Software Methodologies A Quantitative Guide

Jeff Magee and Jeff Kramer John Wiley and Sons, New York, NY, 1999, 374 pp. ISBN 0471987107, $64.99 The book is an introductory text to the ideas, concepts, and topics of concurrency. The text focuses on understanding concepts and techniques, and problems of concurrency, not on the implementation or language. The author's overall goal is that by a combination of learning and doing using Java should make the process of acquiring the skills relating to concurrency interesting, enjoyable, and challenging. The Java language is thus used only for illustration and programming experience of the reader. The book is intended for a computer science student or software developer. A background in programming is expected, as well as some familiarity with the essential concepts of object-oriented programming. Knowledge of the Java programming language and operating systems concepts is beneficial but not required. After reading the text, a reader can expect to have a broad understanding of the concepts of concurrency, the problems that arise, methods to emphasis desirable properties in a concurrent system, and ways to avoid the undesirable ones. The text provides a systematic treatment of concepts, as means to rigorously specify and model concurrent systems, with Java examples to animate and illustrate the concepts discussed. The book is organized into twelve chapters, with three appendices. The first eight chapters provide a concise and comprehensive foundation of concurrency, with the remaining four chapters focusing on more advanced concepts. The latter four chapters are somewhat supplemental and can be read at the discretion of the reader. The content of the text is self-contained, with no reliance upon external references. The authors provide a concluding set of notes and further topics which reference external works, but these are not used in the chapter contents. The introduction provides the foundation for the book, and an idea of what will follow in the rest of the text. The basics of modeling and Java are covered. Authors follow with the concepts of processes, threads and with the idea of concurrency. The emphasis is on using Java, and on the notation used to define a concurrent process or thread. The discussion continues covering interleaving and asynchronous concurrency. Various details about composition of parallel processes and finite state processing modeling are presented. The programming of concurrent execution using Java is then examined via the concept of multiple threads. Here, sharing objects among Java threads is also discussed. The concept of conditional synchronization is covered next, and is used to construct a monitor. The methods of the base object in Java is used, and a waiting queue associated with a Java object is discussed and implemented. This discussion is followed by introduction of deadlock. Authors show the conditions necessary for a deadlock to occur and present an analysis of a concurrent system establishing that such a system is deadlock-free. The classic Dining Philosopher's problem is used to illustrate the distinction between finding deadlocks in models and in programs. The presentation continues with the safety property (that asserts that nothing bad happens), and the liveliness property (that asserts that nothing good happens). Here, authors use the material on model-based design to consolidate many of the concepts previously discussed. No one modeling method or design methodology is emphasized. Then creation and elimination of threads in a running program is covered next. The dynamic starting and stopping of Java threads is presented. The discussion moves then to messaging passing. Asynchronous and synchronous messaging is presented with Java programming examples. The concept of a rendezvous, allowing for interaction in a messaging system, is also presented. Based on the concepts developed so far filter-pipeline, supervisor-worker, and announcer-listener concurrent architectures are examined. Java programs demonstrating how the elements of each model interact at runtime are developed. The presentation completes with modeling and implementing of timed systems. Time is signaled by the passage of successive time ticks. The authors then elaborate on a system that is event-based rather than thread-based. Java programs are used to illustrate in implementation the concepts discussed. The three appendices provide a reference, specification, and listing of semantics for the finite-state modeling algebra used by the authors throughout the book. The text is ideal for teaching in a classroom environment, or for a motivated reader to use for self-paced learning. Its organization follows a logical train of discussion and thought, with each chapter building successively on the other, with the more difficult concepts and topics withheld until later. This gradual approach makes the material flow smoothly and cohesively from the beginning to the end. The book is intended as a textbook, so does organize the material and discussion as one, but does not become too dry or bland to stifle the reader's interest in the material. The examples are inter-mixed with the discussion to highlight and emphasize essential points the authors make in each chapter. The text illustrates concepts well under discussion, and does not become a long-winded recital of theory. The topics examined are fundamental to concurrency, and are well illustrated and discussed, but no one topic is examined extensively. The code examples are well written concerning the programming style, indentation and comments. A CD is provided, containing the codes from the book. In addition supplementary material consisting of presentation slides and an errata is provided on the author's WWW site, as well as on the CD. The book is up to date both on the topics of concurrency, and with the Java applets, code, and programs used to illustrate them. Later, as the Java language evolves, the examples may need to be updated, but for the time being the text well represents that state of the Java language. William F. Gilreath, Micron Technology, Inc., Boise Idaho

