Application of the Resources Model to the Supervision of an Automated Process

The present study was designed to ascertain how far flagging up potential errors can improve the automatic interpretation of technical documents. We used the resources model to analyze the supervised retro-conversion of architectural floor plans from the perspective of distributed cognition. Results showed that automated assistance helps users to correct errors spotted by the system and saves time. Surprisingly, they also showed that flagging up possible errors may make users less effective in identifying and correcting errors that go unnoticed by the system. Responses to a questionnaire probing the participants’ confidence in the system suggested that they were so trusting that they lowered their vigilance in those areas that had not been signaled by the system, leading to the identification of fewer errors there. Thus, although the participants’ confidence in the automated assistance system led to improved performances in those areas it highlighted, it also meant that areas to which the system did not draw attention were less thoroughly checked.     

Erhöhung der Energieeffizienz der Crossflow‐Filtration durch keramische Rohrmembranen einer neuen Generation

The effect of cross‐flow filtration of liquids relies on the continuous and controlled circulation of fluids in linear channels. The flow rate is of crucial importance to the economy of the process. TAMI Industries is investigating the use of so‐called additive processes to produce ceramic supports with geometric structures that cannot be produced using traditional technologies. In comparison to conventional geometries, it is possible to increase the permeate output without increasing the energy consumption or correspondingly reducing the energy consumption at the same permeate output.     

Guiding the use of collective feedback displayed on heatmaps to reduce group conformity and improve learning in Peer Instruction

Peer Instruction is an active learning method widely used in higher education, whereby students answer a series of questions twice, once before and once after peer discussion. There is an ongoing debate as to whether a collective feedback should be given after the students' initial answer, and if so, how the frequently observed group conformity can be avoided. This study examined whether guiding on the use of this feedback can reduce group conformity and improve learning using an interactive learning environment to administer a new type of quiz using graphics, and delivering collective feedback to the whole class in a novel heatmap format. In the experimental group, the teacher told the students that the answer indicated by the heatmap was not necessarily the correct one; this information was not given to students in the control group. Results revealed that guided students were less likely to adopt the (incorrect) majority answer than the non-guided students, and consequently, they were more likely to improve their learning by reaching an agreement about the correct answer through discussion with their peers. These findings suggest that guiding students in their use of collective feedback may have a crucial role in Peer Instruction.     

A model-driven traceability framework for software product lines

Software product line (SPL) engineering is a recent approach to software development where a set of software products are derived for a well defined target application domain, from a common set of core assets using analogous means of production (for instance, through Model Driven Engineering). Therefore, such family of products are built from reuse, instead of developed individually from scratch. SPL promise to lower the costs of development, increase the quality of software, give clients more flexibility and reduce time to market. These benefits come with a set of new problems and turn some older problems possibly more complex. One of these problems is traceability management. In the European AMPLE project we are creating a common traceability framework across the various activities of the SPL development. We identified four orthogonal traceability dimensions in SPL development, one of which is an extension of what is often considered as “traceability of variability”. This constitutes one of the two contributions of this paper. The second contribution is the specification of a metamodel for a repository of traceability links in the context of SPL and the implementation of a respective traceability framework. This framework enables fundamental traceability management operations, such as trace import and export, modification, query and visualization. The power of our framework is highlighted with an example scenario.     

Eager interpretation of on-line hand-drawn structured documents: The DALI methodology

On-line hand-drawn structured document interpretation is a complex problem of pattern recognition. This paper deals with eager strategies for such purpose, i.e. consisting in updating the analyzed document after each input stroke and providing a corresponding feedback to the user. We have designed a new class of visual grammars for the modeling of structured document composition: the context-driven constraint multiset grammars (CD-CMG). Their main originalities are to model the structural context in which a production can be reduced and to take into account the hand-drawn nature of the considered data. Its associated parser exploits the formalized knowledge for predictive purposes and couples bottom-up and top-down strategies. Their context-sensitiveness helps reducing significantly the combinatory associated to the analysis process. We use the fuzzy set framework to evaluate each possible interpretation on a qualitative way. Reject options are exploited to increase the decision making robustness and to detect the need for stroke segmentation. The parser is also able to wait for more information before making a decision by using a branch and bound algorithm. In this paper, we provide experimental results showing that the method is efficient enough to be used in real-time applications. We illustrate this point by focusing on a commercialized pen-based system that is based on the DALI method we present in this paper.     

Test case selection in industry: an analysis of issues related to static approaches

Automatic testing constitutes an important part of everyday development practice. Worldline, a major IT company, is creating more and more tests to ensure the good behavior of its applications and gains in efficiency and quality. But running all these tests may take hours. This is especially true for large systems involving, for example, the deployment of a web server or communication with a database. For this reason, tests are not launched as often as they should be and are mostly run at night. The company wishes to improve its development and testing process by giving to developers rapid feedback after a change. An interesting solution is to reduce the number of tests to run by identifying only those exercising the piece of code changed. Two main approaches are proposed in the literature: static and dynamic. The static approach creates a model of the source code and explores it to find links between changed methods and tests. The dynamic approach records invocations of methods during the execution of test scenarios. Before deploying a test case selection solution, Worldline created a partnership with us to investigate the situation in its projects and to evaluate these approaches on three industrial, closed source, cases to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each solution. We propose a classification of problems that may arise when trying to identify the tests that cover a method. We give concrete examples of these problems and list some possible solutions. We also evaluate other issues such as the impact on the results of the frequency of modification of methods or considering groups of methods instead of single ones. We found that solutions must be combined to obtain better results, and problems have different impacts on projects. Considering commits instead of individual methods tends to worsen the results, perhaps due to their large size.     

Understanding Social Cohesion Differences in Common Interest Housing Developments

The worldwide upsurge of common interest housing developments (CIDs) has stirred up debates regarding community development and social cohesion. Critics have argued that CIDs lack social cohesion because people regulate the community via rules and contracts rather than through social relationships and mutual contact. However, some research points at high levels of socialization and friendship in CIDs, facilitated by the homogeneity of the community in terms of socio-economic class and cultural background. This paper takes the uncertainty regarding social cohesion in CIDs as its starting point. On the basis of empirical research in three cases, this paper shows that social cohesion in CIDs varies, and that themes such as golfing or ecological sustainability play an important role in the development of social cohesion. The paper shows how a clear theme facilitates the development of shared symbols and rituals, and provides logical points of social encounter and interaction.     

Mining architectural violations from version history

Software architecture conformance is a key software quality control activity that aims to reveal the progressive gap normally observed between concrete and planned software architectures. However, formally specifying an architecture can be difficult, as it must be done by an expert of the system having a high level understanding of it. In this paper, we present a lightweighted approach for architecture conformance based on a combination of static and historical source code analysis. The proposed approach relies on four heuristics for detecting absences (something expected was not found) and divergences (something prohibited was found) in source code based architectures. We also present an architecture conformance process based on the proposed approach. We followed this process to evaluate the architecture of two industrial-strength information systems, achieving an overall precision of 62.7 % and 53.8 %. We also evaluated our approach in an open-source information retrieval library, achieving an overall precision of 59.2 %. We envision that an heuristic-based approach for architecture conformance can be used to rapidly raise architectural warnings, without deeply involving experts in the process.