Estudio de la fiabilidad software, según defectos, en controladores de velocidad para robots autónomos móviles

Tanto los robots autónomos móviles como los robots móviles remotamente operados se utilizan con éxito actualmente en un gran número de ámbitos, algunos de los cuales son tan dispares como la limpieza en el hogar, movimiento de productos en almacenes o la exploración espacial. Sin embargo, es difícil garantizar la ausencia de defectos en los programas que controlan dichos dispositivos, al igual que ocurre en otros sectores informáticos. Existen diferentes alternativas para medir la calidad de un sistema en el desempeño de las funciones para las que fue diseñado, siendo una de ellas la fiabilidad. En el caso de la mayoría de los sistemas físicos se detecta una degradación en la fiabilidad a medida que el sistema envejece. Esto es debido generalmente a efectos de desgaste. En el caso de los sistemas software esto no suele ocurrir, ya que los defectos que existen en ellos generalmente no han sido adquiridos con el paso del tiempo, sino que han sido insertados en el proceso de desarrollo de los mismos. Si dentro del proceso de generación de un sistema software se focaliza la atención en la etapa de codificación, podría plantearse un estudio que tratara de determinar la fiabilidad de distintos algoritmos, válidos para desempeñar el mismo cometido, según los posibles defectos que pudieran introducir los programadores. Este estudio básico podría tener diferentes aplicaciones, como por ejemplo elegir el algoritmo menos sensible a los defectos, para el desarrollo de un sistema crítico o establecer procedimientos de verificación y validación, más exigentes, si existe la necesidad de utilizar un algoritmo que tenga una alta sensibilidad a los defectos. En el presente trabajo de investigación se ha estudiado la influencia que tienen determinados tipos de defectos software en la fiabilidad de tres controladores de velocidad multivariable (PID, Fuzzy y LQR) al actuar en un robot móvil específico. La hipótesis planteada es que los controladores estudiados ofrecen distinta fiabilidad al verse afectados por similares patrones de defectos, lo cual ha sido confirmado por los resultados obtenidos. Desde el punto de vista de la planificación experimental, en primer lugar se realizaron los ensayos necesarios para determinar si los controladores de una misma familia (PID, Fuzzy o LQR) ofrecían una fiabilidad similar, bajo las mismas condiciones experimentales. Una vez confirmado este extremo, se eligió de forma aleatoria un representante de clase de cada familia de controladores, para efectuar una batería de pruebas más exhaustiva, con el objeto de obtener datos que permitieran comparar de una forma más completa la fiabilidad de los controladores bajo estudio. Ante la imposibilidad de realizar un elevado número de pruebas con un robot real, así como para evitar daños en un dispositivo que generalmente tiene un coste significativo, ha sido necesario construir un simulador multicomputador del robot. Dicho simulador ha sido utilizado tanto en las actividades de obtención de controladores bien ajustados, como en la realización de los diferentes ensayos necesarios para el experimento de fiabilidad. ABSTRACT Autonomous mobile robots and remotely operated robots are used successfully in very diverse scenarios, such as home cleaning, movement of goods in warehouses or space exploration. However, it is difficult to ensure the absence of defects in programs controlling these devices, as it happens in most computer sectors. There exist different quality measures of a system when performing the functions for which it was designed, among them, reliability. For most physical systems, a degradation occurs as the system ages. This is generally due to the wear effect. In software systems, this does not usually happen, and defects often come from system development and not from use. Let us assume that we focus on the coding stage in the software development pro¬cess. We could consider a study to find out the reliability of different and equally valid algorithms, taking into account any flaws that programmers may introduce. This basic study may have several applications, such as choosing the algorithm less sensitive to pro¬gramming defects for the development of a critical system. We could also establish more demanding procedures for verification and validation if we need an algorithm with high sensitivity to programming defects. In this thesis, we studied the influence of certain types of software defects in the reliability of three multivariable speed controllers (PID, Fuzzy and LQR) designed to work in a specific mobile robot. The hypothesis is that similar defect patterns affect differently the reliability of controllers, and it has been confirmed by the results. From the viewpoint of experimental planning, we followed these steps. First, we conducted the necessary test to determine if controllers of the same family (PID, Fuzzy or LQR) offered a similar reliability under the same experimental conditions. Then, a class representative was chosen at ramdom within each controller family to perform a more comprehensive test set, with the purpose of getting data to compare more extensively the reliability of the controllers under study. The impossibility of performing a large number of tests with a real robot and the need to prevent the damage of a device with a significant cost, lead us to construct a multicomputer robot simulator. This simulator has been used to obtain well adjusted controllers and to carry out the required reliability experiments.

