Knowledge‐related challenges and solutions in GSD

A number knowledge‐related challenges may complicate the work in global software development (GSD) projects. In practice, even a small amount of missing knowledge may cause an activity to fail to create and transfer information which is critical to later functions, causing these later functions to fail. Thus, knowledge engineering holds a central role in order to succeed with globally distributed product development. Furthermore, examining the challenges faced in GSD from a cognitive perspective will help to find solutions that take into account the knowledge needs of different stakeholders in GSD and thus help to establish conditions for successful GSD projects. In this paper, we will discuss these challenges and solutions based on an extensive literature study and practical experience gained in several international projects over the last decade. Altogether, over 50 case studies were analysed. We analysed the challenges identified in the cases from a cognitive perspective for bridging and avoiding the knowledge gaps and, based on this analysis, we will present example solutions to address the challenges during the GSD projects. We will conclude that through understanding both the nature of GSD and the KE challenges in depth, it will be possible for organizations to make their distributed operations successful.     

Self-configuring agents for ambient assisted living applications

Ambient assisted living (AAL) is advocated as the technological solution that will enable the elderly population to maintain their independence for a longer period of time than would otherwise be the case. The inherently heterogeneous nature of AmI environments and special requirements of the elderly population pose new challenges for the design and implementation of AAL systems. Thus, the development of these systems demands a context-aware, open, scalable, and distributed software technology that incorporates both intelligent and autonomic reconfiguration techniques. In this contribution, we focus on the design and implementation challenges of an agent-based AAL system that incorporates self-configuring tasks, by means of applying autonomic computing to software agents’ internal architecture. We use an agent-based system for tracking elderly people’s activity using common commercially available electronic devices as case study. We have validated our approach focusing on response time (a main concern in AAL) using different tests and the results are satisfactory.     

RFID Infrastructure Design: A Case Study of Two Australian RFID Projects

The design, implementation, and deployment of large-scale RFID infrastructures can occur only through innovative solutions that address RFID challenges at all levels, including device, data processing, and data integration. The authors present and discuss several design issues associated with two Australian national RFID projects, implemented based on the EPCglobal Network. Using practical experience gained from these projects, they identify several areas of improvement and research opportunities for future large-scale RFID implementations and deployments.     

Data collection in global software engineering research: learning from past experience

Global Software Engineering has become a standard in today’s software industry. Research in distributed software development poses severe challenges that are due to the spatial and temporal distribution of the actors, as well as to language, intercultural and organizational aspects. These challenges occur in addition to “traditional” challenges of the domain itself in large-scale software projects, like coordination and communication issues, requirements volatily, lack of domain knowledge, among others. While several authors have reported empirical studies of global software development projects, the methodological difficulties and challenges of this type of studies have not been sufficiently discussed. In this paper, we share our experiences of collecting and analysing qualitative data in the context of Global Software Engineering projects. We discuss strategies for gaining access to field sites, building trust and documenting distributed and complex work practices in the context of several research projects we have conducted in the past 9 years. The experiences described in this paper illustrate the need to deal with fundamental problems, such as understanding local languages and different cultures, observing synchronous interaction, or dealing with barriers imposed by political conflicts between the sites. Based on our findings, we discuss some practical implications and strategies that can be used by other researchers and provide some recommendations for future research in methodological aspects of Global Software Engineering.     

Designing for Sustainability: Key Issues of ICT Projects for Ageing at Home

Achieving the sustainability of IT-based solutions is a challenge. We will argue in this paper that it is helpful to conceptualize designing for sustainable IT-based solutions as taking place in a multi-dimensional space. It requires thinking about how a project is framed; the perspectives and commitments of the project partners; the type of innovation that is foregrounded; the motivations and needs of the user group; and the level of sustainability a project or research program may achieve. The paper describes some of the challenges and possible solutions by revisiting a portfolio of projects that developed IT support for elderly people who continue living in their own homes.     

Distributed object management integrating distributed information in heterogeneous environment

Organizations today need an optimized environment that builds and integrates diverse operating systems, hardware and applications. Distributed Computing provides us with a facility to transparently access all data, resources in the network. Current Research, projects that distributed object management concept along with the distributed computing environment can provide a single interface to manage the complexities of a heterogeneous environment. Using a uniform framework based on the DCE standard, we attempt to create an Object Oriented Distributed Computing Environment that will help us create open distributed applications with location independence for client applications in a multivendor network.

