Best practices and innovative capacity development approaches in ARD programmes of ERA-ARD consortium members: Draft compilation of National Contribution

In the framework of the European Research Area for Agricultural Research for Development (ERA-ARD) project, a survey of innovative approaches in capacity development (CD) was undertaken. All Consortium members were asked to describe innovative approaches and best practices of CD mechanisms within their ARD programmes. A tabular overview of all the programmes or mechanisms can be found on page 4. Abstracts of the programmes or mechanisms are compiled in alphabetic order of the consortium members in this document. The intention of this catalogue of mechanisms is to give an overview of different approaches and practices and not to provide a comprehensive mapping of all the ongoing CD activities of the Consortium members. Thus, the programmes described represent only a fraction of all the ongoing CD programmes on the national level.

On the Evaluation of a DSL for Architectural Consistency Checking

Software architecture erodes over time and needs to be constantly monitored to be kept consistent with its original intended design. Consistency is rarely monitored using automated techniques. The cost associated to such an activity is typically not considered proportional to its benefits. To improve this situation, we propose Dicto, a uniform DSL for specifying architectural invariants. This language is designed to reduce the cost of consistency checking by offering a framework in which existing validation tools can be matched to newly-defined language constructs. In this paper we discuss how such a DSL can be qualitatively and qualitatively evaluated in practice.