Software Process - Science topic

Please let me know if anyone is interested to o

When selecting a perspective process model, there are some facts to be

Considered they are Scope of validity, the impact of the process, Degree of confidence

And tailorability of the process.

When considering a flash flood prediction system,

If the Scope is well defined so its Helps to define clear goals in order to reduce cycle time also improving code quality. So according to this system the goal would be give accurate prediction reports on time.

The impact of process- This reflects the weight that should be given to each context of the project. In here If the impact is not known then the prescriptive process will lead to unpredictable results. So this is very important part.

Degree of confidence- Effectiveness of this application to be deployed in different areas where floods can be occur.

The ability to modify when changes in requirements can is referred to Tailorable. It must be able to adapt the process described by the prescriptive model to specific goals of the project. In this system adding new databases ,data sets or new functions can be taken as examples.

Hi Pradeep,

you may wish to look at another framework linking knowledge management, intellectual capital and project management. It is freely available at RG:

Meliha

another vital portion of the RE is preparation and collection of test scenarios and related data.

later on if the application manifest with new modern technolgy, our assumption is user should have same results with same secnarios.

from my expiriance this is the most costly step with in such convertion projects

Dear Dr. Mahmudova

Thanks for your answer to my question.

Regards.

André Gomes Lamas Otero Great! Thanks for your time.

Dear Andrea,

I suggest you to see links and attached files on topic.

Best regards

Download the image J software and look for the feature compatible with your work

To check if this is sample related or instrument/tip related, you could scan at a different angle, say 45°. If it is "real" (i.e. a slope in your sample), the direction of the slope should change. If it is an imaging artefact, changes in tilt might be unrelated to the expected geometrical change in slope of an inclided sample geometry. As previously mentioned by David Mercier, check AFM software handbooks to reduce setting-related imaging artefacts. Also be aware of tip contamination. In general, data levelling is OK if you know that you have device-related issues (e.g. due to the piezos). If in doubt, scan a planar Si wafer and see what you get.

ReflexW is certainly a great software for the processing of 2D seismic and GPR data. It offers numerous geophysical processing options and filters. We use it extensively for the processing and display of 2D GPR profiles, as well as velocity analysis and some 3D processing and visualisations. ReflexW contains options for horizon picking. Dr. Sandmeier is very supportive. To my knowledge there exist still discounted academic licenses, just contact him. I have no experience with RadExPro, but would recommend ReflexW anytime. Alternatively, Seismix Unix of the Colorado School of Mines is a powerful open source package for seismic processing under Linux.

You have not really specified what analysis you intend for your data, but for free Rietveld software I believe FullProf, GSAS-II, and maybe MAUD can all read your data file.

Thank you Tyler Bourret for your response. We actually obtained the sequence second time with more precise result and already submitted to genebank.

A good choice also is OpenDroneMap (https://github.com/OpenDroneMap/OpenDroneMap)

It is difficult to get free softwares this days. Those ones tag free may not be able to do the work for you because some vital components in the software are some times deactivated

Image quality can only be enhanced toward a particular purpose. To make an image more pleasing to look at (to improve its aesthetic quality) may generally require different de-noising than to make it easier to detect some critical feature or state (improve its functional quality toward some practical end). Generally image information is lost with de-noising, and the practical functionality of an image risks degradation with de-noising. Only de-noise if you can objectively show that it is expected to improve some practical functionality.

Following the published theories, a reduction of the number of defects and - eventually - their severity would be assumed.

According to my daily experience: processes are only a means of support. The bigger impact have the skills of the developers involved: lousy developers make lousy software - no matter which processes are involved. On the other hand, good developers may not need formal processes to be followed: they know 'best practice' and are quite sensible in implementing exactly what's required - minimizing overhead. But good developers are a rare species...

This can also be viewed in terms of parallel processing speak which nowadays refers to task based parallelism (coarse grained) and data parallelism (fine grained). Opencl talks about these but tends to concentrate on data parallelism as GPUs were its main target.  But with heterogeneous parallelism (a mix of both types and hence different hardware components we get full range which is more normal for systems. To answer your question: fine grained process will be small domain (limited - but focussed) and if you like,  tending towards specialist, as opposed to the coarse grained much larger domain with generalisation and less detail (and yes managers prefer these!). Large systems will be a patchy mix of both. Often  hardware system are example of heterogeneous parallel processing - several processors (CPU, DSP, FPGA etc)  with different roles but interacting.

