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The Argentine software and computer services sector (SSI) has been active for two decades, driven by public policies and international outsourcing. However, growth in the sector has currently stagnated. This stalling is the result of the extractivism of capacities that operate in three ways: price-salaries, training and financial. The first explanation is the growing competition for costs resulting in contractions of wages and benefits. The second is capacity building that is geared to the requirements of international demand in standardized skills. The third is the financial valuation of the undertakings. This article builds a set of statistical information that enables this phenomenon for the Argentine case to be described and documented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid development of the software system of airborne equipment presents a severe challenge to the mainstream airborne software architecture at home and abroad. It is necessary to design and study the software architecture of the new generation aeronautical airborne equipment. This paper analyzes the development of the software architecture of airborne equipment，and studies the latest software architecture technology in current computer industry. This paper probes into the technical ideas and design scheme of the software architecture of the new generation aeronautical airborne equipment and compares it with the key performance indexes of different architecture software to show the effectiveness of the design scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the development of the German software company Software Aktiengesellschaft (AG), which was among the few European companies that succeeded in the US market already in the 1970s. Utilizing the concept of path creation, it examines how early success impacted the development of the company. It shows that at least two paths in the development, the focus on the Adaptable Database System (Adabas) product ecosystem and the underlying technology, as well as the strong internationalization, relate to the early success and influenced the further evolution of it. The analyses reveal that they played an important role in how the company reacted on to the rise of relational databases and the vertical disintegration of the computer industry. As a consequence of the late adoption, of them they company got into troubles and needed to adjust their profile and orientation during the 1990s and early 2000s, which is analyzed in the final part of the article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite substantial amount of research in software process improvement (SPI) and a wide variety of SPI approaches and software process maturity models, many of the SPI initiatives still fail. This is mainly because the improvement projects are found to be far more complex than expected from the beginning. They embrace a myriad of various organizational, managerial, process, and social properties that need to be considered, such as clear directions, full commitment, continuous sponsorship, and dedicated resources. Some of those properties have been already widely known within SPI arena while others have not yet been recognized. This paper identifies the properties that need to be fulfilled for making SPI projects successful and puts them into an SPI Checklist to be used in the assessment of SPI projects. It then reports on its pilot evaluation within 10 SPI projects at Rolls Royce. The evaluation results show a strong relationship between the fulfillment of the checklist items by the projects studied and the success rates of those projects. Thereby, the results provide a strong proof of concept demonstrating that the success of SPI projects is no accident but a foreseeable outcome of clearly identified and assessable characteristics. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a widely-acknowledged shortage of software developers, and reports of a gap between industry needs and software education, the possible gap between students' needs and software development education has not been explored in detail. In their university education, students want to take courses and carry out projects that clearly relate to their lives and their goals. This paper reports on a quantitative study of 297 software development students. The analysis of the results suggests that software development education has a predominantly social relevance to students and also has moderate personal and professional relevance. The following approaches are recommended to improve students' views of the relevance of software development education: use various learning environments; pay special attention to female students, students who did not have IT as a school subject, and students who rate their own academic performance as low; update educators on the latest developments; design programs to appeal to students and to meet societal demands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article introduces and discusses the role ofbespoke codein Wikipedia, which is code that runs alongside a platform or system, rather than being integrated into server-side codebases by individuals with privileged access to the server. Bespoke code complicates the common metaphors of platforms and sovereignty that we typically use to discuss the governance and regulation of software systems through code. Specifically, the work of automated software agents (bots) in the operation and administration of Wikipedia is examined, with a focus on the materiality of code. As bots extend and modify the functionality of sites like Wikipedia, but must be continuously operated on computers that are independent from the servers hosting the site, they involve alternative relations of power and code. Instead of taking for granted the pre-existing stability of Wikipedia as a platform, bots and other bespoke code require that we examine not only the software code itself, but also the concrete, historically contingent material conditions under which this code is run. To this end, this article weaves a series of autobiographical vignettes about the author's experiences as a bot developer alongside more traditional academic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article turns to classical economic insights on the division of labor and to institutional reasoning to identify some costs and benefits of open source software (OSS) and proprietary software production. It suggests that, thanks to its licenses, OSS favors market expansion more than proprietary software does by tapping into spontaneous work input. The spontaneous tapping leads to a division of labor that exhibits what the article calls redundant economies. By generating a circle of knowledge growth, reuse, and sharing, redundant economies lead to increasing returns, which are crucial for economic growth. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines an empirical study which focuses on the requirements engineering (RE) practices employed by agile software developers and the benefits and challenges posed by these practices. It discusses an analysis of data from 16 software development organizations which reveals seven agile RE methodologies. The study has two phases including the carrying of case studies in 10 organizations involved in high-speed software development and the taking of data from six organizations which used Extreme Programming and Scrum. The study analyzes the difference between agile RE and traditional RE and suggests that the intensive communication between the developers and customers is the most important RE practice.