Qualitative operational risk software -development of a software tool for determining the root of operational risk

This article shows software that allows determining the statistical behavior of qualitative data originating surveys previously transformed with a Likert’s scale to quantitative data. The main intention is offer to users a useful tool to know statistics' characteristics and forecasts of financial risks in a fast and simple way. Additionally,this paper presents the definition of operational risk. On the other hand, the article explains different techniques to do surveys with a Likert’s scale (Avila, 2008) to know expert’s opinion with the transformation of qualitative data to quantitative data. In addition, this paper will show how is very easy to distinguish an expert’s opinion related to risk, but when users have a lot of surveys and matrices is very difficult to obtain results because is necessary to compare common data. On the other hand, statistical value representative must be extracted from common data to get weight of each risk. In the end, this article exposes the development of “Qualitative Operational Risk Software” or QORS by its acronym, which has been designed to determine the root of risks in organizations and its value at operational risk OpVaR (Jorion, 2008; Chernobai et al, 2008) when input data comes from expert’s opinion and their associated matrices.

Studying the laws of software evolution in a long-lived FLOSS project

ome free, open-source software projects have been around for quite a long time, the longest living ones dating from the early 1980s. For some of them, detailed information about their evolution is available in source code management systems tracking all their code changes for periods of more than 15 years. This paper examines in detail the evolution of one of such projects, glibc, with the main aim of understanding how it evolved and how it matched Lehman's laws of software evolution. As a result, we have developed a methodology for studying the evolution of such long-lived projects based on the information in their source code management repository, described in detail several aspects of the history of glibc, including some activity and size metrics, and found how some of the laws of software evolution may not hold in this case

The Innovation Sources in Software Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review

During the last century many researches on the business, marketing and technology fields have developed the innovation research line and large amount of knowledge can be found in the literature. Currently, the importance of systematic and openness approaches to manage the available innovation sources is well established in many knowledge fields. Also in the software engineering sector, where the organizations need to absorb and to exploit as much innovative ideas as possible to get success in the current competitive environment. This Master Thesis presents an study related with the innovation sources in the software engineering eld. The main research goals of this work are the identication and the relevance assessment of the available innovation sources and the understanding of the trends on the innovation sources usage. Firstly, a general review of the literature have been conducted in order to define the research area and to identify research gaps. Secondly, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has been proposed as the research method in this work to report reliable conclusions collecting systematically quality evidences about the innovation sources in software engineering field. This contribution provides resources, built-on empirical studies included in the SLR, to support a systematic identication and an adequate exploitation of the innovation sources most suitable in the software engineering field. Several artefacts such as lists, taxonomies and relevance assessments of the innovation sources most suitable for software engineering have been built, and their usage trends in the last decades and their particularities on some countries and knowledge fields, especially on the software engineering, have been researched. This work can facilitate to researchers, managers and practitioners of innovative software organizations the systematization of critical activities on innovation processes like the identication and exploitation of the most suitable opportunities. Innovation researchers can use the results of this work to conduct research studies involving the innovation sources research area. Whereas, organization managers and software practitioners can use the provided outcomes in a systematic way to improve their innovation capability, increasing consequently the value creation in the processes that they run to provide products and services useful to their environment. In summary, this Master Thesis research the innovation sources in the software engineering field, providing useful resources to support an effective innovation sources management. Moreover, several aspects should be deeply study to increase the accuracy of the presented results and to obtain more resources built-on empirical knowledge. It can be supported by the INno- vation SOurces MAnagement (InSoMa) framework, which is introduced in this work in order to encourage openness and systematic approaches to identify and to exploit the innovation sources in the software engineering field.