I'm very sorry for misunderstanding the question you've asked. I considered the "SEM" as the abbreviation of "Structural Equation Modeling". My apology! Wish someone else could help you. 

First of all you should define the goal of creating hybrid model..for example a goal might be to reduce communication gap between teams or team members..or to reduce time of sprint cycle...

after deciding the goal, you can analyse both process models and explore/ identify phases/activities suitable to achieve your goal.  

Thank you George. We will consider this Computer Program.

Hi Sandra

What could be interesting to look  at is the methodology of Design Thinking, it has been very successful for some companies for the Design of there software for niched population  or special conditions ( I put accessibility in this category ).

Have a look at Design School link below. 

Hope this could help

Alain

you may use reaction kinetic data of ethylene oxide and alcohol firstly and then use a proper reactor for that reaction. you have the following components: ethylene oxide, a alcohol and you product in presence of a catalyst.  After that use a property package like NRTL and define your reaction data. Then enter the simulation environment and introduce your feed stream to a reactor. 

just one thing to remember, Ethylene oxide is such a reactive intermediate that it is seldom shipped in large quantities.

Software engineering is the practice of engineering software: namely, finding a need that software can solve, identifying requirements that if enacted, would solve the need, structuring the solution to meet the requirements and designing the details (architecture and detailed design) and then implementing (coding), along with appropriate V&V. 

Software process management is behind the scenes. It manages the processes for doing all of the above.   For example, whether and how requirements are tested: does the customer actually need exactly what he/she seems to be asking for, or would this 90% solution, which will be half as expensive, actually work for them?   Or: will we do software incrementally and go through this whole life cycle process once every sprint (agile software development) or will we gather and proof out a large number of requirements before designing and coding any of them? 

Software engineering follows processes, but they have to be managed because they get old and people may take shortcuts. One has to determine whether the shortcuts are truly efficiencies that everyone should consider using, or if they are going to harm the project but you won't find out till later, in which case there should be either full process usage or at least  a workaround.

A manager of software development ordinarily has software engineers working for him or her, and is responsible for process maintenance, but often the organization as a whole manages the processes (This shortcut was deemed to be good for project X; will it work for all projects? Maybe we should tweak it a bit so it is more broadly applicable.)

You can use The ERDAS Imagine model maker

Ahmad,

try to find articles/book by setting keywords in Google Scholar, e.g.

You can find excellent articles in leading SE journals, e.g. my choice includes:

Empirical Software Engineering

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

Journal of Systems and Software

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

Software Quality Journal

Information and Software Technology

Journal of Software - Evolution and Process

Regards,

Zeljko

Hi Marco,

we are working right now on such more-detailed definition too. We call our approach BPM(N)Easy. BPM(N)Easy defines (not only on a top level description) an agile method in the context of BPM. As soon the complete work (with project samples) are ready I'll push it to researchgate.

Matthieu,

Thank you for very useful link.

Zeljko

Yes, we did apply six sigma principles like DMAIC for improving software development process.

·         We first flowcharted the software process like anyone would do for any other manufacturing process.

·         Then, we looked into tasks/ functions, which were repetitive or were duplicated at various points in the life-cycle.

·         In addition, we identified tasks, which were either time consuming or labor intensive.  

·         We applied Six Sigma DMAIC process for those tasks, which were time-consuming or labor intensive. The idea was to identify root cause and thereafter develop corrective actions.

The following paper may provide you with some details.

You can try BCAL LiDAR Tools. BCAL LiDAR Tools is a freeware developed at Department of Geosciences, Boise Center Aerospace Laboratory (BCAL). These tools can be used for processing, analyzing and visualizing LiDAR data. They are written in IDL programming language and are intended to be used as add-on in the ENVI remote sensing software package.

The tools can currently process LiDAR data up to LAS 1.2 format. BLT can be downloaded from the link http://bcal.geology.isu.edu/tools-2/envi-tools. BLT are

widely used by a variety of federal and state agencies for research and teaching throughout the world.

BLT is equipped with all the essential modules for following a general workflow for LiDAR data processing and product generation. The workflow involves the steps starting from importing the data to visualizing it and to classifying it for finally generating a product with acceptable international standards. The successful implementation of this freeware for various projects can be followed on http://code.google.com/p/bcal-lidar-tools/wiki/ToolsUsage.

