Empirical Studies in End-User Software Engineering and Viewing Scientific Programmers as End-Users -- POSITION STATEMENT --

My work has two relationships with End User Software Engineering. First, as an Empirical Software Engineer, I am interested in meeting with people who do research into techniques for improving end-user software engineering. All of these techniques need to have some type of empirical validation. In many cases this validation is performed by the researcher, but in other cases it is not. Regardless, an independent validation of a new approach is vital. Second, an area where I have done a fair amount of work is in software engineering for scientific software (typically written for a parallel supercomputer). These programmers are typically scientists who have little or no training in formal software engineering. Yet, to accomplish their work, they often write very complex simulation and computation software. I believe these programmers are a unique class of End-Users that must be addresse

A Methodology to Design Pipelined Simulated Annealing Kernel Accelerators on Space-Borne Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

Increased levels of science objectives expected from spacecraft systems necessitate the ability to carry out fast on-board autonomous mission planning and scheduling. Heterogeneous radiation-hardened Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) with embedded multiplier and memory modules are well suited to support the acceleration of scheduling algorithms. A methodology to design circuits specifically to accelerate Simulated Annealing Kernels (SAKs) in event scheduling algorithms is shown. The main contribution of this thesis is the low complexity scoring calculation used for the heuristic mapping algorithm used to balance resource allocation across a coarse-grained pipelined data-path. The methodology was exercised over various kernels with different cost functions and problem sizes. These test cases were benchedmarked for execution time, resource usage, power, and energy on a Xilinx Virtex 4 LX QR 200 FPGA and a BAE RAD 750 microprocessor

The Energy Future: An Unanswered Question

The purpose of the following paper is to examine broadly some of the implications of the energy shortage, in terms of the following: the new kinds of technology being developed to tap alternative energy sources; the relationship between the energy shortage and the soon-to-be-felt shortages of other resources; possible effects of the energy shortage upon efforts to protect the environment; and social implications of the inevitable limitation to economic and population growth, at least on this planet. The paper is presented in two parts. The first will be a brief discussion of the major elements of the problem and a look at the probable course of our national effort to cope with it. Secondly, I will address the problem of public awareness of the significant issues; in this part will be presented a short story, portrayinga slice of the world as it might exist in twenty or thirty years

Cultural Responsiveness of the Next Generation Science Standards

Student enrollment statistics indicate an increase in linguistically and culturally diverse students in the United States. Along with the increase in the diversity of the preK–12 student population, one would also expect to see a parallel increase in equitable learning opportunities for all students. Equity and inquiry are the key principles of the Framework for K–12 Science Education (the Framework) as well as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Due to the growth of minority populations and the increase in the enrollment of minority students, there is an increasing need to address the underrepresentation of linguistically and culturally diverse students. In this article, we intend to bring to the forefront issues related to the education of a diverse student population, including students from different racial and ethnic groups as well as English language learners, in the Western cultural views in science classrooms. We also intend to shed light on the responsiveness of Western science education, the Framework, and the NGSS to linguistically and culturally diverse students. In addition, we introduce some of the challenges that face diverse students. Finally, we provide some recommendations to meet the needs of diverse students

Developers Perception of Peer Code Review in Research Software Development

Context Research software is software developed by and/or used by researchers, across a wide variety of domains, to perform their research. Because of the complexity of research software, developers cannot conduct exhaustive testing. As a result, researchers have lower confidence in the correctness of the output of the software. Peer code review, a standard software engineering practice, has helped address this problem in other types of software. Objective Peer code review is less prevalent in research software than it is in other types of software. In addition, the literature does not contain any studies about the use of peer code review in research software. Therefore, through analyzing developers perceptions, the goal of this work is to understand the current practice of peer code review in the development of research software, identify challenges and barriers associated with peer code review in research software, and present approaches to improve the peer code review in research software. Method We conducted interviews and a community survey of research software developers to collect information about their current peer code review practices, difficulties they face, and how they address those difficulties. Results We received 84 unique responses from the interviews and surveys. The results show that while research software teams review a large amount of their code, they lack formal process, proper organization, and adequate people to perform the reviews. Conclusions Use of peer code review is promising for improving the quality of research software and thereby improving the trustworthiness of the underlying research results. In addition, by using peer code review, research software developers produce more readable and understandable code, which will be easier to maintain

Best Practices for managing the fuzzy front-end of software development (SD): Insights from a systematic review of new product development (NPD) literature

Although they have followed independent paths of development, the two fields of software development (SD) and new product development (NPD) face common problems (Buyukozkan and Feyzioglu, 2004; Shane and Ulrich, 2004) and share many similarities (Nambisan and Wilemon, 2000). The research findings in the NPD domain are therefore relevant to SD (Nambisan and Wilemon, 2000). In this article we conduct a systematic literature review to identify the empirically validated best practices in the fuzzy front end (FFE) phase of NPD. The findings presented in this article will be useful as any improvement in the upstream front end phase of SD can result in the most positive impact on downstream SD activities (Hannola, Oinonen and Nikula, 2011)

The Impact of Background and Experience on Software Inspections

This dissertation is an initial study into the relationship between an inspector's characteristics and his or her effectiveness in an inspection. Research has shown that improving the individual effectiveness of the inspectors improves the overall effectiveness of an inspection team. But, the performance of inspectors varies widely, even when using the same inspection technique. This variation is often due to the inherent differences among the inspectors who used the technique. In order to better understand this variation and provide guidance to inspection planners, this dissertation has focused on the background and experience of the inspector as the source of variation. To study this issue I used a novel approach for software engineering, grounded theory. This methodology allowed hypotheses to be built both top-down, from the literature, as well as bottom-up, using data. The literature portion came from software engineering as well as education and psychology. The data portion came from both existing studies and newly designed studies. The data from existing studies allowed the initial hypotheses to become more concrete. Once some of the hypotheses had support from data, the final step was to design studies to test a subset of the hypotheses. I designed and ran two studies to test the selected hypotheses. The goal of the first study was to understand the type and level of experience with the software inspection process that was necessary. The earlier data had shown that process experience was important, but the effect of the type and level of experience was still unclear. The goal of the second study was to understand the interaction between an inspector's software development experience and the level of detail required in an inspection process. The earlier data had shown some indications that for experienced inspectors too much detail reduced the number of defects found, while less experienced inspectors needed more detail to overcome their lack of experience and find more defects. This dissertation presents complete list of hypotheses and the results of these studies along with some specific suggestions for both researchers and practitioners

Unofficial Legislative History of the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act 2009, An

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act of 2009 (BPCIA) which created a regulatory pathway for, and scheme for litigation of patent issues relating to, “biosimilar” biological products. This article discusses the history of the BPCIA and explains its provisions. Section I provides background and a history of the regulation of drugs and biological products in the United States. Section II describes the growing interest in biosimilar approval from the early 2000s through September 2006, when the legislative debate began in earnest. Section III describes the legislative and stakeholder process from September 2006 to enactment, and section IV discusses the BPCIA in some detail. These sections show, and the conclusion in section V explains, that the regulatory and intellectual property issues addressed in the final 2010 legislation were debated, discussed, explored, and vetted by stakeholders — including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Democrats and Republicans in both House and Senate, the United States Pharmacopoeia, the generic industry, the biosimilar industry, trade associations, professional organizations like the Drug Information Association (DIA), and European regulators — for (in some cases) as many as ten years. Moreover, as these sections also show, like the Hatch-Waxman amendments of 1984, the final legislation represents a true compromise of competing interests