Protocol to design techniques for implementing software development best practices

Software engineering best practices allow significantly improving the software development. However, the implementation of best practices requires skilled professionals, financial investment and technical support to facilitate implementation and achieve the respective improvement. In this paper we proposes a protocol to design techniques to implement best practices of software engineering. The protocol includes the identification and selection of process to improve, the study of standards and models, identification of best practices associated with the process and the possible implementation techniques. In addition, technical design activities are defined in order to create or adapt the techniques of implementing best practices for software development.

XML-Intensive software development

168 p.

Favorability conditions in the adoption of agile method practices for software development in a public banking

The main purpose of this paper is to propose and test a model to assess the degree of conditions favorability in the adoption of agile methods to develop software where traditional methods predominate. In order to achieve this aim, a survey was applied on software developers of a Brazilian public retail bank. Two different statistical techniques were used in order to assess the quantitative data from the closed questions in the survey. The first, exploratory factorial analysis validated the structure of perspectives related to the agile model of the proposed assessment. The second, frequency distribution analysis to categorize the answers. Qualitative data from the survey opened question were analyzed with the technique of qualitative thematic content analysis. As a result, the paper proposes a model to assess the degree of favorability conditions in the adoption of Agile practices within the context of the proposed study.

RTOS Framework for Real-Time Control System

This thesis is done as a complementary part for the active magnet bearing (AMB) control software development project in Lappeenranta University of Technology. The main focus of the thesis is to examine an idea of a real-time operating system (RTOS) framework that operates in a dedicated digital signal processor (DSP) environment. General use real-time operating systems do not necessarily provide sufficient platform for periodic control algorithm utilisation. In addition, application program interfaces found in real-time operating systems are commonly non-existent or provided as chip-support libraries, thus hindering platform independent software development. Hence, two divergent real-time operating systems and additional periodic extension software with the framework design are examined to find solutions for the research problems. The research is discharged by; tracing the selected real-time operating system, formulating requirements for the system, and designing the real-time operating system framework (OSFW). The OSFW is formed by programming the framework and conjoining the outcome with the RTOS and the periodic extension. The system is tested and functionality of the software is evaluated in theoretical context of the Rate Monotonic Scheduling (RMS) theory. The performance of the OSFW and substance of the approach are discussed in contrast to the research theme. The findings of the thesis demonstrates that the forged real-time operating system framework is a viable groundwork solution for periodic control applications.

Uma API criptográfica para aplicações embarcadas

This document presents GEmSysC, an unified cryptographic API for embedded systems. Software layers implementing this API can be built over existing libraries, allowing embedded software to access cryptographic functions in a consistent way that does not depend on the underlying library. The API complies to good practices for API design and good practices for embedded software development and took its inspiration from other cryptographic libraries and standards. The main inspiration for creating GEmSysC was the CMSIS-RTOS standard, which defines an unified API for embedded software in an implementation-independent way, but targets operating systems instead of cryptographic functions. GEmSysC is made of a generic core and attachable modules, one for each cryptographic algorithm. This document contains the specification of the core of GEmSysC and three of its modules: AES, RSA and SHA-256. GEmSysC was built targeting embedded systems, but this does not restrict its use only in such systems – after all, embedded systems are just very limited computing devices. As a proof of concept, two implementations of GEmSysC were made. One of them was built over wolfSSL, which is an open source library for embedded systems. The other was built over OpenSSL, which is open source and a de facto standard. Unlike wolfSSL, OpenSSL does not specifically target embedded systems. The implementation built over wolfSSL was evaluated in a Cortex- M3 processor with no operating system while the implementation built over OpenSSL was evaluated on a personal computer with Windows 10 operating system. This document displays test results showing GEmSysC to be simpler than other libraries in some aspects. These results have shown that both implementations incur in little overhead in computation time compared to the cryptographic libraries themselves. The overhead of the implementation has been measured for each cryptographic algorithm and is between around 0% and 0.17% for the implementation over wolfSSL and between 0.03% and 1.40% for the one over OpenSSL. This document also presents the memory costs for each implementation.

Software transactional memory as a building block for parallel embedded realtime systems

The recent trends of chip architectures with higher number of heterogeneous cores, and non-uniform memory/non-coherent caches, brings renewed attention to the use of Software Transactional Memory (STM) as a fundamental building block for developing parallel applications. Nevertheless, although STM promises to ease concurrent and parallel software development, it relies on the possibility of aborting conflicting transactions to maintain data consistency, which impacts on the responsiveness and timing guarantees required by embedded real-time systems. In these systems, contention delays must be (efficiently) limited so that the response times of tasks executing transactions are upper-bounded and task sets can be feasibly scheduled. In this paper we assess the use of STM in the development of embedded real-time software, defending that the amount of contention can be reduced if read-only transactions access recent consistent data snapshots, progressing in a wait-free manner. We show how the required number of versions of a shared object can be calculated for a set of tasks. We also outline an algorithm to manage conflicts between update transactions that prevents starvation.

Online Alpha Wave detector: an Embedded hardware-software implementation

The recent trend on embedded system development opens a new prospect for applications that in the past were not possible. The eye tracking for sleep and fatigue detection has become an important and useful application in industrial and automotive scenarios since fatigue is one of the most prevalent causes of earth-moving equipment accidents. Typical applications such as cameras, accelerometers and dermal analyzers are present on the market but have some inconvenient. This thesis project has used EEG signal, particularly, alpha waves, to overcome them by using an embedded software-hardware implementation to detect these signals in real time

A Referential Model for Small Companies of Development Software

This paper presents the proposal for a reference model for developing software aimed at small companies. Despite the importance of that represent the small software companies in Latin America, the fact of not having its own standards, and able to meet their specific, has created serious difficulties in improving their process and also in quality certification. In this sense and as a contribution to better understanding of the subject they propose a reference model and as a means to validate the proposal, presents a report of its application in a small Brazilian company, committed to certification of the quality model MPS.BR.

