40,069 research outputs found
A Case Study on Artefact-based RE Improvement in Practice
Most requirements engineering (RE) process improvement approaches are
solution-driven and activity-based. They focus on the assessment of the RE of a
company against an external norm of best practices. A consequence is that
practitioners often have to rely on an improvement approach that skips a
profound problem analysis and that results in an RE approach that might be
alien to the organisational needs. In recent years, we have developed an RE
improvement approach (called \emph{ArtREPI}) that guides a holistic RE
improvement against individual goals of a company putting primary attention to
the quality of the artefacts. In this paper, we aim at exploring ArtREPI's
benefits and limitations. We contribute an industrial evaluation of ArtREPI by
relying on a case study research. Our results suggest that ArtREPI is
well-suited for the establishment of an RE that reflects a specific
organisational culture but to some extent at the cost of efficiency resulting
from intensive discussions on a terminology that suits all involved
stakeholders. Our results reveal first benefits and limitations, but we can
also conclude the need of longitudinal and independent investigations for which
we herewith lay the foundation
Case Studies in Industry: What We Have Learnt
Case study research has become an important research methodology for
exploring phenomena in their natural contexts. Case studies have earned a
distinct role in the empirical analysis of software engineering phenomena which
are difficult to capture in isolation. Such phenomena often appear in the
context of methods and development processes for which it is difficult to run
large, controlled experiments as they usually have to reduce the scale in
several respects and, hence, are detached from the reality of industrial
software development. The other side of the medal is that the realistic
socio-economic environments where we conduct case studies -- with real-life
cases and realistic conditions -- also pose a plethora of practical challenges
to planning and conducting case studies. In this experience report, we discuss
such practical challenges and the lessons we learnt in conducting case studies
in industry. Our goal is to help especially inexperienced researchers facing
their first case studies in industry by increasing their awareness for typical
obstacles they might face and practical ways to deal with those obstacles.Comment: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Conducting Empirical
Studies in Industry, co-located with ICSE, 201
Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering: A Design for a Global Family of Surveys and First Results from Germany
For many years, we have observed industry struggling in defining a high
quality requirements engineering (RE) and researchers trying to understand
industrial expectations and problems. Although we are investigating the
discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, they still do not allow for
empirical generalisations. To lay an empirical and externally valid foundation
about the state of the practice in RE, we aim at a series of open and
reproducible surveys that allow us to steer future research in a problem-driven
manner. We designed a globally distributed family of surveys in joint
collaborations with different researchers and completed the first run in
Germany. The instrument is based on a theory in the form of a set of hypotheses
inferred from our experiences and available studies. We test each hypothesis in
our theory and identify further candidates to extend the theory by correlation
and Grounded Theory analysis. In this article, we report on the design of the
family of surveys, its underlying theory, and the full results obtained from
Germany with participants from 58 companies. The results reveal, for example, a
tendency to improve RE via internally defined qualitative methods rather than
relying on normative approaches like CMMI. We also discovered various RE
problems that are statistically significant in practice. For instance, we could
corroborate communication flaws or moving targets as problems in practice. Our
results are not yet fully representative but already give first insights into
current practices and problems in RE, and they allow us to draw lessons learnt
for future replications. Our results obtained from this first run in Germany
make us confident that the survey design and instrument are well-suited to be
replicated and, thereby, to create a generalisable empirical basis of RE in
practice
Multilingual Information Framework for Handling textual data in Digital Media
This document presents MLIF (Multi Lingual Information Framework), a high-level model for describing multilingual data across a wide range of possible applications in the translation/localization process within several multimedia domains (e.g. broadcasting interactive programs within a multilingual community)
The mass and environmental dependence on the secular processes of AGN in terms of morphology, colour, and specific star-formation rate
Galaxy mass and environment play a major role in the evolution of galaxies.
In the transition from star-forming to quenched galaxies, Active galactic
nuclei (AGN) have also a principal action. However, the connections between
these three actors are still uncertain. In this work we investigate the effects
of stellar mass and the large-scale environment (LSS), on the fraction of
optical nuclear activity in a population of isolated galaxies, where AGN would
not be triggered by recent galaxy interactions or mergers. As a continuation of
a previous work, we focus on isolated galaxies to study the effect of stellar
mass and the LSS in terms of morphology (early- and late-type), colour (red and
blue), and specific star formation rate (quenched and star-forming). To explore
where AGN activity is affected by the LSS we fix the stellar mass into low- and
high-mass galaxies. We use the tidal strength parameter to quantify their
effects. We found that AGN is strongly affected by stellar mass in 'active'
galaxies (namely late-type, blue, and star-forming), however it has no
influence for 'quiescent' galaxies (namely early-type, red, and quenched), at
least for masses down to . In relation to the LSS, we
found an increment on the fraction of SFN with denser LSS in low-mass star
forming and red isolated galaxies. Regarding AGN, we find a clear increment of
the fraction of AGN with denser environment in quenched and red isolated
galaxies, independently of the stellar mass. AGN activity would be 'mass
triggered' in 'active' isolated galaxies. This means that AGN is independent of
the intrinsic property of the galaxies, but on its stellar mass. On the other
hand, AGN would be 'environment triggered' in 'quiescent' isolated galaxies,
where the fraction of AGN in terms of sSFR and colour increases from void
regions to denser LSS, independently of its stellar mass.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures (11 pages and 6 figures without appendix),
accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic
Classification of cosmological milestones
In this paper causal geodesic completeness of FLRW cosmological models is
analysed in terms of generalised power expansions of the scale factor in
coordinate time. The strength of the found singularities is discussed following
the usual definitions due to Tipler and Krolak. It is shown that while
classical cosmological models are both timelike and lightlike geodesically
incomplete, certain observationally alllowed models which have been proposed
recently are lightlike geodesically complete.Comment: RevTeX 4, 12 page
The Geography of Non-formal Manifolds
We show that there exist non-formal compact oriented manifolds of dimension
and with first Betti number if and only if and
, or and . Moreover, we present explicit
examples for each one of these cases.Comment: 8 pages, one reference update
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