Agile approaches to software maintenance : an exploratory study of practitioner views

Whilst there has been some research into the application of agile approaches to the world of software maintenance, in this paper it is argued that there has not been a coherent investiga-tion that focuses on the collection and analysis of the views and perceptions of agile software maintenance approaches held by experienced software maintenance professionals. In this paper, we report such an exploratory investigation, which has seeded the development of a simple framework for classifying collected views and perceptions. Specifically, a matrix framework has been introduced, to facilitate comparison of the levels of understanding of the issues affecting an agile adoption decision, and the extent to which an agile approach has been implemented. Examples of organizations operating in all four cells of this matrix have been presented.

Object oriented finite element analysis: a distributed approach to mesh generation

The object-oriented finite element method (OOFEM) has attracted the attention of many researchers. Compared with the traditional finite element method, OOFEM software has the advantages of maintenance and reuse. Moreover, it is easier to expand the architecture to a distributed one. In this paper, we introduce a distributed architecture of a object-oriented finite element preprocessor. A comparison between the distributed system and the centralised system shows that the former, presented in the paper, greatly improves the performance of mesh generation. Other finite element analysis modules could be expanded according to this architecture.