A better model for Open Distributed Computing aided by Object Oriented concepts is offered. Some of the research issues in realizing such a model are contemplated. We integrate an Object Manager with the OSF' DCE and discuss its benefits.     

Digital Libraries for the Next Millennium: Challenges and Research Directions

The unprecedented growth of Internet technologies has made resources on the World Wide Web instantly accessible to various user communities through digital libraries. Since the early 1990s, there have been several digital library initiatives sponsored by government agencies and/or private organizations all over the world. A digital library is a networked system environment that provides diverse user communities with coherent, seamless and transparent access to large, organized, and digitized information resources. This article provides a comprehensive overview of major digital library projects that are currently being undertaken across the globe. We also identify and discuss major challenges and research issues to be addressed in the design and implementation of digital libraries for the next millennium. We believe that digital libraries are ripe with research opportunities, offer many challenges, and will continue to grow in the next several years.     

A review of smart homes- present state and future challenges

In the era of information technology, the elderly and disabled can be monitored with numerous intelligent devices. Sensors can be implanted into their home for continuous mobility assistance and non-obtrusive disease prevention. Modern sensor-embedded houses, or smart houses, cannot only assist people with reduced physical functions but help resolve the social isolation they face. They are capable of providing assistance without limiting or disturbing the resident's daily routine, giving him or her greater comfort, pleasure, and well-being. This article presents an international selection of leading smart home projects, as well as the associated technologies of wearable/implantable monitoring systems and assistive robotics. The latter are often designed as components of the larger smart home environment. The paper will conclude by discussing future challenges of the domain.     

分布对象平台Java RMI和CORBA的对比研究

文章对开发基于Java的分布式应用程序的两种分布对象技术—————JavaRMI和CORBA的功能和效率进行了对比和分析。CORBA具有良好的语言中立性,定义有功能较强的各种服务,适合于规模较大,需要与其他语言集成的系统,它的缺点是开发过程较为繁琐,Java的一些先进特性无法在远程调用的界面上使用。RMI与Java语言结合得十分紧密,开发方便,支持对象传值,但它不太适合需要异种语言集成的场合。     

Multiplex assays for biomarker research and clinical application: translational science coming of age

Over the last decade, translational science has come into the focus of academic medicine, and significant intellectual and financial efforts have been made to initiate a multitude of bench-to-bedside projects. The quest for suitable biomarkers that will significantly change clinical practice has become one of the biggest challenges in translational medicine. Quantitative measurement of proteins is a critical step in biomarker discovery. Assessing a large number of potential protein biomarkers in a statistically significant number of samples and controls still constitutes a major technical hurdle. Multiplexed analysis offers significant advantages regarding time, reagent cost, sample requirements and the amount of data that can be generated. The two contemporary approaches in multiplexed and quantitative biomarker validation, antibody-based immunoassays and MS-based multiple (or selected) reaction monitoring, are based on different assay principles and instrument requirements. Both approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages and therefore have complementary roles in the multi-staged biomarker verification and validation process. In this review, we discuss quantitative immunoassay and multiple reaction monitoring/selected reaction monitoring assay principles and development. We also discuss choosing an appropriate platform, judging the performance of assays, obtaining reliable, quantitative results for translational research and clinical applications in the biomarker field.     

Interactive computations: toward risk management in interactive intelligent systems

Understanding the nature of interactions is regarded as one of the biggest challenges in projects related to complex adaptive systems. We discuss foundations for interactive computations in interactive intelligent systems (IIS), developed in the Wistech program and used for modeling complex systems. We emphasize the key role of risk management in problem solving by IIS. The considerations are based on experience gained in real-life projects concerning, e.g., medical diagnosis and therapy support, control of an unmanned helicopter, fraud detection algorithmic trading or fire commander decision support.     

