorded by the SDaaS architecture. This data is used to automate the generation of safety cases argument fragments. Thus, reducing the development cost and time. Finally, the case study shows that we can integrate some existing tools and create new ones as activities used in process models. The proposed SDaaS reference architecture (combined with its modelling, scheduling and enactment capabilities) brings the benefits of the cloud to software development. It can potentially save software production cost and provide an accessible platform that supports collaborating teams (potentially across di erent locations). The executable process models support unified interpretation and execution of processes across team(s) members. In addition, the use of models provide managers with global awareness and can be utilised for quality assurance and process metrics analysis and improvement. We see the contributions provided in this thesis as a first step towards an alternative development method that uses the benefits of cloud and Model-Driven Engineering to overcome existing challenges and open new opportunities. However, there are several challenges that are outside the scope of this study which need to be addressed to allow full support of the SDaaS vision (e.g., supporting interactive workflows). The solutions provided in this thesis address only part of a bigger vision. There is also a need for empirical and usability studies to study the impact of the SDaaS architecture on both the produced products (in terms of quality, cost, time, etc.) and the participating stakeholders

Increasing participation in the information society by people with disabilities and their families in lower-income countries using mainstream technologies

Assistive technology (AT) has been actively researched, developed and implemented throughout higher-income countries, but is relatively absent from lower-income countries. In lower-income countries, there is very little AT for reading, writing, communicating and for participation in the information society. In order for persons with disabilities in lower-income countries to participate fully in society, mainstream information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as mobile phones should be used as AT. This paper explores the potential for using mainstream ICTs as AT in lower-income countries, keeping in mind current ICT trends, characteristics of the post-PC era and ICT-based AT in higher-income countries. The paper concludes with a case study where mobile phones and SMS were used by people with disabilities and their caregivers to access information in a resourced-limited community in Bogota, Colombia. Mobile phones, a readily available mainstream ICT in this community, were a useful tool for addressing the information exclusion of people with disabilities and caregivers