Automatização de testes à framework myMIS

Atualmente, verifica-se um aumento na necessidade de software feito à medida do cliente, que se consiga adaptar de forma rápida as constantes mudanças da sua área de negócio. Cada cliente tem os seus problemas concretos que precisa de resolver, não lhe sendo muitas vezes possível dispensar uma elevada quantidade de recursos para atingir os fins pretendidos. De forma a dar resposta a estes problemas surgiram várias arquiteturas e metodologias de desenvolvimento de software, que permitem o desenvolvimento ágil de aplicações altamente configuráveis, que podem ser personalizadas por qualquer utilizador das mesmas. Este dinamismo, trazido para as aplicações sobre a forma de modelos que são personalizados pelos utilizadores e interpretados por uma plataforma genérica, cria maiores desafios no momento de realizar testes, visto existir um número de variáveis consideravelmente maior que numa aplicação com uma arquitetura tradicional. É necessário, em todos os momentos, garantir a integridade de todos os modelos, bem como da plataforma responsável pela sua interpretação, sem ser necessário o desenvolvimento constante de aplicações para suportar os testes sobre os diferentes modelos. Esta tese debruça-se sobre uma aplicação, a plataforma myMIS, que permite a interpretação de modelos orientados à gestão, escritos numa linguagem específica de domínio, sendo realizada a avaliação do estado atual e definida uma proposta de práticas de testes a aplicar no desenvolvimento da mesma. A proposta resultante desta tese permitiu verificar que, apesar das dificuldades inerentes à arquitetura da aplicação, o desenvolvimento de testes de uma forma genérica é possível, podendo as mesmas lógicas ser utilizadas para o teste de diversos modelos distintos.

TIGRE - An autonomous ground robot for outdoor exploration

13th International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems (Robotica), 2013

Desenvolvimento de Frameworks de Testes Automáticos de Software

O objetivo deste trabalho é o desenvolvimento de frameworks de testes automáticos de software. Este tipo de testes normalmente está associado ao modelo evolucionário e às metodologias ágeis de desenvolvimento de software, enquanto que os testes manuais estão relacionados com o modelo em cascata e as metodologias tradicionais. Como tal foi efetuado um estudo comparativo sobre os tipos de metodologias e de testes existentes, para decidir quais os que melhor se adequavam ao projeto e dar resposta à questão "Será que realmente compensa realizar testes (automáticos)?". Finalizado o estudo foram desenvolvidas duas frameworks, a primeira para a implementação de testes funcionais e unitários sem dependências a ser utilizada pelos estagiários curriculares da LabOrders, e a segunda para a implementação de testes unitários com dependências externas de base de dados e serviços, a ser utilizada pelos funcionários da empresa. Nas últimas duas décadas as metodologias ágeis de desenvolvimento de software não pararam de evoluir, no entanto as ferramentas de automação não conseguiram acompanhar este progresso. Muitas áreas não são abrangidas pelos testes e por isso alguns têm de ser feitos manualmente. Posto isto foram criadas várias funcionalidades inovadoras para aumentar a cobertura dos testes e tornar as frameworks o mais intuitivas possível, nomeadamente: 1. Download automático de ficheiros através do Internet Explorer 9 (e versões mais recentes). 2. Análise do conteúdo de ficheiros .pdf (através dos testes). 3. Obtenção de elementos web e respetivos atributos através de código jQuery utilizando a API WebDriver com PHP bindings. 4. Exibição de mensagens de erro personalizadas quando não é possível encontrar um determinado elemento. As frameworks implementadas estão também preparadas para a criação de outros testes (de carga, integração, regressão) que possam vir a ser necessários no futuro. Foram testadas em contexto de trabalho pelos colaboradores e clientes da empresa onde foi realizado o projeto de mestrado e os resultados permitiram concluir que a adoção de uma metodologia de desenvolvimento de software com testes automáticos pode aumentar a produtividade, reduzir as falhas e potenciar o cumprimento de orçamentos e prazos dos projetos das organizações.