The architecture of SOA-based applications is different from traditional software architecture where the architecture is mainly static. The architecture of an SOA-based application is dynamic, i.e., the application may be composed at runtime using existing services. Thus SOA has provided a new direction for software architecture study, where the architecture is determined at runtime and the architecture can be dynamically changed at runtime to meet the new software requirements. This paper proposes an architecture classification scheme for SOA-based applications. Using this classification, several wellknown SOA-based applications are reviewed including the architectures proposed and adopted by major computer companies and standard organizations. The architecture classification provides a unified way to evaluate a variety of architectures for SOA-based applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on a study which assesses the practical application of software reliability growth models (SRGMs) during integration and test, and also compares these models with other estimation methods. As per the study, which selected test data from three software development projects, software reliability estimations can be obtained before product release by using SRGMs and failure data collected by test scripts that simulate operational attitude in a controlled test environment. INSET: Related Work in Software Reliability.

In this article the author discusses the origin and history of spreadsheet computer programs. He describes the first time he saw one in the late 20th century, the early era of personal computing. Discussed is the competition among software firms to develop their own version of spreadsheet software. The author notes the increase in development of computers that could run IBM-compatible software. The author analyzes a copyright lawsuit over software development brought by one firm against another and the disputed judgement that resulted.

The article focuses on the growing division among patterns experts which is critical to achieve full benefits in software development. A survey conducted in December 2006 showed a huge gap between many typical pattern consumers and the pattern experts community. The survey indicates several respondents have written their own patterns and only few of them availed the body of work. The authors have figured out the complexities between aspiring pattern authors compared to a more collaborative platform that provide better authoring, pattern selection and evolution with usability that are available in popular community sites.

Version control systems play a very important role in maintaining the revision history of software and facilitating software evolution. As the software development process is gradually taking the form of a collaborative effort among several teams hosted over widely dispersed sites, centralized version control systems are gradually giving way to multi-sited version control systems. Ensuring the integrity and consistency of versioned objects in a environment that supports concurrent access, is a difficult problem. The paradigm of transactions has been successfully used in database systems to ensure integrity of objects. In this paper, we look into the transaction management requirements of version control systems and propose a new transaction model of revision control. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article explores open-world software in the realm of business processes. The authors argue for the application of service-oriented design that has long driven the telecommunications infrastructure development and applications development. Because of its strong emphasis on modularization, development of service-oriented software radically alters the way business processes are modeled, realized, and maintained. The complex functions of the underlying business applications are virtualized by domain-specific services so that they can be loosely coupled to form transorganizational processes. They suggest new tools to guarantee a vertically seamless development of the modeled process.

The article features the Cocomo II cost estimation model and the Coqualmo quality estimation model. These are value-based software engineering models that provide for a quantitative risk analysis which helps determine when to stop testing a software product and the when to release it. Cocomo II parameters include the products' equivalent size in thousands of lines of code or functional equivalent, the personnel characteristics such as capability, experience and continuity, the project characteristics, and the product characteristics. Meanwhile, the Coqualmo model is an extension of Cocomo II. INSET: Value-Based Software Engineering.

