OECD Recommendation's draft concerning access to research data from public funding: A review

Sharing research data from public funding is an important topic, especially now, during times of global emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic, when we need policies that enable rapid sharing of research data. Our aim is to discuss and review the revised Draft of the OECD Recommendation Concerning Access to Research Data from Public Funding. The Recommendation is based on ethical scientific practice, but in order to be able to apply it in real settings, we suggest several enhancements to make it more actionable. In particular, constant maintenance of provided software stipulated by the Recommendation is virtually impossible even for commercial software. Other major concerns are insufficient clarity regarding how to finance data repositories in joint private-public investments, inconsistencies between data security and user-friendliness of access, little focus on the reproducibility of submitted data, risks related to the mining of large data sets, and sensitive (particularly personal) data protection. In addition, we identify several risks and threats that need to be considered when designing and developing data platforms to implement the Recommendation (e.g., not only the descriptions of the data formats but also the data collection methods should be available). Furthermore, the non-even level of readiness of some countries for the practical implementation of the proposed Recommendation poses a risk of its delayed or incomplete implementation

Effects of Test-Driven Development : A Comparative Analysis of Empirical Studies

Test-driven development is a software development practice where small sections of test code are used to direct the development of program units. Writing test code prior to the production code promises several positive effects on the development process itself and on associated products and processes as well. However, there are few comparative studies on the effects of test-driven development. Thus, it is difficult to assess the potential process and product effects when applying test-driven development. In order to get an overview of the observed effects of test-driven development, an in-depth review of existing empirical studies was carried out. The results for ten different internal and external quality attributes indicate that test-driven development can reduce the amount of introduced defects and lead to more maintainable code. Parts of the implemented code may also be somewhat smaller in size and complexity. While maintenance of test-driven code can take less time, initial development may last longer. Besides the comparative analysis, this article sketches related work and gives an outlook on future research.Peer reviewe

Empirical Investigation on Agile Methods Usage: Issues Identified from Early Adopters in Malaysia

Agile Methods are a set of software practices that can help to produce products faster and at the same time deliver what customers want. Despite the benefits that Agile methods can deliver, however, we found few studies from the Southeast Asia region, particularly Malaysia. As a result, less empirical evidence can be obtained in the country making its implementation harder. To use a new method, experience from other practitioners is critical, which describes what is important, what is possible and what is not possible concerning Agile. We conducted a qualitative study to understand the issues faced by early adopters in Malaysia where Agile methods are still relatively new. The initial study involves 13 participants including project managers, CEOs, founders and software developers from seven organisations. Our study has shown that social and human aspects are important when using Agile methods. While technical aspects have always been considered to exist in software development, we found these factors to be less important when using Agile methods. The results obtained can serve as guidelines to practitioners in the country and the neighbouring regions

Software defect prediction: do different classifiers find the same defects?

Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.During the last 10 years, hundreds of different defect prediction models have been published. The performance of the classifiers used in these models is reported to be similar with models rarely performing above the predictive performance ceiling of about 80% recall. We investigate the individual defects that four classifiers predict and analyse the level of prediction uncertainty produced by these classifiers. We perform a sensitivity analysis to compare the performance of Random Forest, Naïve Bayes, RPart and SVM classifiers when predicting defects in NASA, open source and commercial datasets. The defect predictions that each classifier makes is captured in a confusion matrix and the prediction uncertainty of each classifier is compared. Despite similar predictive performance values for these four classifiers, each detects different sets of defects. Some classifiers are more consistent in predicting defects than others. Our results confirm that a unique subset of defects can be detected by specific classifiers. However, while some classifiers are consistent in the predictions they make, other classifiers vary in their predictions. Given our results, we conclude that classifier ensembles with decision-making strategies not based on majority voting are likely to perform best in defect prediction.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Dynamics of railway freight vehicles

This paper summarises the historical development of railway freight vehicles and how vehicle designers have tackled the difficult challenges of producing running gear which can accommodate the very high tare to laden mass of typical freight wagons whilst maintaining stable running at the maximum required speed and good curving performance. The most common current freight bogies are described in detail and recent improvements in techniques used to simulate the dynamic behaviour of railway vehicles are summarised and examples of how these have been used to improve freight vehicle dynamic behaviour are included. A number of recent developments and innovative components and sub systems are outlined and finally two new developments are presented in more detail: the LEILA bogie and the SUSTRAIL bogie

Ocenka stepeni zailenija, malogo vodokhranilishha na fone denudacionnykh processov v lessovom vodosbore

In paper are presented results of measurements of accumulation of load in small river reservoir on Dłubnia River. The capacity of this reservoir was 228 000 m³. The greater part of river basin consists of loess. The map of slop shows that 80% of surface area is strongly eroded. In different periods (1966-1974) were conducted the measurements of load being deposited. A value of denudation acc. to A. Reniger and K. Dębski was 223,2 t/km²/year. Table 6 shows that disagreements exist between computed and measured values of denudation depending on period of measurements. In conclusions are discussed reasons of these disagreements and suggestions how to slow down a process of accumulation of load in reservoir.Работа представляет результаты многолетних измерений заиления малого водохранилища (с объёмом 228 ООО м³ ), на реке Длубня. Большую часть поверхности водосбора занимают лессы. Как показано на карте склонов, около 80% поверхности подвергается сильной поверхностной эрозии. Через разные промежутки времени (в годы 1966-1974) были проведены измерения отложенных наносов. Одновременно определяли методом А. Ренигер и К. Дембского величину денудации для этого водосбора,которая составляет 223,3 т/км² /г. Как представлено в таб. 6 существуют разницы между показателями денудации определёнными на основе измерений заиления водохранилища, и вычислений для отдельных периодов исследований