The Synonym management process in SAREL

The specification phase is one of the most important and least supported parts of the software development process. The SAREL system has been conceived as a knowledge-based tool to improve the specification phase. The purpose of SAREL (Assistance System for Writing Software Specifications in Natural Language) is to assist engineers in the creation of software specifications written in Natural Language (NL). These documents are divided into several parts. We can distinguish the Introduction and the Overall Description as parts that should be used in the Knowledge Base construction. The information contained in the Specific Requirements Section corresponds to the information represented in the Requirements Base. In order to obtain high-quality software requirements specification the writing norms that define the linguistic restrictions required and the software engineering constraints related to the quality factors have been taken into account. One of the controls performed is the lexical analysis that verifies the words belong to the application domain lexicon which consists of the Required and the Extended lexicon. In this sense a synonym management process is needed in order to get a quality software specification. The aim of this paper is to present the synonym management process performed during the Knowledge Base construction. Such process makes use of the Spanish Wordnet developed inside the Eurowordnet project. This process generates both the Required lexicon and the Extended lexicon that will be used during the Requirements Base construction.Postprint (published version

Computing support for virtual communities of practice

This document describes a research and development project - Semantic Web and Cooperative Problem Solving for Online Communities of Practice. The aim of the project is to build a system supporting Cooperative Problem Solving within the framework of online Communities of Practice, applying the concepts of the Semantic Web. The document presents the background, objectives and partial results of the project.Eje: Ingeniería de software y base de datosRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Sustainable computational science: the ReScience initiative

Computer science o ers a large set of tools for prototyping, writing, running, testing, validating, sharing and reproducing results, however computational science lags behind. In the best case, authors may provide their source code as a compressed archive and they may feel con dent their research is reproducible. But this is not exactly true. Jonathan Buckheit and David Donoho proposed more than two decades ago that an article about computational results is advertising, not scholarship. e actual scholarship is the full so ware environment, code, and data that produced the result. is implies new work ows, in particular in peer-reviews. Existing journals have been slow to adapt: source codes are rarely requested, hardly ever actually executed to check that they produce the results advertised in the article. ReScience is a peer-reviewed journal that targets computational research and encourages the explicit replication of already published research, promoting new and open-source implementations in order to ensure that the original research can be replicated from its description. To achieve this goal, the whole publishing chain is radically di erent from other traditional scienti c journals. ReScience resides on GitHub where each new implementation of a computational study is made available together with comments, explanations, and so ware tests

Theory of Planned Behavior and the Influence of Communication Self-Efficacy on Intention to Pursue a Software Development Career

In modern software development, communication is one of the key success factors in software project development and team performance. However, software engineering (SE) students and educators may not have fully considered its significance in comparison to technical skills. The objective of the study was to determine the influence of communication self-efficacy and factors related to the theory of planned behavior (TPB) on the intention to pursue a career in software development. A survey was used to collect data from senior SE students at six universities in Thailand. The partial least squares – structural equation model (PLS-SEM) was used to analyze the data. The findings indicate that attitudes toward software development careers and communication self-efficacy for software development had a positive influence on the students’ intention to pursue a career in software development. This study is the first attempt to investigate how communication self-efficacy in software development affects intention to work in a software development career. Educators can use the findings to improve curricula to foster students’ communication self-efficacy and encourage them to pursue a software development career

Hierarchical decomposition and simulation of manufacturing cells using Ada

A useful tool in the development of flexible automation is a system description language which can generate a complete func tional description of a manufacturing cell of arbitrary complexity. We propose a description system based on the concept of hierar chical decomposition utilizing the Ada programming language in conjunction with established diagrammatical decomposition methods. The distinguishing aspect of our work is that it takes advantage of certain features of Ada (such as type checking) to create a description that can be automatically verified for con sistency Simulation is often an indispensable tool in the develop ment of manufacturing systems. We show how a simulation of the operation of the manufacturing cell can be embedded in its description. Finally, we apply the methodology to a specific instance of a manufacturing cell.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68498/2/10.1177_003754978604600402.pd

The realignment of offshoring frame disputes (OFD): an ethnographic ‘cultural’ analysis

In Information Systems (IS) research on cross-cultural issues, cultural categories are typically introduced as analytical labels that explain why and how organizational groups in different parts of the world act and think differently. However, broad cultural categories can also be discursively mobilized by organizational members as strategic adaptive resources. Drawing on an ethnographic study of offshoring frame disputes (OFD) in an Indian subsidiary unit of a large Western information technology (IT) organization, this paper explores how members actively invoke a series of beliefs about Western culture and implicitly position them as the binary opposite of Eastern (or Indian) culture. The findings demonstrate how the mobilization of such beliefs eventually plays a vital role in the reconciliation of four different types of OFD. Drawing on this analysis, I build a social–psychological process model that explains how frame extensions trigger a cognitive reorganization process, leading to the accomplishment of OFD realignment. The paper argues that discursively invoked binary cultural categories help maintain non-confrontational definitions of situations and sustain working relationships in IT offshoring environments. Furthermore, interpretations linked to cultural notions seem to reflexively take the offshore–onshore power differentials into account

Lightning talk: Supporting software sustainability with lightweight specifications

Lightweight specifications support software maintainability by providing a way to verify that any changes to a code base preserve certain program properties. We give two examples of lightweight specifications for numerical code: $\textit{units-of-measure types}$ which specify the physical units of numerical quantities in a program; and $\textit{stencil specifications}$ which describe the pattern of data access used in array computations. Not only can we automatically verify that a program correctly implements these requirements but specifications provide documentation for future developers. Specifications can also be inferred and generated automatically in some cases, further reducing programmer effort. We finish by identifying future potential specification techniques to ease the maintenance and comprehension of scientific code.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (Grant ID: EP/M026124/1)This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from CEUR Workshop Proceedings via http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1686

Supporting Software Sustainability with Lightweight Specifications

Lightweight specifications support software maintainability by providing a way to verify that any changes to a code base preserve certain program properties. We give two examples of lightweight specifications for numerical code: units-of-measure types which specify the physical units of numerical quantities in a program; and stencil specifications which describe the pattern of data access used in array computations. Not only can we automatically verify that a program correctly implements these requirements but specifications provide documentation for future developers. Specifications can also be inferred and generated automatically in some cases, further reducing programmer effort. We finish by identifying future potential specification techniques to ease the maintenance and comprehension of scientific code