Restoring a legacy: lessons learned

Rebuilding a legacy system has some parallels to the restoration of a work of art. The authors draw upon this comparison to illustrate the challenges they faced in redesigning a telephony system. The restoration involved far more than updating the code, the development team also had to understand the existing architecture, add new functionality, and develop a long-term hardware migration plan. The technical and managerial lessons learned should prove valuable to those involved in similar projects     

Rapid prototyping: lessons learned

Opinions on rapid prototyping as a practical development tool vary widely, with conventional wisdom seeing it more as a research topic than a workable method. The authors counter this notion with results from 39 case studies, most of which have used this approach successfully     

MySQL: lessons learned on a digital library

In recent years, the open source products have achieved enterprise-level quality. In response, enterprises have become more interested in migrating from proprietary, commercial products to open source. Businesses around the world commonly use the two leading open source relational DBMSs, MySQL and PostgreSQL. The Los Alamos National Laboratory's Research Library has used MySQL databases for years. However, a recent project to develop a comprehensive database of scientific journal articles and citation information revealed its unique strengths and features.     

可用性测试平台

阐明了软件可用性测试的重要性及其方法分类,着重说明了用户测试方法的步骤.介绍了所设计的软件可用性测试平台的特点和建设该平台的必要性,通过该平台对鱼眼菜单、单列菜单、级联式菜单进行了可用性测试.在测试用户较少的情况下,实验结果与其它主流实验室的结果相一致,表明了该实验平台的有效性和高效性.最后,对该测试平台可能的改进提出了设想.     

UML formal semantics: lessons learned

The article below presents the insights gained during a number of years of research dedicated to the formalisation of the Unified Modeling Language.     

Design measurement: some lessons learned

The author extracts from several measurement projects some of the important lessons he has learned about measurement in general and design measurement in particular. He synthesizes from these lessons a design-measurement framework in an attempt to communicate his personal measurement experience to other software engineers. The lessons he has learned fall into three areas: (1) how measurement must be applied in individual experiments or case studies; (2) how measurement can help continuously improve an organization's state of the practice; and (3) why measurement requires automated support.<>     

Cognitive skills training: lessons learned

This paper describes lessons we have learned about presenting cognitive skills training. We have used ShadowBox as our training approach (Klein and Borders in J Cogn Eng Decis Mak 10:268–280, 2016), but the lessons apply regardless of specific techniques employed. We analyze key takeaways and lessons learned throughout the course of multiple ShadowBox projects. We explain how the original ShadowBox mission statement has evolved based on these lessons learned. Recommendations are offered for others who are engaged in cognitive skills training.     

Interactive remote instruction: lessons learned

This paper describes experiences with the use of the interactive remote instruction (IRI) system which was used to teach a computer science graduate course at Old Dominion University during the Fall 1995 semester. Through the use of high-speed networks and high performance workstations, IRI creates a virtual classroom so that geographically dispersed students can fully participate in a class. Central to this system is the availability of a personal workstation to each student through which the class is taken. Placing a workstation at each student's disposal opens the opportunity for student interaction and group collaboration. We compare this approach with other educational settings and describe lessons learned from instructor, student and technical perspectives. We also describe changes we are putting in place for an expanded usage in the coming fall semester using fiberoptic cable supporting a WAN internet protocol.     

Intelligent lessons learned systems

Lessons learned processes have been deployed in commercial, government, and military organizations since the late 1980s to capture, store, disseminate, and share experiential working knowledge. However, recent studies have shown that software systems for supporting lesson dissemination do not effectively promote knowledge sharing. We found that the problems with these systems are related to their textual representation for lessons and that they are not incorporated into the processes they are intended to support. In this article, we survey lessons learned processes and systems, detail their capabilities and limitations, examine lessons learned system design issues, and identify how artificial intelligence technologies can contribute to knowledge management solutions for these systems.     

ERP requirements engineering practice: lessons learned

Standard off-the-shelf requirements engineering processes have become a key to conceptualizing any integrated, corporate-wide solution based on packaged enterprise resource planning software. A generic RE model offers defined processes, suggests process stakeholders, specifies steps to accomplish tasks, indicates task dependencies, and provides standard tool support for ERP RE. Essentially, any off-the-shelf RE process is about composition and reconciliation: you start with a general set of business process and data requirements, then explore standard ERP functionality to see how closely it matches your organization's process and data needs.     

Ada and real-time robotics: lessons learned

The Supervisory Telerobotics Laboratory (Steler) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has developed a prototype telerobotic system to demonstrate the type of technology that will be used aboard Space Station Freedom Although the concept of telerobotics for space exploration is not new, the Steler system broke new ground in its demonstration of the feasibility of a local-remote architecture, including ground-remote control, for space applications. A remote space environment poses some interesting computational challenges to ground-remote control of space applications. A remote site has limited computation facilities, is burdened by minimal bandwidth and by round-trip communication delays of as much as 8 seconds, and yet is expected to respond quickly, predictably, and with recoverability to any anomalous situation. Additional design constraints are imposed by NASA's limitations on software, including on-board programs for the robot, being uploaded to the remote site without prior flight qualification. The authors discuss the use of Ada to meet the computational requirements of this project     

Teaching PSP: challenges and lessons learned

Software engineering educators need to provide environments where students learn about the size and complexity of modern software systems and the techniques available for managing these difficulties. Five universities used the personal software process to teach software engineering concepts in a variety of contexts.     

