Real world evaluation of aspect-oriented software development : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Software development has improved over the past decade with the rise in the popularity of the Object-Oriented (OO) development approach. However, software projects continue to grow in complexity and continue to have alarmingly low rates of success. Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is touted to be one solution to this software development problem. It shows promise of reducing programming complexity, making software more flexible and more amenable to change. The central concept introduced by AOP is the aspect. An aspect is used to modularise crosscutting concerns in a similar fashion to the way classes modularise business concerns. A crosscutting concern cannot be modularised in approaches such as OO because the code to realise the concern must be spread throughout the module (e.g. a tracing concent is implemented by adding code to every method in a system). AOP also introduces join points, pointcuts, and advice which are used with aspects to capture crosscutting concerns so they can be localised in a modular unit. OO took approximately 20 years to become a mainstream development approach. AOP was only invented in 1997. This project considers whether AOP is ready for commercial adoption. This requires analysis of the AOP implementations available, tool support, design processes, testing tools, standards, and support infrastructure. Only when AOP is evaluated across all these criteria can it be established whether it is ready to be used in commercial projects. Moreover, if companies are to invest time and money into adopting AOP, they must be aware of the benefits and risks associated with its adoption. This project attempts to quantify the potential benefits in adopting AOP, as well as identifying areas of risk. SolNet Solutions Ltd, an Information Technology (IT) company in Wellington, New Zealand, is used in this study as a target environment for integration of aspects into a commercial development process. SolNet is in the business of delivering large scale enterprise Java applications. To assist in this process they have developed a Common Services Architecture (CSA) containing components that can be reused to reduce risk and cost to clients. However, the CSA is complicated and SolNet have identified aspects as a potential solution to decrease the complexity. Aspects were found to bring substantial improvement to the Service Layer of SolNet. applications, including substantial reductions in complexity and size. This reduces the cost and time of development, as well as the risk associated with the projects. Moreover, the CSA was used in a more consistent fashion making the system easier to understand and maintain, and several crosscutting concerns were modularised as part of a reusable aspect library which could eventually form part of their CSA. It was found that AOP is approaching commercial readiness. However, more work is needed on defining standards for aspect languages and modelling of design elements. The current solutions in this area are commercially viable, but would greatly benefit from a standardised approach. Aspect systems can be difficult to test and the effect of the weaving process on Java serialisation requires further investigation

The impact of the law on industrial disputes in the 1980s: report of a survey of public transport employers

This paper reports the results of one part of a research project which investigated the nature and extent of the impact of the labour legislation enacted between 1980 and 1990 on the conduct of the industrial relations and the processes by which this came about. Interviews were carried out with managers in three major public sector transport organisations. All three were subject to radical organisational change during the period under review and had quite extensive experience of dispute in this time. While they had made greater use of the law than employers in other sectors covered by the research project, there were mixed views on the results of this resort to the law. In general the law appeared to be a subsidiary part of, and influence on, the management of the process of change rather than an independent factor influencing management''s relations with trade unions and the workforce

Union Negotiators

It has been widely assumed that the labour legislation of the 1980s has been a major catalyst for change in British industrial relations. The nature and extent of the law's impact have usually been assumed and rarely been clearly articulated. This paper reports the results of part of a research project designed to investigate these issues and the processes by which any legal influences took effect. A survey of negotiations in twenty five trade unions was carried out by questionnaire. The responses showed that the law had become a more important factor in the conduct of disputes. Its influence on union negotiations had not, however, been entirely negative. The law on strike ballots stood out as the most important of the changes in the law made by the 1980s legislation and the use of ballots emerged as a feature of union strategy in negotiations. More often than not this produced positive results from a union perspective. Nevertheless overall a majority of negotiations saw the law as an important factor favouring employers in the bargaining process.

The Impact of the Law on Industrial Disputes in the 1980s: Report of a Survey of Education Authorities

This paper reports the results of one part of a research project designed to investigate the nature and extent of the impact of the labour legislation enacted between 1980 and 1990 on the conduct of industrial relations and the processes by which this has come about. Interviews were carried out with officers in the education departments of ten Local Education Authorities. All had felt the impact of major national disputes from the mid-1980s to early 1990s. The most important legacy of this experience so far as the law was concerned was that it had now become generally the case that any significant industrial action would lead to Authorities considering whether to make deductions from the pay of workers concerned. Modification to the structure for the provision of public sector education under the Education Acts of the late 1980s and early 1990s was a far more important legal influence. This required significant change in established industrial relations and employment practices and could be a cause of dispute to which the labour legislation of the 1980s was of limited relevance.

The Impact of the Law on Industrial Disputes in the 1980s: Report of a Survey of Public Transport Employers

This paper reports the results of one part of a research project which investigated the nature and extent of the impact of the labour legislation enacted between 1980 and 1990 on the conduct of the industrial relations and the processes by which this came about. Interviews were carried out with managers in three major public sector transport organisations. All three were subject to radical organisational change during the period under review and had quite extensive experience of dispute in this time. While they had made greater use of the law than employers in other sectors covered by the research project, there were mixed views on the results of this resort to the law. In general the law appeared to be a subsidiary part of, and influence on, the management of the process of change rather than an independent factor influencing management's relations with trade unions and the workforce.

Detection of Mines in Acoustic Images using Higher Order Spectral Features

A new pattern-recognition algorithm detects approximately 90% of the mines hidden in the Coastal Systems Station Sonar0, 1, and 3 databases of cluttered acoustic images, with about 10% false alarms. Similar to other approaches, the algorithm presented here includes processing the images with an adaptive Wiener filter (the degree of smoothing depends on the signal strength in a local neighborhood) to remove noise without destroying the structural information in the mine shapes, followed by a two-dimensional FIR filter designed to suppress noise and clutter, while enhancing the target signature. A double peak pattern is produced as the FIR filter passes over mine highlight and shadow regions. Although the location, size, and orientation of this pattern within a region of the image can vary, features derived from higher order spectra (HOS) are invariant to translation, rotation, and scaling, while capturing the spatial correlations of mine-like objects. Classification accuracy is improved by combining features based on geometrical properties of the filter output with features based on HOS. The highest accuracy is obtained by fusing classification based on bispectral features with classification based on trispectral features

Imprints of deviations from the gravitational inverse-square law on the power spectrum of mass fluctuations

Deviations from the gravitational inverse-square law would imprint scale-dependent features on the power spectrum of mass density fluctuations. We model such deviations as a Yukawa-like contribution to the gravitational potential and discuss the growth function in a mixed dark matter model with adiabatic initial conditions. Evolution of perturbations is considered in general non-flat cosmological models with a cosmological constant, and an analytical approximation for the growth function is provided. The coupling between baryons and cold dark matter across recombination is negligibly affected by modified gravity physics if the proper cutoff length of the long-range Yukawa-like force is > 10 h^{-1} Mpc. Enhancement of gravity affects the subsequent evolution, boosting large-scale power in a way that resembles the effect of a lower matter density. This phenomenon is almost perfectly degenerate in power-spectrum shape with the effect of a background of massive neutrinos. Back-reaction on density growth from a modified cosmic expansion rate should however also affect the normalization of the power spectrum, with a shape distortion similar to the case of a non-modified background.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures; submitted to MNRA

Australian Journalism Research Index, 1992-97

This is an index of Australian journalism and news media-related articles and books from 1992 onwards. The index is in two main parts: a listing by author, and a listing by subject matter in which an article may appear a number of times. Multi-author articles are listed by each author