Evolution of an induction programme.

The Bootstrap Programme is a department-specific induction programme that has run for three years. Initially Bootstrap was a short programme used to help students get to know their peers and a few members of the lecturing staff. The programme was designed to provide students with a degree of comfort in their new learning environment. The induction programme has evolved into a programme that is also intended to help students to better understand what computer science is and how the department’s research will enhance their degree

An investigation into evolving support for component reuse

It is common in engineering disciplines for new product development to be based on a concept of reuse, i.e. based on a foundation of knowledge and pre-existing components familiar to the discipline's community. In Software Engineering, this concept is known as software reuse. Software reuse is considered essential if higher quality software and reduced development effort are to be achieved. A crucial part of any engineering development is access to tools that aid development. In software engineering this means having software support tools with which to construct software including tools to support effective software reuse. The evolutionary nature of software means that the foundation of knowledge and components on which new products can be developed must reflect the changes occurring in both the software engineering discipline and the domain in which the software is to function. Therefore, effective support tools, including those used in software reuse, must evolve to reflect changes in both software engineering and the varying domains that use software. This thesis contains a survey of the current understanding of software reuse. Software reuse is defined as the use of knowledge and work components of software that already exist in the development of new software. The survey reflects the belief that domain analysis and software tool support are essential in successful software reuse. The focus of the research is an investigation into the effects of a changing domain on the evolution of support for component-based reuse and domain analysis, and on the application of software reuse support methods and tools to another engineering discipline, namely roll design. To broaden understanding of a changing domain on the evolution of support for software reuse and domain analysis, a prototype for a reuse support environment has been developed for roll designers in the steel industry

An analysis of bimonthly admissions to the accident and health rooms of Hill Hospital from March 1, 1956 through February, 1957

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Towards collaborative learning via shared artefacts over the Grid

The Web is the most pervasive collaborative technology in widespread use today; and its use to support eLearning has been highly successful. There are many web-based Virtual Learning Environments such as WebCT, FirstClass, and BlackBoard as well as associated web-based Managed Learning Environments. In the future, the Grid promises to provide an extremely powerful infrastructure allowing both learners and teachers to collaborate in various learning contexts and to share learning materials, learning processes, learning systems, and experiences. This position paper addresses the role of support for sharing artefacts in distributed systems such as the Grid. An analogy is made between collaborative software development and collaborative learning with the goal of gaining insights into the requisite support for artefact sharing within the eLearning community

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

Web-based support for managing large collections of software artefacts

There has been a long history of CASE tool development, with an underlying software repository at the heart of most systems. Usually such tools, even the more recently web-based systems, are focused on supporting individual projects within an enterprise or across a number of distributed sites. Little support for maintaining large heterogeneous collections of software artefacts across a number of projects has been developed. Within the GENESIS project, this has been a key consideration in the development of the Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR). Its most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross project global views of large software collections as well as historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR is widely adopted and various steps to facilitate this are described

The GENESIS platform, its distribution, and web services

The GENESIS project is developing an Open Source platform that supports co-operation and communication among software engineers belonging to distributed development teams involved in modeling, controlling, and measuring software development and maintenance processes. The GENESIS platform is made up of three main elements: a distributed workflow management system, a resource management system, and an artefact management system (OSCAR, developed at Durham). The platform is designed to be non-invasive and have a low barrier to entry (in terms of the effort required to begin using the system). This is accomplished, as far as possible, by adapting the platform to the workflow processes and tools already in place in an organisation. OSCAR (Open-Source Component Artefact Repository) is the artefact management system, used to store and retrieve any item produced by any member of a software engineering team. Traditional artefacts (documents and code, for example) as well as non-traditional items (such as informal annotations, mailing list postings, and personnel profiles) are managed by the system, which has the capability to maintain a rich set of relationships between the artefacts (for traceability and comprehension purposes). Each instance of OSCAR contains a software configuration management system (currently, a plugin is provided to use CVS). Currently, OSCAR is slightly distributed: the workflow management system can use more than one instance of a repository, but a single instance of OSCAR can use only one repository. There are a few known systems which provide some form of real distributed software configuration management, which, it is hoped, can be used to inspire further development of the distribution of OSCAR and its associated services. Initially, OSCAR and the rest of the GENESIS platform communicated using RMI, but a web service interface is currently under development. As an initial attempt at realising this, the RMI interface is simply wrapped to provide servlets. The web services approach allows for a single instance of an OSCAR repository to serve many projects, and for potential global distribution of a single instance of the GENESIS platform. Possible avenues for future work include: applications to e-learning and e-science (applying OSCAR to the Grid, in order to support educational and scientific collaboration); using OSCAR as a basis for supporting collaborative design work; instrumenting the tools in the GENESIS platform to provide data for studies of software engineering practices; and studying process models (for example, determining the difference between the ideal models defined in the literature and the real processes of software engineering)

Open-Source Development Processes and Tools

Open-source software projects rarely have highquality process support. Any tools which are used to control workflow in a project are usually fixed to a particular process, which is often not made explicit. In order to improve the support for process modelling, monitoring, and control, it is necessary to use tools which allow the creation and manipulation of process models. This paper describes the GENESIS platform, an opensource lightweight process-neutral toolkit which supports distributed collaboration over the internet for software engineering. The capabilities provided by the platform make it suitable for adoption by open-source projects. Many open-source projects have little or no automated process support. The GENESIS project offers these capabilities in a form which is ideal for adoption by such projects

Towards Collaborative Learning via Shared Artefacts over the Grid

The Web is the most pervasive collaborative technology in widespread use today; and its use to support eLearning has been highly successful. There are many web-based Virtual Learning Environments such as WebCT, FirstClass, and BlackBoard as well as associated web-based Managed Learning Environments. In the future, the Grid promises to provide an extremely powerful infrastructure allowing both learners and teachers to collaborate in various learning contexts and to share learning materials, learning processes, learning systems, and experiences. This position paper addresses the role of support for sharing artefacts in distributed systems such as the Grid. An analogy is made between collaborative software development and collaborative learning with the goal of gaining insights into the requisite support for artefact sharing within the eLearning community