One of the most important features of an ERP system is that it integrates all the units of a company, such as sales, production, purchasing, inventory, accounting, and human resources, in real time and with a close relationship to each other.This integration enables total optimization and makes the business process more customer-oriented.Complaints about defects in the software, estimation of appropriate development costs, etc. are raised by the client, while complaints about unstable requirements, excessive changes, delayed delivery and non-payment of development costs are raised by the customer.This paper is a study on how to estimate the completion level and appropriate development cost and defect repair cost in a project where ERP system development is completed.Based on the completeness of the ERP system delivered by Company A to Company B and the IFPUG's FP estiamtion manual and the detailed method of the software cost estimation guide, the function point was calculated, and based on this, the appropriate development cost, development period, and defect repair cost were calculated.

Importance and use of formal research and evaluation

The purpose of this research paper is to examine (1) why formal methods are required for software systems today; (2) the Praxis High Integrity Systems' Correctness-by-Construction methodology; and (3) an affordable application of a formal methods methodology to software engineering. The cultivated research for this paper included literature reviews of documents found across the Internet and in publications as well as reviews of conference proceedings including the 2004 High Confidence Software and Systems Conference and the 2004 Special Interest Group on Ada Conference. This research realized that (1) our reliance on software systems for national, business and personal critical processes outweighs the trust we have in our systems; (2) there is a growing demand for the ability to trust our software systems; (3) methodologies such as Praxis' Correctness-by-Construction are readily available and can provide this needed level of trust; (4) tools such as Praxis' SparkAda when appropriately applied can be an affordable approach to applying formal methods to a software system development process; (5) software users have a responsibility to demand correctness; and finally, (6) software engineers have the responsibility to provide this correctness. Further research is necessary to determine what other methodologies and tools are available to provide affordable approaches to applying formal methods to software engineering. In conclusion, formal methods provide an unprecedented ability to build trust in the correctness of a system or component. Through the development of methodologies such as Praxis' Correctness by Construction and tools such as SparkAda, it is becoming ever more cost advantageous to implement formal methods within the software engineering lifecycle. As the criticality of our IT systems continues to steadily increase, so must our trust that these systems will perform as expected. Software system clients, such as government, businesses and all other IT users, must demand that their IT systems be delivered with a proven level of correctness or trust commensurate to the criticality of the function they perform.

The well logging phase of a coordinated formation evaluation program can improve the quality of basic reservoir data while reducing the need for extensive coring and drill-stem testing. The quantitative data to be determined from log analyses are formation porosity, fluid saturation and formation water resistivity. In order for these data to be obtained successfully, the proper logging devices must be selected, accurate data on the borehole conditions must be obtained and quality control measures regarding logging techniques must be exercised. The use of core analyses and drill-stem test data on a key-well basis to confirm log calculations is a necessary requirement to assure maximum dependability of quantitative log interpretation for reservoir analysis purposes. Introduction Well logging is one of the most useful of the various types of open-hole formation evaluation methods. When properly applied, present techniques of well logging and interpretation can provide substantial reductions in the costs of evaluation, development and exploitation of petroleum reservoirs. The initial benefit from a good logging program is that better well completions can be made. A second and more important benefit is that a reliable calculation of oil in place can be made for reservoir analysis purposes from the location of water contacts, reservoir boundaries and the calculation of formation porosity and water saturation data. Necessary formation evaluation data can be obtained at a much lower cost by using log information to extend key-well core analyses and drill-stem test data for coverage of the entire reservoir instead of using an extensive coring and testing program. A logging program cannot be considered successful and profitable unless the basic reservoir data obtained from the logs are valid and complete. This objective can be reached, however, if the logging program is properly planned and coordinated with the other formation evaluation methods used. It is worthy of note that even the qualitative value of logs is doubtful unless proper planning is used in the selection of the types of logs to be run and unless suitable quality control measures are followed in logging techniques.