Modelos de métrica para sistemas electrónicos de adquisición de datos y de procesamiento para investigación clínica con dispositivos cardiacos implantables

RESUMEN Las enfermedades cardiovasculares constituyen en la actualidad la principal causa de mortalidad en el mundo y se prevé que sigan siéndolo en un futuro, generando además elevados costes para los sistemas de salud. Los dispositivos cardiacos implantables constituyen una de las opciones para el diagnóstico y el tratamiento de las alteraciones del ritmo cardiaco. La investigación clínica con estos dispositivos alcanza gran relevancia para combatir estas enfermedades que tanto afectan a nuestra sociedad. Tanto la industria farmacéutica y de tecnología médica, como los propios investigadores, cada día se ven involucrados en un mayor número de proyectos de investigación clínica. No sólo el incremento en su volumen, sino el aumento de la complejidad, están generando mayores gastos en las actividades asociadas a la investigación médica. Esto está conduciendo a las compañías del sector sanitario a estudiar nuevas soluciones que les permitan reducir los costes de los estudios clínicos. Las Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones han facilitado la investigación clínica, especialmente en la última década. Los sistemas y aplicaciones electrónicos han proporcionado nuevas posibilidades en la adquisición, procesamiento y análisis de los datos. Por otro lado, la tecnología web propició la aparición de los primeros sistemas electrónicos de adquisición de datos, que han ido evolucionando a lo largo de los últimos años. Sin embargo, la mejora y perfeccionamiento de estos sistemas sigue siendo crucial para el progreso de la investigación clínica. En otro orden de cosas, la forma tradicional de realizar los estudios clínicos con dispositivos cardiacos implantables precisaba mejorar el tratamiento de los datos almacenados por estos dispositivos, así como para su fusión con los datos clínicos recopilados por investigadores y pacientes. La justificación de este trabajo de investigación se basa en la necesidad de mejorar la eficiencia en la investigación clínica con dispositivos cardiacos implantables, mediante la reducción de costes y tiempos de desarrollo de los proyectos, y el incremento de la calidad de los datos recopilados y el diseño de soluciones que permitan obtener un mayor rendimiento de los datos mediante la fusión de datos de distintas fuentes o estudios. Con este fin se proponen como objetivos específicos de este proyecto de investigación dos nuevos modelos: - Un modelo de recuperación y procesamiento de datos para los estudios clínicos con dispositivos cardiacos implantables, que permita estructurar y estandarizar estos procedimientos, con el fin de reducir tiempos de desarrollo Modelos de Métrica para Sistemas Electrónicos de Adquisición de Datos y de Procesamiento para Investigación Clínica con Dispositivos Cardiacos Implantables de estas tareas, mejorar la calidad del resultado obtenido, disminuyendo en consecuencia los costes. - Un modelo de métrica integrado en un Sistema Electrónico de Adquisición de Datos (EDC) que permita analizar los resultados del proyecto de investigación y, particularmente del rendimiento obtenido del EDC, con el fin de perfeccionar estos sistemas y reducir tiempos y costes de desarrollo del proyecto y mejorar la calidad de los datos clínicos recopilados. Como resultado de esta investigación, el modelo de procesamiento propuesto ha permitido reducir el tiempo medio de procesamiento de los datos en más de un 90%, los costes derivados del mismo en más de un 85% y todo ello, gracias a la automatización de la extracción y almacenamiento de los datos, consiguiendo una mejora de la calidad de los mismos. Por otro lado, el modelo de métrica posibilita el análisis descriptivo detallado de distintos indicadores que caracterizan el rendimiento del proyecto de investigación clínica, haciendo factible además la comparación entre distintos estudios. La conclusión de esta tesis doctoral es que los resultados obtenidos han demostrado que la utilización en estudios clínicos reales de los dos modelos desarrollados ha conducido a una mejora en la eficiencia de los proyectos, reduciendo los costes globales de los mismos, disminuyendo los tiempos de ejecución, e incrementando la calidad de los datos recopilados. Las principales aportaciones de este trabajo de investigación al conocimiento científico son la implementación de un sistema