A Case Study on Artefact-based RE Improvement in Practice

Most requirements engineering (RE) process improvement approaches are solution-driven and activity-based. They focus on the assessment of the RE of a company against an external norm of best practices. A consequence is that practitioners often have to rely on an improvement approach that skips a profound problem analysis and that results in an RE approach that might be alien to the organisational needs. In recent years, we have developed an RE improvement approach (called \emph{ArtREPI}) that guides a holistic RE improvement against individual goals of a company putting primary attention to the quality of the artefacts. In this paper, we aim at exploring ArtREPI's benefits and limitations. We contribute an industrial evaluation of ArtREPI by relying on a case study research. Our results suggest that ArtREPI is well-suited for the establishment of an RE that reflects a specific organisational culture but to some extent at the cost of efficiency resulting from intensive discussions on a terminology that suits all involved stakeholders. Our results reveal first benefits and limitations, but we can also conclude the need of longitudinal and independent investigations for which we herewith lay the foundation

Performance criteria for multi-sourced urban water systems

Urban water management is now constrained by rapid population growth, climate change and variability and their prediction uncertainty and above all by resource limitations. The ability of water systems to operate satisfactorily under these constraints is an important system characteristic. Performance criteria described in terms of mean yield and variance are not sufficient. Therefore risk-based performance criteria for urban water systems are proposed. These criteria are risk and reliability, resiliency and vulnerability. The quantitative estimation of these criteria and their implications for water resources planning are expected to improve the long term sustainability of water systems. The relatively new concept of integrated urban water management encourages water source diversification. This includes the use of rainwater, stormwater and treated wastewater. In this paper, multi-sourced urban water systems and their risk-based performance criteria have been proposed

The Home of Football: How Globalisation has Impacted the English Football Team

By winning the World Cup at Wembley in 1966, the England team created arguably the most prideful postwar moment for fans, who saw the team as a symbol of national success (Armstrong and Giulianotti 1999). Since then, the England national team has experienced many highs and lows, and in recent years there has been a growing disinterest with the national team because of poor performances at international competitions. As England is culturally far different from the country it was in 1966, this paper aims to discover the impact that globalisation has had on national identity through Tajfel and Turner’s Social Identity Approach (1979). This theoretical framework aims to explain how individuals behave and group themselves in regards to the social world. Drawing upon the ideas of the Social Identity Approach helped gain a better understanding of attitudes towards the English national team and what had caused these to change over time

Monitoring the Health of Computer Networks with Visualization - VAST 2012 Mini Challenge 1 Award: "Efficient Use of Visualization"

The complex computer networks of large organisations contain many machines of many types, used in many geographic locations. Although system administrators should monitor the health of each machine, they need to do so within the context of the whole computer network. Our visualization presents the health of a fictitious financial institution's computer network at a snapshot in time and over a time range, and preserves the important aspects of each facility's administrative and geographic context. Using the "Bank of Money" VAST Challenge dataset, our visualization allowed us to correctly identify several areas of concern, as well as hypothesise about their causes

Stormwater sand filters in water-sensitive urban design

This paper investigates the suitability of sand filters for harvesting and treating stormwater for non-potable reuse purposes. A stormwater sand filtration device was constructed in a small urban catchment in Sydney, Australia. A sand filter is typically used in water-sensitive urban design (WSUD) as a component of a treatment train to remove pollution from stormwater before discharge to receiving waters, to groundwater or for collection and reuse. This paper describes an 18 month field study undertaken to determine the effectiveness and pollutant removal efficiency of a sand filter, and the differences in the pollutant removal efficiency of two grades of sand. A comparison of pollutant removal with previous literature on sand filters showed similar efficiencies but nutrient removal was higher than expected. A further unexpected result was that the coarse filter media performed as well as the fine media for most pollutant types and was superior in suspended solids removal. Improved modelling equations for predicting suspended solids and total phosphorus removal in sand filters are also presented in this paper

Incorporating residual temperature and specific humidity in predicting weather-dependent warm-season electricity consumption

Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.Climate warming and increasing variability challenges the electricity supply in warm seasons. A good quantitative representation of the relationship between warm-season electricity consumption and weather condition provides necessary information for long-term electricity planning and short-term electricity management. In this study, an extended version of cooling degree days (ECDD) is proposed for better characterisation of this relationship. The ECDD includes temperature, residual temperature and specific humidity effects. The residual temperature is introduced for the first time to reflect the building thermal inertia effect on electricity consumption. The study is based on the electricity consumption data of four multiple-street city blocks and three office buildings. It is found that the residual temperature effect is about 20% of the current-day temperature effect at the block scale, and increases with a large variation at the building scale. Investigation of this residual temperature effect provides insight to the influence of building designs and structures on electricity consumption. The specific humidity effect appears to be more important at the building scale than at the block scale. A building with high energy performance does not necessarily have low specific humidity dependence. The new ECDD better reflects the weather dependence of electricity consumption than the conventional CDD method

‘Follow the Moon’ Development: Writing a Systematic Literature Review on Global Software Engineering Education

This presentation reflects on method and practice in Computer Science Education Research, through introducing the process of conducting a Systematic Literature Review. While Systematic Literature Reviews are an established research method within the Software Engineering discipline, they are a relatively unfamiliar research approach within Computer Science Education. Yet research disciplines can be strengthened by borrowing and adapting methods from other fields. I reflect on the rationale and underlying philosophy behind Systematic Reviews, and the implications for conducting a rigorous study and the quality of the resulting outputs. This chronicle of the journey of an ITiCSE working group, outlines the process we adopted and reflects on the methodological and logistical challenges we had to overcome in producing a review titled Challenges and Recommendations for the Design and Conduct of Global Software Engineering Courses. I conclude by discussing how systematic literature reviews can be adapted to an undergraduate teaching setting

Couplerlib: a metadata-driven library for the integration of multiple models of higher and lower trophic level marine systems with inexact functional group matching

End-to-end modelling is a rapidly developing strategy for modelling in marine systems science and management. However, problems remain in the area of data matching and sub-model compatibility. A mechanism and novel interfacing system (Couplerlib) is presented whereby a physical–biogeochemical model (General Ocean Turbulence Model–European Regional Seas Ecosystem Model, GOTM–ERSEM) that predicts dynamics of the lower trophic level (LTL) organisms in marine ecosystems is coupled to a dynamic ecosystem model (Ecosim), which predicts food-web interactions among higher trophic level (HTL) organisms. Coupling is achieved by means of a bespoke interface, which handles the system incompatibilities between the models and a more generic Couplerlib library, which uses metadata descriptions in extensible mark-up language (XML) to marshal data between groups, paying attention to functional group mappings and compatibility of units between models. In addition, within Couplerlib, models can be coupled across networks by means of socket mechanisms. As a demonstration of this approach, a food-web model (Ecopath with Ecosim, EwE) and a physical–biogeochemical model (GOTM–ERSEM) representing the North Sea ecosystem were joined with Couplerlib. The output from GOTM–ERSEM varies between years, depending on oceanographic and meteorological conditions. Although inter-annual variability was clearly present, there was always the tendency for an annual cycle consisting of a peak of diatoms in spring, followed by (less nutritious) flagellates and dinoflagellates through the summer, resulting in an early summer peak in the mesozooplankton biomass. Pelagic productivity, predicted by the LTL model, was highly seasonal with little winter food for the higher trophic levels. The Ecosim model was originally based on the assumption of constant annual inputs of energy and, consequently, when coupled, pelagic species suffered population losses over the winter months. By contrast, benthic populations were more stable (although the benthic linkage modelled was purely at the detritus level, so this stability reflects the stability of the Ecosim model). The coupled model was used to examine long-term effects of environmental change, and showed the system to be nutrient limited and relatively unaffected by forecast climate change, especially in the benthos. The stability of an Ecosim formulation for large higher tropic level food webs is discussed and it is concluded that this kind of coupled model formulation is better for examining the effects of long-term environmental change than short-term perturbations

Management of Transhepatic Cholangioscopy: A Case Series

Presented at the 2022 Virtual Northwest Medical Research Symposiu