This paper describes how oil is being developed from small compartmentalized fluviatile reservoirs, stacked vertically from around 4000’ to 9000’ below sea level. The oil reservoirs are encountered intermittently amongst gas reservoirs. The oil and gas reserves are being developed through low cost wells and platforms that are installed and brought on production in a back-to-back manner in order to maintain the oil rate at the facility capacity of a new oil processing platform. The paper provides some historical background and explains the challenges that were faced in bringing this project to fruition. Initially, the oil was considered a problem within the context of an existing and established gas infrastructure. Given the limited size of the oil reservoirs and the incompatibility of oil in the gas systems, an innovative development plan was required, that would enable sufficient economies of scale to reach economic viability. A focussed team was formed to review options to develop the oil-rich gas prospects that were geographically spread over an area of around 250 km2. The oil development scheme that was chosen requires the back-to-back installation of over 10 wellhead platforms and drilling of over 105 wells. The oil is transported through 3-phase pipelines to a new oil-processing platform, from which oil is exported to a new export system and an FSO and gas is transferred to the existing gas infrastructure. Development costs are balanced against reservoir recovery using "fit for purpose" solutions to make the project economically viable. The paper describes the full development scheme, ranging from well design (spacing, drilling, formation evaluation, completion) through oil processing to oil export/storage, and explains which "fit for purpose" solutions were applied. The project was fast-tracked, and risk management was applied to deal with the uncertainties in oil reserves/recovery and cost exposure associated with the oil development. From drilling the exploration wells to "first oil" production took only 19 months. The paper also reviews several factors that contributed to the ability to fast track and manage the risks of the project.

Development and evaluation of an ontology for guiding appropriate antibiotic prescribing

Activities such as copying, pasting and modifying codes usually lead to a lot of code clones in the software systems. These code clones have a great impact on software development and maintenance. This paper presents a new clone detection approach. That is to uses a algorithm based on suffix array to efficiently search repeated token substrings and finally to detect code clones. We also develop a clone detection tool SaCD in order to implement the method. This tool has detected statement clones in 31 open source software systems of C, C++ and Java language. The experimental results show that the SaCD can efficiently detect code clones at the statement granularity in the software.

Mobile devices, especially those that handle Android operating system have been well received in recent years and are used to solve problems in real time. Nowadays some applications are being developed to support visual programming within these devices and mobile applications have been developed to accomplish this approach as Catroid and Scratch, since it has been proven through studies that allows graphical programming to gain more interest in software development and has supported applications for computers with Scratch, StarLogo and Alice. For these reasons is presented the design and analysis of an application that lets you to program using blocks from Android devices and allows the generation and execution of code in the Java language on a remote server.

\n Contains fulltext :\n 158152.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)\n

Data have become a highly valued asset for governments, industries and individuals, and the management of these data collections remains a critical technical challenge.. The challenges of managing terabytes and exabytes of data and expanding data management to include other data modalities while maintaining the fundamental tenets of database management (data independence, data integrity, data consistency, etc) are important issues for any organization today. Published as five volumes with over 4000 pages, the Encyclopedia of Database Systems provides easy access to important concepts relevant information on all aspects of very large databases, data management, and database systems, including areas of current interest and research results of historical significance.. This comprehensive reference contains 1,300 illustrated entries, organized alphabetically. Each entry presents basic terminology, concepts, methods and algorithms, key results to date, references to the literature, and cross-references to other entries. Topics for the Encyclopedia — including areas of current interest as well as research results of historical significance — were selected by a distinguished international advisory board and written by world class experts in the field. Encyclopedia of Database Systems is designed to meet the needs of researchers, professors, graduate and undergraduate students in computer science and engineering. Industry professionals such as database specialists and software developers will also benefit from this reference work. [from publisher's website]