de procesamiento inteligente de los datos almacenados por los dispositivos cardiacos implantables, la integración en el mismo de una base de datos global y optimizada para todos los modelos de dispositivos, la generación automatizada de un repositorio unificado de datos clínicos y datos de dispositivos cardiacos implantables, y el diseño de una métrica aplicada e integrable en los sistemas electrónicos de adquisición de datos para el análisis de resultados de rendimiento de los proyectos de investigación clínica. ABSTRACT Cardiovascular diseases are the main cause of death worldwide and it is expected to continue in the future, generating high costs for health care systems. Implantable cardiac devices have become one of the options for diagnosis and treatment of cardiac rhythm disorders. Clinical research with these devices has acquired great importance to fight against these diseases that affect so many people in our society. Both pharmaceutical and medical technology companies, and also investigators, are involved in an increasingly number of clinical research projects. The growth in volume and the increase in medical research complexity are contributing to raise the expenditure level associated with clinical investigation. This situation is driving health care sector companies to explore new solutions to reduce clinical trial costs. Information and Communication Technologies have facilitated clinical research, mainly in the last decade. Electronic systems and software applications have provided new possibilities in the acquisition, processing and analysis of clinical studies data. On the other hand, web technology contributed to the appearance of the first electronic data capture systems that have evolved during the last years. Nevertheless, improvement of these systems is still a key aspect for the progress of clinical research. On a different matter, the traditional way to develop clinical studies with implantable cardiac devices needed an improvement in the processing of the data stored by these devices, and also in the merging of these data with the data collected by investigators and patients. The rationale of this research is based on the need to improve the efficiency in clinical investigation with implantable cardiac devices, by means of reduction in costs and time of projects development, as well as improvement in the quality of information obtained from the studies and to obtain better performance of data through the merging of data from different sources or trials. The objective of this research project is to develop the next two models: • A model for the retrieval and processing of data for clinical studies with implantable cardiac devices, enabling structure and standardization of these procedures, in order to reduce the time of development of these tasks, to improve the quality of the results, diminish therefore costs. • A model of metric integrated in an Electronic Data Capture system (EDC) that allow to analyze the results of the research project, and particularly the EDC performance, in order to improve those systems and to reduce time and costs of the project, and to get a better quality of the collected clinical data. As a result of this work, the proposed processing model has led to a reduction of the average time for data processing by more than 90 per cent, of related costs by more than 85 per cent, and all of this, through automatic data retrieval and storage, achieving an improvement of quality of data. On the other hand, the model of metrics makes possible a detailed descriptive analysis of a set of indicators that characterize the performance of each research project, allowing inter‐studies comparison. This doctoral thesis results have demonstrated that the application of the two developed models in real clinical trials has led to an improvement in projects efficiency, reducing global costs, diminishing time in execution, and increasing quality of data collected. The main contributions to scientific knowledge of this research work are the implementation of an intelligent processing system for data stored by implantable cardiac devices, the integration in this system of a global and optimized database for all models of devices, the automatic creation of an unified repository of clinical data and data stored by medical devices, and the design of a metric to be applied and integrated in electronic data capture systems to analyze the performance results of clinical research projects.

