Keeping Continuous Deliveries Safe

Allowing swift release cycles, Continuous Delivery has become popular in application software development and is starting to be applied in safety-critical domains such as the automotive industry. These domains require thorough analysis regarding safety constraints, which can be achieved by formal verification and the execution of safety tests resulting from a safety analysis on the product. With continuous delivery in place, such tests need to be executed with every build to ensure the latest software still fulfills all safety requirements. Even more though, the safety analysis has to be updated with every change to ensure the safety test suite is still up-to-date. We thus propose that a safety analysis should be treated no differently from other deliverables such as source-code and dependencies, formulate guidelines on how to achieve this and advert areas where future research is needed.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Pyroomacoustics: A Python package for audio room simulations and array processing algorithms

We present pyroomacoustics, a software package aimed at the rapid development and testing of audio array processing algorithms. The content of the package can be divided into three main components: an intuitive Python object-oriented interface to quickly construct different simulation scenarios involving multiple sound sources and microphones in 2D and 3D rooms; a fast C implementation of the image source model for general polyhedral rooms to efficiently generate room impulse responses and simulate the propagation between sources and receivers; and finally, reference implementations of popular algorithms for beamforming, direction finding, and adaptive filtering. Together, they form a package with the potential to speed up the time to market of new algorithms by significantly reducing the implementation overhead in the performance evaluation step.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, describes a software packag

DeltaImpactFinder: Assessing Semantic Merge Conflicts with Dependency Analysis

In software development, version control systems (VCS) provide branching and merging support tools. Such tools are popular among developers to concurrently change a code-base in separate lines and reconcile their changes automatically afterwards. However, two changes that are correct independently can introduce bugs when merged together. We call semantic merge conflicts this kind of bugs. Change impact analysis (CIA) aims at estimating the effects of a change in a codebase. In this paper, we propose to detect semantic merge conflicts using CIA. On a merge, DELTAIMPACTFINDER analyzes and compares the impact of a change in its origin and destination branches. We call the difference between these two impacts the delta-impact. If the delta-impact is empty, then there is no indicator of a semantic merge conflict and the merge can continue automatically. Otherwise, the delta-impact contains what are the sources of possible conflicts.Comment: International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies 2015, Jul 2015, Brescia, Ital

Don't Repeat Yourself: Seamless Execution and Analysis of Extensive Network Experiments

This paper presents MACI, the first bespoke framework for the management, the scalable execution, and the interactive analysis of a large number of network experiments. Driven by the desire to avoid repetitive implementation of just a few scripts for the execution and analysis of experiments, MACI emerged as a generic framework for network experiments that significantly increases efficiency and ensures reproducibility. To this end, MACI incorporates and integrates established simulators and analysis tools to foster rapid but systematic network experiments. We found MACI indispensable in all phases of the research and development process of various communication systems, such as i) an extensive DASH video streaming study, ii) the systematic development and improvement of Multipath TCP schedulers, and iii) research on a distributed topology graph pattern matching algorithm. With this work, we make MACI publicly available to the research community to advance efficient and reproducible network experiments

Sharing and Preserving Computational Analyses for Posterity with encapsulator

Open data and open-source software may be part of the solution to science's "reproducibility crisis", but they are insufficient to guarantee reproducibility. Requiring minimal end-user expertise, encapsulator creates a "time capsule" with reproducible code in a self-contained computational environment. encapsulator provides end-users with a fully-featured desktop environment for reproducible research.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Safety-Critical Systems and Agile Development: A Mapping Study

In the last decades, agile methods had a huge impact on how software is developed. In many cases, this has led to significant benefits, such as quality and speed of software deliveries to customers. However, safety-critical systems have widely been dismissed from benefiting from agile methods. Products that include safety critical aspects are therefore faced with a situation in which the development of safety-critical parts can significantly limit the potential speed-up through agile methods, for the full product, but also in the non-safety critical parts. For such products, the ability to develop safety-critical software in an agile way will generate a competitive advantage. In order to enable future research in this important area, we present in this paper a mapping of the current state of practice based on {a mixed method approach}. Starting from a workshop with experts from six large Swedish product development companies we develop a lens for our analysis. We then present a systematic mapping study on safety-critical systems and agile development through this lens in order to map potential benefits, challenges, and solution candidates for guiding future research.Comment: Accepted at Euromicro Conf. on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications 2018, Prague, Czech Republi