Need of a BIM-agile Coach to Oversee Architectural Design From one pedagogical experiment to another

International audienceThis paper is part of our research on the digital transition in architecture, and more particularly on the integration of BIM (Building Information Management) technology. Indeed, in the field of AEC in France, this transition is still ongoing and remains difficult for architects. BIM technology changes the way people work and communicate, and remains only a tool without a method behind it. His arrival then raises technical but also human questions. Our research then turns to the social sciences and project management sciences to see if the creation or adaptation of project management methods can facilitate this integration. In other fields such as industry, software engineering, or HMI design, we have seen the emergence of agile methods that focus more on design teams, and therefore communication, than on the process itself. After experimenting with several agile practices, we identified the need for a design team to be mentored by someone in the role of facilitator or coach. This article describes how we can transfer to students an agile practice called BIM-agile Coach that we experimented during a weeklong workshop

Une approche pédagogique par les modèles pour la sensibilisation au concept de BIM (Maquette Numérique)

Les pratiques de projet autour du BIM nécessitent une bonne compréhension des notions liées à la différentiation des formes de modèles impliquées dans cette technologie. L'expérience pédagogique évoquée ici fait suite à deux enseignements : le premier porte sur la modélisation géométrique et la programmation visuelle en Grasshopper et le second sur la modélisation sémantique et la mise en oeuvre de bases de données relationnelles. Le mixage de ces deux enseignements nous permet de proposer un travail pédagogique portant sur la différenciation des différents types de modèles manipulés lors d'un travail simplifié de conception partagée à l'image de ce pourrait être une pratique collective autour d'un outil BIM. Le but de cette sensibilisation est d'offrir aux étudiants une meilleure compréhension des enjeux des différentes pratiques nécessaires à la coopération tant dans les étapes de conception (production) que de partage (communication).The BIM project practices require a good understanding of concepts related to the differentiation of model types involved in this technology. The educational experience mentioned below follows two courses: the first is about geometric modeling and visual programming with Grasshopper and the second addresses semantic modeling and relational databases implementation. The mixing of these two courses offer an educational work on the differentiation of the different model types handled in a simplified work of shared design similar to what could be a collective practice with a BIM tool. The purpose of this outreach is to offer students a better understanding of issues on practices needed to cooperate both in the design stage (production) and in the sharing stage (communication)

Numérisation et valorisation de maquettes anciennes de villes

La maquette a été pendant longtemps le moyen de communication le plus efficace pour représenter l’architecture et la ville. Libérée des contraintes de la représentation graphique, la troisième dimension permet une lecture simplifiée de l’objet représenté. Au-delà de la question du remplacement de la maquette par des médiations numériques toujours plus réalistes et immersives, nous examinons ici les modes opératoires à l’œuvre dans les projets ainsi que les complémentarités entre maquettes physiques et numériques. Depuis une vingtaine d’années, un nombre croissant de projets mobilisent conjointement maquettes et sciences du numérique. L’archivage et la valorisation des maquettes sont des objectifs partagés par la plupart des projets, tandis qu’une minorité ambitionne la reconstitution d’environnements disparus et la création de systèmes d’information multidimensionnels permettant d’interfacer les données relatives aux maquettes. Une quarantaine de projets faisant intervenir des maquettes anciennes de villes ont été étudiés parmi lesquels le programme de numérisation de plans-reliefs du MAP (UMR « Modèles et simulations pour l’architecture et le patrimoine »). Alors que l’acquisition 3D est l’étape première de la plupart des projets étudiés – et malgré les avancées en matière de collecte de données –, les propriétés exceptionnelles des maquettes constituent un premier obstacle. À l’autre bout de la chaîne de production, le produit final (système d’information nD, copie physique, maquette augmentée, film, etc.) est également analysé pour dégager les usages et les formes de dialogue qui s’établissent entre maquette physique, modèle numérique et la connaissance relative à ces supports. Cet article synthétise les objectifs, les enjeux, les méthodes de production et de diffusion à l’œuvre dans ces approches et introduit le projet « Urbania », dernière recherche du MAP sur la numérisation de plans-reliefs.For a long time, scale models were the most effective means of communication to depict architecture and cities. Free from the constraints of the graphical representation, the third dimension allows a simplified reading of the depicted object. Beyond the question of replacing the model with increasingly realistic and immersive digital mediations, our communication investigates the processes at work in projects as well as the dialogue between physical and digital models. Over the past twenty years or so, a growing number of projects have brought together models and digital science. Archiving and valorisation of scale models are objectives shared by most projects, while a minority aspires to reconstitute past environments and create multidimensional information systems to interface the data relating to scale models. Some forty projects involving old city models were studied, including MAP’s digitalization program for plans-reliefs. While 3D acquisition is the first step in most of the projects studied —and despite advances in data collection— the exceptional properties of scale models are a first challenge. At the other end of the production chain, the final product (nD information system, physical replica, augmented scale models, film, etc.) is also analysed to identify the uses and forms of dialogues that are established between physical model, digital model and knowledge relating to these media. This paper synthesizes the objectives, challenges, production and dissemination methods at work in these approaches and introduces the ‘Urbania’ project, the latest research of MAP on the digitisation of relief planes