The article talks about the relationship of the quality of the software products produced and the tools and materials used as reflected in the whole process of designing and manufacturing. Reflection in action and on action are learning concepts that enable developers to view software engineering as a conversation with the design materials. Meanwhile, design principles are intended to guide the creation of models and codes. There are times that the products and/or its presentation is found to be on the crowded spot and this situation needs reflection. This could either be due to a bad layout and lacking presentation. On the other hand, it could also be due to a bad partitioning of responsibilities among classes. INSETS: Flow, Performance, and Reflection in Action;Backtalk versus Feedback.

The article talks about software development optimization through software virtualization, a powerful mechanism for running multiple operating systems, as well as multiple applications on different software platforms on the same physical hardware. Virtualization approaches can be varied. These approaches include the emulation or full system virtualization, the paravirtualization, the native virtualization and the operating system-level virtualization. Virtualization can save significant capital expenditure in test infrastructure. Furthermore, it saves executing 30 percent of the product tests in the desktop environment.

This paper presents a new methodology for predicting software reliability in the field environment. Our work differs from some existing models that assume a constant failure detection rate for software testing and field operation environments, as this new methodology considers the random environmental effects on soft- ware reliability. Assuming that all the random effects of the field environments can be captured by a unit-free environmental factor, η, which is modeled as a random-distributed variable, we establish a generalized random field environment (RFE) software reliability model that covers both the testing phase and the operating phase in the software development cycle. Based on the generalized RFE model, two specific random field environmental reliability models are proposed for predicting software reliability in the field environment: the γ-RFE model, and the β-RFE model. A set of software failure data from a telecommunication software application is used to illustrate the proposed models, both of which provide very good fittings to the software failures in both testing and operation environments. This new methodology provides a viable way to model the user environments, and further makes adjustments to the reliability prediction for similar software products. Based on the generalized software reliability model, further work may include the development of software cost models and the optimum software release policies under random field environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose the first practical and secure way to integrate the iris biometric into cryptographic applications. A repeatable binary string, which we call a biometric key, is generated reliably from genuine iris codes. A well-known difficulty has been how to cope with the 10 to 20 percent of error bits within an iris code and derive an error-free key. To solve this problem, we carefully studied the error patterns within iris codes and devised a two-layer error correction technique that combines Hadamard and Reed-Solomon codes. The key is generated from a subject's iris image with the aid of auxiliary error-correction data, which do not reveal the key and can be saved in a tamper-resistant token, such as a smart card. The reproduction of the key depends on two factors: the iris biometric and the token. The attacker has to procure both of them to compromise the key. We evaluated our technique using iris samples from 70 different eyes, with 10 samples from each eye. We found that an error-free key can be reproduced reliably from genuine iris codes with a 99.5 percent success rate. We can generate up to 140 bits of biometric key, more than enough for 128-bit AES. The extraction of a repeatable binary string from biometrics opens new possible applications, where a strong binding is required between a person and cryptographic operations. For example, it is possible to identify individuals without maintaining a central database of biometric templates, to which privacy objections might be raised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current fault attacks against public key cryptography focus on traditional schemes, such as RSA and ECC, and, to a lesser extent, on primitives such as XTR. However, bilinear maps, or pairings, have presented theorists with a new and increasingly popular way of constructing cryptographic protocols. Most notably, this has resulted in efficient methods for Identity Based Encryption (IBE). Since identity-based cryptography seems an ideal partner for identity aware devices such as smart-cards, in this paper, we examine the security of concrete pairing instantiations in terms of fault attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the factors influencing perceptions of data warehousing process maturity. Data warehousing, like software development, is a process, which can be expressed in terms of components such as artifacts and workflows. In software engineering, the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) was developed to define different levels of software process maturity. We draw upon the concepts underlying CMM to define different maturity levels for a data warehousing process (DWP). Based on the literature in software development and maturity, we identify a set of features for characterizing the levels of data warehousing process maturity and conduct an exploratory field study to empirically examine if those indeed are factors influencing perceptions of maturity. Our focus in this paper is on managerial perceptions of DWP. The results of this exploratory study indicate that several factors—data quality, alignment of architecture, change management, organizational readiness, and data warehouse size—have an impact on DWP maturity, as perceived by IT professionals. From a practical standpoint, the results provide useful pointers, both managerial and technological, to organizations aspiring to elevate their data warehousing processes to more mature levels. This paper also opens up several areas for future research, including instrument development for assessing DWP maturity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the software product blue print that would let stakeholders view a software project's status at any point in its development. It explains that one element of project management is cost and time estimation in which researchers in software engineering spent a great deal of effort in trying to effectively estimate a project's effort and duration and to develop supporting tools and metrics. The software product blueprint would likely be the answer, it is a high-level drawing of the software code modules and how these modules are decomposed, interact, and are deployed in hardware that would be helpful for progress tracking.

