Software Configuration Management in a Parallel Development Environment

The U.S. Geological Survey's automated information system's software for processing, storing, and retrieving water data is developed and maintained by the National Water Information System Program of the Water Resources Division. As part of that responsibility, a new system is currently being designed to replace the systems that run on a mainframe computer located at headquarters in Reston, Vz., and on minicomputers located in Division offices across the Nation. The new system is to run on workstations and file servers to be installed in all of the Division offices. A software life cycle provides the framework for defining, developing, and maintaining the new software system and for helping to meet software development challenges. Soft*'are quality assurance is needed in building the new system to provide confidence that the software is engineered to meet users' needs and conforms to established technical requirements. Successful software quality assurance depends on the application of uniform terminology and effective communication among users, developers, and managers. Software quality control is a planned and systematic process that focuses on establishing software standards and procedures, reviews and inspections, testing, and software configuration management throughout the software life cycle. This report explains the background for software quality assurance and the implementation of software quality assurance and quality control in the National Water Information System Program using a generic workbench approach, and presents an example workbench for the requirements-analysis phase of the software life-cycle.

Short development life cycles, the importance of time-to-market and fast changes in technology influence the requirements engineering process. Requirements are exposed to changes during the entire development life cycle, and decisions related to requirements and system design are moving toward developers. For this reason it is important to keep requirement changes under control during the entire development process. This control can be achieved by utilizing Configuration Management (CM) functions and in particular Change Management. This paper describes a model for managing requirements using CM functions. A requirements specification is defined as an hierarchic structure, in which elements of the structure are isolated requirements designated Requirements Specification Items. Having items under version control it is possible to get a better overview of the requirements change process. In the implementation phase, requirement items are associated with Change Requests which define implementations to be introduced in the system. When using Change Requests as links between requirements and the implemented functions we achieve a greater awareness of requirements and a better overview over the requirement process. Furthermore it provides a foundation for reuse of requirements when new systems are built.

This new edition follows the second edition of 2006. In this revised edition, we introduce more educational policies that have numerous implications for educational managers. These policies require educational managers to create a conducive environment where firm collegial relationships are established for effective teaching and learning. At the core of these policy initiatives is a thrust towards democratisation of the principles by which schools are governed and managed. These processes and structures involve institutional autonomy, school-based management, self-management, site-based management and participative decision-making. Educational managers require and deserve all the help available to turn the avalanche of reforms into workable practices. Human Resources Management in Education seeks to contribute helpful advice and assistance to educational managers to address numerous management problems and challenges. The topics covered include resourcing and development (staffing, induction, professional development and staff appraisal), empowering people (staff motivation, effective communication, conflict management and stress management) and stimulating individual and team performance (self-management, team management and leadership). Human Resources Management in Education is intended to guide educational managers through the main issues, not simply in problem-solving, but also in contextualisation. Furthermore, the third edition of Human Resources Management in Education aims to facilitate acquisition of knowledge, skills and attitudes in human resource management. Prof GM Steyn and Prof EJ van Niekerk's involvement in formal courses on education management have brought them in direct contact with the practical problems that educational managers experience in the school setting. They have both published a substantial number of articles and chapters in books on various educational topics.

At Amazon, Release Engineering falls under what we call Operational Excellence: designing, implementing, maintaining, and releasing a scalable product. There is an even more basic component that is often ignored: source control. Good source control practices are necessary but not sufficient for delivering good software. Over the 25+ years source control has been used, each tool has come with its own set of pitfalls: CVS, subversion, mercurial, and most recently, git. For decades, the unwritten rule has been for each organization to identify and mitigate these pitfalls independently, with an expectation that the next innovation would remediate it. This approach scales neither for large organizations such as Amazon nor the software engineering community at large. The real source of this dysfunction—remote collaboration between software engineers—must be examined and ultimately fixed. In the interim, it is up to the engineering community to share practices independent of software process to make up the difference. At its core, source control is a fundamental tool of software engineers, expected to be easily understood and “just work;” this assumption is invalid on a number of dimensions. Neither Software Configuration Management (SCM) nor the tools used are intuitive to new practitioners, and must be taught. The changing landscape of newer tools misleads even expert users of past tools who are not screened for this critical skill. And finally, success is dependent upon synthesis of past experience and tuning a pre-determined process to both project goals and the team. Success, then, is stacked against the engineering team—so what happens when source control usage goes horribly wrong? The baseline and team end up in “Git Hell,” slowed down, or even blocked, by the very tool that facilitates collaboration and parallel development. “Git Hell” originates from various sources: poor tool design, misuse or misconfiguration of the command line interface, and lack of understanding of the “nuts and bolts” of the tool. For example, poor interface design or configuration, even with the command line interface, has widespread impact. A substantial flaw in the mechanics of git push caused substantial pain at multiple engineering firms. The interface was straightforward: a push sends all branches with updates to the server; adding the -f option forces an update; combining them proved disastrous, as an engineer with minimal knowledge of git could harm the integrity of the baseline without even realizing it. This prior version required each developer to add local configuration to his workstation, ensuring others in the future would repeat the mistake. These classes of issues are repeated at company after company, group after group—illustrating a systemic problem with git, its configuration, the instruction in its usage, and the interaction between collaborating engineers. To combat this, I generalized preventative measures as a workaround in a workshop entitled “Get out of Git Hell” that can be shared among engineers regardless of experience or process, at least until the root causes can be studied and remediated.

