Configuration management for Lyee software

This article presents a configuration management concept for software projects using Lyee methodology. To illustrate this concept, an introduction in configuration management is given. Then, the structure of Lyee programs is defined by sets and their dependencies. From this structure, the actual configuration management concept is deduced and discussed by rendering the structure for an existing configuration management testbed and describing the involved key players as well as the necessary procedures.     

Risk management for software projects

There is little to instruct software project managers on how to handle risk in a way that ensures the success of contingency planning and avoids crisis. This seven-step procedure describes how to identify risk factors, calculate their probability and effect on a project, and plan for and conduct risk management     

Quality management metrics for software development

It can be argued that the quality of software management has an effect on the degree of success or failure of a software development program. We have developed a metric for measuring the quality of software management along four dimensions: requirements management, estimation/planning management, people management, and risk management. The quality management metric (QMM) for a software development program manager is a composite score obtained using a questionnaire administered to both the program manager and a sample of his or her peers. The QMM is intended to both characterize the quality of software management and serve as a template for improving software management performance. We administered the questionnaire to measure the performance of managers responsible for large software development programs within the US Department of Defense (DOD). Informal verification and validation of the metric compared the QMM score to an overall program-success score for the entire program; this resulted in a positive correlation.     

A hierarchical multiple-view approach to three-dimensional objectrecognition

A hierarchical approach is proposed for solving the surface and vertex correspondence problems in multiple-view-based 3D object-recognition systems. The proposed scheme is a coarse-to-fine search process, and a Hopfield network is used at each stage. Compared with conventional object-matching schemes, the proposed technique provides a more general and compact formulation of the problem and a solution more suitable for parallel implementation. At the coarse search stage, the surface matching scores between the input image and each object model in the database are computed through a Hopfield network and are used to select the candidates for further consideration. At the fine search stage, the object models selected from the previous stage are fed into another Hopfield network for vertex matching. The object model that has the best surface and vertex correspondences with the input image is finally singled out as the best matched model. Experimental results are reported using both synthetic and real range images to corroborate the proposed theory.     

A software architecture for distributed organization management

In large organizations, management of large amounts of knowledge is a common problem. This knowledge is usually available in a distributed environment, in structured or non-structured form, and often is not exactly known where it is located and how to retrieve it in flexible ways. This paper describes an architecture to manage typical activities for an organization such as our University. During system analysis and specification, we had to collect a lot of information about structure and content of our organization, information available in various formats and media and not always automatically collectable. Hence, we designed a Document-based Software Architecture to support systems where formalization of information repositories, standardization of information location and management of every aspect involved in distributed contexts are crucial needs. We discuss if the configuration of a central-knowledge centered organization is the right solution or if it is better the choice of a distributed one. Since, all the documents managed in any organization are usually available in a structured way, we foresee a strong usage of XML documents and metadata standard definitions.     

软件事务内存的动态竞争管理策略

软件事务内存是为了简化并行程序设计而出现的一种新的程序设计技术.为了降低软件事务内存系统中事务冲突的发生频率以提升系统整体性能,提出了一种新的基于动态控制和队列调度的竞争管理策略.定义了竞争强度的概念和系统总体框架,并在此基础上给出了利用运行时反馈信息动态调节竞争强度的方法.同时给出了事务序列化的设计方法与实现中应注意的问题,通过将冲突概率大的事务序列化以达到避免相同冲突再次发生的目的.结合常用的基准数据结构,对模型和算法进行了实验,最后结果表明了算法的正确性和有效性.     

Decision support system for software project management

Decision support systems combine individuals' and computers' capabilities to improve the quality of decisions. Usually adopted in manufacturing to design floor plans and optimize resource allocation and performance, DSSs are penetrating increasingly complex application areas, from insurance fraud detection to military system procurement to emergency planning. Although researchers have suggested many approaches, DSSs haven't yet entered the main stream of software engineering tools. The complexity of the software process and its sociotechnical nature are often mentioned as the main obstacles to their adoption. As DSSs are developed for other equally complex application areas, we need to identify approaches that can overcome these difficulties and enable project managers to exploit DSSs' capabilities in their daily activities. A hybrid two-level modeling approach is a step in this direction.     

Requirement-oriented risk management for incremental software development

In incremental software development (ISD) functionalities are delivered incrementally and requirements keep on evolving across iterations. The requirements evolution involves the addition of new dependencies and conflicts among functional and non-functional requirements along with changes in priorities and dependency weights. This, in turn, demands refactoring the order of development of system components to minimize the impact of these changes. Neglecting the non-functional constraints in the software development process exposes it to risks that may accumulate across several iterations. In this research work, we propose a risk management framework for ISD processes that provides an estimate of risk exposure for the project when functional features are frozen while ignoring the associations with non-functional requirements. Our framework proposes suitable risk reduction strategies that work in tandem with the risk assessment module. We also provide a tool interface for our risk management framework.