Desenvolvimento de software com integração contínua

A integração contínua é uma prática no desenvolvimento de software que já existe há algum tempo mas ainda não é muito conhecida nem usada. Esta prática no desenvolvimento de software surgiu com a programação extrema e tem evoluído ao longo dos últimos anos, adaptando-se às novas tecnologias. O estudo aqui apresentado pretende essencialmente mostrar a real importância e o valor acrescido que a integração contínua pode trazer a um projeto de desenvolvimento de software. O trabalho aqui exposto surge no âmbito de um projeto interno, realizado pelo autor na empresa Konkconsulting, cuja finalidade se prende com o conhecimento mais aprofundado da integração contínua e com o levantamento das necessidades e criação de soluções, de modo a conseguir a sua utilização nos produtos que irão ser desenvolvidos pela empresa. Nesta dissertação, é proposto um conjunto de ferramentas para responder às necessidades imediatas da empresa na implementação de integração contínua num dos seus projetos. Estas ferramentas devem ser de simples e de fácil utilização, de modo a ajudar os programadores durante os desenvolvimentos e responder às necessidades da utilização da integração contínua em um projeto a ser desenvolvido pela empresa, mas ao mesmo tempo, podendo ser facilmente incorporadas em futuros projetos.

m-SportGIS

Information technologies (ITs), and sports resources and services aid the potential to transform governmental organizations, and play an important role in contributing to sustainable communities development, respectively. Spatial data is a crucial source to support sports planning and management. Low-cost mobile geospatial tools bring productive and accurate data collection, and their use combining a handy and customized graphical user interface (GUI) (forms, mapping, media support) is still in an early stage. Recognizing the benefits — efficiency, effectiveness, proximity to citizens — that Mozambican Minister of Youth and Sports (MJD) can achieve with information resulted from the employment of a low-cost data collection platform, this project presents the development of a mobile mapping application (app) — m-SportGIS — under Open Source (OS) technologies and a customized evolutionary software methodology. The app development embraced the combination of mobile web technologies and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) (e.g. Sencha Touch (ST), Apache Cordova, OpenLayers) to deploy a native-to-the-device (Android operating system) product, taking advantage of device’s capabilities (e.g. File system, Geolocation, Camera). In addition to an integrated Web Map Service (WMS), was created a local and customized Tile Map Service (TMS) to serve up cached data, regarding the IT infrastructures limitations in several Mozambican regions. m-SportGIS is currently being exploited by Mozambican Government staff to inventory all kind of sports facilities, which resulted and stored data feeds a WebGIS platform to manage Mozambican sports resources.

Fostering e-participation sustainability through a BPM-driven semantic model

According to a recent Eurobarometer survey (2014), 68% of Europeans tend not to trust national governments. As the increasing alienation of citizens from politics endangers democracy and welfare, governments, practitioners and researchers look for innovative means to engage citizens in policy matters. One of the measures intended to overcome the so-called democratic deficit is the promotion of civic participation. Digital media proliferation offers a set of novel characteristics related to interactivity, ubiquitous connectivity, social networking and inclusiveness that enable new forms of societal-wide collaboration with a potential impact on leveraging participative democracy. Following this trend, e-Participation is an emerging research area that consists in the use of Information and Communication Technologies to mediate and transform the relations among citizens and governments towards increasing citizens’ participation in public decision-making. However, despite the widespread efforts to implement e-Participation through research programs, new technologies and projects, exhaustive studies on the achieved outcomes reveal that it has not yet been successfully incorporated in institutional politics. Given the problems underlying e-Participation implementation, the present research suggested that, rather than project-oriented efforts, the cornerstone for successfully implementing e-Participation in public institutions as a sustainable added-value activity is a systematic organisational planning, embodying the principles of open-governance and open-engagement. It further suggested that BPM, as a management discipline, can act as a catalyst to enable the desired transformations towards value creation throughout the policy-making cycle, including political, organisational and, ultimately, citizen value. Following these findings, the primary objective of this research was to provide an instrumental model to foster e-Participation sustainability across Government and Public Administration towards a participatory, inclusive, collaborative and deliberative democracy. The developed artefact, consisting in an e-Participation Organisational Semantic Model (ePOSM) underpinned by a BPM-steered approach, introduces this vision. This approach to e-Participation was modelled through a semi-formal lightweight ontology stack structured in four sub-ontologies, namely e-Participation Strategy, Organisational Units, Functions and Roles. The ePOSM facilitates e-Participation sustainability by: (1) Promoting a common and cross-functional understanding of the concepts underlying e-Participation implementation and of their articulation that bridges the gap between technical and non-technical users; (2) Providing an organisational model which allows a centralised and consistent roll-out of strategy-driven e-Participation initiatives, supported by operational units dedicated to the execution of transformation projects and participatory processes; (3) Providing a standardised organisational structure, goals, functions and roles related to e-Participation processes that enhances process-level interoperability among government agencies; (4) Providing a representation usable in software development for business processes’ automation, which allows advanced querying using a reasoner or inference engine to retrieve concrete and specific information about the e-Participation processes in place. An evaluation of the achieved outcomes, as well a comparative analysis with existent models, suggested that this innovative approach tackling the organisational planning dimension can constitute a stepping stone to harness e-Participation value.

