Software Engineering and Management: a curriculum description

[Abstract] The curriculum of the Software Engineering and Management education at the IT University of Gothenburg is described. The education is build upon porblem based learning and uses a project orientation, in each term students spend as much time in projects as they spend in courses where the theory is taught. This educational model orginiates from the university of Aalborg in Denmark. It is used in the described curiculum to enable the students to aquire managerial and programming skills to complement their technical knowledge

How well are your requirements tested?

We address the question: to what extent does covering requirements ensure that a test suite is effective at revealing faults? To answer it, we generate minimal test suites that cover all requirements, and assess the tests they contain. They turn out to be very poor-ultimately because the notion of covering a requirement is more subtle than it appears to be at first. We propose several improvements to requirements tracking during testing, which enable us to generate minimal test suites close to what a human developer would write. However, there remains a class of plausible bugs which such suites are very poor at finding, but which random testing finds rather easily

Find More Bugs with QuickCheck!

Random testing is increasingly popular and successful, but tends to spend most time rediscovering the ``most probable bugs'' again and again, reducing the value of long test runs on buggy software. We present a new automated method to adapt random test case generation so that already-discovered bugs are avoided, and further test effort can be devoted to searching for new bugs instead. We evaluate our method primarily against RANDOOP-style testing, in three different settings our method avoids rediscovering bugs more successfully than RANDOOP and in some cases finds bugs that RANDOOP did not find at all

Understanding the ongoing struggle for land use and transport integration:Institutional incongruence in the Dutch national planning process

Formal and informal institutions help shape processes of planning, as 'rules of the game'. However, institutions do not always align. As a result of changes in strategy and operation, institutional incongruence can emerge as old and new institutions conflict or as actors perceive and apply institutions in a different manner. In this article, we aim to gain insight in the concept of institutional incongruence and the way it shapes transport planning policy and implementation. To this end, we analyse the role of institutional congruence in the case of land use transport integration (LUTI) in the Netherlands. Although LUTI creates opportunities for beneficial synergies and helps avoid unwanted consequences, such as project time and project cost overruns, examples of successful deployment remain scarce. Through an institutional analysis of the Dutch national Planning, Programming and Budgeting (PPB) System for road infrastructure, we assess the ways in which LUTI is enabled or obstructed by formal and informal institutions. The one-year research project involves a triangulation of literature research, policy analysis, 22 expert interviews, focus groups and workshops. The findings illustrate that strategy and operation each present distinct formal and informal institutional incongruence that negatively influence land-use transport integration. We conclude that institutional incongruence is several instances of institutional incongruence can be found throughout the Dutch national planning process. These are partly inevitable because institutional change occurs gradually to reflect developments in society and manifests itself in both formal and informal rules. Therefore we recommend that, in order to achieve LUTI, the full institutional configuration of formal and informal rules, at strategic and operational level should be analysed, redesigned and aligned

Finding Race Conditions in Erlang with Quick Check and PULSE

We address the problem of testing and debugging concurrent, distributed Erlang applications. In concurrent programs, race conditions are a common class of bugs and are very hard to find in practice. Traditional unit testing is normally unable to help finding all race conditions, because their occurrence depends so much on timing. Therefore, race conditions are often found during system testing, where due to the vast amount of code under test, it is often hard to diagnose the error resulting from race conditions. We present three tools (Quick Check, PULSE, and a visualizer) that in combination can be used to test and debug concurrent programs in unit testing with a much better possibility of detecting race conditions. We evaluate our method on an industrial concurrent case study and illustrate how we find and analyze the race conditions

