A Survey on Intermediation Architectures for Underwater Robotics

Currently, there is a plethora of solutions regarding interconnectivity and interoperability for networked robots so that they will fulfill their purposes in a coordinated manner. In addition to that, middleware architectures are becoming increasingly popular due to the advantages that they are capable of guaranteeing (hardware abstraction, information homogenization, easy access for the applications above, etc.). However, there are still scarce contributions regarding the global state of the art in intermediation architectures for underwater robotics. As far as the area of robotics is concerned, this is a major issue that must be tackled in order to get a holistic view of the existing proposals. This challenge is addressed in this paper by studying the most compelling pieces of work for this kind of software development in the current literature. The studied works have been assessed according to their most prominent features and capabilities. Furthermore, by studying the individual pieces of work and classifying them several common weaknesses have been revealed and are highlighted. This provides a starting ground for the development of a middleware architecture for underwater robotics capable of dealing with these issues.

Afghan Opium and the EU: Fighting the War Economy through Development Cooperation. EU Diplomacy Paper No. 4, 2014

Opium is at the heart of the war economy in Afghanistan, involving a broad range of actors. It generates a sustainable violence cycle and, while international troops withdraw from the country, threatens the Afghan government’s reconstruction efforts. The European Union (EU) plays an important part in the debate on how to deal with this issue. Several counter-narcotics policies have been implemented since 2001 and have mostly failed. This paper looks at these failures and questions the European Union’s ability to help tackle the problem of opium in Afghanistan. It argues that a comprehensive development response, backed by counter-narcotics incentives, could unfasten the spiral of the war economy. It also argues that the EU has developed relevant policies based on poverty alleviation and a structural approach to the opium issue but still lacks the means for action and for donor coordination in order to significantly influence the situation.

spotlight europe, August 2015: Sustainable Development Goals: Are the rich countries ready?

The Millennium Development Goals have led to tangible progress in many developing countries. Once adopted, the United Nations' new global Sustainable Development Goals will additionally require industrialized countries to implement such standards beginning in 2016. But the world's first comprehensive stocktaking shows that most industrialized nations are a long way from serving as role models for sustainable development.

Towards moldable development tools

Developers commonly ask detailed and domain-specific questions about the software systems they are developing and maintaining. Integrated development environments (IDEs) form an essential category of tools for developing software that should support software engineering decision making. Unfortunately, rigid and generic IDEs that focus on low-level programming tasks, that promote code rather than data, and that suppress customization, offer limited support for informed decision making during software development. We propose to improve decision making within IDEs by moving from generic to context-aware IDEs through moldable tools. In this paper, we promote the idea of moldable tools, illustrate it with concrete examples, and discuss future research directions.

SubCM: A tool for improved visibility of software change in an industrial setting

Software Configuration Management is the discipline of managing large collections of software development artefacts from which software products are built. Software configuration management tools typically deal with artefacts at fine levels of granularity - such as individual source code files - and assist with coordination of changes to such artefacts. This paper describes a lightweight tool, designed to be used on top of a traditional file-based configuration management system. The add-on tool support enables users to flexibly define new hierarchical views of product structure, independent of the underlying artefact-repository structure. The tool extracts configuration and change data with respect to the user-defined hierarchy, leading to improved visibility of how individual subsystems have changed. The approach yields a range of new capabilities for build managers, and verification and validation teams. The paper includes a description of our experience using the tool in an organization that builds large embedded software systems.

Supporting the software testing process through specification animation

Achieving consistency between a specification and its implementation is an important part of software development. In this paper, we present a method for generating passive test oracles that act as self-checking implementations. The implementation is verified using an animation tool to check that the behavior of the implementation matches the behavior of the specification. We discuss how to integrate this method into a framework developed for systematically animating specifications, which means a tester can significantly reduce testing time and effort by reusing work products from the animation. One such work product is a testgraph: a directed graph that partially models the states and transitions of the specification. Testgraphs are used to generate sequences for animation, and during testing, to execute these same sequences on the implementation.

