470 research outputs found
Determination and evaluation of web accessibility
The Web is the most pervasive collaborative
technology in widespread use today; however,
access to the web and its many applications cannot
be taken for granted. Web accessibility encompasses
a variety of concerns ranging from societal,
political, and economic to individual, physical, and
intellectual through to the purely technical. Thus,
there are many perspectives from which web
accessibility can be understood and evaluated. In
order to discuss these concerns and to gain a better
understanding of web accessibility, an accessibility
framework is proposed using as its base a layered
evaluation framework from Computer Supported
Co-operative Work research and the ISO standard,
ISO/IEC 9126 on software quality. The former is
employed in recognition of the collaborative nature
of the web and its importance in facilitating
communication. The latter is employed to refine and
extend the technical issues and to highlight the need
for considering accessibility from the viewpoint of
the web developer and maintainer as well as the web
user. A technically inaccessible web is unlikely to be
evolved over time. A final goal of the accessibility
framework is to provide web developers and
maintainers with a practical basis for considering
web accessibility through the development of a set of
accessibility factors associated with each identified
layer
Historical awareness support and its evaluation in collaborative software engineering
The types of awareness relevant to collaborative soft-
ware engineering are identified and an additional type,
"historical awareness" is proposed. This new type of
awareness is the knowledge of how software artefacts re-
sulting from collaboration have evolved in the course of
their development.
The types of awareness that different software engineer-
ing environment architectures can support are discussed. A
way to add awareness support to our existing OSCAR sys-
tem, a component of the GENESIS software engineering
platform, is proposed. Finally ways of instrumenting and
evaluating the awareness support offered by the modified
system are outlined
WETICE 2004 Evaluating Collaborative Enterprises (ECE) Workshop - Final report
A summary of the fifth Evaluating Collaborative Enterprises (ECE)
workshop which ran on June 14th at University of Modena, Italy. The
overall theme of the workshop this year was evaluation within the
software lifecyle rather than as a separate activity. Each of the
five papers touched on this subject and the subsequent winner of
Best Paper covered it thoroughly.
Concerns about the level of interactivity within the workshop and
WETICE itself prompted a format change to ``paired-paper'' sessions
with plenty of discussion time.
Several outstanding issus were identified during the discussion,
including development of ``evaluation components'' alongside
software components, the need to convince managers of the business
case for evaluation and meta-evaluation of popular techniques with a
view to avoiding studies that select inappropriate techniques or
rely too heavily on one type of technique
Open source ERP for SMEs.
For the last decade or so, the biggest category of the IT investment has unarguably been Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Most of the bigger corporations in the developed countries have implemented ERP systems with an aim to achieving competitive edge in their respective business areas. Now that the top end of the ERP market has been saturated, the main interest has moved to non-commercial sectors such as universities and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). These organisations have not been able benefit directly from the ERP revolution because an ERP implementation requires huge resources and entails high risks.
Over the same period, the concept of Open Source Software (OSS) has been enthusiastically adopted by the software engineering community. OSS has excelled in many systems software domains, for example, operating systems with Linux and web servers with Apache. Having observed these successes, the software industry has been showing interest in application domains such as enterprise information systems, more specifically ERP systems, as the next OSS candidates. In this paper, we outline the challenges as well as opportunities of OSS ERP development
Evaluation of an awareness distribution mechanism: a simulation approach
In distributed software engineering, the role of informal communication is frequently overlooked. Participants simply employ their own ad-hoc methods of informal communication. Consequently such communication is haphazard, irregular, and rarely recorded as part of the project documentation. Thus, a need for tool support to facilitate more systematic informal communication via awareness has been identified. The tool proposed is based on the provision of awareness support that recognises the complete context of the evolution of software artefacts rather than single events.
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking has been successfully
employed to develop various distributed software engineering support tools. However, there are scalability problems inherent in naive P2P networks. To this end a semantic overlay network organisation algorithm has been developed and tested in simulation prior to deployment as part of a forthcoming awareness extension to the Eclipse environment.
The simulation verified that the self-organisation algorithm was suitable for arranging a P2P network, but several unexpected behaviours were observed. These included
wandering nodes, starved nodes, and local maxima. Each
of these problems required modification of the original algorithm design to solve or ameliorate them
Evolution of a cross-year mentoring scheme
In a university department where less than seven percent of the students and staff are women, a sense of isolation can have a detrimental effect on the progression and retention of those female students. To address issues of isolation, progression, and retention the University of Lincoln's Department of Computing and Informatics (DCI)1 began a cross-year mentoring scheme in 2005 and has tracked the progress and the changes that this scheme has brought about over the past two years. Key issues addressed include better
support for women students to ensure they successfully omplete their studies and progress to successful careers in Computing; raising awareness of the predominantly male staff in the department regarding the impacts on female student retention; raising awareness university-wide about the support provided to female students and transferring the knowledge gained across the university to other departments. The cross-year mentoring scheme for DCI women students has resulted in a dramatic increase in female student retention. A 2004 census of students showed that only 25% of female students progressed into their 3rd academic year. However, in 2006 100% of female students advanced into their 3rd year class. The mentoring scheme initially focused on students from the year above mentoring students in the year below, and now continues by promoting postgraduate students as mentors
Supporting collaborative grid application development within the escience community
The systemic representation and organisation of software artefacts, e.g. specifications, designs, interfaces, and implementations, resulting from the development of large distributed systems from software components have been addressed by our research within the Practitioner and AMES projects [1,2,3,4]. Without appropriate representations and organisations, large collections of existing software are not amenable to the activities of software reuse and software maintenance, as these activities are likely to be severely hindered by the difficulties of understanding the software applications and their associated components. In both of these projects, static analysis of source code and other development artefacts, where available, and subsequent application of reverse engineering techniques were successfully used to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the software applications under study [5,6]. Later research addressed the maintenance of a component library in the context of component-based software product line development and maintenance [7]. The classic software decompositions, horizontal and vertical, proposed by Goguen [8] influenced all of this research. While they are adequate for static composition, they fail to address the dynamic aspects of composing large distributed software applications from components especially where these include software services. The separation of component co-ordination concerns from component functionality proposed in [9] offers a partial solution
Identifying and improving reusability based on coupling patterns
Open Source Software (OSS) communities have not yet taken full advantage of reuse mechanisms. Typically many OSS projects which share the same application domain and topic, duplicate effort and code, without fully leveraging the vast amounts of available code.
This study proposes the empirical evaluation of source code folders of OSS projects in order to determine their actual internal reuse and their potential as shareable, fine-grained and externally reusable software components by future projects.
This paper empirically analyzes four OSS systems, identifies which components (in the form of folders) are currently being reused internally and studies their coupling characteristics. Stable components (i.e., those which act as service providers rather than service consumers) are shown to be more likely to be reusable. As a means of supporting replication of these successful instances of OSS reuse, source folders with similar patterns are extracted from the studied systems, and identified as externally reusable components
- …