An analysis of techniques and methods for technical debt management: a reflection from the architecture perspective

Technical debt is a metaphor referring to the consequences of weak software development. Managing technical debt is necessary in order to keep it under control, and several techniques have been developed with the goal of accomplishing this. However, available techniques have grown disperse and managers lack guidance. This paper covers this gap by providing a systematic mapping of available techniques and methods for technical debt management, covering architectural debt, and identifying existing gaps that prevent to manage technical debt efficiently

A model-driven engineering process for autonomic sensor-actuator networks

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are the next generation of embedded ICT systems designed to be aware of the physical environment by using sensor-actuator networks to provide users with a wide range of smart applications and services. Many of these smart applications are possible due to the incorporation of autonomic control loops that implement advanced processing and analysis of historical and real-time data measured by sensors; plan actions according to a set of goals or policies; and execute plans through actuators. The complexity of this kind of systems requires mechanisms that can assist the system?s design and development. This paper presents a solution for assisting the design and development of CPS based on Model-Driven Development: MindCPS (doMaIN moDel for CPS) solution. MindCPS solution is based on a model that provides modelling primitives for explicitly specifying the autonomic behaviour of CPS and model transformations for automatically generating part of the CPS code. In addition to the automatic code generation, the MindCPS solution offers the possibility of rapidly configuring and developing the core behaviour of a CPS, even for nonsoftware engineers. The MindCPS solution has been put into practice to deploy a smart metering system in a demonstrator located at the Technical University of Madrid

Cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, and diabetes mortality burden of cardiometabolic risk factors from 1980 to 2010: A comparative risk assessment

Background: High blood pressure, blood glucose, serum cholesterol, and BMI are risk factors for cardiovascular diseases and some of these factors also increase the risk of chronic kidney disease and diabetes. We estimated mortality from cardiovascular diseases, chronic kidney disease, and diabetes that was attributable to these four cardiometabolic risk factors for all countries and regions from 1980 to 2010. Methods: We used data for exposure to risk factors by country, age group, and sex from pooled analyses of population-based health surveys. We obtained relative risks for the effects of risk factors on cause-specific mortality from meta-analyses of large prospective studies. We calculated the population attributable fractions for each risk factor alone, and for the combination of all risk factors, accounting for multicausality and for mediation of the effects of BMI by the other three risks. We calculated attributable deaths by multiplying the cause-specific population attributable fractions by the number of disease-specific deaths. We obtained cause-specific mortality from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors 2010 Study. We propagated the uncertainties of all the inputs to the final estimates. Findings: In 2010, high blood pressure was the leading risk factor for deaths due to cardiovascular diseases, chronic kidney disease, and diabetes in every region, causing more than 40% of worldwide deaths from these diseases; high BMI and glucose were each responsible for about 15% of deaths, and high cholesterol for more than 10%. After accounting for multicausality, 63% (10·8 million deaths, 95% CI 10·1-11·5) of deaths from these diseases in 2010 were attributable to the combined effect of these four metabolic risk factors, compared with 67% (7·1 million deaths, 6·6-7·6) in 1980. The mortality burden of high BMI and glucose nearly doubled from 1980 to 2010. At the country level, age-standardised death rates from these diseases attributable to the combined effects of these four risk factors surpassed 925 deaths per 100 000 for men in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia, but were less than 130 deaths per 100 000 for women and less than 200 for men in some high-income countries including Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, and Spain. Interpretation: The salient features of the cardiometabolic disease and risk factor epidemic at the beginning of the 21st century are high blood pressure and an increasing effect of obesity and diabetes. The mortality burden of cardiometabolic risk factors has shifted from high-income to low-income and middle-income countries. Lowering cardiometabolic risks through dietary, behavioural, and pharmacological interventions should be a part of the global response to non-communicable diseases. Funding: UK Medical Research Council, US National Institutes of Health. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd

Articulatory-acoustic correlations in coarticulatory processes: a cross-language investigation (Proyecto ACCOR)

Proyecto subvencionado por la Comunidad Europea en el programa ESPRIT-II (BRA), número de acción 3279

The Global Cardiovascular Risk Transition Associations of Four Metabolic Risk Factors with National Income, Urbanization, and Western Diet in 1980 and 2008

Background-It is commonly assumed that cardiovascular disease risk factors are associated with affluence and Westernization. We investigated the associations of body mass index (BMI), fasting plasma glucose, systolic blood pressure, and serum total cholesterol with national income, Western diet, and, for BMI, urbanization in 1980 and 2008