The article focuses on the importance of human capabilities in software development. The process of assigning people to development roles is not just crucial for generating productive teams, it can also help software organizations develop systematic long-term competence. The author discusses the personality factors influencing individual's capabilities. It also offers information about the capabilities-based assignment methods propose using the ratio of necessary capabilities each individual satisfies to capabilities required to determine which individual best fits each role.

The article focuses on the use of wikis in software development. Wikis have become one of the most popular tool shells imaginable based on open source software. It also offers information about the historical background and the origin of the word wiki. The system creates the necessary links automatically, so Web page editors have much less to worry about. However, wikis move beyond offering practical help to adopting a particular philosophy on who can edit material and under what circumstances. Specifically, just about any system user can edit a page written by any other user. INSET: Additional Resources on Wikis..

The article focuses on the importance of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for software development. UML models are the first artifacts to systematically represent a software architecture. The UML specification defines the language notation, syntax, and semantics. The author also presents a survey and industry case study which reveal common problems with UML models and some techniques for controlling their quality. The author also presents the responses to survey questions regarding the use of UML metrics. The case studies revealed several violations of UML modeling rules.

The article presents information on the role of Version Control (VC) systems in developing computer softwares. One of the oldest, most vulnerable VC systems is Concurrent Versions System (CVS). CVS is a open source tool. As software is developed in small steps or versions. These versions are results of collaborations among different persons. At times one want to refer to a previous version or compare various variants. Sometimes, one need to trace changes to change requests. All these tasks are concerned with version control. VC systems only stores the differences between successive versions. The basic VC idea is to separate the files that programmers work on, called working copies, from the master copies of the same files, which are stored in a repository. The programmers never work on the repository. They check out their working copies from the repository, make changes, and then check in their changes. Every time a programmer commits a file, the VC system creates a new version in the repository. In this way, the repository contains all versions of a file. In addition, it also highlights the comparison between various version control systems. INSET: Version Control System Resources..

The article discusses the milestones in the software development industry in 2005. In 2005, many necessary technologies have at last converged, with a mature generation of users exerting pressure on shaping how the technology will be used. Many of the concepts discussed in the past, such as collaboration, rationalizing software with just enough functionality, integrated project management and file tagging tools are, now hot-button features being added to new graphic applications. Also, the computer software industry is broader evidenced by the availability of two software versions, the professional and consumer versions.

This article begins by explaining the concepts of proprietary and open source software technology, which are now competing in the marketplace. A review of recent individual and cooperative technology development and public policy advocacy efforts, by both proponents of open source software and advocates of proprietary software, subsequently follows, with supporting positions articulated. This is followed by an analysis of the results of a recent draft of a Center for Strategic & International Studies global study of government initiatives to incorporate open source software as an option in their institutional operations. The article concludes with analysis and recommendations on public policies for appropriate software technology assessment policy. For governments, the encouragement of neutral standards (i.e., not favoring one software business model), open competition for research funding of software development, and nondiscrimination in computer software procurement policies will result in the most effective and efficient procurement decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the iterative rework process in computer software development. In iterative development, each iteration subsumes the previous iteration's software and adds capabilities to the evolving product to produce a next version. Each iteration involves a certain amount of rework to enhance and fix existing capabilities. However, excessive rework could indicate problems in the requirements, the developers' skills and motivation, the development processes or technology used, or all of the above. Exorbitant levels of rework result in truly untenable situations. On the other hand, too little rework could indicate insufficient review and testing or too little anticipation of the product features needed to support the next version. INSETS: What Is Refactoring?;How Control Charts Work..