Software industry experiments: a systematic literature review

There is no specialized survey of experiments conducted in the software industry. Goal: Identify the major features of software industry experiments, such as time distribution, independent and dependent variables, subject types, design types and challenges. Method: Systematic literature review, taking the form of a scoping study. Results: We have identified 10 experiments and five quasi-experiments up to July 2012. Most were run as of 2003. The main features of these studies are that they test technologies related to quality and management and analyse outcomes related to effectiveness and effort. Most experiments have a factorial design. The major challenges faced by experimenters are to minimize the cost of running the experiment for the company and to schedule the experiment so as not to interfere with production processes.

Building lean thinking in a telecom software development organization: strengths and challenges.

The potential shown by Lean in different domains has aroused interest in the software industry. However, it remains unclear how Lean can be effectively applied in a domain such as software development that is fundamentally different from manufacturing. This study explores how Lean principles are implemented in software development companies and the challenges that arise when applying Lean Software Development. For that, a case study was conducted at Ericsson R&D Finland, which successfully adopted Scrum in 2009 and subsequently started a comprehensible transition to Lean in 2010. Focus groups were conducted with company representatives to help devise a questionnaire supporting the creation of a Lean mindset in the company (Team Amplifier). Afterwards, the questionnaire was used in 16 teams based in Finland, Hungary and China to evaluate the status of the transformation. By using Lean thinking, Ericsson R&D Finland has made important improvements to the quality of its products, customer satisfaction and transparency within the organization. Moreover, build times have been reduced over ten times and the number of commits per day has increased roughly five times.The study makes two main contributions to research. First, the main factors that have enabled Ericsson R&D?s achievements are analysed. Elements such as ?network of product owners?, ?continuous integration?, ?work in progress limits? and ?communities of practice? have been identified as being of fundamental importance. Second, three categories of challenges in using Lean Software Development were identified: ?achieving flow?, ?transparency? and ?creating a learning culture?

Metamodelo para la definición de metodologías de desarrollo software centradas en documentos y la mejora de la calidad de la documentación software

La documentación en los proyectos software presenta una serie de problemas que afectan a la calidad del producto y al proceso software. Con frecuencia, la documentación es considerada sólo como un volumen adicional de información disponible para la organización y el equipo de desarrollo, que ralentiza la ejecución del proyecto. En este sentido, el papel de la documentación en un proyecto se concibe como una de las actividades más costosas y que consumen más tiempo y que luego no se utiliza de forma extensiva. La documentación queda, en muchos casos, relegada a un segundo plano y es poco valorada frente a la comunicación cara a cara. Existe además una relación entre la calidad de la documentación y el proceso software. Se plantean dificultades en la adopción de buenas prácticas de proceso software y el impacto del exceso de documentación percibido por parte de los gestores de proyectos en los que se quiere abordad un programa de mejora del proceso software. Recordemos que la calidad de la documentación está muy relacionada con la utilización de la misma que puedan hacer los desarrolladores. Esta tesis aborda el problema planteando un cambio de punto de vista en el proceso software, en el que la documentación pasa de ser un sub producto de las actividades y tareas del proceso a ser el elemento que vertebra el propio proceso. En este nuevo punto de vista, la definición de los propios documentos, sus propiedades y relaciones permiten establecer y guiar procesos software de cualquier tipo. Para ello, desarrolla un metamodelo para definición de metodologías centradas en documentos. Este metamodelo se confronta con una serie atributos de calidad de la documentación software para comprobar que existe una mejora sobre estos, y, por consiguiente se mejora la calidad de la documentación software en general. Por último se utiliza este metamodelo centrado en documentos para describir una metodología ágil (Scrum) y validar la capacidad y flexibilidad del metamodelo utilizando el cambio de punto de vista sobre el proceso software planteado en esta tesis. ABSTRACT The documentation in software projects has a number of problems affecting the quality of the product and the software process. Often, documentation is considered only as an additional volume of information available to the organization and development team, which slows project execution. In this sense, the role of documentation in a project is conceived as one of the most expensive activities and more time-consuming and then not used extensively. The documentation is, in many cases, relegated to the background and is undervalued compared to face-to-face communication. There is also a relationship between the quality of the documentation and software process. There are difficulties in adopting good practices of software process and the impact of excess documentation perceived by project managers in Software Process Improvement activities. We have to remember that quality of the documentation is closely related to the use of it that can make developers. This thesis addresses the problem considering a change of view on the software process, in which the documentation happens to be a by-product of the activities and tasks of the process to be the element that structures the process itself. Through this new view, the definition of the documents themselves, their properties and relationships, allow us to establish processes and guidance for develop software of any kind. To achieve this target, a metamodel for defining document-centric methodologies has been developed. This metamodel confronts a number of quality attributes software documentation to prove that there is an improvement on these, and therefore the quality of the software documentation is improved. Finally this document-centric metamodel is used to describe an agile methodology (Scrum) to validate the capability and flexibility of the metamodel, using the proposed change of view on the software process described in this thesis.

