Some Findings Concerning Requirements in Agile Methodologies

gile methods have appeared as an attractive alternative to conventional methodologies. These methods try to reduce the time to market and, indirectly, the cost of the product through flexible development and deep customer involvement. The processes related to requirements have been extensively studied in literature, in most cases in the frame of conventional methods. However, conclusions of conventional methodologies could not be necessarily valid for Agile; in some issues, conventional and Agile processes are radically different. As recent surveys report, inadequate project requirements is one of the most conflictive issues in agile approaches and better understanding about this is needed. This paper describes some findings concerning requirements activities in a project developed under an agile methodology. The project intended to evolve an existing product and, therefore, some background information was available. The major difficulties encountered were related to non-functional needs and management of requirements dependencies

The dimensions of software engineering success

Software engineering research and practice are hampered by the lack of a well-understood, top-level dependent variable. Recent initiatives on General Theory of Software Engineering suggest a multifaceted variable – Software Engineering Success. However, its exact dimensions are unknown. This paper investigates the dimensions (not causes) of software engineering success. An interdisciplinary sample of 191 design professionals (68 in the software industry) were interviewed concerning their perceptions of success. Non-software designers (e.g. architects) were included to increase the breadth of ideas and facilitate comparative analysis. Transcripts were subjected to supervised, semi-automated semantic content analysis, including a software developer vs. other professionals comparison. Findings suggest that participants view their work as time-constrained projects with explicit clients and other stakeholders. Success depends on stakeholder impacts – financial, social, physical and emotional – and is understood through feedback. Concern with meeting explicit requirements is peculiar to software engineering and design is not equated with aesthetics in many other fields. Software engineering success is a complex multifaceted variable, which cannot sufficiently be explained by traditional dimensions including user satisfaction, profitability or meeting requirements, budgets and schedules. A proto-theory of success is proposed, which models success as the net impact on a particular stakeholder at a particular time. Stakeholder impacts are driven by project efficiency, artifact quality and market performance. Success is not additive, e.g., ‘low’ success for clients does not average with ‘high’ success for developers to make ‘moderate’ success overall; rather, a project may be simultaneously successful and unsuccessful from different perspectives

Software engineering processes for self-adaptive systems

In this paper, we discuss how for self-adaptive systems some activities that traditionally occur at development-time are moved to run-time. Responsibilities for these activities shift from software engineers to the system itself, causing the traditional boundary between development-time and run-time to blur. As a consequence, we argue how the traditional software engineering process needs to be reconceptualized to distinguish both development-time and run-time activities, and to support designers in taking decisions on how to properly engineer such systems. Furthermore, we identify a number of challenges related to this required reconceptualization, and we propose initial ideas based on process modeling. We use the Software and Systems Process Engineering Meta-Model (SPEM) to specify which activities are meant to be performed off-line and on-line, and also the dependencies between them. The proposed models should capture information about the costs and benefits of shifting activities to run-time, since such models should support software engineers in their decisions when they are engineering self-adaptive systems

RELATIONSHIP OF THE GRIP AND PINCH STRENGTH OF THE DOMINANT HAND WITHANTHROPOMETRIC MEASUREMENTS OF FOREARM

Amaç: Çalısmanın amacı ön kol uzunluğunun ön kol çevresine oranı ile el kavrama kuvveti ve parmak kavrama kuvveti arasındaki iliskiyi incelemekti. Gereç ve yöntem: Çalısmaya Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Fizik Tedavi ve Rehabilitasyon Yüksekokulu'nda öğrenim gören 28 kadın, 31 erkek öğrenci dahil edildi. Olguların yas, boy, vücut ağırlığı, beden kütle indeksi, dominant ekstremite kavrama kuvveti, parmak kavrama kuvveti, ön kol uzunluğunun ön kol çevresine oranı kaydedildi. El kavrama kuvveti ölçümleri için Jamar El Dinamometresi, parmak kavrama kuvvetinin ölçümü için pinchmetre kullanıldı. El kavrama ve parmak kavrama kuvveti ölçümleri, Amerikan El Terapistleri Derneği tarafından önerilen standart pozisyonda yapıldı. Bulgular: Ön kol uzunluğunun çevre ölçümüne oranı ile el kavrama ve parmak kavrama kuvveti arasında olumsuz yönde, anlamlı bir iliski bulundu. Sonuç: Dominant elde, el ve parmak kavrama kuvveti önkolun antropometrik ölçümleri ile iliskilidir. Objective: The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between forearm length to forearm circumference ratio and grip and pinch strength. Material and method: 28 female and 31 male students from Dokuz Eylül University School of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation participated in this study. Age, height, body weight, body mass index, dominant hand, grip strength, pinch strength, forearm length to forearm circumference ratio were recorded. Jamar Hand Dynomometer and pinchmeter were used to measure grip and pinch strength. Grip and pinch strength were performed at the standart position which is recommended by American Society of Hand Therapists. Results: A significant negative correlation was found between the grip and pinch strength and forearm length to forearm circumference ratio.Conclusion: Grip and pinch strength of dominant hand were related with the anthropometric measurements of forearm

What Does It Take to Develop a Million Lines of Open Source Code?