The article discusses about computer architecture reviews. An architecture review is a mechanism for increasing the likelihood that a system architecture will be complete and consistent. Good software architecture is critically important for successful software development. It's the key framework for all technical decisions. It provides the foundation for reuse, using commercially available software, and getting to the marketplace fast. In addition, software architecture has a profound influence on project organizations' functioning and structure. Poor architecture can reflect poorly defined organizations with inherent project inefficiencies, poor communication, and poor decision-making. Since 1988, the authors have conducted more than 700 project reviews. Starting with AT&T, architecture reviews have grown across all their companies. They estimate that projects of 100,000 non-commentary source lines of code have saved an average of U.S.$1 million each by identifying and resolving problems early.

The authors consider the design and implementation of SPARE TIME as an example of taxonomy-based software construction (TABASCO). SPARE TIME is a C++ toolkit for keyword pattern matching. It differs from other toolkits in that it is based on a taxonomy of keyword pattern matching algorithms. They discuss the aims of TABASCO and of taxonomy construction and taxonomy-based toolkit design in particular. They show how the taxonomy structure induces the architecture and design of SPARE TIME. The taxonomy-oriented derivation also makes the toolkit easier to understand and use. The toolkit - like the taxonomy - contains the well known Knuth- Morris-Pratt, Boyer-Moore, Aho-Corasick and Commentz-Walter algorithms, as well as variants thereof, including more recent algorithms such as Backward Oracle Matching. It is freely available for noncommercial use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to improve analyses of why errors occur in software effort estimation. Within one software development company, we collected information about estimation errors through: 1) interviews with employees in different roles who are responsible for estimation, 2) estimation experience reports from 68 completed projects, and 3) statistical analysis of relations between characteristics of the 68 completed projects and estimation error. We found that the role of the respondents, the data collection approach, and the type of analysis had an important impact on the reasons given for estimation error. We found, for example, a strong tendency to perceive factors outside the respondents' own control as important reasons for inaccurate estimates. Reasons given for accurate estimates, on the other hand, typically cited factors that were within the respondents' own control and were determined by the estimators' skill or experience. This bias in types of reason means that the collection only of project managers' viewpoints will not yield balanced models of reasons for estimation error. Unfortunately, previous studies on reasons for estimation error have tended to collect information from project managers only. We recommend that software companies combine estimation error information from in-depth interviews with stakeholders in all relevant roles, estimation experience reports, and results from statistical analyses of project characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the need to find requirements about software attributes. Requirements conflict with each other when they make contradicting statements about common software attributes, and they cooperate when they mutually enforce such attributes. Because software developers rarely apply formal requirements specification techniques in practice, and because reliable techniques for natural language understanding aren't available, it's generally infeasible to automatically identify conflicts and cooperation among requirements. Requirement traceability is the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement, forward and backward. This would be done by defining and maintaining relationship to various artifacts created during system development, such as stakeholder needs, architectural or design elements, or source code. Analyzing requirements using software attributes can make conflicts and cooperation instances more obvious, because changes in quality often cause certain functional changes that in turn affect other quality attributes. For example, it is known that checking user inputs increases correctness but also increases costs and decreases performance. INSET: Related Work..