Education has been shown to be the foundation of social equity and economic progress, underpinning individual and community, self-sufficiency and sustainability. The correlation between teacher quality and student education outcomes has been well-evidenced in previous research. The purpose of this study was to explore the potential use of Human Resource Management (HRM) theory and practice to identify and select quality teachers for the range of individual and contextually different schools that exist within education systems. The variance between schools in their context, sector, socio economic status and needs, is considerable, consequently individual schools have quite specific local needs when recruiting and selecting teachers. The ability to draw on consistent evidence-based practices may result in not only rigorous recruitment and selection processes but also teacher retention. Effective recruitment, selection and retention of teachers has emerged, in recent studies, to be one of the most crucial school improvement strategies. In order to understand how HRM practices might improve recruitment and selection of teachers in independent schools it was necessary firstly to identify the HRM practices being used. To this end an online survey of school leaders was conducted this was followed by six one on one interviews to enrich the survey data. The results of the survey indicated that a variety of HRM processes were being utilised by school leaders at the functional level with little cognisance of the strategic possibilities nor an HRM evidence-based structure of practices. The interviews supported these findings and also revealed that there is a growing awareness in school leaders that the adoption of HRM informed practices may indeed be beneficial in recruitment and selection of teachers. These results provide a compelling reason for further research and indicate there is great potential for use of HRM expertise and practices by school leaders for recruitment and selection of teachers as part of a suite of HRM practices which may indeed lead to school improvement and eventually to improved social and economic outcomes.

Reviews the state of Vietnam’s innovation system and proposes an agenda for improving it by (1) assessing the country’s current innovation capacity; (2) examining the demand side and how the need for knowledge and the absorptive capacity of firms can find improvement; (3) considering how the supply of knowledge and skills from higher education and research can rise; and (4) adopting the goal of creating an innovation-led economy that includes restructuring state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to create a level playing field, strengthening microeconomic foundations to enhance private sector competitiveness and leveraging external trade opportunities for growth. Vietnam’s economic aspirations require it to raise its growth rate, but since 1990, it has grown mainly by expanding the labor force and both foreign direct investment (FDI) and domestic capital. Demographic shifts and limit of capital mobilization have now closed that option, forcing future growth to rely on a labor force working smarter with higher quality capital resources.

Nursing education in Argentina

Object-oriented software engineering methodology defines systems requirements in the form of flow-oriented use cases. This OOSE process involves developing a formal problem description - a problem statement $then developing use cases to capture the functional requirements of a proposed system. According to the OOSE approach, use cases should be used throughout the entire development process. Thus, they play a major role in a project's analysis, design, testing, and implementation stages. Use cases have five key stakeholders namely customers, systems and business analysts, systems architects and developers, software testing and quality assurance engineers, and project managers. Conceptual use case diagrams that draw on critical analysis can enhance a project manager's ability to allocate medium-sized or large-scale development projects in a way that limits task duplication and functional overlaps

The Digital Services Research Group and its predecessor groups and offshoots in Digital Equipment Corporation have been mobilizing leading-edge AI research to bear on real-life problems that face the corporation and its customers. The general strategy of the group is to explore emerging techniques relevant to service and support needs through developing rapid prototypes, deploying these prototypes, and incorporating feedback from users. With over 32 major projects undertaken during the past decade, we have worked on broad spectrum of problems and explored a variety of advanced AI techniques. This article describes the current AI activities in five areas: (1) enterprise advisory systems, (2) natural language processing and textual information retrieval, (3) largescale knowledge base management and access, (4) software configuration management, and (5) intrusion detection. We also list some future research directions.

There are 29 medical schools in Argentina (this number has increased rapidly in the last decade) offering a 6-year curriculum that usually consists of 3 years of basic science, 2 years of clinical sciences, and one internship year. Annually, 5,000 physicians graduate from these programs. Admission requirements vary depending on each university's policy. Some do not have entry requirements; others require a course, usually on the basics of mathematics, biology, chemistry or physics, and some introduction to social and humanistic studies. Each year, there are approximately 12,000 first-year medical students attending the 29 schools, which suffer a high dropout rate during the first years because of vocational problems or inability to adapt to university life. Some schools have massive classes (over 2,000 students), which makes it difficult for the schools to perfect their teaching. The number of full-time faculty members is low, and some of them have appointments at more than one medical school. Residency programs offer an insufficient number of places, and fewer than 50% of the graduates can obtain a residency position because of strict admission requirements. Coordination between the Ministry of Health, representing the health care system, and the Ministry of Education, representing the medical education system, needs to be improved. Despite the problems of medical education in Argentina, the movement to improve the education of health care workers is growing. The author offers two recommendations to help accomplish this goal.

