A key barrier to achieving the necessary breakthroughs in software design and productivity is that, as a community, we do not have an adequate understanding and consensus on how to evaluate research on the topic.http://www.nitrd.gov/subcommittee/sdp/vanderbilt/position_papers/william_pugh_evaluating_research.pdf. Software design and productivity involves, at its core, human creativity and un-derstanding. Rigorous experimental studies of software design and productivity are therefore di cult, expensive and rare. So we need to develop benchmarks, challenge problems, frameworks and (partial) consen-sus to allow evaluation of useful research on software design and productivity without requiring prohibitive experiments involving programmers. A number of di erent forums and committees have recognized the important of research in software design and productivity to our national goals. A key problem is that while we have a good understanding of how to evaluate papers that describe techniques to improve program execution speed, it is much more di cult to evaluate papers that aim to improve software design and productivity. Much of the important research in this field are likely to depend upon techniques that are not both sound and complete, but instead act as heuristics to identify possible problems in software design. We need, as a community, to closely examine and try to come to some agreements on additional ways to evaluate research in software design and productivity. Other parts of this process will just depend on arriving at a consensus as a community about how to evaluate research on software design and productivity. There are many di erent facets to this issue; in this white paper, I will discuss some of the issues I’ve ...




Occupations could be viewed as carrying metaphoric representations of that inner reality (e.http://www.wpi.edu/News/Conf/ISTAS/Presentations/spiritual.pdf.g., farmer, builder, shepherd) This paper is about looking at the work of the software developer in this manner. Software development is obviously an important occupation in today's world and for the foreseeable future. Looking at software development as a metaphor for spiritual work may provide people from different cultures a new vocabulary for discussing the spiritual work of human character development. The author believes that software development is rich with spiritual metaphors (or, spiritual meaning). The basic metaphor is that software development is a symbolic manifestation of inner character development. We will not discuss other possible spiritual interpretations of software development and computer technology. Our focus is on software development as a metaphor for perfecting the human character. Software development is a metaphor for the human spiritual journey. The Basic Goal in Software Development The fundamental goal of the software developer (at least, ideally) is to make the customer happy. In trying to satisfy the Customer, the software developer is working on creating something new, something that has not existed before, something that represents another step forward in the development of human society, in the development of human consciousness. As the software developer performs the outer work of building a new computer system, we shall view this as a metaphor for the inner work that this same software developer must perform in order to perfect his or her character. Denning and Dunham's observation ...


A key goal of the DARPA Polymorphous Computing Architectures (PCA) program is to develop reactive closed-loop systems that are capable of being dynamically reconfigured in order to respond to changing mission scenarios.http://www.ll.mit.edu/HPEC/agendas/proc03/abstracts/dandass-HPEC-2003.pdf. This is in contrast to current systems that are fixed in nature and rely on architecture and software optimizations targeted for specific missions. In order to accomplish this objective, a number of “malleable” processing elements, runtime support software, compilers, and application development tools are being developed by a variety of research teams. Application software development for PCA systems is expected to be particularly challenging because of the need to respond to rapid changes in the mission requirements and environment. The authors of this talk have formed a team that is focusing its effort on developing application modeling tools and middleware libraries that assist in managing the complexity of developing, deploying, and maintaining PCA applications. The four high-level research objectives of this effort are as follows: Study, prototype and develop a modeling language for streaming and threaded resources and components, Perform Design Space exploration to enable PCA scheduling (including use of AI techniques), Achieve System Synthesis and Generation (including performance monitoring and feedback) to support, and Accomplish Dynamic Reconfiguration study and support for PCA. Design space exploration/navigation and optimization techniques are used to map the application and specifications to component and resource implementations. Generation includes configuration of runtime dynamic resource ...