Bankable procedures for the technical quality assurance of large scale PV plants

Strict technical quality assurance procedures are essential for PV plant bankability. When large-scale PV plants are concerned, this is typically accomplished in three consecutive phases: an energy yield forecast, that is performed at the beginning of the project and is typically accomplished by means of a simulation exercise performed with dedicated software; a reception test campaign, that is performed at the end of the commissioning and consists of a set of tests for determining the efficiency and the reliability of the PV plant devices; and a performance analysis of the first years of operation, that consists in comparing the real energy production with the one calculated from the recorded operating conditions and taking into account the maintenance records. In the last six years, IES-UPM has offered both indoor and on-site quality control campaigns for more than 60 PV plants, with an accumulated power of more than 300 MW, in close contact with Engineering, Procurement and Construction Contractors and financial entities. This paper presents the lessons learned from such experience.

BioMet®Phon: A system to monitor phonation quality in the clinics

BioMet®Phon is a software application developed for the characterization of voice in voice quality evaluation. Initially it was conceived as plain research code to estimate the glottal source from voice and obtain the biomechanical parameters of the vocal folds from the spectral density of the estimate. This code grew to what is now the Glottex®Engine package (G®E). Further demands from users in laryngology and speech therapy fields instantiated the development of a specific Graphic User Interface (GUI’s) to encapsulate user interaction with the G®E. This gave place to BioMet®Phon, an application which extracts the glottal source from voice and offers a complete parameterization of this signal, including distortion, cepstral, spectral, biomechanical, time domain, contact and tremor parameters. The semantic capabilities of biomechanical parameters are discussed. Study cases from its application to the field of laryngology and speech therapy are given and discussed. Validation results in voice pathology detection are also presented. Applications to laryngology, speech therapy, and monitoring neurological deterioration in the elder are proposed.

Categorization of Anti-Patterns in Software Project Management

In the last decades, software systems have become an intrinsic element in our daily lives. Software exists in our computers, in our cars, and even in our refrigerators. Today’s world has become heavily dependent on software and yet, we still struggle to deliver quality software products, on-time and within budget. When searching for the causes of such alarming scenario, we find concurrent voices pointing to the role of the project manager. But what is project management and what makes it so challenging? Part of the answer to this question requires a deeper analysis of why software project managers have been largely ineffective. Answering this question might assist current and future software project managers in avoiding, or at least effectively mitigating, problematic scenarios that, if unresolved, will eventually lead to additional failures. This is where anti-patterns come into play and where they can be a useful tool in identifying and addressing software project management failure. Unfortunately, anti-patterns are still a fairly recent concept, and thus, available information is still scarce and loosely organized. This thesis will attempt to help remedy this scenario. The objective of this work is to help organize existing, documented software project management anti-patterns by answering our two research questions: · What are the different anti-patterns in software project management? · How can these anti-patterns be categorized?

An Analysis Of The Recommended Knowledge For The Software Project Management Discipline