This article focuses on the need for creating predictability in distributed systems. While the connectivity and efficiency advantages of distributed systems ensure their continued expansion, our increasing dependency on distributed resources comes at a cost of reduced predictability. Much of the burden of creating the needed levels of predictability necessarily falls on the software that controls and orchestrates the distributed resources' behaviors. The need for creating predictability in distributed systems is most often specified in terms of quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, which help define the acceptable levels of dependability with which capabilities such as processing capacity, data throughput, or service availability reach users. While such distributed development processes provide a powerful and economically important development model, they unfortunately also increase the churn rates in QoS-intensive software. In practice, budgets for development and in-house quality assurance are often too limited to perform a comprehensive exploration of the software configuration space. INSETS: QoS and PSAs.;Software Configuration Spaces..

Reports on the growth and development of the software design process. Use of enterprise software in central and critical business applications; Definition of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Role of software development in many aspects of the kitchen design and build process; Flows of software development; Alternative models for SDLC; Responsibility of SDLC models in making sure that software is properly defined, built, tested, and implemented.

Focuses on the usage-based reading (UBR) technique which combines traditional inspection principals, use cases, and operational profile testing to create and efficient, user-oriented software inspection reading technique. Application of inspection to all kinds of software development artifacts; Comparison of the UBR with the checklist-based reading approach.

