Is a Dominant Service-Centric Sector Good for Diversity of Provision?

An obvious assumption underpinning the immense interest in service-oriented computing is that it is an inherently Good Thing, by which we mean that robust processes and tools for developing service-based systems will bring benefits for service providers and service consumers. The arguments, in terms of consumer choice and flexibility, are certainly quite convincing. However, in this position paper, we question the nature of the underlying assumption, in a world where requirements are as many and varied as potential users and ask if safeguards are needed to ensure that diversity of provision is maintained

Dr. William D. Sawyer interview (2) conducted on October 8, 1984 about the Boonshoft School of Medicine at Wright State University

In this second interview Dr. William D. Sawyer, Dean of the Wright State University School of Medicine, continues his discussion of his background prior to coming to Wright State University. He compares medical education development between Thailand and the United States and his move back from Thailand to Indiana University in the United States. Dean Sawyer then goes on to describe his tenure as Chairman of the Department of Microbiology/Immunology at the School of Medicine at Indiana University. Dean Sawyer discusses his administrative and leadership style at Indiana University and his challenges as Chairman. In the third part of the interview Dean Sawyer recalls his thoughts on applying for the Deanship of a school of medicine. He recounts his ideas and thoughts on the subject of progressivism in medical education and how it related to his choice of medical schools. He then discusses his application process to Wright State University for the Deanship of the Wright State University School of Medicine

Speculative Requirements: Design Fiction and RE

Many innovative software products are conceived, developed and deployed without any conventional attempt to elicit stakeholder requirements. Rather, they are the result of the vision and intuition of a small number of creative individuals who perceive a market opportunity that has been facilitated by the emergence of a new technology. In this paper we consider how the conditions that enable new products' emergence might be better anticipated, making innovations a little less reliant on individual vision and a little more informed by stakeholder need. We contend that this is particularly important where just-over-the-horizon technology would have the potential for social impact, good or bad. Speculative design describes a basket of techniques that seek to explore this landscape. We focus particularly on one of these, design fiction, and describe a case study where it was used to explore how plausible new technologies might impact on dementia care

Tracing the distribution concern: Bridging the Gap

Distribution is often presented as an example of a crosscutting concern that is difficult to modularize. This paper presents an approach for modeling distribution using a combination of AOSD and use cases. One of the aims of the paper is to bridge the gap between the handling of crosscutting concerns during the early and later phases of the lifecycle when developing distributed applications. With our approach the distribution concern is modularized in control objects in Analysis, in design control classes in Design and in distributed components in Implementation and Deployment. Use cases are used to establish a clear traceability among the analysis, design, deployment and implementation stages. In this sense, control objects of the analysis have a direct correspondence with distributed components in the implementation and deployment models

Canary: Extracting Requirements-Related Information from Online Discussions

Online discussions about software applications generate a large amount of requirements-related information. This information can potentially be usefully applied in requirements engineering; however currently, there are few systematic approaches for extracting such information. To address this gap, we propose Canary, an approach for extracting and querying requirements-related information in online discussions. The highlight of our approach is a high-level query language that combines aspects of both requirements and discussion in online forums. We give the semantics of the query language in terms of relational databases and SQL. We demonstrate the usefulness of the language using examples on real data extracted from online discussions. Our approach relies on human annotations of online discussions. We highlight the subtleties involved in interpreting the content in online discussions and the assumptions and choices we made to effectively address them. We demonstrate the feasibility of generating high-quality annotations by obtaining them from lay Amazon Mechanical Turk users