Interface Implementation for GPRS/PCU Software Testing with Emulators

Jatkuvasti lisääntyvä matkapuhelinten käyttäjien määrä, internetin kehittyminen yleiseksi tiedon ja viihteen lähteeksi on luonut tarpeen palvelulle liikkuvan työaseman liittämiseksi tietokoneverkkoihin. GPRS on uusi teknologia, joka tarjoaa olemassa olevia matka- puhelinverkkoja (esim. NMT ja GSM) nopeamman, tehokkaamman ja taloudellisemman liitynnän pakettidataverkkoihin, kuten internettiin ja intranetteihin. Tämän työn tavoitteena oli toteuttaa GPRS:n paketinohjausyksikön (Packet Control Unit, PCU) testauksessa tarvittavat viestintäajurit työasemaympristöön. Aidot matkapuhelinverkot ovat liian kalliita, eikä niistä saa tarvittavasti lokitulostuksia, jotta niitä voisi käyttää GPRS:n testauksessa ohjelmiston kehityksen alkuvaihessa. Tämän takia PCU-ohjelmiston testaus suoritetaan joustavammassa ja helpommin hallittavassa ympäristössä, joka ei aseta kovia reaaliaikavaatimuksia. Uusi toimintaympäristö ja yhteysmedia vaativat PCU:n ja muiden GPRS-verkon yksiköiden välisistä yhteyksistä huolehtivien ohjelman osien, viestintäajurien uuden toteutuksen. Tämän työn tuloksena syntyivät tarvittavien viestintäajurien työasemaversiot. Työssä tarkastellaan eri tiedonsiirtotapoja ja -protokollia testattavan ohjelmiston vaateiden, toteutetun ajurin ja testauksen kannalta. Työssä esitellään kunkin ajurin toteuttama rajapinta ja toteutuksen aste, eli mitkä toiminnot on toteutettu ja mitä on jätetty pois. Ajureiden rakenne ja toiminta selvitetään siltä osin, kuin se on oleellista ohjelman toiminnan kannalta.

Software product line for power converters

Työn tilaajana toimi Visedo Oy. Työn tavoitteina oli tutkia Visedo Oy:n ohjelmistokehityksen nykytila, tunnistaa seuraavat parannuskohteet ja antaa ohjeita havaittujen parannuskohteiden korjaamiseksi. Visedo Oy:n tehonmuokkain ohjelmistokehityksen nykytilaa käsiteltiin neljän valitun osa-alueen näkökulmasta: ohjelmistoarkkitehtuurityyli, komponenttipohjainen ohjelmistokehitys, ohjelmistotuotelinjojen kehitysmenetelmät ja ohjelmistovariaatioiden hallinta. Valituilla osa-alueilla havaittujen parannuskohteiden perusteella annettiin korjausehdotuksia: ohjelmistoarkkitehtuurin rakenteeseen, komponenttien jakautumiselle, komponenttien koostamiselle ja komponenttien versioinnille. Lisäksi ehdotettiin uudenlaista ohjelmistotuotelinja rakennetta, joka yhdistää kerros- ja komponenttipohjaiset arkkitehtuurityylit mahdollistaen ominaisuuksiltaan eroavien tehonmuokkain ohjelmistojen hallinnan.