Test them all, is it worth it? Assessing configuration sampling on the JHipster Web development stack

Many approaches for testing configurable software systems start from the same assumption: it is impossible to test all configurations. This motivated the definition of variability-aware abstractions and sampling techniques to cope with large configuration spaces. Yet, there is no theoretical barrier that prevents the exhaustive testing of all configurations by simply enumerating them if the effort required to do so remains acceptable. Not only this: we believe there is a lot to be learned by systematically and exhaustively testing a configurable system. In this case study, we report on the first ever endeavour to test all possible configurations of the industry-strength, open source configurable software system JHipster, a popular code generator for web applications. We built a testing scaffold for the 26,000+ configurations of JHipster using a cluster of 80 machines during 4 nights for a total of 4,376 hours (182 days) CPU time. We find that 35.70% configurations fail and we identify the feature interactions that cause the errors. We show that sampling strategies (like dissimilarity and 2-wise): (1) are more effective to find faults than the 12 default configurations used in the JHipster continuous integration; (2) can be too costly and exceed the available testing budget. We cross this quantitative analysis with the qualitative assessment of JHipster’s lead developers.</p

An ontological model for the reality-based 3D annotation of heritage building conservation state

The conservation and restoration of historical monuments require a diagnostic analysis carried out by amultidisciplinary team. The results of the diagnosis include data produced by different techniques andprotocols, which are used by conservation scientists to assess the built heritage. Nowadays, together withthe aforementioned data, a great deal of heterogeneous information is also available, including descriptiveand contextual information, as well as 2D/3D geometrical restitution of the studied object. However, theintegration of these diverse data into a unique information model capable of fully describing the buildingconservation state, as well as integrating future data, is still an open issue within the Cultural Heritagecommunity. It is of paramount importance to correlate these data and spatialize them in order to providescientists in charge of our heritage with a practical and easy means to explore the information usedduring their assessment, as well as a way to record their scientific observation and share them withintheir community of practice. In order to resolve this issue, we developed a correlation pipeline for theintegration of the semantic, spatial and morphological dimension of a built heritage. The pipeline uses anontological model for recording and integrating multidisciplinary observations of the conservation stateinto structural data spatialized into a semantic-aware 3D representation. The pipeline was successfullytested on the Saint Maurice church of Caromb in the south of France, integrating into a unique spatialrepresentation information about material and alteration phenomena, providing users with a means tocorrelate, and more importantly retrieve several types of information

Yo Variability! JHipster: A Playground for Web-Apps Analyses

International audienceThough variability is everywhere, there has always been a shortage of publicly available cases for assessing variability-aware tools and techniques as well as supports for teaching variability-related concepts. Historical software product lines contains industrial secrets their owners do not want to disclose to a wide audience. The open source community contributed to large-scale cases such as Eclipse, Linux kernels, or web-based plugin systems (Drupal, WordPress). To assess accuracy of sampling and prediction approaches (bugs, performance), a case where all products can be enumerated is desirable. As configuration issues do not lie within only one place but are scattered across technologies and assets, a case exposing such diversity is an additional asset. To this end, we present in this paper our efforts in building an explicit product line on top of JHipster, an industrial open-source Web-app configurator that is both manageable in terms of configurations (~ 163,000) and diverse in terms of technologies used. We present our efforts in building a variability-aware chain on top of JHipster's configurator and lessons learned using it as a teaching case at the University of Rennes. We also sketch the diversity of analyses that can be performed with our infrastructure as well as early issues found using it. Our long term goal is both to support students and researchers studying variability analysis and JHipster developers in the maintenance and evolution of their tools

Test them all, is it worth it? Assessing configuration sampling on the JHipster Web development stack

Many approaches for testing configurable software systems start from the same assumption: it is impossible to test all configurations. This motivated the definition of variability-aware abstractions and sampling techniques to cope with large configuration spaces. Yet, there is no theoretical barrier that prevents the exhaustive testing of all configurations by simply enumerating them, if the effort required to do so remains acceptable. Not only this: we believe there is lots to be learned by systematically and exhaustively testing a configurable system. In this case study, we report on the first ever endeavour to test all possible configurations of an industry-strength, open source configurable software system, JHipster, a popular code generator for web applications. We built a testing scaffold for the 26,000+ configurations of JHipster using a cluster of 80 machines during 4 nights for a total of 4,376 hours (182 days) CPU time. We find that 35.70% configurations fail and we identify the feature interactions that cause the errors. We show that sampling strategies (like dissimilarity and 2-wise): (1) are more effective to find faults than the 12 default configurations used in the JHipster continuous integration; (2) can be too costly and exceed the available testing budget. We cross this quantitative analysis with the qualitative assessment of JHipster's lead developers.Comment: Submitted to Empirical Software Engineerin