Moomba - A collaborative environment for supporting distributed extreme programming in global software development

Global Software Development (GSD) is an emerging distributive software engineering practice, in which a higher communication overhead due to temporal and geographical separation among developers is traded with gains in reduced development cost, improved flexibility and mobility for developers, increased access to skilled resource-pools and convenience of customer involvements. However, due to its distributive nature, GSD faces many fresh challenges in aspects relating to project coordination, awareness, collaborative coding and effective communication. New software engineering methodologies and processes are required to address these issues. Research has shown that, with adequate support tools, Distributed Extreme Programming (DXP) – a distributive variant of an agile methodology – Extreme Programming (XP) can be both efficient and beneficial to GDS projects. In this paper, we present the design and realization of a collaborative environment, called Moomba, which assists a distributed team in both instantiation and execution of a DXP process in GSD projects.

Dartboard arrangements with a concave penalty function

This paper investigates combinatorial arrangements of the dartboard to maximize a penalty function derived from the differences of adjacent sectors. The particular penalty function is constructed by summing the absolute differences of neighbouring sectors raised to a power between zero and one. The arrangement to give the maximum penalty is found

OntoRama: Browsing RDF ontologies using a hyperbolic-style browser

This paper presents a Java-based hyperbolic-style browser designed to render RDF files as structured ontological maps. The program was motivated by the need to browse the content of a web-accessible ontology server: WEB KB-2. The ontology server contains descriptions of over 74,500 object types derived from the WordNet 1.7 lexical database and can be accessed using RDF syntax. Such a structure creates complications for hyperbolic-style displays. In WEB KB-2 there are 140 stable ontology link types and a hyperbolic display needs to filter and iconify the view so different link relations can be distinguished in multi-link views. Our browsing tool, OntoRama, is therefore motivated by two possibly interfering aims: the first to display up to 10 times the number of nodes in a hyperbolic-style view than using a conventional graphics display; secondly, to render the ontology with multiple links comprehensible in that view.

On the relative complexity of labelled modal tableaux

We investigate the relative complexity of two free-variable labelled modal tableaux(KEM and Single Step Tableaux, SST). We discuss the reasons why p-simulation is not a proper measure of the relative complexity of tableaux-like proof systems, and we propose an improved comparison scale (p-search-simulation). Finally we show that KEM p-search-simulates SST while SST cannot p-search-simulate KEM.