Reconciliating divergent data is an important issue in concurrent engineering mobile computing and software configuration management. Currently, a lot of synchronizers or merge tools perform reconciliations. However, they do not define what is the correctness of their synchronisation. In this paper, we propose to use a transformational approach as the basic model for reasonning about synchronisation. We propose an algorithm and specific transformation functions that realize a file system synchronisation. Unlike classic synchronizers, our synchronizer ensures properties of convergence, causality and intention preservation and is extensible to new data types.

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture. internationale./http://portal.acm.org/

Developers of computer codes, analysts who use the codes, and decision makers who rely on the results of the analyses face a critical question: How should confidence in modeling and simulation be critically assessed? Verification and validation (V&V) of computational simulations are the primary methods for building and quantifying this confidence. Briefly, verification is the assessment of the accuracy of the solution to a computational model. Validation is the assessment of the accuracy of a computational simulation by comparison with experimental data. In verification, the relationship of the simulation to the real world is not an issue. In validation, the relationship between computation and the real world, ie, experimental data, is the issue. This paper presents our viewpoint of the state of the art in V&V in computational physics. (In this paper we refer to all fields of computational engineering and physics, eg, computational fluid dynamics, computational solid mechanics, structural dynamics, shock wave physics, computational chemistry, etc, as computational physics.) We describe our view of the framework in which predictive capability relies on V&V, as well as other factors that affect predictive capability. Our opinions about the research needs and management issues in V&V are very practical: What methods and techniques need to be developed and what changes in the views of management need to occur to increase the usefulness, reliability, and impact of computational physics for decision making about engineering systems? We review the state of the art in V&V over a wide range of topics, for example, prioritization of V&V activities using the Phenomena Identification and Ranking Table (PIRT), code verification, software quality assurance (SQA), numerical error estimation, hierarchical experiments for validation, characteristics of validation experiments, the need to perform nondeterministic computational simulations in comparisons with experimental data, and validation metrics. We then provide an extensive discussion of V&V research and implementation issues that we believe must be addressed for V&V to be more effective in improving confidence in computational predictive capability. Some of the research topics addressed are development of improved procedures for the use of the PIRT for prioritizing V&V activities, the method of manufactured solutions for code verification, development and use of hierarchical validation diagrams, and the construction and use of validation metrics incorporating statistical measures. Some of the implementation topics addressed are the needed management initiatives to better align and team computationalists and experimentalists in conducting validation activities, the perspective of commercial software companies, the key role of analysts and decision makers as code customers, obstacles to the improved effectiveness of V&V, effects of cost and schedule constraints on practical applications in industrial settings, and the role of engineering standards committees in documenting best practices for V&V. There are 207 references cited in this review article.

Software Configuration Management in a Parallel Development Environment

This paper examines how education and Human Resource Management (HRM) in the education sector together can catalyze socio-economic development in Dwarahat district (Uttarakhand), a predominantly rural Himalayan district in India. Using secondary data from census reports, district education records, and state/national policy documents, the study maps Dwarahat’s education indicators, identifies systemic HRM challenges within local educational institutions, and proposes an integrated policy and operational roadmap. Principal findings indicate that while Dwarahat’s literacy averages are comparable to state levels, significant challenges persist in gender parity, teacher distribution, retention, and infrastructure. Dwarahat’s overall literacy rate (79.1%) nearly matches the Uttarakhand average (79.6%) and surpasses the national figure (74.0%). Male literacy (88.2%) is above both state and national averages, while female literacy (70.3%) lags behind the state (70.9%) and contributes to a higher gender literacy gap (17.9%). Primary enrollment is strong (96.5%), but secondary enrollment (72.4%) falls below the state average (75.6%) with dropout rates (27.6%) exceeding both state and national levels. HRM-related concerns are pronounced: the pupil–teacher ratio (32:1) is higher than the state average (28:1), the share of female teachers (28.7%) is lower than both state (35.2%) and national averages (37.4%), and ICT facility coverage (22.5%) remains inadequate. Vocational training opportunities are scarce, with only two institutes compared to 54 across Uttarakhand. The paper concludes by recommending HRM-driven educational reforms tailored to the socio-cultural context of Dwarahat, emphasizing skill development, gender equity, improved teacher management, and community-based engagement as pathways for sustainable socio-economic development.