An exploration of seniors’ motivation to use mobile brain-exercise software

This article reports on the development of an iPhone-based brain-exercise tool for seniors involving a series of focus groups (FGs) and field trials (FTs). Four FGs with 34 participants were conducted aimed at understanding the underlying motivational and de-motivational factors influencing seniors’ engagement with mobile brain-exercise software. As part of the FGs, participants had approximately 40 minutes hands-on experience with commercially available brain-exercise software. A content analysis was conducted on the data resulting in a ranking of 19 motivational factors, of which the top three were challenge, usefulness and familiarity and 15 de-motivational factors, of which the top-three were usability issues, poor communication and games that were too fast. Findings were used to inform the design of three prototype brain-exercise games for the iPhone contained within one overall application, named Brain jog. Subsequently, two FTs were conducted using Brain jog to investigate the part that time exposure has to play in shaping the factors influencing engagement. New factors arose with respect to the initial FGs including the motivational factor feedback and the de-motivational factor boring. The results of this research provide valuable guidelines for the design and evaluation of mobile brain-exercise software for seniors.

Towards optimal software engineering: learning from agile practice

In essence, optimal software engineering means creating the right product, through the right process, to the overall satisfaction of everyone involved. Adopting the agile approach to software development appears to have helped many companies make substantial progress towards that goal. The purpose of this paper is to clarify that contribution from comparative survey information gathered in 2010 and 2012. The surveys were undertaken in software development companies across Northern Ireland. The paper describes the design of the surveys and discusses optimality in relation to the results obtained. Both surveys aimed to achieve comprehensive coverage of a single region rather than rely on a voluntary sample. The main outcome from the work is a collection of insights into the nature and advantages of agile development, suggesting how further progress towards optimality might be achieved.

The Maturation of Agile Software Development Principles and Practice: Observations on Successive Industrial Studies in 2010 and 2012

The agile model of software development has been mainstream for several years, and is now in a phase where its principles and practices are maturing. The purpose of this paper is to describe the results of an industry survey aimed at understanding how maturation is progressing. The survey was taken across 40 software development companies in Northern Ireland at the beginning of 2012. The paper describes the design of the survey and examines maturity by comparing the results obtained in 2012 with those from a study of agile adoption in the same region in 2010. Both surveys aimed to achieve comprehensive coverage of a single area rather than rely on a voluntary sample. The main outcome from the work is a collection of ‘insights’ into the nature and practice of agile development, the main two of which are reported in this paper.

Software Patents and the Digital Environment

Software is patentable in Europe so long as there is sufficient ‘technical contribution’ under the decades-long interpretation of the European Patent Convention made by the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office. Despite the failure of the proposed Directive on Computer Implemented Inventions, opponents of software patents have failed to have any affect upon this technical contrivance. Yet, while national courts find the Boards of Appeal decisions persuasive, ‘technical contribution’ remains a difficult test for these various courts to apply. In this article I outline that the test is difficult to utilise in national litigation (it is an engineering approach, rather than a legal one) and suggest that as the Boards of Appeal become less important (and thus less persuasive) should the proposed Unified Patent Court come to fruition, the ‘technical contribution’ test is unlikely to last. This may again make the whole issue of what/whether/how software should be patentable open to debate, hopefully in a less aggressive environment than has existed to date.

Streets for people, or why we should reuse buildings in the city centre

Cities are constantly changing, and city centres are the pinnacle of that change. In the last hundred years these changes have been dramatic, transforming city centres from a complex combination of uses into exclusively retail and leisure areas. Meanwhile, most residents of city centres fled to the suburbs, removing much of the livelihood of central areas. These transformations has been stronger in Northern Europe and especially in English speaking countries, where zoning policies were instrumental in urban development since the 1960s. This process along with the rise of shopping malls left many city centre streets lifeless, which in turn caused the dereliction and demolition of significant heritage areas and buildings. Belfast is no exception, where the broad process of suburbanization and zoning since the 1970s produced a city centre for either retail or dereliction, where much built heritage has been lost or is at risk of being lost.

Towards an automated evaluation process for software architectures

Optimizing and editing enterprise software systems, after the implementation process has started, is widely recognized to be an expensive process. This has led to increasing emphasis on locating mistakes within software systems at the design stage, to help minimize development costs. There is increasing interest in the field of architecture evaluation techniques that can identify problems at the design stage, either within complete, or partially complete architectures. Most current techniques rely on manual review-based evaluation methods that require advanced skills from architects and evaluators. We are currently considering what a formal Architecture Description Language (ADL) can contribute to the process of architecture evaluation and validation. Our investigation is considering the inter-relationships between the activities performed during the architecture evaluation process, the characteristics an ADL should possess to support these activities, and the tools needed to provide convenient access to, and presentation of architectural information.

Derivation of scientific software from mathematical specifications

Often the modification and enhancement of large scientific software systems are severely hampered because many components of the system are written in an implementation dependent fashion, they are inadequately documented, and their functionalities are not precisely known. In this paper we consider how mathematics may be employed to alleviate some of these problems. In particular, we illustrate how the formal specification notation VDM-SL is being used to specify precisely abstract data types for use in the development of scientific software.

NanoStreams: Advancing the Hardware and Software Stack for Real-Time Analytics on Fast Data Streams

NanoStreams is a consortium project funded by the European Commission under its FP7 programme and is a major effort to address the challenges of processing vast amounts of data in real-time, with a markedly lower carbon footprint than the state of the art. The project addresses both the energy challenge and the high-performance required by emerging applications in real-time streaming data analytics. NanoStreams achieves this goal by designing and building disruptive micro-server solutions incorporating real-silicon prototype micro-servers based on System-on-Chip and reconfigurable hardware technologies.