In this paper we propose a new software development process simulation model. The model can predict variations of productivity based on dynamic changes in the developer's knowledge structure. An important concept of the model is that a developer's productivity is influenced by the developer's knowledge. Moreover, a developer can acquire new knowledge by executing activities of a project. In other words, the developer's knowledge structure changes during the project. The knowledge structure is defined using a cognitive map that consists of knowledge elements and prerequisite relationships among the knowledge elements. By adding the specific developer's knowledge and the specific project workload to the knowledge structure, an increment of the developer's knowledge and the project progress are calculated into the model. The simulation results are useful for making project plans including technical reviews, which are an efficient technique for acquiring new knowledge. The simulation model can predict what knowledge should be discussed in the technical review, when the review should be held, and who the members of the review should be. The simulation results help managers make the most appropriate and executable project plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software engineering environments have a history of about two decades. Early environments provided support for small fragments of the software process (usually focusing on programming-in-the small). Then there was a trend towards support for more complete software processes (from early phases like requirements analysis and design down to testing and configuration management). Ten years ago the notion of process-centered software engineering environments initiated a new field in software engineering: software process research. The key idea is to use a model of a software process as input parameter for a software engineering environment. The environment is supposed to "behave" in accordance to the process model. Some aspects of this vision became true, others turned out to be of little practicability. In this article, we discuss the history of software engineering environments with a particular focus on process-centered software engineering environments (PCSEEs). We discuss the notion of distributed software processes (as one of the most substantial current trends in software process research) and we motivate the notion of a software process middleware which serves as basis of real-world software processes spread over various sites. In addition, we discuss some other trends in the software process research arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Process Centered Environments (PCEs) are the most recent generation of environments supporting the software engineering process. They aim to drive and assist developpers in the application of software development methods, by exploiting an explicit representation of the process. Several PCEs have been developped, both as research project and commercial products. This paper makes a point of research works and research challenges. It identifies 8 PCEs and a list of general requirements selected regarding actual software process technology needs along with some PCEs experiments results. A set of comparison criteria is then established and a list of open issues, derived from PCEs comparison, is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deriving a unique software development process is not possible since the requirements of individual projects vary significantly. What is possible is a standard framework, defined by a metamodel, which can then provide an extensible and tailorable process environment such that individual and project-specific processes can be created and configured precisely to those project needs. As an illustration of this approach, the OPEN Process Framework (OPF) is described in terms of its underpinning metamodel. The use of this framework to construct individual process instances is then described, first in principle and then illustrated by three case studies: a process for mid-sized MIS development; a process for Web development; and a process to assist organizations in transitioning from a non-OO to an OO development culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe how knowledge management and software process support can be integrated to improve the efficiency of virtual software teams. The approach presented here integrates a process enactment environment with an on-demand knowledge delivery strategy that is based on parameterized information needs models. The parameters in the information needs models are bound at project execution time to values extracted from the process enactment engine. Thus, the approach supports virtual teams by establishing a platform for systematic and task-specific knowledge exchange. The proposed approach is prototypically implemented in the MILOS system, an open source project of the University of Calgary (Canada) and the University of Kaiserslautern (Germany). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances in information technology have made Internet-based collaboration much easier. It is now possible for a software team to draw on talented developers from around the world without the need to gather them together physically. However, being able to tap into a large pool of talent does not guarantee success. Software managers have to be able to manage these distributed teams. They need to define sharper processes and ensure that they are followed. They also need to better control project execution. To do so effectively, we have developed a tool that integrates features for both project and process management. Existing project management tools were originally designed for projects on a single site. Many of them do not provide the features necessary to support cooperative multi-site software projects or process management. We have developed a tool, called IPPM, which supports these features. IPPM, which integrates features for process and project management, resolves differences between existing project and process tools, and provides a number of unique features to support multi-site development. IPPM has been implemented and used by several development teams working in different regions in Hong Kong and Mainland China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managing process diversity becomes increasingly relevant in software development. Software organizations typically do not work on the Greenfield and thus need to integrate external work flows with R&D internal workflow management and heterogeneous development and maintenance processes. To stay competitive with its software development, Alcatel has put in place an orchestrated improvement program of its processes and the underlying engineering tools environment. Why do we call this "e-R&D"? For two reasons. These improvement activities necessarily fit into the wider context of Alcatel's business process improvement and corporate c-business initiatives. The "e-R&D" also means enabling of interactive R&D processes and increasing collaborative work across the globe. At Alcatel we realized, during a substantial reengineering of our development and industrialization processes, that the approach to acquire an off-the- shelf process and tailor it to our needs was not applicable. Different processes need to be seamlessly integrated to avoid inconsistencies and inefficiency caused by replicated work. Specific focus is given within this article on how we manage process diversity in a product line where various components are embedded in individual architectures, asking for different but defined development and maintenance processes depending on pre-selected criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent trend in software engineering is the shift from a focus on laboratory-oriented software engineering to a more industry-oriented view of software engineering processes. This complements preceding ideas about software engineering in terms of organization and process-orientation. From the domain coverage point of view, many of the existing software engineering approaches have mainly concentrated on the technical aspects of software development. Important areas of software engineering, such as the technical and organizational infrastructures, have been left untouched. As software systems increase in scales, issues of complexity and professional practices become involved. Software development as an academic or laboratory activity, has to engage with software development as a key industrialized process. This expanded domain