During which stage of the software development cycle would user documentation of the software solution be produced? (A) Defining and understanding the problem (B) Planning and design of software solutions (C) Implementation of software solutions (D) Testing and evaluation of software solutions A real estate agent has been keeping information on rental properties in a spreadsheet.http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/hsc_exams/hsc2001exams/pdf_doc/software_design_developm_01.pdf. To ensure that the software solution is implemented in an appropriate time frame, what project management technique could be utilised? (A) Data flow diagram (B) Gantt chart (C) IPO diagram (D) Pseudocode A programmer has written a program in a high-level language that can be interpreted or compiled. In order to access information on the Internet, a visually impaired person may use screen-reading software that converts text to sound. What should developers do to make a website inclusive of the visually impaired? (A) Choose web-safe colours (B) Supplement graphics with text (C) Have only text on each page (D) Avoid the use of JavaScript A systems analyst has consulted the users during the planning stage of the project to develop new payroll management software. The analyst does not communicate with the users again until the training program for the new software begins. (B) It is appropriate because users need to understand how to use the software before it becomes active. (C) It is not appropriate because the users should have the final say about what the software should look like. A software designer has decided to include a button on each of the screens of a program to allow the user to navigate back to the main menu screen. An installation guide ...


Operating systems have taken a miracu-lous journey over the past 30 years, from custom, internally developed kernels through commercial embedded real-time operating systems to the open source Linux world.http://www.compactpci-systems.com/columns/software_corner/pdfs/4.2005.pdf. The open source paradigm of Linux has found its way into the soft-ware development tools arena with the emergence of the Eclipse Foundation Eclipse development environment. This tool framework is written entirely in Java with the ability to plug in any number of application-specific develop-ment environments. This paradigm is also gaining significant momentum. The user and developer membership consists of more than 80 companies with far more in the general user community. A recent announcement also introduced a Spotlight on Eclipse supplement jointly sponsored by SD Times and the Eclipse Foundation. With all this activity and momentum around this open source effort, it could be well worth your time to take a look at the organization and technology. Impressive growth of Eclipse Eclipse initially went open source in November, 2001. Since that time, more than 600 commercially available plug-ins have been developed. Eclipse provides a common founda - tion for creation of a robust, integrated development environment including the building, debugging, and software config-uration management for software devel-opment projects. The work-bench includes a Software Widget Toolkit (SWT), which provides the tools for building graphical user interfaces and a JFace component. The workspace is linked to a particular plug-in for the Eclipse environment, which then provides facilities such as software development, ...


buzzword in the EDA industry.http://www.computer.org/portal/cms_docs_design/design/content/promo1.pdf. It has found its way into the mainstream EDA vocabulary in the past few years because of increased interest in finding new ways to raise the abstraction level for the design entry point during the electronic-systems design process. In hardware design over the past three decades, the design entry point has moved upward in the abstraction hierarchy—from hand-drawn schematics to gate-level design, to RTL descriptions. As hardware design com-plexity has become increasingly unmanageable, find-ing ways to design hardware ICs at higher abstraction levels and developing tools to automatically create the circuits’ actual layouts has gained more importance in industry and academia. This upward trend in abstrac-tion has enabled engineers to exploit the scientific and engineering advances that have tracked Moore’s law quite closely. Since the late 1980s, the design entry point’s abstrac-tion level had remained almost stagnant at the structur-al RTL. Behavioral synthesis had remained mostly elusive, with some domain-specific success areas, such as DSP chips. But by the late 1990s, recognition of the so-called “productivity gap problem” led to various attempts at abstraction enhancement. These attempts gave rise to various languages for system-level design, such as SpecC, SystemC, and variants of these. In contrast to earlier comput-ing devices such as microcontrollers and general-purpose microprocessors (GPPs), these systems had one thing in common: you could distribute their functionality into hardware or software with sufficient fluidity based on var-ious trade-offs in performance, power, cost, and ...


Altera, The Programmable Solutions Company, the stylized Altera logo, specific device designations, and all other words and logos that are identified as trademarks and/or service marks are, unless noted otherwise, the trademarks and service marks of Altera Corporation in the U.http://www.altera.com/literature/manual/mnl_niossft.pdf.S. and other countries. Altera warrants performance of its semiconductor products to current specifications in accordance with Altera’s standard warranty, but reserves the right to make changes to any products and services at any time without notice. Altera customers are advised to obtain the latest version of device specifications before relying on any published information and before placing orders for products or services. This document covers information required to create software for the Nios embedded processor and is for software designers interested in familiarizing themselves with the Nios software development kit (SDK) environment without extensive knowledge of the Nios hardware architecture. SOPC Builder is used by hardware designers to create the foundation for hardware and software development. This document covers the SDK generated mentioned in step 2 above, and the utilities used to create software with the SDK. When you transition your software design to the target hardware platform, it is possible to continue using the facilities mentioned above to continue downloading and debugging your code. Using the Nios development board, user software applications can be stored in flash and executed automatically on system power-up or reset. Each register is included as an integer (int) structure field, so software that ...


