What does it mean to “measure performance

Abstract. The purpose of much computer science research is to invent algorithms, and generate evidence to convince others that the new methods are worthwhile. All too often, however, the work has no impact, because the supporting evidence does not meet basic standards of rigor or persuasiveness. Here the notion of “experiment ” is explored, with reference to our current investigation into distributed text query processing on a cluster of computers. We describe some of the issues that we encountered, and lessons that can be applied by researchers designing experiments in other areas of computing.

Dissecting Configuration Management Policies

A configuration management policy specifies the procedures through which a user evolves artifacts stored in a configuration management system

Foundations for Software Configuration Management Policies using Graph Transformations

Existing software configuration management systems embody a wide variety of policies for how artifacts can evolve. New policies continue to be introduced. Without a clean separation of configuration management policies from configuration management mechanisms, it is difficult to understand the policies as well as difficult to reason about how they relate. We introduce a formal foundation for specifying configuration management policies by viewing the policies in terms of graph transformation systems. Not only are we able to precisely capture the semantics of individual policies, we can, for the first time, describe formal properties of the relationship between policies