The Software Engineering Institute (www.sei.cmu.edu) has created and collected evidence for many years that the improvement of formalized software development processes (in the context of CMMI) tends to help the development success of large organizations.

Likewise the agile community for the lightweight software development processes, if you find case studies to be admissible empirical evidence (which I think you should).

Generally, yes: a better process will tend to lead to better software -- this is self-evident because it is how you would _define_ the term "better process". What actually _is_ a better process in practice, however, is a question that carries a huge set of environment variables with it and so is very difficult to answer empirically.

You need to:

Bear in mind that most practitioners don't have close links to research and that the research community is churning out research literature at an incredible rate.  Even those few practitioners (like myself) who try to keep an eye out for interesting ideas find it very difficult to spot those worth following up on.  

Personally, what I usually find is that potentially interesting ideas haven't been validated in any meaningful way so it's very difficult for me to justify the (large amount of) time needed to figure out if they are worth pursuing.

Carnegie Mellon developed CMM as a process maturity model. Implementation of CMM raised many challenges that led to development of CMMI as an improvement. CMMI however does not replace CMM and the effectiveness depends on the specific area of application. CMM measures the maturity level of an organization by determining if an organization completes the specific activities listed in the Key Performance Areas (KPA), oblivious to whether the completion of such activity leads to the desired result. CMMI is also an activity based approach but the major difference is that CMMI takes a more result-oriented approach when defining and measuring Key Performance Areas. CMMI documents industry best practices categorized on separate areas of interests rather than separate functions. Organizations choose from any of the 22 available models depending on the business objectives, and each model covers all the functional areas. 

Both CMM and CMMI define five distinct levels of process maturity based on Key Performance Areas (KPA’s). The KPA's of CMMI levels overcome the inefficiency of CMM levels to unearth significant architectural flaws.

Level 1 (Initial): The first level of both CMM and CMMI describes an immature organization without any defined processes, run in an ad hoc, uncontrolled, and reactive manner.

Level 2 (Repeat): Organizations that repeat some processes attain Level 2 CMM. Level 2 of CMMI however requires management of organizational requirements through planned, performed, measured, and controlled processes.

Level 3 (Defined): CMM Level 3 mandates a set of documented standard processes to establish consistency across the organization. CMMI Level 3 is an improvement of CMMI Level 2 and describes the organizational processes in standards, procedures, tools, and methods.

Level 4 (Manage): CMM Level 4 requires organizations to attain control over processes by using quantitative statistical techniques. CMMI Level 4 demands likewise, but also identifies sub processes that significantly contribute to overall process efficiency.

Level 5 (Optimized): CMM Level 5 mandates use of quantitative tools and objectives to manage process improvement. CMMI Level 5 on the other hand focuses on continuously improving process performance through incremental and innovative technological improvements.

While CMM is a certification tool, CMMI is not. An organization is appraised and awarded a CMMI Rating from 1 to 5 depending on the extent to which the organization adopts the selected CMMI model.

Hi Hammad,

A lot of work has been done with hemispheric objectives on camera's in field. This work dates back for more than 10 years now.

Software (CANEYE) has also been developed and can be downloaded at

The most used and according to me also the most accurate software was developed by INRA (Institut National des Recherches Agronomiques or the French National Agricultural Research Institute). I have used this software myself in field work and also my students use the software in practical exercises in remote sensing. The method is one of the best to estimate LAI in forests but also agricultural plots, better even than the LAI-2000, which is useless in forests. The LAI-2000 does not enable to discriminate between leaves and trunks for example. Crucial is that color has to be acquired by the camera when one wants to determine a LEAF area index.

If something would not be clear please let me know. The type of camera we used is a NIKON body equipped with a NIKON standard hemispheric objective. The best one, but not the cheapest one, especially the hemispheric objective is expensive.

The website I mentioned will give much more information than I can give here. Please do consult it for further detail on methodology, software and camera's. An international consortium VALERI (Validation of European Remote Sensing Satellites), uses the technique to perform intercomparisons of LAI in field campaigns worldwide, together with a NASA team.