Increase coverage of application by models Introduce new meta-models for more aspects Maximize validation Build networks of interconnected models Maximize code generation Identify suitable target architectures Increase abstraction level Introduce model-to-model transformations Code templates currently programmed against a logical meta-model, which is too complicated in the future Use EMF generated model API Single meta-meta-model: Use Ecore as single meta-meta-model for everything Enables crosslinks between meta-models Same tools for everything Each model can be located in a multi-dimensional cube: Between models there are 3 kinds of relations: First target architecture must be specified, then code generation can be implemented Model transformation means loss of information In order to keep information, code must be generated for each abstraction level MVGT Engine is up and running New meta-models, validators, generators, transformers and code templates can quickly be built and plugged in Definition of target architecture needs improvement THIS IS NOT A PRODUCT SPECIFICATION The information contained in this document represents the current view of Intershop Communications AG on the issues discussed as of the date of publication.http://www.software-families.org/slides/haensgen.pdf. Because Intershop must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Intershop, and Intershop cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented. This document is for informational purposes only. Intershop MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS DOCUMENT. Intershop Communications AG may have patents or pending ...


This document gives a short overview of software development history.http://www.generexe.com/softhist.pdf. How does your software perform on a slower or faster machine, a machine with a small hard-disk, a machine with low bandwidth communciation, etc. Software development deals with the creation of highly complex and dynamic “systems”. 3. Software A big part of the “software” design consisted of circuit design and making sure that no fuses were blown. Programming software required making semi-hard changes in the hardware. The increase in hardware-capabilities resulted in an exponential increase of potential software complexity. However, the development disciplines to deal with increased software complexity did not evolve this fast. –sometimes for specific kind of problems-as well as helping us to control complexity by enforcing certain rules, about how to group chunks of software. Enforcing maintainable software structure, without reducing expressiveness. One of the biggest challenges of Software Engineering right now is how to control complexity. Efficiently and clearly expressing a solution, which remains maintainable during (and beyond) the software’s expected lifetime. Off course they do, but does it help us to make better programs or just stimulate the playfull trial-and-error attitude, which seems to dominate software development for a long time? Most software development is not really engineering and does not have to be. However, sometimes software development NEEDS to be software engineering.


This material is posted here with per-mission of the IEEE.http://www.aristeia.com/Papers/IEEE_Software_JulAug_2004.pdf. Such permis-sion of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement. In-ternal or personal use of this ma-terial is permitted. However, per-mission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or pro-motional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by sending a blank email message to pubs-permis-sions@ieee.org. he activity of “design” includes many things, but certainly one of the most im-portant aspects is interface specification. Interfaces determine which aspects of a component are accessible and to whom; Interfaces reflect how a system is broken down into its constituent components. They’re the “I” in GUI and API, but they’re much more pervasive than that. Classes and structs have interfaces; functions and methods have inter-faces; templates and namespaces have interfaces; subsystems and modules have interfaces; libraries and applications have interfaces. Regardless of your role in the development of a software sys-tem, it almost certainly involves some interface design, so it’s helpful to have some heuristics that indicate when you’re doing it well—or poorly. Over time, I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important general interface de-sign guideline is this: Make interfaces easy to use correctly and hard to use incorrectly. This guideline leads to a conclusion that some developers find unsettling. Interface designers must take responsibility Alas, our world isn’t perfect, but the interfaces used in most software systems can be signifi-cantly improved with relatively ...


This paper promotes some high-level best practices that reflect the authors’ experiences in deploying SCM.http://www.perforce.com/perforce/bestpractices.pdf. As providers of software configuration management tools and consultants to software companies, we are often asked for sound advice on SCM best practices - that is, how to deploy SCM software to the maximum advantage. In answering these requests we have a bounty of direct and indirect SCM experience from which to draw. The direct experience comes from having been developers and codeline managers ourselves; the indirect experience comes from customer reports of successes and failures with our product (Perforce) and other SCM tools. The workspace is where engineers edit source files, build the software components they’re working on, and test and debug what they’ve built. Jello views are a source of chaos in software development. In this context, the codeline is the canonical set of source files required to produce your software. With this broader objective, the codeline owner can smooth the ride over rough spots in software development by advising developers on policy exceptions and documenting them. A mainline provides an ultimate destination for almost all changes - both maintenance fixes and new features - and represents the primary, linear evolution of a software product. Release codeline: software must build and pass regression tests before check-in; check-ins limited to bug fixes; no new features or functionality may be checked in; after check-in, branch is frozen until entire QA cycle is completed. With a mainline, contributors’ workspaces and environments are stable for the duration of their tasks at hand, and ...