Towards Testing Product Line Architectures

A product line architecture is a single specification capturing the overall architecture of a series of closely related products. Its structure consists of a set of mandatory elements and a set of variation points. Whereas mandatory elements are part of the architecture of every product in the product line architecture, variation points precisely define the dimensions along which the architectures of individual products differ from each other.The increased use of product line architectures in today's software development projects poses several challenges for existing testing techniques. In this paper we discuss those challenges and discuss what we believe are opportunities for addressing them.     

PeerCare: Supporting Awareness of Rhythms and Routines for Better Aging in Place

Caring for the elderly is becoming a key challenge for society, given the shortage of trained personnel and the increased age of the population. Innovative approaches are needed to help the elderly remain at home longer and more safely, that is, to age in place. One popular strategy is to monitor the activity of the elderly: this focuses on obtaining information for caregivers rather than supporting the elderly directly. We propose an alternative, i.e. to enhance their inter-personal communication. We report the results of a user study with 14 independent elderly women and discuss the existing role that communication plays in maintaining their independence and well-being. We highlight the importance of peer support relationships, which we call PeerCare, and how awareness of each other’s rhythms and routines helps them to stay in touch. We then describe the deployment of a technology probe, called markerClock, which a pair of elderly friends used to improve their awareness of each other’s rhythms and routines. We conclude with a discussion of how such communication appliances enhance the awareness of rhythms and routines among elderly peers and can improve their quality of life and provide safer and more satisfying aging in place.     

Wireless sensor networks for rehabilitation applications: Challenges and opportunities

Rehabilitation supervision has emerged as a new application of wireless sensor networks (WSN), with unique communication, signal processing and hardware design requirements. It is a broad and complex interdisciplinary research area on which more than one hundred papers have been published by several research communities (electronics, bio-mechanical, control and computer science). In this paper, we present WSN for rehabilitation supervision with a focus on key scientific and technical challenges that have been solved as well as interdisciplinary challenges that are still open. We thoroughly review existing projects conducted by several research communities involved in this exciting field. Furthermore, we discuss the open research issues and give directions for future research works. Our aim is to gather information that encourage engineers, clinicians and computer scientists to work together in this field to tackle the arising challenges. We believe that bridging researchers with different scientific backgrounds could have a significant impact on the development of WSN for rehabilitation and could improve the way rehabilitation is provided today.     

Conducting a Business Ethnography in Global Software Development projects of small German enterprises

Context

Studying work practices in the context of Global Software Development (GSD) projects entails multiple opportunities and challenges for the researchers. Understanding and tackling these challenges requires a careful and rigor application of research methods.

Objective

We want to contribute to the understanding of the challenges of studying GSD by reflecting on several obstacles we had to deal with when conducting ethnographically-informed research on offshoring in German small to medium-sized enterprises.

Method

The material for this paper is based on reflections and field notes from two research projects: an exploratory ethnographic field study, and a study that was framed as a Business Ethnography. For the analysis, we took a Grounded Theory-oriented coding and analysis approach in order to identify issues and challenges documented in our research notes.

Results

We introduce the concept of Business Ethnography and discuss our experiences of adapting and implementing this action research concept for our study. We identify and discuss three primary issues: understanding complex global work practices from a local perspective, adapting to changing interests of the participants, and dealing with micro-political frictions between the cooperating sites.

Conclusions

We identify common interests between the researchers and the companies as a challenge and chance for studies on offshoring. Building on our experiences from the field, we argue for an active conceptualization of struggles and conflicts in the field as well as for extending the role of the ethnographer to that of a learning mediator.     

Industry–academia collaborations in software testing: experience and success stories from Canada and Turkey

