Developing complex projects using XP with extensions

Using methodological extensions to adapt extreme programming (XP) for major projects offers a high security and reliability without limiting software development's advantages. The authors describe their use of XP extensions that focus on development's planning and controlling aspects, demonstrating that a suitably adapted agile development process is applicable to long-term, large-system projects.     

Schrifttumsberichte

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Calculation of the homogeneous degradation of injection laser parameters from initial degradation rates

The change of operating parameters above threshold of (Ga, Al)As injection lasers with aging time was calculated assuming a uniform mode of degradation mechanism with temperature-dependent degradation rates. In the calculation, the degradation rate for the threshold current was assumed to be temperature dependent, but not explicitly dependent on aging time and pumping current. Optical output power was kept constant during aging. The calculated time variation of laser parameters predicts a runaway after an initial slow rise. The mathematical model thus provides the means to correlate time-to-failure data with initial degradation rates and permits the evaluation of the influence of various laser parameters on lifetime. A selected group of laser diodes were aged at 80 °C under the conditions specified by the model. Degradation rates for the threshold current varied between4 times 10^{-5}and5 times 10^{-4}h^-1. These would extrapolate to lifetimes in excess of 10 000 h at the elevated temperature for half of the diodes in reasonable agreement with experimental values obtained by others.     

Code Compression for VLIW Embedded Systems Using a Self-Generating Table

We propose a new class of methods for VLIW code compression using variable-sized branch blocks with self-generating tables. Code compression traditionally works on fixed-sized blocks with its efficiency limited by their small size. A branch block, a series of instructions between two consecutive possible branch targets, provides larger blocks for code compression. We compare three methods for compressing branch blocks: table-based, Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW)-based and selective code compression. Our approaches are fully adaptive and generate the coding table on-the-fly during compression and decompression. When encountering a branch target, the coding table is cleared to ensure correctness. Decompression requires a simple table lookup and updates the coding table when necessary. When decoding sequentially, the table-based method produces 4 bytes per iteration while the LZW-based methods provide 8 bytes peak and 1.82 bytes average decompression bandwidth. Compared to Huffman's 1 byte and variable-to-fixed (V2F)'s 13-bit peak performance, our methods have higher decoding bandwidth and a comparable compression ratio. Parallel decompression could also be applied to our methods, which is more suitable for VLIW architectures.