On the evolution and impact of architectural smells—an industrial case study

Architectural smells (AS) are notorious for their long-term impact on the Maintainability and Evolvability of software systems. The majority of research work has investigated this topic by mining software repositories of open source Java systems, making it hard to generalise and apply them to an industrial context and other programming languages. To address this research gap, we conducted an embedded multiple-case case study, in collaboration with a large industry partner, to study how AS evolve in industrial embedded systems. We detect and track AS in 9 C/C++ projects with over 30 releases for each project that span over two years of development, with over 20 millions lines of code in the last release only. In addition to these quantitative results, we also interview 12 among the developers and architects working on these projects, collecting over six hours of qualitative data about the usefulness of AS analysis and the issues they experienced while maintaining and evolving artefacts affected by AS. Our quantitative findings show how individual smell instances evolve over time, how long they typically survive within the system, how they overlap with instances of other smell types, and finally what the introduction order of smell types is when they overlap. Our qualitative findings, instead, provide insights on the effects of AS on the long-term maintainability and evolvability of the system, supported by several excerpts from our interviews. Practitioners also mention what parts of the AS analysis actually provide actionable insights that they can use to plan refactoring activities

The thought journal app:Designed to confront thoughts that influence sleep

Problems initiating or maintaining sleep are prevalent and impact the quality of life negatively. Negative thinking patterns may perpetuate insomnia by inducing a state of arousal and consequently disrupting sleep. 'Thought challenging' is a common strategy to adopt a positive and peaceful mindset, but requires high awareness to internalize rational reasoning. Regular self-report and feedback may support the acquisition of fundamental reflection skills. We developed a thought journal in a mobile app to facilitate thought challenging. With the app, the users can reflect on daily situations and get visualized summaries as feedback. We carried out one week trial to explore perceived benefit, motivation, user engagement, and its integration with a sleep support tool. The results showed that using the app improved self-reflection skills and visualized summaries are perceived as motivating to log thoughts. </p

Wafer flow simulator visualizer

The control software that drives the ASML photolithography systems is tested on different levels ranging from using simulators to using real hardware. The wafer handling (WH) sub-system uses the Wafer Flow Simulator (WFS) for testing. However, the WFS also requires testing and its information polluted, big log files are cumbersome to debug. Moreover, the interior of the photolithography systems cannot be observed during the production. This project proposes a 3D visualizer to make the testing process easier for the WFS and to ena-ble the observation of the WH subsystem. The visualizer puts all the information in the WFS (e.g., position, orientation of the peripherals) in one 3D scene that otherwise the user would have to check multiple (in order of ten to fifteen) different windows to see the same information. The visualization tool can also indicate the non-nominal behaviors that are injected by the user and can read and re-play the system trace files. A prototype of this tool was already used to observe the WH of an existing system. Moreover, the visualization tool can be used to visualize the WH subsystem of the machines that are still being designed and to train new employees that will work on it

Wafer flow simulator visualizer

The control software that drives the ASML photolithography systems is tested on different levels ranging from using simulators to using real hardware. The wafer handling (WH) sub-system uses the Wafer Flow Simulator (WFS) for testing. However, the WFS also requires testing and its information polluted, big log files are cumbersome to debug. Moreover, the interior of the photolithography systems cannot be observed during the production. This project proposes a 3D visualizer to make the testing process easier for the WFS and to ena-ble the observation of the WH subsystem. The visualizer puts all the information in the WFS (e.g., position, orientation of the peripherals) in one 3D scene that otherwise the user would have to check multiple (in order of ten to fifteen) different windows to see the same information. The visualization tool can also indicate the non-nominal behaviors that are injected by the user and can read and re-play the system trace files. A prototype of this tool was already used to observe the WH of an existing system. Moreover, the visualization tool can be used to visualize the WH subsystem of the machines that are still being designed and to train new employees that will work on it

3D Modeling with a Symmetric Sketch

International audienceWe propose a method that allows geometric operations such as view change, deformation, simulation, or symmetrization on a single off-line sketch via a proxy geometry reconstructed directly from the sketch. The reconstruction captures the overall shape of the object depicted by making use of the global relationships of the curves and the assumption that the sketched object is bilaterally symmetric. After cleaning the sketch and extracting the curves, topological and geometric properties of a set of identified points are used to derive robust correspondence and pairwise constraints. These constraints are considered all at once in a spectral algorithm to get the optimum matching of the curves. Depths of points on the matched curves are extracted by utilizing the symmetry assumption. They are then used to reconstruct a smooth geometry. The whole process is automatic except for a few seconds of user interaction

The thought journal app: Designed to confront thoughts that influence sleep

Problems initiating or maintaining sleep are prevalent and impact the quality of life negatively. Negative thinking patterns may perpetuate insomnia by inducing a state of arousal and consequently disrupting sleep. 'Thought challenging' is a common strategy to adopt a positive and peaceful mindset, but requires high awareness to internalize rational reasoning. Regular self-report and feedback may support the acquisition of fundamental reflection skills. We developed a thought journal in a mobile app to facilitate thought challenging. With the app, the users can reflect on daily situations and get visualized summaries as feedback. We carried out one week trial to explore perceived benefit, motivation, user engagement, and its integration with a sleep support tool. The results showed that using the app improved self-reflection skills and visualized summaries are perceived as motivating to log thoughts