According to the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge), project management is “the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements” [1]. Project Management has proven to be one of the most important disciplines at the moment of determining the success of any project [2][3][4]. Given that many of the activities covered by this discipline can be said that are “horizontal” for any kind of domain, the importance of acknowledge the concepts and practices becomes even more obvious. The specific case of the projects that fall in the domain of Software Engineering are not the exception about the great influence of Project Management for their success. The critical role that this discipline plays in the industry has come to numbers. A report by McKinsey & Co [4] shows that the establishment of programs for the teaching of critical skills of project management can improve the performance of the project in time and costs. As an example of the above, the reports exposes: “One defense organization used these programs to train several waves of project managers and leaders who together administered a portfolio of more than 1,000 capital projects ranging in Project management size from $100,000 to $500 million. Managers who successfully completed the training were able to cut costs on most projects by between 20 and 35 percent. Over time, the organization expects savings of about 15 percent of its entire baseline spending”. In a white paper by the PMI (Project Management Institute) about the value of project management [5], it is stated that: “Leading organizations across sectors and geographic borders have been steadily embracing project management as a way to control spending and improve project results”. According to the research made by the PMI for the paper, after the economical crisis “Executives discovered that adhering to project management methods and strategies reduced risks, cut costs and improved success rates—all vital to surviving the economic crisis”. In every elite company, a proper execution of the project management discipline has become a must. Several members of the software industry have putted effort into achieving ways of assuring high quality results from projects; many standards, best practices, methodologies and other resources have been produced by experts from different fields of expertise. In the industry and the academic community, there is a continuous research on how to teach better software engineering together with project management [4][6]. For the general practices of Project Management the PMI produced a guide of the required knowledge that any project manager should have in their toolbox to lead any kind of project, this guide is called the PMBOK. On the side of best practices 10 and required knowledge for the Software Engineering discipline, the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) developed the SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body of Knowledge) in collaboration with software industry experts and academic researchers, introducing into the guide many of the needed knowledge for a 5-year expertise software engineer [7]. The SWEBOK also covers management from the perspective of a software project. This thesis is developed to provide guidance to practitioners and members of the academic community about project management applied to software engineering. The way used in this thesis to get useful information for practitioners is to take an industry-approved guide for software engineering professionals such as the SWEBOK, and compare the content to what is found in the PMBOK. After comparing the contents of the SWEBOK and the PMBOK, what is found missing in the SWEBOK is used to give recommendations on how to enrich project management skills for a software engineering professional. Recommendations for members of the academic community on the other hand, are given taking into account the GSwE2009 (Graduated Software Engineering 2009) standard [8]. GSwE2009 is often used as a main reference for software engineering master programs [9]. The standard is mostly based on the content of the SWEBOK, plus some contents that are considered to reinforce the education of software engineering. Given the similarities between the SWEBOK and the GSwE2009, the results of comparing SWEBOK and PMBOK are also considered valid to enrich what the GSwE2009 proposes. So in the end the recommendations for practitioners end up being also useful for the academic community and their strategies to teach project management in the context of software engineering.

A taxonomy of the quality attributes for distributed applications

The software engineering community has paid little attention to non-functional requirements, or quality attributes, compared with studies performed on capture, analysis and validation of functional requirements. This circumstance becomes more intense in the case of distributed applications. In these applications we have to take into account, besides the quality attributes such as correctness, robustness, extendibility, reusability, compatibility, efficiency, portability and ease of use, others like reliability, scalability, transparency, security, interoperability, concurrency, etc. In this work we will show how these last attributes are related to different abstractions that coexist in the problem domain. To achieve this goal, we have established a taxonomy of quality attributes of distributed applications and have determined the set of necessary services to support such attributes.

Guía para el desarrollo de software seguro

El presente Trabajo de Fin de Grado (TFG) es el resultado de la necesidad de la seguridad en la construcción del software ya que es uno de los mayores problemas con que se enfrenta hoy la industria debido a la baja calidad de la misma tanto en software de Sistema Operativo, como empotrado y de aplicaciones. La creciente dependencia de software para que se hagan trabajos críticos significa que el valor del software ya no reside únicamente en su capacidad para mejorar o mantener la productividad y la eficiencia. En lugar de ello, su valor también se deriva de su capacidad para continuar operando de forma fiable incluso de cara de los eventos que la amenazan. La capacidad de confiar en que el software seguirá siendo fiable en cualquier circunstancia, con un nivel de confianza justificada, es el objetivo de la seguridad del software. Seguridad del software es importante porque muchas funciones críticas son completamente dependientes del software. Esto hace que el software sea un objetivo de valor muy alto para los atacantes, cuyos motivos pueden ser maliciosos, penales, contenciosos, competitivos, o de naturaleza terrorista. Existen fuentes muy importantes de mejores prácticas, métodos y herramientas para mejorar desde los requisitos en sus aspectos no funcionales, ciclo de vida del software seguro, pasando por la dirección de proyectos hasta su desarrollo, pruebas y despliegue que debe ser tenido en cuenta por los desarrolladores. Este trabajo se centra fundamentalmente en elaborar una guía de mejores prácticas con la información existente CERT, CMMI, Mitre, Cigital, HP, y otras fuentes. También se plantea desarrollar un caso práctico sobre una aplicación dinámica o estática con el fin de explotar sus vulnerabilidades.---ABSTRACT---This Final Project Grade (TFG) is the result of the need for security in software construction as it is one of the biggest problems facing the industry today due to the low quality of it both OS software, embedded software and applications software. The increasing reliance on software for critical jobs means that the value of the software no longer resides solely in its capacity to improve or maintain productivity and efficiency. Instead, its value also stems from its ability to continue to operate reliably even when facing events that threaten it. The ability to trust that the software will remain reliable in all circumstances, with justified confidence level is the goal of software security. The security in software is important because many critical functions are completely dependent of the software. This makes the software to be a very high value target for attackers, whose motives may be by a malicious, by crime, for litigating, by competitiveness or by a terrorist nature. There are very important sources of best practices, methods and tools to improve the requirements in their non-functional aspects, the software life cycle with security in mind, from project management to its phases (development, testing and deployment) which should be taken into account by the developers. This paper focuses primarily on developing a best practice guide with existing information from CERT, CMMI, Mitre, Cigital, HP, and other organizations. It also aims to develop a case study on a dynamic or static application in order to exploit their vulnerabilities.