     

Information rich glyphs for software management data

Three high-dimensional glyphs for viewing software project management data assist in perhaps the most challenging engineering task in modern times managing large software projects. In data exploration, glyphs refer to graphical objects or symbols that represent data through visual parameters that are either spatial (positions x or y), retinal (color and size), or temporal. Common examples of graphical objects include the bars in a bar chart or the points within a scatter plot. We focus on glyphs for visualizing software project management data. Any large-scale project will have many different classes of resources (lab equipment, staff time, machine cycles, disk resources, interim deliverables, and customer commitments) that must be scheduled and tracked. Inevitably, problems will arise and solutions must be found. To support the management process, information systems collect and maintain large status databases. We aim to support and improve the understanding of this information through visualization. Our glyphs are designed to expose patterns among sets of software artifacts and to help identify differences between items     

A net practice for software project management

Technical and managerial complexity increasingly overwhelm project managers. To rein in that complexity, the authors propose PM-Net, a model that captures the concurrent, iterative, and evolutionary nature of software development. It adopts the basic concepts of Petri nets, graphical models of information flow, with extensions to represent both decisions and artifacts     

Pragmatic software configuration management

Often an organization's software configuration management (SCM) mechanisms don't help with the work of building software as much as they could. Either no mechanisms exist for doing common tasks or the processes to use those mechanisms are too complicated and become tasks in themselves. On a daily basis, developers shouldn't notice SCM that much, and what they do notice, they should eagerly embrace because these things help them do their jobs. When developers don't find SCM processes to be helpful, it's often because the processes don't serve the organization's goals well. This tends to be due to two issues: first, basic SCM structures lacking and, second, the structure doesn't fit well into the development environment. This paper provides a brief overview of the essential patterns for a basic, agile SCM environment.     

Testing network management software

A fourth wave of computer-based network management systems is here. Experienced network managers worry about the reliability of software. This discussion provides ways of testing software to improve software and system reliability, and it proposes a reliability footprint in-process metric to monitor the effectiveness of a test program. Systematic ways of moving from debugging to assuring reliable network management systems are emphasized.     

Improving software development management through software project telemetry

Conventional wisdom in the software engineering research community says that metrics can make project management more effective. Software metrics range from internal product attributes such as size, complexity, and modularity to external process attributes such as effort, productivity, and reliability. Software project telemetry facilitates local, in-process decision making.     

Knowledge flow management for distributed team software development

Cognitive cooperation is often neglected in current team software development processes. This issue becomes more important than ever when team members are globally distributed. This paper presents a notion of knowledge flow and the related management mechanism for realizing an ordered knowledge sharing and cognitive cooperation in a geographically distributed team software development process. The knowledge flow can carry and accumulate knowledge when it goes through from one team member to another. The coordination between the knowledge flow process and the workflow process of a development team provides a new way to improve traditional team software development processes. A knowledge grid platform has been implemented to support the knowledge flow management across the Internet.     

An integrated technology for intelligent software risk management

The paper presents a formalized technology for risk management intellectualized with new functions to increase the software process maturity. Intelligent risk management (IRM) is represented by a double spiral with “inner” turns being the processes of expert assessment of IRM objects to support the increased consistency of decisions and the efficiency of IRM participants. They link “outer” turns (the cycles of efficient risk mitigation in a common information environment at the levels of both developing organization and software project) to support the integration of project targets and improvement of software quality and strategic goals of the executing organization.     

A management tool for evaluation of software design

A model for evaluating software designs based on extending the functional model of program verification with concepts from economic decision theory has been proposed. The authors describe the method, and discuss a prototype implementation of a tool, called Selector, which implements this technique. It is suggested that a system like Selector can be used in two ways: as a decision support system for management to be used in the process of making choices among various alternatives; and as a prototyping investigative system for proposing and answering a series of `what if' scenarios. The proposed model depends on a risk analysis, of each potential solution and aspects of decision theory to modify the evaluation strategy. The model depends on equilibrium probabilities for generating answers     

Bounded Inconsistency for Type-Specific Concurrency Control

The traditional correctness criterion of serializability indatabases is considered too restrictive especially whendatabases are used to model advanced applications. In general,two approaches are adopted to address this problem. The firstapproach considers placing more structure on data objects toexploit type specific properties while keeping serializabilityas the correctness criterion. The other approach uses explicitsemantics of transactions and databases to permit interleavedexecutions of transactions that are non-serializable. In thispaper, we attempt to bridge the gap between the two approachesby using the notion of serializability with boundedinconsistency. Users are free to specify the maximum level ofinconsistency that can be allowed in the executions ofoperations dynamically. In particular, if no inconsistency isallowed in the execution of any operation, the protocol will bereduced to a standard strict two phase locking protocol based ontype-specific semantics of data objects. On the other hand, ifinconsistency is not bounded, the execution of transactions isunrestricted in the proposed model. The proposed protocols havebeen implemented and the paper includes a performance comparisonwith the two-phase locking protocol. The results demonstrate thatthe associated overhead in the proposed protocol is notoverwhelming and the gains in transition throughput can besignificant for object based systems. Bounded inconsistency canbe applied to many areas which do not require exact values ofthe data such as for gathering information for statisticalpurpose, for decision support systems, and for reasoning inexpert systems which can tolerate uncertainty in input data.     

Mining software defect data to support software testing management

Achieving high quality software would be easier if effective software development practices were known and deployed in appropriate contexts. Because our theoretical knowledge of the underlying principles of software development is far from complete, empirical analysis of past experience in software projects is essential for acquiring useful software practices. As advances in software technology continue to facilitate automated tracking and data collection, more software data become available. Our research aims to develop methods to exploit such data for improving software development practices.