Export Competitiveness of Software Industry In India

The study was motivated by the need to understand factors that guide the software exports and competitiveness, both positively and negatively. The influence of one factor or another upon the export competitiveness is to be understood in great depth, which is necessary to find out the industry’s sustainability. India is being emulated as an example for the success strategy in software development and exports. India’s software industry is hailed as one of the globally competitive software industry in the world. The major objectives are to model the growth pattern of exports and domestic sales of software and services of India and to find out the factors influencing the growth pattern of software industry in India. The thesis compare the growth pattern of software industry of India with respect to that of Ireland and Israel and to critically of various problems faced by software industry and export in India and to model the variables of competitiveness of emerging software producing nations

Genetic Programming meets Model-Driven Development

Genetic programming is known to provide good solutions for many problems like the evolution of network protocols and distributed algorithms. In such cases it is most likely a hardwired module of a design framework that assists the engineer to optimize specific aspects of the system to be developed. It provides its results in a fixed format through an internal interface. In this paper we show how the utility of genetic programming can be increased remarkably by isolating it as a component and integrating it into the model-driven software development process. Our genetic programming framework produces XMI-encoded UML models that can easily be loaded into widely available modeling tools which in turn posses code generation as well as additional analysis and test capabilities. We use the evolution of a distributed election algorithm as an example to illustrate how genetic programming can be combined with model-driven development. This example clearly illustrates the advantages of our approach – the generation of source code in different programming languages.

Programming & Software

An overview of programming and software development.

INFO2009 resource: Infographic on the evolution of Open Source Software

Infographic providing a timeline of important events in the history of open source software since the fifties. Also includes stats for OSS licenses, usage in Business and reasons for participating in an OSS community.

Oportunidades para la internacionalización del clúster de tecnologías de la información y desarrollo de software en Colombia

El presente trabajo pretende encontrar y explicar las ventajas o desventajas que traen para la internacionalización la creación de Clústers en Colombia; en particular el del sector de tecnologías de la información, telecomunicaciones y desarrollo de software, el cual presenta características diferenciadoras en la elaboración de los productos y servicios, debido a que al ser en su mayoría intangibles requieren de diferentes fuentes de recursos y altos niveles innovación; así como de diferentes agentes coadyuvantes dentro de la industria. Se describen aquellos factores logísticos, legales y estratégicos a tener en cuenta en la conformación de Clústers así como algunas experiencias internacionales del sector que ayudarán a construir las bases y buenas prácticas tanto para agentes públicos como privados en la conformación de Clústers.

A data collection case study supporting requirements oriented prediction and management in software developments

Consider the statement "this project should cost X and has risk of Y". Such statements are used daily in industry as the basis for making decisions. The work reported here is part of a study aimed at providing a rational and pragmatic basis for such statements. Of particular interest are predictions made in the requirements and early phases of projects. A preliminary model has been constructed using Bayesian Belief Networks and in support of this, a programme to collect and study data during the execution of various software development projects commenced in May 2002. The data collection programme is undertaken under the constraints of a commercial industrial regime of multiple concurrent small to medium scale software development projects. Guided by pragmatism, the work is predicated on the use of data that can be collected readily by project managers; including expert judgements, effort, elapsed times and metrics collected within each project.

The Impact of office productivity cloud computing on energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions

Cloud computing is usually regarded as being energy efficient and thus emitting less greenhouse gases (GHG) than traditional forms of computing. When the energy consumption of Microsoft’s cloud computing Office 365 (O365) and traditional Office 2010 (O2010) software suites were tested and modeled, some cloud services were found to consume more energy than the traditional form. The developed model in this research took into consideration the energy consumption at the three main stages of data transmission; data center, network, and end user device. Comparable products from each suite were selected and activities were defined for each product to represent a different computing type. Microsoft provided highly confidential data for the data center stage, while the networking and user device stages were measured directly. A new measurement and software apportionment approach was defined and utilized allowing the power consumption of cloud services to be directly measured for the user device stage. Results indicated that cloud computing is more energy efficient for Excel and Outlook which consumed less energy and emitted less GHG than the standalone counterpart. The power consumption of the cloud based Outlook (8%) and Excel (17%) was lower than their traditional counterparts. However, the power consumption of the cloud version of Word was 17% higher than its traditional equivalent. A third mixed access method was also measured for Word which emitted 5% more GHG than the traditional version. It is evident that cloud computing may not provide a unified way forward to reduce energy consumption and GHG. Direct conversion from the standalone package into the cloud provision platform can now consider energy and GHG emissions at the software development and cloud service design stage using the methods described in this research.