Frustrations Steering Women away from Software Engineering

Why do women choose particular interests, study programs and careers as alternative to software engineering? What are the triggers and benefits of these alternatives that software engineering is lacking? In this article, we share findings from a questionnaire study of 139 adult women, revealing the frustrations that women feel along their way to software engineering, whether they have stayed in, or have dropped out and are trying to re-establish the connection later. After identifying the frustrations, which all seem to be preventable, this article pinpoints the most promising solutions, such as the interdisciplinary approach to education, which could be of enormous help to girls’ retention in computing education

Grid Mind: Prolog-Based Simulation Environment for Future Energy Grids

Fundamental changes in the current energy grids, towards the so called smart grids, initiated a range of projects involving extensive deployment of metering and control devices into the grid infrastructure. Since in many countries, the choice of supportive information and communication technologies (ICT) for the grid devices still remains an open question, benchmarking tools aimed at predicting their behavior in the deployed solution play an essential role in the decision-making process. This paper presents a Prolog-based simulation environment, named Grid Mind, primarily intended for the very purpose. The tool was successfully used to generate simulation scenarios in several smart-grid related projects and became a self-standing simulation tool for the evaluation of information and communication technologies used to deliver lowvoltage metering and monitoring data. The tool is continuously evolving, aimed to become an integral part of the future energy grid design in the Czech Republic and beyond

Better Scrum through Essence

We live at an exciting time where software has become a dominant aspect of our everyday life. Although software provides opportunities for improving various aspects of our society, it also presents many challenges. One of them is development, deployment and sustaining of high quality software on a broad scale. While agile methods (Scrum being one of the most prominent examples) ease the process, their popularity deteriorates the clarity and simplicity they were once meant to bring into software development. This article explores the synergy of Scrum and Essence, a domain model of software engineering processes, intending to become a common ground for software development methods, bringing clarity into the composition of methods from individual practices. This short communication motivates the interplay of Scrum and Essence, being accompanied with a set of videotutorials and 21 Scrum Essential cards to further guide more effective team's way of working

Anomaly Detection in Smart Grid Data: An Experience Report

In recent years, we have been witnessing profound transformation of energy distribution systems fueled by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), towards the so called Smart Grid. However, while the Smart Grid design strategies have been studied by academia, only anecdotal guidance is provided to the industry with respect to increasing the level of grid intelligence. In this paper, we report on a successful project in assisting the industry in this way, via conducting a large anomaly-detection study on the data of one of the power distribution companies in the Czech Republic. In the study, we move away from the concept of single events identified as anomaly to the concept of collective anomaly, that is itemsets of events that may be anomalous based on their patterns of appearance. This can assist the operators of the distribution system in the transformation of their grid to a smarter grid. By analyzing Smart Meters data streams, we used frequent itemset mining and categorical clustering with clustering silhouette thresholding to detect anomalous behaviour. As the main result, we provided to stakeholders both a visual representation of the candidate anomalies and the identification of the top-10 anomalies for a subset of Smart Meters

A Case Study in Parallel Verification of Component-Based Systems

In large component-based systems, the applicability of formal verification techniques to check interaction correctness among components is becoming challenging due to the concurrency of a large number of components. In our approach, we employ parallel LTL-like model checking to handle the size of the model. We present the results of the actual application of the technique to the verification of a complex model of a real system created within the CoCoME Modelling Contest. In this case study, we check the validity of the model and the correctness of the system via checking various temporal properties. We concentrate on the component-specific properties, like local deadlocks of components, and correctness of given use-case scenarios.Článek prezentuje výsledky aplikace paralelní verifikace na ověření korektnosti interakce mezi komponentami ve skutečném komponentovém systému definovaném v rámci CoCoME Modelling Contest. V prezentované případové studii se věnujeme jak ověření správnosti modelu, tak i kontrole správnosti systému prostřednictvím verifikace různých temporálních vlastností