Developing relational navigation to effectively understand software

Effective comprehension of complex software systems requires understanding of both the individual documents that represent software and the complex relationships that exist within and between documents. Relationships of all kinds play a vital role in a software engineer's comprehension of, and navigation within and between, software documents. User-determined relationships have the additional role of enabling the engineer to create and maintain relational documentation that cannot be generated by tools or derived from other relationships. We argue that for a software development environment to effectively support the understanding of complex software systems, relational navigation must be supported at both the document-focused (intra-document) and relation-focused (inter-document) levels. The need for a relation-focused approach is highlighted by an evaluation of an existing document-focused relational interface. We conclude with the requirements for a relation-focused approach to relational navigation. These requirements focus on the user's perspective when interacting with a collection of related documents. We define the requirements for a software development environment that effectively supports the understanding of the software documents and relationships that define a complex software system.

Development of real-time process control systems using formal techniques

A major application of computers has been to control physical processes in which the computer is embedded within some large physical process and is required to control concurrent physical processes. The main difficulty with these systems is their event-driven characteristics, which complicate their modelling and analysis. Although a number of researchers in the process system community have approached the problems of modelling and analysis of such systems, there is still a lack of standardised software development formalisms for the system (controller) development, particular at early stage of the system design cycle. This research forms part of a larger research programme which is concerned with the development of real-time process-control systems in which software is used to control concurrent physical processes. The general objective of the research in this thesis is to investigate the use of formal techniques in the analysis of such systems at their early stages of development, with a particular bias towards an application to high speed machinery. Specifically, the research aims to generate a standardised software development formalism for real-time process-control systems, particularly for software controller synthesis. In this research, a graphical modelling formalism called Sequential Function Chart (SFC), a variant of Grafcet, is examined. SFC, which is defined in the international standard IEC1131 as a graphical description language, has been used widely in industry and has achieved an acceptable level of maturity and acceptance. A comparative study between SFC and Petri nets is presented in this thesis. To overcome identified inaccuracies in the SFC, a formal definition of the firing rules for SFC is given. To provide a framework in which SFC models can be analysed formally, an extended time-related Petri net model for SFC is proposed and the transformation method is defined. The SFC notation lacks a systematic way of synthesising system models from the real world systems. Thus a standardised approach to the development of real-time process control systems is required such that the system (software) functional requirements can be identified, captured, analysed. A rule-based approach and a method called system behaviour driven method (SBDM) are proposed as a development formalism for real-time process-control systems.

CADS*: Computer-Aided Development of self-* systems

We present the prototype tool CADS* for the computer-aided development of an important class of self-* systems, namely systems whose components can be modelled as Markov chains. Given a Markov chain representation of the IT components to be included into a self-* system, CADS* automates or aids (a) the development of the artifacts necessary to build the self-* system; and (b) their integration into a fully-operational self-* solution. This is achieved through a combination of formal software development techniques including model transformation, model-driven code generation and dynamic software reconfiguration.

FlexSIG-Flexible software inspection groupware

The objective of this research is to design and build a groupware system which will allow members of a distributed group more flexibility in performing software inspection. Software inspection, which is part of non-execution based testing in software development, is a group activity. The groupware system aims to provide a system that will improve acceptability of groupware and improve software quality by providing a software inspection tool that is flexible and adaptable. The groupware system provide a flexible structure for software inspection meetings. The groupware system will extend the structure of the software inspection meeting itself, allowing software inspection meetings to use all four quadrant of the space-time matrix: face-to-face, distributed synchronous, distributed asynchronous, and same place-different time. This will open up new working possibilities. The flexibility and adaptability of the system allows work to switch rapidly between synchronous and asynchronous interaction. A model for a flexible groupware system was developed. The model was developed based on review of the literature and questionnaires. A prototype based on the model was built using java and WWW technology. To test the effectiveness of the system, an evaluation was conducted. Questionnaires was used to gather response from the users. The evaluations ascertained that the model developed is flexible and adaptable to the different working modes, and the system is capable of supporting several different models of the software inspection process.