of software engineering exposes the limitations of existing methodologies that often address only individual subdomains. There is, therefore, a demand for an overarching approach that provide a basis for theoretical and practical infrastructures capable of accommodating the whole range of modern software engineering practices and requirements. One approach is provided by Process-Based Software Engineering (PBSE); part of the more general trend towards a focus on process. This paper provides a review of process techniques for software engineering and a high-level perspective on PBSE. Typical approaches and techniques for the establishment, assessment, improvement and bench-marking of software engineering process systems are introduced in this paper, and many are developed further in other contributions to this volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have found that, when software is developed by multiple, geographically separated teams, the cost-benefit trade-offs of software inspection change. In particular, this situation can significantly lengthen the inspection interval (calendar time needed to complete an inspection). Our research goal was to find a way to reduce the inspection interval without reducing inspection effectiveness. We believed that Internet technology offered some potential solutions, but we were not sure which technology to use nor what effects it would have on effectiveness. To conduct this research, we drew on the results of several empirical studies we had previously performed. These results clarified the role that meetings and individuals play in inspection effectiveness and interval. We conducted further studies showing that manual inspections without meetings were just as effective as manual inspections with them. On the basis of these and other findings and our understanding of Internet technology, we built an economical and effective tool that reduced the interval without reducing effectiveness. This tool, Hypercode, supports meetingless software inspections with geographically distributed reviewers. HyperCode is a platform independent tool, developed on top of an Internet browser, that integrates seamlessly into the current development process. By seamless, we mean the tool produces a paper flow that is almost identical to the current inspection process. HyperCode's acceptance by its user community has been excellent. Moreover, we estimate that using HyperCode has reduced the inspection interval by 20 to 25 percent. We believe that, had we focused solely on technology (without considering the information our studies had uncovered), we would have created a more complex, but not necessarily more effective tool. We probably would have supported group meetings, restricted each participant's access to review comments, and supported a wider variety of inspection methods. In other words, the principles derived from our empirical studies dramatically and successfully directed our search for a technological solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the authors discuss approaches to the automation of software development in use during the past 20 years for trunk business systems, in particular categorized reusable components, the center of this method's technology. First an outline of the software in question, the development environments, and approaches to automation is given. With respect to the major automation methods, the structure of methods for categorized reusable components, a structural element, and the design of skeletons for batch programming are described. This approach uses (1) input and output component groups, (2) program skeleton groups, and (3) data processing groups for which detailed processes have been turned into components, all in a mutually independent fashion as categorized reusable components for the software to be generated. Then these components are adjusted and a program is generated by combining them together using tools. By making the components independent in this fashion, this approach has the capacity to create X*Y*Z structures overall even with only X, Y, and Z components each. In addition, the 24 skeletons developed during this research are demonstrated to cover 90% of large-scale trunk systems, and the top 10 skeletons over 70%. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 85(6): 50–66, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjb.10057 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software merging is an essential aspect of the maintenance and evolution of large-scale software systems. This paper provides a comprehensive survey and analysis of available merge approaches. Over the years, a wide variety of different merge techniques has been proposed. While initial techniques were purely based on textual merging, more powerful approaches also take the syntax and semantics of the software into account. There is a tendency towards operation-based merging because of its increased expressiveness. Another tendency is to try to define merge techniques that are as general, accurate, scalable, and customizable as possible, so that they can be used in any phase in the software life-cycle and detect as many conflicts as possible. After comparing the possible merge techniques, we suggest a number of important open problems and future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses that in order to achieve systematic reuse, the technical and non-technical issues must be considered in parallel, and a set of component models should be built from different perspectives. Each of these models gives a specific view of the components so as to satisfy different needs of different persons involved in the enterprise reuse program. Especially, we present a reusable component model - FLP model for reusable component, which describes components from three dimensions (form, level, and presentation) and views components and their relationships from the perspective of process and management. This model determines the sphere of reusable components, the time points of reusing components in the development process, and the needed means to present components in terms of the abstraction level, logic granularity and presentation media. It is the basis on which the management and technical decisions are made. It will be used as the kernel model to initialize and normalize a systematic enterprise reuse program. After the FLP model, the relationships among these different models are discussed. Furthermore, the usage of these models to facilitate the perspective management of enterprise software reuse is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several cost models have been proposed in the past for estimating, predicting, and analyzing the costs of software reuse. In this paper we propose an integrated ROI-based cost model which attempts to encompass existing models. Our approach is to analyze existing models, identify their dimensions of variance, classify the models along these dimensions, then provide an integrated cost model that makes explicit provisions for these dimensions of variance. In this paper, we also discuss in what sense our model encompasses existing models, present a prototype that supports the cost model, and illustrate the model with a sample example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When first formulated in the early seventies, the laws of software evolution were, for a number of reasons, not widely accepted as relevant to software engineering practice. Over the years, however, they have gradually become recognised as providing useful inputs to understanding of the software process. Now eight in number, they have been supplemented by the software uncertainty principle and the FEAST (Feedback, Evolution And Software Technology) hypothesis. Based on all these and on the further results of the FEAST research projects this paper develops and presents some fifty rules for application in software system process planning and management and indicates tools available or that could usefully be developed to support their application. The listing is structured according to the laws that encapsulate the observed phenomena and that lead to the recommendations. Each sublist is preceded by a textual discussion providing at least some of the reasoning that has led to the recommended procedures. The references direct the interested reader to the literature that records observed behaviours, interpretations, models and metrics obtained from industrially evolved systems, and from which the recommendations were derived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]