Diseño de una metodología CASE de desarrollo de software

En la actualidad existe una gran expectación ante la introducción de nuevas herramientas y métodos para el desarrollo de productos software, que permitirán en un futuro próximo un planteamiento de ingeniería del proceso de producción software. Las nuevas metodologías que empiezan a esbozarse suponen un enfoque integral del problema abarcando todas las fases del esquema productivo. Sin embargo el grado de automatización conseguido en el proceso de construcción de sistemas es muy bajo y éste está centrado en las últimas fases del ciclo de vida del software, consiguiéndose así una reducción poco significativa de sus costes y, lo que es aún más importante, sin garantizar la calidad de los productos software obtenidos. Esta tesis define una metodología de desarrollo software estructurada que se puede automatizar, es decir una metodología CASE. La metodología que se presenta se ajusta al modelo de ciclo de desarrollo CASE, que consta de las fases de análisis, diseño y pruebas; siendo su ámbito de aplicación los sistemas de información. Se establecen inicialmente los principios básicos sobre los que la metodología CASE se asienta. Posteriormente, y puesto que la metodología se inicia con la fijación de los objetivos de la empresa que demanda un sistema informático, se emplean técnicas que sirvan de recogida y validación de la información, que proporcionan a la vez un lenguaje de comunicación fácil entre usuarios finales e informáticos. Además, estas mismas técnicas detallarán de una manera completa, consistente y sin ambigüedad todos los requisitos del sistema. Asimismo, se presentan un conjunto de técnicas y algoritmos para conseguir que desde la especificación de requisitos del sistema se logre una automatización tanto del diseño lógico del Modelo de Procesos como del Modelo de Datos, validados ambos conforme a la especificación de requisitos previa. Por último se definen unos procedimientos formales que indican el conjunto de actividades a realizar en el proceso de construcción y cómo llevarlas a cabo, consiguiendo de esta manera una integridad en las distintas etapas del proceso de desarrollo.---ABSTRACT---Nowdays there is a great expectation with regard to the introduction of new tools and methods for the software products development that, in the very near future will allow, an engineering approach in the software development process. New methodologies, just emerging, imply an integral approach to the problem, including all the productive scheme stages. However, the automatization degree obtained in the systems construction process is very low and focused on the last phases of the software lifecycle, which means that the costs reduction obtained is irrelevant and, which is more important, the quality of the software products is not guaranteed. This thesis defines an structured software development methodology that can be automated, that is a CASE methodology. Such a methodology is adapted to the CASE development cycle-model, which consists in analysis, design and testing phases, being the information systems its field of application. Firstly, we present the basic principies on which CASE methodology is based. Secondly, since the methodology starts from fixing the objectives of the company demanding the automatization system, we use some techniques that are useful for gathering and validating the information, being at the same time an easy communication language between end-users and developers. Indeed, these same techniques will detail completely, consistently and non ambiguously all the system requirements. Likewise, a set of techniques and algorithms are shown in order to obtain, from the system requirements specification, an automatization of the Process Model logical design, and of the Data Model logical design. Those two models are validated according to the previous requirement specification. Finally, we define several formal procedures that suggest which set of activities to be accomplished in the construction process, and how to carry them out, getting in this way integrity and completness for the different stages of the development process.