Enhanced semantic access to formal software models

The success of the Semantic Web, as the next generation of Web technology, can have profound impact on the environment for formal software development. It allows both the software engineers and machines to understand the content of formal models and supports more effective software design in terms of understanding, sharing and reusing in a distributed manner. To realise the full potential of the Semantic Web in formal software development, effectively creating proper semantic metadata for formal software models and their related software artefacts is crucial. In this paper, a methodology with tool support is proposed to automatically derive ontological metadata from formal software models and semantically describe them.

New capabilities:can IT service providers leverage crowdsourcing?

Technological advancements enable new sourcing models in software development such as cloud computing, software-as-a-service, and crowdsourcing. While the first two are perceived as a re-emergence of older models (e.g., ASP), crowdsourcing is a new model that creates an opportunity for a global workforce to compete with established service providers. Organizations engaging in crowdsourcing need to develop the capabilities to successfully utilize this sourcing model in delivering services to their clients. To explore these capabilities we collected qualitative data from focus groups with crowdsourcing leaders at a large technology organization. New capabilities we identified stem from the need of the traditional service provider to assume a "client" role in the crowdsourcing context, while still acting as a "vendor" in providing services to the end client. This paper expands the research on vendor capabilities and IS outsourcing as well as offers important insights to organizations that are experimenting with, or considering, crowdsourcing.

Trends, challenges and opportunities for performance engineering with modern business software

The author looks at trends in software and systems, and the current and likely implications of these trends on the discipline of performance engineering. In particular, he examines software complexity growth and its consequences for performance engineering for enhanced understanding, more efficient analysis and effective performance improvement. The pressures for adaptive and autonomous systems introduce further opportunities for performance innovation. The promise of aspect oriented software development technologies for assisting with some of these challenges is introduced.

Selecting the 'invisible' user interface development tool

Developers of interactive software are confronted by an increasing variety of software tools to help engineer the interactive aspects of software applications. Typically resorting to ad hoc means of tool selection, developers are often dissatisfied with their chosen tool on account of the fact that the tool lacks required functionality or does not fit seamlessly within the context in which it is to be used. This paper describes a system for evaluating the suitability of user interface development tools for use in software development organisations and projects such that the selected tool appears ‘invisible’ within its anticipated context of use. The paper also outlines and presents the results of an informal empirical study and a series of observational case studies of the system.

Knowledge workers and their relationships with organisations

The programme of research examines knowledge workers, their relationships with organisations, and perceptions of management practices through the development of a theoretical model and knowledge worker archetypes. Knowledge worker and non-knowledge worker archetypes were established through an analysis of the extant literature. After an exploratory study of knowledge workers in a small software development company the archetypes were refined to include occupational classification data and the findings from Study 1. The Knowledge Worker Characteristics Model (KWCM) was developed as a theoretical framework in order to analyse differences between the two archetypes within the IT sector. The KWCM comprises of the variables within the job characteristics model, creativity, goal orientation, identification and commitment. In Study 2, a global web based survey was conducted. There were insufficient non-knowledge worker responses and therefore a cluster analysis was conducted to interrogate the archetypes further. This demonstrated, unexpectedly, that that there were marked differences within the knowledge worker archetypes suggesting the need to granulate the archetype further. The theoretical framework and the archetypes were revised (as programmers and web developers) and the research study was refocused to examine occupational differences within knowledge work. Findings from Study 2 identified that there were significant differences between the archetypes in relation to the KWCM. 19 semi-structured interviews were conducted in Study 3 in order to deepen the analysis using qualitative data and to examine perceptions of people management practices. The findings from both studies demonstrate that there were significant differences between the two groups but also that job challenge, problem solving, intrinsic reward and team identification were of importance to both groups of knowledge workers. This thesis presents an examination of knowledge workers’ perceptions of work, organisations and people management practices in the granulation and differentiation of occupational archetypes.