Collaboration between industry and academia supports improvement and innovation in industry and helps to ensure industrial relevance in academic research. However, many researchers and practitioners believe that the level of joint industry–academia collaborations (IAC) in software engineering (SE) is still relatively very low, compared to the amount of activity in each of the two communities. The goal of the empirical study reported in this paper is to characterize a set of collaborative industry–academia R&D projects in the area of software testing conducted by the authors (based in Canada and Turkey) with respect to a set of challenges, patterns and anti-patterns identified by a recent Systematic Literature Review study, with the aim of contributing to the body of evidence in the area of IAC, for the benefit of SE researchers and practitioners in conducting successful IAC projects in software testing and in software engineering in general. To address the above goal, a pool of ten IAC projects (six completed, two failed and two ongoing) all in the area of software testing, which the authors have led or have had active roles in, were selected as objects of study and were analyzed (both quantitatively and qualitatively) with respect to the set of selected challenges, patterns and anti-patterns. As outputs, the study presents a set of empirical findings and evidence-based recommendations, e.g.: it has been observed that even if an IAC project may seem perfect from many aspects, one single major challenge (e.g., disagreement in confidentiality agreements) can lead to its failure. Thus, we recommend that both parties (academics and practitioners) consider all the challenges early on and proactively work together to eliminate the risk of challenges in IAC projects. We furthermore report correlation and interrelationship of challenges, patterns and anti-patterns with project success measures. This study hopes to encourage and benefit other SE researchers and practitioners in conducting successful IAC projects in software testing and in software engineering in general in the future.     

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.     

Technology to support parental engagement in elementary education: Lessons learned from the UK

This paper compares and contrasts two projects in order to better understand the complex issues surrounding the use of technology to support parental involvement with schools and their children’s learning. The Becta-funded ICT Test Bed evaluation (2002–2006) had the intention of saturating schools (in three areas of social deprivation) with a range of technologies, including 23 elementary schools. The ESRC/EPSRC/DTI-funded Homework project (2003–2006) used participatory design methods to develop and evaluate technology to link home and school in a elementary school in the South East. Both projects shared a common theoretical foundation, that of socio-cultural theory. The theory influenced the evaluation methodology employed in both projects and in the Homework project it additionally influenced the design of the technology intervention. Findings suggest that technologies with readily accessible and interactive resources that are flexible can help develop parental engagement. However, simpler and less resource hungry solutions such as the use of websites and email can provide opportunities for quick wins. In relation to transporting technology between home and school, there are issues for both staff and parents. Without purposeful use, these challenges act as a barrier once they outweigh the novelty effect. We conclude that parental needs are complex and that engagement needs to be sensitively scaffolded rather than focussing on the technology. Participatory design offers an effective means of addressing this and should be the starting point. The technology should facilitate independence and mediate access to a shared space for collaborative activity. The content and guidance needs to be purposeful and relevant, offering a means to integrate learning across the learner’s broader context, including school and home seamlessly.     

Mitigating Risks Associated with Transitive Trust in Service-Based Identity Propagation

ABSTRACT

Over the past 20 years, software has evolved from monolithic, stove-piped applications to services that communicate with other distributed components over communications networks. The rise in popularity of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and web services has presented unique challenges for securely conveying the identity of end users at every point, especially when mashups, Web service composition and orchestration solutions combine multiple distributed components throughout a network, and where each component may need to know the identity of the end user. Over the past decade, many U.S. government projects have embraced SOA, have identified security risks with certain types of identity propagation, and have built solutions for mitigating the risks. This paper focuses on identity propagation in Web service transactions and describes how several early SOA-based projects utilized “transitive trust” approaches. We categorize the security risks found and describe how these projects minimized or mitigated the risks. Finally, we discuss approaches used in current projects and provide guidance for future implementations.     

Energy profile of rollback-recovery strategies in high performance computing

Extreme-scale computing is set to provide the infrastructure for the advances and breakthroughs that will solve some of the hardest problems in science and engineering. However, resilience and energy concerns loom as two of the major challenges for machines at that scale. The number of components that will be assembled in the supercomputers plays a fundamental role in these challenges. First, a large number of parts will substantially increase the failure rate of the system compared to the failure frequency of current machines. Second, those components have to fit within the power envelope of the installation and keep the energy consumption within operational margins. Extreme-scale machines will have to incorporate fault tolerance mechanisms and honor the energy and power restrictions. Therefore, it is essential to understand how fault tolerance and energy consumption interplay. This paper presents a comparative evaluation and analysis of energy consumption of three different rollback-recovery protocols: checkpoint/restart, message logging and parallel recovery. Our experimental evaluation shows parallel recovery has the minimum execution time and energy consumption. Additionally, we present an analytical model that projects parallel recovery can reduce energy consumption more than 37% compared to checkpoint/restart at extreme scale.