An Integrated Requirements Engineering Framework for Agile Software Product Lines

Requirements engineering (RE) techniques play a determinant role within Agile Product Lines development methods; these notably allow to establish the relevance to adopt or not the product line approach for software-intensive systems production. This paper proposes an integrated goal and feature-based meta-model for agile software product lines development. The main objective is to permit the sepecification of the requirements that precisely capture stakeholder’s needs and intentions as well as the management of product line variabilities. Adopting practices from requirements engineering, especially goal and feature models, helps designing the domain and application engineering tiers of an agile product line. Such an approach allows a holistic perspective integrating human, organizational and agile aspects to better understand product lines dynamic business environments. It helps bridging the gap be-tween product lines structures and requirements models, and proposes an integrated framework to all actors involved in the product line architecture. In this paper we show how our proposed metamodel can be applied to the requirements engineering stage of an agile product line development mainly for feature-oriented agile product lines such as our own methodology called AgiFPL

Community and Trust in the Network Society. The Case of Virtual Communities

In the uncertain scenario that surrounds today’s man, there is a new need for spaces to share, to establish new relationships of mutual trust. As the new technology advances, virtual communities are one of the responses to such need. In this revolutionary media environment, one might ask how a quite strong relationship of mutual trust can be created and nurtured in a virtual community, in relation to real objective relations and to the virtual community itself, as well as the technology that makes it possible, when it is, by definition, an ever-changing system. In this respect, some issues have been found to promote such relationships and others to (un)willingly hinder it. Therefore, the concept of trust should be re-semanticised to have a new relational paradigm built on ethical grounds, in which the individual becomes aware of what resources are required to cope with the insecurity of an increasingly uncertain society, partly with the help of virtual communities. Only through a jointly responsible behaviour, aimed at filling the gap that is inherent to the very concept of (virtual) community, can one trust something else—whether an individual, a technology or the community itself—aware of the hint of “magic” that is implied in the very etymology of the concept of trust

Overview of the Manitou Experimental Forest Observatory: site description and selected science results from 2008 to 2013

The Bio-hydro-atmosphere interactions of Energy, Aerosols, Carbon, H 2O, Organics & Nitrogen (BEACHON) project seeks to understand the feedbacks and inter-relationships between hydrology, biogenic emissions, carbon assimilation, aerosol properties, clouds and associated feedbacks within water-limited ecosystems. The Manitou Experimental Forest Observatory (MEFO) was established in 2008 by the National Center for Atmospheric Research to address many of the BEACHON research objectives, and it now provides a fixed field site with significant infrastructure. MEFO is a mountainous, semi-arid ponderosa pine-dominated forest site that is normally dominated by clean continental air but is periodically influenced by anthropogenic sources from Colorado Front Range cities. This article summarizes the past and ongoing research activities at the site, and highlights some of the significant findings that have resulted from these measurements. These activities include, -soil property measurements, -hydrological studies, -measurements of high-frequency turbulence parameters, -eddy covariance flux measurements of water, energy, aerosols and carbon dioxide through the canopy, -determination of biogenic and anthropogenic volatile organic compound emissions and their influence on regional atmospheric chemistry, -aerosol number and mass distributions, -chemical speciation of aerosol particles, -characterization of ice and cloud condensation nuclei, -trace gas measurements; and- model simulations using coupled chemistry and meteorology In addition to various long-term continuous measurements, three focused measurement campaigns with state-of-the-art instrumentation have taken place since the site was established, and two of these studies are the subjects of this special issue: BEACHON-ROCS (Rocky Mountain Organic Carbon Study, 2010) and BEACHON-RoMBAS (Rocky Mountain Biogenic Aerosol Study, 2011). © 2014 Author(s). CC Attribution 3.0 License