Non-preemptive and SRP-based fullypreemptive scheduling of real-time Software Transactional Memory

Recent embedded processor architectures containing multiple heterogeneous cores and non-coherent caches renewed attention to the use of Software Transactional Memory (STM) as a building block for developing parallel applications. STM promises to ease concurrent and parallel software development, but relies on the possibility of abort conflicting transactions to maintain data consistency, which in turns affects the execution time of tasks carrying transactions. Because of this fact the timing behaviour of the task set may not be predictable, thus it is crucial to limit the execution time overheads resulting from aborts. In this paper we formalise a FIFO-based algorithm to order the sequence of commits of concurrent transactions. Then, we propose and evaluate two non-preemptive and one SRP-based fully-preemptive scheduling strategies, in order to avoid transaction starvation.

Performance analysis of software run-time behaviour using 3D-visualisation

Monimutkaisen tietokonejärjestelmän suorituskykyoptimointi edellyttää järjestelmän ajonaikaisen käyttäytymisen ymmärtämistä. Ohjelmiston koon ja monimutkaisuuden kasvun myötä suorituskykyoptimointi tulee yhä tärkeämmäksi osaksi tuotekehitysprosessia. Tehokkaampien prosessorien käytön myötä myös energiankulutus ja lämmöntuotto ovat nousseet yhä suuremmiksi ongelmiksi, erityisesti pienissä, kannettavissa laitteissa. Lämpö- ja energiaongelmien rajoittamiseksi on kehitetty suorituskyvyn skaalausmenetelmiä, jotka edelleen lisäävät järjestelmän kompleksisuutta ja suorituskykyoptimoinnin tarvetta. Tässä työssä kehitettiin visualisointi- ja analysointityökalu ajonaikaisen käyttäytymisen ymmärtämisen helpottamiseksi. Lisäksi kehitettiin suorituskyvyn mitta, joka mahdollistaa erilaisten skaalausmenetelmien vertailun ja arvioimisen suoritusympäristöstä riippumatta, perustuen joko suoritustallenteen tai teoreettiseen analyysiin. Työkalu esittää ajonaikaisesti kerätyn tallenteen helposti ymmärrettävällä tavalla. Se näyttää mm. prosessit, prosessorikuorman, skaalausmenetelmien toiminnan sekä energiankulutuksen kolmiulotteista grafiikkaa käyttäen. Työkalu tuottaa myös käyttäjän valitsemasta osasta suorituskuvaa numeerista tietoa, joka sisältää useita oleellisia suorituskykyarvoja ja tilastotietoa. Työkalun sovellettavuutta tarkasteltiin todellisesta laitteesta saatua suoritustallennetta sekä suorituskyvyn skaalauksen simulointia analysoimalla. Skaalausmekanismin parametrien vaikutus simuloidun laitteen suorituskykyyn analysoitiin.

Object-oriented development of client / server application: case study of service control software

Tässä työssä on esitetty sen ohjelmiston kehittämisen prosessi, joka on tarkoitettu annettavien palveluiden valvottavaksi käyttäen prototyyppimallia. Raportti sisältää vaatimusten, kohteisiin suunnatun analyysin ja suunnittelun, realisointiprosessien kuvauksen ja prototyypin testauksen. Ohjelmiston käyttöala – antavien palveluiden valvonta. Vaatimukset sovellukselle analysoitiin ohjelmistomarkkinoiden perusteella sekä ohjelmiston engineeringin periaatteiden mukaisesti. Ohjelmiston prototyyppi on realisoitu käyttäen asiakas-/palvelinhybridimallia sekä ralaatiokantaa. Kehitetty ohjelmisto on tarkoitettu venäläisille tietokonekerhoille, jotka erikoistuvat pelipalvelinten antamiseen.

Physical layer development in third generation protocol software architecture

Diplomityön tavoitteena oli kehittää kolmannen sukupolven fyysistä protokollakerrosta matkapuhelimen ohjelmistoarkkitehtuurille. Kolmannen sukupolven matkapuhelinjärjestelmät ovat aikaisempia järjestelmiä monimutkaisempia. Ohjelmiston koon ja monimutkaisuuden sekä aikataulujen kiireellisyyden vuoksi on tullut tarve ottaa käyttöön formaaleja menetelmiä ohjelmiston kehitystyöhön. Formaalit kuvauskielet mahdollistavat tarkan, yksiselitteisen ja simuloitavissa olevan järjestelmäkuvauksen muodostamisen. Fyysinen protokollakerros tarjoaa tiedon siirtoa ylemmille protokollakerroksille. Tämän tiedonsiirron hallinta vaatii protokollakerrosten välistä viestinvälitystä. Formaaleja kuvauskieliä käyttämällä voidaan viestinvälityksen toteutusta automatisoida ja siinä tarvittavaa logiikkaa havainnollistaa. Työssä suunniteltiin, toteutettiin ja testattiin ylempien protokollakerrosten kanssa kommunikoivaa osaa fyysisestä protokollakerroksesta. Tuloksena saatiin solunvalintatoiminnallisuuden vaatiman kommunikoinnin ja tilakoneen toteutus ohjelmistoarkkitehtuurissa. Ohjelmistonkehityksen alkuvaiheiden havaittiin olevan fyysisen kerroksen suorituskyvyn kannalta merkittävässä asemassa, koska tällöin viestinvälityksen optimointi on helpointa. Formaalit kuvauskielet eivät ole sellaisenaan täysin soveltuvia tarkoin määritellyn ohjelmistoarkkitehtuurin osien kehitykseen.