What Am I Testing and Where? Comparing Testing Procedures based on Lightweight Requirements Annotations

[Context] The testing of software-intensive systems is performed in different test stages each having a large number of test cases. These test cases are commonly derived from requirements. Each test stages exhibits specific demands and constraints with respect to their degree of detail and what can be tested. Therefore, specific test suites are defined for each test stage. In this paper, the focus is on the domain of embedded systems, where, among others, typical test stages are Software- and Hardware-in-the-loop. [Objective] Monitoring and controlling which requirements are verified in which detail and in which test stage is a challenge for engineers. However, this information is necessary to assure a certain test coverage, to minimize redundant testing procedures, and to avoid inconsistencies between test stages. In addition, engineers are reluctant to state their requirements in terms of structured languages or models that would facilitate the relation of requirements to test executions. [Method] With our approach, we close the gap between requirements specifications and test executions. Previously, we have proposed a lightweight markup language for requirements which provides a set of annotations that can be applied to natural language requirements. The annotations are mapped to events and signals in test executions. As a result, meaningful insights from a set of test executions can be directly related to artifacts in the requirements specification. In this paper, we use the markup language to compare different test stages with one another. [Results] We annotate 443 natural language requirements of a driver assistance system with the means of our lightweight markup language. The annotations are then linked to 1300 test executions from a simulation environment and 53 test executions from test drives with human drivers. Based on the annotations, we are able to analyze how similar the test stages are and how well test stages and test cases are aligned with the requirements. Further, we highlight the general applicability of our approach through this extensive experimental evaluation. [Conclusion] With our approach, the results of several test levels are linked to the requirements and enable the evaluation of complex test executions. By this means, practitioners can easily evaluate how well a systems performs with regards to its specification and, additionally, can reason about the expressiveness of the applied test stage.TU Berlin, Open-Access-Mittel - 202

Jet Production with Polarized Beams at Next-to-Leading Order

Jet production cross-sections in polarized proton-proton and electron-proton collisions are studied to next-to-leading order accuracy. Phenomenological results are presented for RHIC and HERA kinematics.Comment: 3 pages, 4 figures, talk given at the DIS99 Workshop, Zeuthen, Germany, April 19-23, 199

Ontology for Representing Human Needs

Need satisfaction plays a fundamental role in human well-being. Hence understanding citizens' needs is crucial for developing a successful social and economic policy. This notwithstanding, the concept of need has not yet found its place in information systems and online tools. Furthermore, assessing needs itself remains a labor-intensive, mostly offline activity, where only a limited support by computational tools is available. In this paper, we make the first step towards employing need management in the design of information systems supporting participation and participatory innovation by proposing OpeNeeD, a family of ontologies for representing human needs data. As a proof of concept, OpeNeeD has been used to represent, enrich and query the results of a needs assessment study in a local citizen community in one of the Vienna districts. The proposed ontology will facilitate such studies and enable the representation of citizens' needs as Linked Data, fostering its co-creation and incentivizing the use of Open Data and services based on it

Subsidising Education with Unionised Labour Markets

It is well known from the literature that a unionisation of labour markets leads to an increase in wages and a decrease in employment. However, in these models human capital formation is usually taken as given. This paper internalises the education decision and shows that a unionisation of the labour market for unskilled workers will also lead to an inefficiently low education level. We discuss the effects of an education subsidy. It will turn out that both the way of financing and the reaction of the trade union to tax rate changes are crucial for the employment and welfare effects

Images of isogeny classes on modular elliptic curves

Let K be a number field and E/K a modular elliptic curve, with modular parametrization $X_0(N) \to E$ defined over K. The purpose of this note is to study the images in E of classes of isogenous points in X_0(N).Comment: LaTeX, 2 pages, to appear in Math. Res. Let

Special subvarieties of Drinfeld modular varieties

We explore an analogue of the Andr\'e-Oort conjecture for subvarieties of Drinfeld modular varieties. The conjecture states that a subvariety $X$ of a Drinfeld modular variety contains a Zariski-dense set of complex multiplication (CM) points if and only if $X$ is a "special" subvariety (i.e. $X$ is defined by requiring additional endomorphisms). We prove this conjecture in two cases. Firstly when $X$ contains a Zariski-dense set of CM points with a certain behaviour above a fixed prime (which is the case if these CM points lie in one Hecke orbit), and secondly when $X$ is a curve containing infinitely many CM points without any additional assumptions.Comment: 22 pages, significant rewrit

Why do pluralistic media systems emerge? Comparing media change in the Czech Republic and in Russia after the collapse of Communism

A quarter century after the collapse of Communism in the former Eastern bloc, a wide range of scholarly projects have been undertaken to compare and theorize processes of media change in the region. One question that scholars have sought to address is: what were the factors that crucially impacted how these media landscapes evolved? This essay aims to contribute to this debate by juxtaposing media change in two selected cases: the Czech Republic (as a best-case scenario in terms of convergence with the Western model) and Russia (as a scenario where convergence has been limited). Based on secondary analysis of a wide range of sources, the essay systematically exposes 11 crucial differences between the two countries and illustrates how these have impacted the processes of media change. The conclusion sets out how these findings could serve as a starting point and source of inspiration for future comparative research