11752127 2109SPi-5 4 3 2 1 0 To our families PrefaceWe are in an information era where generating and storing large amounts of data are commonplace.A growing number of organizations routinely handle terabytes and exabytes of data, and individual digital data collections easily reach multiple gigabytes.Along with the increases in volume, the modality of digitized data that requires efficient management and the access modes to these data have become more varied.It is increasingly common for business and personal data collections to include images, video, voice, and unstructured text; the retrieval of these data comprises various forms, including structured queries, keyword search, and visual access.Data have become a highly valued asset for governments, industries and individuals, and the management of these data collections remains a critical technical challenge.Database technology has matured over the past four decades and is now quite ubiquitous in many applications that deal with more traditional business data.The challenges of expanding data management to include other data modalities while maintaining the fundamental tenets of database management (data independence, data integrity, data consistency, etc.) are issues that the community continues to work on.The lines between database management and other fields such as information retrieval, multimedia retrieval, and data visualization are increasingly blurred.This multi-volume Encyclopedia of Database Systems provides easy access to important concepts on all aspects of database systems, including areas of current interest and research results of historical significance.It is a comprehensive collection of over 1,250 in-depth entries (3,067 including synonyms) that present coverage of the important concepts, issues, emerging technology and future trends in the field of database technologies, systems, and applications.The content of the Encyclopedia was determined through wide consultations.We were assisted by an Advisory Board in coming up with the overall structure and content.Each of these areas were put under the control of Area Editors (70 in total) who further developed the content for each area, soliciting experts in the field as contributors to write the entries, and performed the necessary technical editing.Some of them even wrote entries themselves.Nearly 1,000 authors were involved in writing entries.The intended audience for the Encyclopedia is technically broad and diverse.It includes anyone concerned with database system technology and its applications.Specifically, the Encyclopedia can serve as a valuable and authoritative reference for students, researchers and practitioners who need a quick and authoritative reference to the subject of databases, data management, and database systems.We anticipate that many people will benefit from this reference work, including database specialists, software developers, scientists and engineers who need to deal with (structured, semi-structured or unstructured) large datasets.In addition, database and data mining researchers and scholars in the many areas that apply database technologies, such as artificial intelligence, software engineering, robotics and computer vision, machine learning, finance and marketing are expected to benefit from the Encyclopedia.We would like to thank the members of the Advisory Board, the Editorial Board, and the individual contributors for their help in creating this Encyclopedia.The success of the Encyclopedia could not have been achieved without the expertise and the effort of the many contributors.Our sincere thanks also go to Springer's editors and staff, including Jennifer Carlson, Susan Lagerstrom-Fife, Oona Schmid, and Susan Bednarczyk for their support throughout the project.Finally, we would very much like to hear from readers for any suggestions regarding the Encyclopedia's content.With a project of this size and scope, it is quite possible that we may have missed some concepts.It is also possible that some entries may benefit from revisions and clarifications.We are committed to issuing periodic updates and we look forward to the feedback from the community to improve the Encyclopedia.

The advent of the Internet resulted in availability of e-content in huge quantities; this e-content includes information in different domains. This information is being exploited for various reasons and applications. As the formal evaluation and assessment techniques are undergoing transformations, there is also a need for a voluminous Question Bank (QB). The manual creation of questions is a time-consuming and expensive task as it requires domain experts and there is a growing trend towards question bank based question paper generation for assessment. Hence the problem of automatic question generation has attracted attention of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) research community; this problem can be handled by NLP. Automatic generation of high-quality questions is the long-term goal of the Question Generation (QG) research community. The automatic question generation aims to generate all possible questions from the input text or document. This survey article presents the issues, challenges and approaches as well as reviews the reported research work in the context of automatic question generation for different languages at national and international level.

This paper presents a virtual platform for the development and test of application software, low-level software, and hardware components for an MPSoC (Multiprocessor System-on-Chip) platform, where components are interconnected by a network-on-chip (NoC). The environment is aimed at the development of multithread real-time embedded applications in Java language. Communication and task management services are provided that are able to deal with real-time restrictions, following the RTSJ standard. SystemC models are used to describe processors and network connections that have equivalent descriptions in VHDL. Performance and power / energy evaluation are made possible, helping to shorten cycles for embedded system development, integration, and test.

Formal methods for software development receive much attention in research centres, but are rarely used in industry for the development of (large) software systems. One of the reasons is that little is known about the integration of formal methods in the software process, and the exact role of formal methods in the software life-cycle is still unclear. In this paper, a detailed examination is made of the application of, and the benefits resulting from, a generally applicable formal method (VDM) in a standard model for software development (DoD-STD-2167A). Currently, there is no general agreement on how formal methods should be used, but in order to analyse the use of formal methods in the software process, a clear view of such use is essential. Therefore, we show what is meant by ‘using a formal method’. The different activities of DoD-STD-2167A are analysed with regard to their suitability for applying VDM and the benefits that may result from applying VDM for that activity. Based on this analysis, an overall view on the usage of formal methods in the software process is formulated.