Handhelds go to school: lessons learned

Working in conjunction with teachers, researchers have developed a series of projects exploring the potential for using wireless handheld devices to enhance K-12 classroom instruction.     

Usability testing in 2000 and beyond

Usability testing is a widely used technique to evaluate user performance and acceptance of products and systems. It was introduced in the late 1980s and rose to popularity in the past decade. This paper provides a view of the current status of usability testing as a method and describes how it will be used in the 21st century. Although usability testing may not be the most efficient technique for discovery of usability problems, it is a reliable way to estimate quantitatively users' performance and subjective satisfaction with products. Four major trends in usability testing include: common reporting formats and methods for industry; Internet application and website testing; testing of mobile, handheld devices; and testing in more naturalistic environments such as simulated homes and classrooms. In the 21st century, ‘quick and clean’ usability testing methods are needed to provide valid and reliable data on how well people use products and systems, and how they like using them.     

Usability testing in 2000 and beyond

Usability testing is a widely used technique to evaluate user performance and acceptance of products and systems. It was introduced in the late 1980s and rose to popularity in the past decade. This paper provides a view of the current status of usability testing as a method and describes how it will be used in the 21st century. Although usability testing may not be the most efficient technique for discovery of usability problems, it is a reliable way to estimate quantitatively users' performance and subjective satisfaction with products. Four major trends in usability testing include: common reporting formats and methods for industry; Internet application and website testing; testing of mobile, handheld devices; and testing in more naturalistic environments such as simulated homes and classrooms. In the 21st century, 'quick and clean' usability testing methods are needed to provide valid and reliable data on how well people use products and systems, and how they like using them.     

Requirements engineering within a large-scale security-oriented research project: lessons learned

Requirements engineering has been recognized as a fundamental phase of the software engineering process. Nevertheless, the elicitation and analysis of requirements are often left aside in favor of architecture-driven software development. This tendency, however, can lead to issues that may affect the success of a project. This paper presents our experience gained in the elicitation and analysis of requirements in a large-scale security-oriented European research project, which was originally conceived as an architecture-driven project. In particular, we illustrate the challenges that can be faced in large-scale research projects and consider the applicability of existing best practices and off-the-shelf methodologies with respect to the needs of such projects. We then discuss how those practices and methods can be integrated into the requirements engineering process and possibly improved to address the identified challenges. Finally, we summarize the lessons learned from our experience and the benefits that a proper requirements analysis can bring to a project.     

Software testing with code-based test generators: data and lessons learned from a case study with an industrial software component

Automatically generating effective test suites promises a significant impact on testing practice by promoting extensively tested software within reasonable effort and cost bounds. Code-based test generators rely on the source code of the software under test to identify test objectives and to steer the test case generation process accordingly. Currently, the most mature proposals on this topic come from the research on random testing, dynamic symbolic execution, and search-based testing. This paper studies the effectiveness of a set of state-of-the-research test generators on a family of industrial programs with nontrivial domain-specific peculiarities. These programs are part of a software component of a real-time and safety-critical control system and integrate in a control task specified in LabVIEW, a graphical language for designing embedded systems. The result of this study enhances the available body of knowledge on the strengths and weaknesses of test generators. The empirical data indicate that the test generators can truly expose subtle (previously unknown) bugs in the subject software and that there can be merit in using different types of test generation approaches in a complementary, even synergic fashion. Furthermore, our experiment pinpoints the support for floating point arithmetics and nonlinear computations as a major milestone in the path to exploiting the full potential of the prototypes based on symbolic execution in industry.     

Developing groupware for requirements negotiation: lessons learned

Defining requirements is a complex and difficult process, and defects in the process often lead to costly project failures. There is no complete and well-defined set of requirements waiting to be discovered in system development. Different stakeholders: users, customers, managers, domain experts, and developers, come to the project with diverse expectations and interests. Requirements emerge in a highly collaborative, interactive, and interdisciplinary negotiation process that involves heterogeneous stakeholders. At the University of Southern California's Center for Software Engineering, we have developed a series of groupware implementations for the WinWin requirements negotiation approach. The WinWin approach involves having a system's success-critical stakeholders participate in a negotiation process so they can converge on a mutually satisfactory or win-win set of requirements. The WinWin groupware system, which has evolved over four generations, enables and facilitates heterogeneous stakeholder participation and collaboration. Each generation reflects an increase in our understanding of what is needed for successful WinWin groupware operations and technology support. The authors present the major lessons they learned during WinWin's development