This article presents a preliminary and exploratory study of the relationship between size, on the one hand, and effort, duration and team size, on the other, for 11 Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects with current size ranging between between 0.6 and 5.3 million lines of code (MLOC). Effort was operationalised based on the number of active committers per month. The extracted data did not fit well an early version of the closed-source cost estimation model COCOMO for proprietary software, overall suggesting that, at least to some extent, FLOSS communities are more productive than closedsource teams. This also motivated the need for FLOSS-specific effort models. As a first approximation, we evaluated 16 linear regression models involving different pairs of attributes. One of our experiments was to calculate the net size, that is, to remove any suspiciously large outliers or jumps in the growth trends. The best model we found involved effort against net size, accounting for 79 percent of the variance. This model was based on data excluding a possible outlier (Eclipse), the largest project in our sample. This suggests that different effort models may be needed for certain categories of FLOSS projects. Incidentally, for each of the 11 individual FLOSS projects we were able to model the net size trends with very high accuracy (R 2 ≥ 0.98). Of the 11 projects, 3 have grown superlinearly, 5 linearly and 3 sublinearly, suggesting that in the majority of the cases accumulated complexity is either well controlled or don't constitute a growth constraining factor

Improvement Opportunities and Suggestions for Benchmarking

During the past 10 years, the amount of effort put on setting up benchmarking repositories has considerably increased at the organizational, national and even at international levels to help software managers to determine the performance of software activities and to make better software estimates. This has enabled a number of studies with an emphasis on the relationship between software product size, effort and cost factors in order to either measure the average performance for similar software projects or develop reliable estimation models and then refine them using the collected data. However, despite these efforts, none of those methods are yet deemed to be universally applicable and there is still no agreement on which cost factors are significant in the estimation process. This study discusses some of the possible reasons why in software engineering, practitioners and researchers have not yet been able to come up with well defined relationships between effort and cost drivers although considerable amounts of data on software projects have been collected.Volume 5891/200

Formal Methods and Testing: Hypotheses, and Correctness Approximations

mcg at lri.fr Abstract. It has been recognised for a while that formal specifications can bring much to software testing. Numerous methods have been proposed for the derivation of test cases from various kinds of formal specifications, their submission, and verdict. All these methods rely upon some hypotheses on the system under test that formalise the gap between the success of a test campaign and the correctness of the system under test.

The Influence of Age and Sex on Genetic Associations with Adult Body Size and Shape : A Large-Scale Genome-Wide Interaction Study

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified more than 100 genetic variants contributing to BMI, a measure of body size, or waist-to-hip ratio (adjusted for BMI, WHRadjBMI), a measure of body shape. Body size and shape change as people grow older and these changes differ substantially between men and women. To systematically screen for age-and/or sex-specific effects of genetic variants on BMI and WHRadjBMI, we performed meta-analyses of 114 studies (up to 320,485 individuals of European descent) with genome-wide chip and/or Metabochip data by the Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits (GIANT) Consortium. Each study tested the association of up to similar to 2.8M SNPs with BMI and WHRadjBMI in four strata (men 50y, women 50y) and summary statistics were combined in stratum-specific meta-analyses. We then screened for variants that showed age-specific effects (G x AGE), sex-specific effects (G x SEX) or age-specific effects that differed between men and women (G x AGE x SEX). For BMI, we identified 15 loci (11 previously established for main effects, four novel) that showed significant (FDR= 50y). No sex-dependent effects were identified for BMI. For WHRadjBMI, we identified 44 loci (27 previously established for main effects, 17 novel) with sex-specific effects, of which 28 showed larger effects in women than in men, five showed larger effects in men than in women, and 11 showed opposite effects between sexes. No age-dependent effects were identified for WHRadjBMI. This is the first genome-wide interaction meta-analysis to report convincing evidence of age-dependent genetic effects on BMI. In addition, we confirm the sex-specificity of genetic effects on WHRadjBMI. These results may providefurther insights into the biology that underlies weight change with age or the sexually dimorphism of body shape.Peer reviewe