It’s not unusual for Dave to make provocative statements like that, but this time I was dumbstruck.http://www.vanderburg.org/Writing/xpannealed.pdf. From the beginning, I had liked Extreme Programming’s redundancy and interconnectedness—it seemed like a strength of the process to me. And yet there was a deeper point Dave was making, one that I didn’t have an answer for. Glib answers notwithstanding, I could see how that tight coupling could have a strong negative impact for a software process, too. For any process, Extreme or not, to be really useful and successful in a variety of situations for different teams, we have to understand how to tailor it. Is this internal coupling as bad for software processes as it is for software? Until we understand how process elements depend upon and reinforce one another, process design and tailoring will continue to be the hit-or-miss black art that it is today. One reason is that it acknowledges those dependencies and tries to enumerate them (Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained devotes a chapter to explaining many of them[1]). It provides an unusually broad (if not necessarily complete) picture of the software development process. Given that there are good reasons to customize a chosen software process, can you even start to do it sensibly in an XP context? For that, we must turn to traditional models of software processes and understand where this model fits into them. Barry Boehm’s cost of change curve is one of the linchpins of software engineering theory and practice[2]. Those decisions were often carefully scrutinized to identify mistakes, but the only true test of software is to run it. Another traditional view ...


But does it need to be that hard? And is the diffi-culty even specific to OO program-ming? Many of the cornerstones of OO programming benefit other programming paradigms as well.. Even if you’re writing shell scripts or batch files, you can use these tech-niques to great advantage. What’s good code? There are many aspects to writing good code, but most of these hinge on a single un-derlying quality: flexibility. Flexibility means that you can change the code easily, adapt it to new and revised circumstances, and use it in contexts other than those originally intended. Why does code need to be flexible? It’s largely because of us humans. In-stead, we need to realize that software must be soft: it has to be easy to change because it will change despite our misguided efforts otherwise. Capers Jones, in his book Software Assess-ments, Benchmarks, and Best Practices (Addi-son-Wesley, 2000), showed that requirements change at a rate of about 2 percent per month (which really starts to add up after a year or two). But the problem with changes to projects is by no means limited to the common scape-goat of “requirements,” nor is it limited to the software industry. It’s just hu-man nature that we’ll get some things wrong, so what differentiates software quality is how well—and how quickly—we can fix or change something. One of our favorite OO principles is “Tell, Don’t Ask” (see IEEE Software, Jan./Feb. 2003, p. 10). To recap briefly: as an industry, we’ve come to think of software in terms of function calls.


‘Software projects are notoriously difficult to manage’ ‘Software projects for complex and large systems are risky’ ‘Customer changes their mind too often’ ‘We cannot control and measure what the software guys do’ No alarm was raised.http://www.imse.hku.hk/imse2013/IE2013-2.pdf. The ship was sunk with considerable loss of life” “Gemini V splashed down 100 miles off target when the program used 360 degrees for the Earth rotation in one day.” “A fire occurred in a chemical reactor because of the following ambiguous statement of requirement: ‘if a fault occurs, leave all controlled variables as they were’. This was interpreted as ‘keep the flow of cooling water constant’ rather ‘than keep the temperature of the reactor constant’.” Interference from therapeutic microwaves has reset his pace-maker, driving his already injured heart at 214 beats per minutes.” Project Manager: Get and manage businesses Analysts: establish requirement, write high level documentation, good at communicating with people Designers: understand computer technology, good at structuring solution for a given requirement Programmers: understand well programming languages, good at writing programs Put more focus on quality by design, not quality by tests Have more iterative design and development phases Defect prevention rather than defect correction Helps to deal with complex systems Formalises system description to reduce ambiguity Facilitates: Promote concurrency of design To establish cross-functional teams that communicates Shared responsibility among team members for ensuring delivery of a successful product What is the system going to accomplish? Does not reflect the problem-solving nature of ...