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Driver behaviour is considered a key factor in the majority of car accidents. As a consequence driver behaviour has been receiving vast attention in different domain areas, such as psychology, transport engineering and computer science. Computer scientists are primarily interested in what and how computing means can be applied to understand the relation between driver behaviour and transport systems. In this paper, we adopt a stochastic approach to conduct a quantitative investigation of driver behaviour. We use the Markovian process algebra PEPA (Performance Evaluation Process Algebra) to describe the overall system model. The system component describing the topology and dynamic of the traffic is composed in parallel with the system component describing the driver state and its evolution due to experience. We illustrate our approach using a three-way junction as an example and present the numerical results of the system analysis., Electronic Communications of the EASST, Volume 69: Formal Methods for Interactive Systems 2013

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development has proven itself over the years to be able to deliver high-quality software products. However, it is not clear how quality emerges from the large amount of loosely organised activities of a FLOSS community. This makes it difficult to apply traditional quality metrics and certification processes to FLOSS products. This paper investigates possible indicators of collaboration effectiveness and quality of individuals’ contribution that could be extracted from the data available in repositories of FLOSS projects. The ultimate purpose of this effort is to develop quantitative metrics for these indicators and merge such metrics into a global metric for FLOSS software quality to be used in a certification process., Electronic Communications of the EASST, Volume 48: Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Software Certification 2011

Antipatterns have been mostly reported in closed source software environments. With the advent of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), researchers have started analysing popular FLOSS projects, seeking vitality indicators and success patterns. However, an impressively high percentage of FLOSS projects are unsuccessful. Moreover, even in the successful cases of FLOSS there can be found tracks of failed attempts, dead-ends, forks, abandonments etc. FLOSS antipatterns can help developers to improve their code and improve the communication and collaboration within the FLOSS community. In this paper, we present some example of FLOSS antipatterns and discuss the benefits that they bring to various FLOSS user roles. Furthermore, we present ontology-based technology and software tools that can be used to assist FLOSS developers and community users to identify, document, share antipatterns and use these mechanisms to assist FLOSS projects conform to specified requirements. Finally, we propose a framework for the quantitative identification of the antipatterns to use as quality indicators in the certification of FLOSS products., Electronic Communications of the EASST, Volume 48: Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Software Certification 2011

This paper presents a framework to identify and analyse learning and activity patterns that characterise participation and collaboration of individuals in Open Source Software (OSS) communities. It first describes how participants’ activities enable and drive a learning process that occurs in individual participants as well as in the OSS project community as a whole. It then explores how to identify and analyse learning patterns at both individual level and community level. The objective of such analysis is to determine the impact of these patterns on the quality of the OSS product and define a descriptive approach to quality that is concerned less with standards than with the facts of OSS peer-review and peer-production., Electronic Communications of the EASST, Volume 48: Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Software Certification 2011

Automatic behaviour can be defined as a fast processing human activity that does not require attention to occur. According to Norman and Shallice's model of attention and automaticity the majority of responses are under fairly automatic control triggered by environmental cues. In this paper we define a process algebraic framework to formalise Norman and Shallice's model and illustrate it through two case studies: Driving and using an Automatic Teller Machine (ATM). Finally we show how to use model-checking to analyse model instantiations and present the outcome of the analysis for the ATM case study., Electronic Communications of the EASST, Volume 45: Formal Methods for Interactive Systems 2011

Electronic Communications of the EASST, Volume 33: Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Software Certification 2010

The majority of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developers are mobile and often use different identities in the projects or communities they participate in. These characteristics not only poses challenges for researchers studying the presence (where) and contributions (how much) of developers across multiple repositories, but may also require special attention when formulating appropriate metrics or indicators for the certification of both the FOSS product and process. In this paper, we present a methodology to study the patterns of contribution of 502 developers in both SVN and mailing lists in 20 GNOME projects. Our findings shows that only a small percentage of developers are contributing to both repositories and this cohort are making more commits than they are posting messages to mailing lists. The implications of these findings for our understanding of the patterns of contribution in FOSS projects and on the quality of the final product are discussed., Electronic Communications of the EASST, Volume 33: Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Software Certification 2010

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects can be considered as learning environments in which heterogeneous communities get together to exchange knowledge through discussion and put it into practice through actual contributions to software development, revision and testing. This has encouraged tertiary educators to attempt the inclusion of participation in FLOSS projects as part of the requirements of Software Engineering courses, and pilot studies have been conducted to test the effectiveness of such an attempt. This paper discusses two pilot studies with reference to several studies concerning the role of learning in FLOSS projects and shows how using FLOSS projects as E-learning tools has a potential to increase the quality of the software product., Electronic Communications of the EASST, Volume 33: Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Software Certification 2010

Electronic Communications of the EASST, Volume 33: Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Software Certification 2010

Electronic Communications of the EASST, Volume 20: Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Certification 2009

Electronic Communications of the EASST, Volume 20: Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Certification 2009

Software quality is more than just conformance to a set of requirements and represents many attributes related to each other that make up a piece of software. An important part of this measure depends on the underlying processes and methodologies used in the engineering of software. We present an early exposition towards a quality model for open source software (OSS). We describe some basic notions of quality for OSS and present a basic model, where quality notions consist of various factors that influence such quality. The purpose of this effort is ultimately to develop a quantitative metric for software quality., Electronic Communications of the EASST, Volume 20: Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Certification 2009