Algorithms & experiments for the protein chain lattice fitting problem

ix, 47 leaves ; 29 cm.This study seeks to design algorithms that may be used to determine if a given lattice is a good approximation to a given rigid protein structure. Ideal lattice models discovered using our techniques may then be used in algorithms for protein folding and inverse protein folding. In this study we develop methods based on dynamic programming and branch and bound in an effort to identify “ideal” lattice models. To further our understanding of the concepts behind the methods we have utilized a simple cubic lattice for our analysis. The algorithms may be adapted to work on any lattice. We describe two algorithms. One for aligning the protein backbone to the lattice as a walk. This algorithm runs in polynomial time. The second algorithm for aligning a protein backbone as a path to the lattice. Both the algorithms seek to minimize the CRMS deviation of the alignment. The second problem was recently shown to be NP-Complete, hence it is highly unlikely that an efficient algorithm exists. The first algorithm gives a lower bound on the optimal solution to the second problem, and can be used in a branch and bound procedure. Further, we perform an empirical evaluation of our algorithm on proteins from the Protein Data Bank (PDB)

Hive: biomimesis, interactive art, and the honeybee

The pressing need for sustainable design solutions in the face of numerous environmental concerns has led to increased awareness of the importance in acknowledging and respecting older and present day sentient beings, as we can learn much from their anatomy and behaviours. An understanding of the need to explore the complex characteristics which enabled different species to flourish has led designers to turn to biomimesis––borrowing from nature largely for human benifit––as a way to create more sustainable human environment. Biomimesis’s advantages can be reciprocal between human and non-human, but is not always the case. While my paper doesn’t explicitly try to solve sustainability issues using biomimesis, it does discuss how mimicking organisms can create new types of art and design. Artists can use biomimesis to further investigate nature and produce works offering new perspectives that we are not readily accustomed to and challenge or question our human landscape

The temporal distribution of planktonic protists in southwestern Alberta and their role in the persistence of the human pathogen Campylobacter jejuni

The temporal dynamics of Campylobacter jejuni and protistan community structure in southwestern Alberta rivers were studied over a 1 -year period. Culture-based isolations of C. jejuni were predominantly from the winter while real-time quantitative PCR indicated fluctuating densities of C. jejuni with no seasonal trend and no correlation with physicochemical properties of water. Protistan communities clustered according to season rather than location. Clinical C. jejuni isolates from southwestern Alberta survived longer when co-cultured with the model protozoan Acanthamaoeba polyphaga than in the presence of by-products or growth medium. The use of wild type and mutant C. jejuni 81-176 strains revealed a cytotoxic effect toward A. polyphaga, and that invasion requires a functional flagellar apparatus but not quorum sensing nor cytolethal distending toxin. Combined, findings illuminate seasonal patterns of C. jejuni and protists and support the hypothesis that C. jejuni exploit phagotrophic protists as a survival mechanism in water. I

SCOPE New Photographic Practices

The photographic practices brought together for this exhibition and publication provide a broad scope of how photographic and lens based media may be used in order to have a visceral and conceptual impact. The methods on show demonstrate the way that artists might pick and choose from the approaches, processes and debates that have arisen through the medium’s history. This collection of work features film, video and photography that demand a renegotiation of the relationship between camera, subject and viewer. Visual Art Centre Gallery, Tsinghua University, Beijing, Chin

Population density, spatial dynamics and territoriality in vervet monkeys

xvi, 125 leaves : ill. ; 29 cmVervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) are generally described as a territorial species, though variations in territoriality have been observed. This research examined the impact of high population density, large group sizes and extensively overlapping home ranges on the expression of territoriality in a population of vervet monkeys. Over a period of eighteen months, data were collected on three large troops of vervet monkeys (PTN = 31, RBMN = 39, RSTN = 57) on the Samara Game Reserve, South Africa. I examined the spatial dynamics demonstrated in this population, assed the extent and use of home range overlap and examined the occurrence of intertroop encounters in relation to mate defence, resource defence and home range defence. The home ranges of the troops in this study population overlap substantially, and overlap areas are exploited extensively. The frequency of occurrence of intertroop encounters does not increase in the mating season, nor is there evidence of the defence of particular food patches or home range defence. The findings from this thesis emphasize the importance of examining the expression of territoriality of a population within the context of its environment