Why software fails [software failure]

Most IT experts agree that software failures occur far more often than they should despite the fact that, for the most part, they are predictable and avoidable. It is unfortunate that most organizations don't see preventing failure as an urgent matter, even though that view risks harming the organization and maybe even destroying it. Because software failure has tremendous implications for business and society, it is important to understand why this attitude persists.     

Crashproof codes [flight software]

Boeing Co. and NASA have joined forces for the Active Aeroelastic Wing (AAW) Project to test the way a modified F/A-18 strike fighter uses its wings. The AAW was designed to be flexible enough to be twisted on demand in flight and it could herald nothing less than a revolution in aviation. The twisting can be used to control the plane's roll, reducing and ultimately eliminating the need for ailerons and flaps and their associated hardware. AAW-equipped planes would result to increased fuel efficiency and improved maneuverability, able to execute sharper turns at higher speeds. A special flight software was developed to keep track of the plane's speed, altitude, and attitude while monitoring the pilot's controls for commands. Based on a set of rules known as control laws, the software must then translate any commands from the pilot into movements of the aircraft's various control surfaces such as the rudders or, most significantly, the flaps that flex the AAWs. Despite its complex and critical job, the flight software is compact, consisting of only about 13,000 lines of source code written in the Ada language.     

Collaboration nation [group software]

As group software assumes a major role in the workplace, will engineers stop talking to each other? Communication is the essence of collaboration, and increasingly communication about semiconductor design is happening over the Internet not only through e-mail and threaded discussion boards, but also through specially designed Web collaboration software that lets engineers work on parts of the same chip simultaneously, whether they are down the hall or across the world. The increasing use of collaborative software has raised concerns that the engineering workplace would suffer from diminished human contact, and that engineers would be transformed into zombie-like automatons, addicted to their workstations. That hasn't happened; workplace experts say that engineers rely as much as ever on face-to-face interactions.     

The exterminators [software bugs]

This paper describes a sound methodology developed at Praxis High Integrity Systems for detecting and exterminating bugs during all stages of a software project. To develop software, the London-based software house uses mathematically based techniques, known as formal methods, which require that programmers begin their work not by writing code but rather by stringing together special symbols that represent the program's logic. Like a mathematical theorem, these symbol strings can be checked to verify that they form logically correct statements. Once the programmer has checked that the program doesn't have logical flaws, it's a relatively simple matter to convert those symbols into programming code. With an average of less than one error in every 10,000 lines of delivered code, Praxis claims a bug rate that is at least 50 times better than the industry standard.     

Total recall [life recording software]

This paper describes a Microsoft research initiative that focuses on memory augmentation. The research is primarily based on the MyLifeBits Project of Microsoft researcher, Gordon Bell, who, for two years, collected real life data using sensors and a still camera, called SenseCam, with the aim of developing a improved means of information retrieval. With the MyLifeBits software, the SenseCam, and the low cost of memory of all kinds, the rebirth of the PC into a personal mainframe can be realized.     

The African hacker [software development]

This paper narrates the success story of Hermann Chinery-Hesse, chief of Soft Tribe Ltd. located at Ghana, West Africa. Chinery-Hesse has made a small fortune writing software, working as a systems architect, and selling computer code to hundreds of businesses in his country. Through Soft, Chinery-Hesse has also been providing training programs for the country's growing population of full-time programmers. His dream remains to expand software in Ghana, to make more money and to show the world that despite the often depressing headlines about poverty and mayhem in Africa, there are opportunities for technical talent.     

Open-source media [mobile multimedia software]

Multimedia is opening up a vast new frontier for software companies, thanks to the rapid growth of broadband connections to desktop computers and ever more capable cell-phones and wireless PDAs. RealNetworks is about to find out if its open-source gambit is going to pay off, as the first wave of Helix-powered hardware reaches the market. So far, only a handful of such devices have been released, including the Sony Vega television in Japan and the palmOne Treo 650 smart phone in the United States. No doubt other software vendors are watching closely; an open-source model that compels all developers to assign copyright back to the "mother ship" could soon become the preferred way to nurture communities of developers.     

Automatic test-generation for predicates [software testing]

The authors propose a new technique for the automatic generation of test cases for predicates. Earlier, they proposed an efficient effective test generation strategy for Boolean expressions. They now extend this strategy to predicates. Their new strategy addresses several issues, including: analysis of dependencies between relational expressions in a predicate 𝒫; generation of test constraints for 𝒫 based on the detection of Boolean and relational operator faults in 𝒫; and generation of actual tests according to the generated test constraints for 𝒫. They propose: the use of constraint logic programming (CLP) to automate test-data generation for a predicate; and an incremental approach to apply CLP techniques to solve a constraint system. Since their technique is specification-based, it can facilitate generation of anticipated outputs for actual tests     

Tools for schools [mathematical software packages]

The latest math packages for engineering education offer: programming through icons; collaboration over the Internet; electronic textbooks; and free courseware on the Web. Mathematical software tools can be divided into two groups: programs that chiefly perform symbolic manipulations (also called computer algebra programs for their ability to find exact solutions to analytical expressions) and programs used primarily for large numerical calculations. But the line between these tools is blurring, for some leading vendors now produce packages that include both numerical and symbolic capabilities. The author discusses both types of program and describes some of the features and functions of the programs     

Technical software [Technology 2000 analysis and forecast]

Twenty years ago, only a handful of visionaries could have predicted that powerful software born of supercomputing would butt its way into almost every desktop PC. Few foresaw the scale of data that would be manipulated or the complexity of the tasks that would be performed by software tools costing a few hundred dollars. But now, all developers of technical software take it as given that users may need to process gigabytes of data drawn from a combination of sources: instrument output; archived data; and publicly available materials, such as census data downloaded from the Internet. In this paper, the author argues that, in a sophisticated marketplace, the success of those developers hinges on equipping users to gain ever swifter insight into many reams of data     

Agents on the move [mobile software agents]

The author describes a new kind of software, based on artificial intelligence research, that can move itself from place to place to help people work more effectively. Known as agents, these artificial assistants are software components that live inside computer environments. Developed out of research in artificial intelligence (AI), agents were made in a variety of forms to perform all sorts of useful work-including obtaining airline departure dates and times, filtering e-mail for messages the user considers important, alerting users to significant stock price changes, and a host of other tasks. At first, agents were constrained to a single computer or at most to a single computing environment-a closed, homogenous network of, say, Unix platforms. Their behavior was limited and all the tasks they could do had to be pre-established. Today, agents are breaking the bonds that confine them to a single environment while learning new ways of accomplishing tasks on their own, based on their experience. The newcomers are called mobile agents, because they can move from one computer to another. As they emerge from the shadow of AI research, they are bringing together telecommunications, software, and distributed-system technologies to create new ways of getting things done     

Choosing an optimal set of libraries [software reliability]

This paper presents optimization models for selecting a subset of software libraries, viz, collections of programs, residing on floppy disks or compact disks, available on the market. Each library contains a variety of programs whose reliabilities are assumed to be known. The objective is to maximize the reliability of the computer system subject to a budget constraint on the total cost of the libraries selected. The paper includes six models, each of which applies to a different software structure and assumptions. A detailed branch and bound algorithm for solving one of the six models is described; it contains a simple greedy-procedure for generating an initial solution