Cheers,

Frank

One technology/method to support process lines is domain-specific languages. That means capturing variability space directly in a language and then all legal product variants can be specified with the langauge. This gives more flexibility than parameter lists, wizards or feature models and allows to use already known product concepts directly in models.

When it comes to industry practices, see a review of 20+ cases in SPLC 2005 paper: Defining Domain-Specific Modeling Languages to Automate Product Derivation: Collected Experiences. Proceedings of the 9th International Software Product Line Conference, H. Obbink and K. Pohl (Eds.) Springer-Verlag, LNCS 3714, pp. 198 – 209, 2005. (Published with permission from Springer-Verlag at: http://users.jyu.fi/~jpt/TolKelSPLC2005.pdf.

That is a very interesting question, which we investigate for a while! In order to create a more clear terminology, we name two paradigms: 1) activity-based and 2) artifact-based processes (explanation in short words follows).

In the activity-based paradigm (this is what you call imperative), the focus of the process is the activities (the methods) to carry out certain tasks. A process is then defined by a sequence of activities (a workflow). Artifacts, which represent any piece of produced/consumed data in a project, are the inputs and outputs of activities. Dependencies between artifacts are expressed by the combination of activities in the workflow.

In the artifact-based paradigm (this is what you call declarative), the focus is the artifacts. Artifacts have type, structure, content, responsibilities, and dependencies among each other. For every artifact, there are several methods that can be used to create the artifact, e.g., a requirements spec can be created using plain text, structured text, diagrams and models, and so forth. That is, a process is defined by a set of artifacts to be created, and a context-specific selection of appropriate methods.

What we learned so far:

- There is no absolute distinction between these paradigms; you always have a mixture.

- Activity-based processes better reflect the way of work.

- Artifact-based processes provide better means to assess project outcomes.

- Artifact-based processes are more flexible, as one can select different methods to create an artifact.

However, in an experiment, we learned that artifact-based approaches are easier to analyze, design, and implement processes (which means: this paradigm seems to better support SPI projects), while process users do not care, and prefer more detailed guidance. Experience from practice also shows that artifact-based processes are more difficult to teach, as they require a certain level of abstract thinking.

So, are declarative more intuitive? It depends. For just enacting a process in a project, the imperative process is more intuitive as it contains more guidance. If you have to analyze and design processes, then the declarative approach is more intuitive as you can talk about process artifacts, their properties, and so on. In the end, neither is simple. It always depends on the users and their intention.

I want to believe it's possible to use linguistic metrics (e.g. G. Lami with QuARS) to find out if a requirement explained as a sentence written, say for example, in English contains implicit meaning potentially hiding tacit knowledge.

Thank you so much I closed it

I've been using a cost consequence analysis as a quick, preliminary method in costing software use in healthcare and its potential impact.

That’s not easy. First of all, you have to define the attributes you are interested in, e.g., process-related attributes, user-centered attributes, and product-related attributes.

In literature, you can find a number of such attributes documented in a variety of case studies. You may have a look at the proceedings, e.g., from the ICSSP, Profes, XP, SEAA, and EuroSPI conferences. Here, you can find numerous reports and case studies.

Important is, again, that you precisely define the attributes that you are interested in. Second step is the definition of a strategy to gather the data. This strategy then depends on the data you are interested in. For example, if you are interested in the quality attributes of the resulting product, you should consider establishing some kind of automatic data collection, e.g., changes, bugs, feature requests, and so forth from a ticket system. Some standard values are for instance:

- remaining work

- open features

- velocity

- time to fix bugs

- and many, many more

If you are interested into the users’ perception of the process, usually, you have to conduct survey-based research. You may create a questionnaire in which you can ask for, e.g.:

- appropriateness of the process

- completeness and consistency

- adequacy

- way of use

- accessibility

- and many, many more

Finally, if you are interested in the model as such, you first have to determine whether the model is a “real” model (e.g., realized using the Eclipse Process Framework). If this is the case, you can also apply metrics to evaluate the model, e.g.:

- completeness and consistency

- validity

- complexity of the model

In summary, there is much that can be measured. A good point to start with is maybe the book “Metrics and Models in Software Quality Engineering” (there is an online version available). If you are looking for some smaller bits of information to start with, have a look on our paper on process modeling experimentation, which covers process engineering and process user perspectives (process-centered):

Hope this helps a bit.

That's a bit tricky. It depends on the context (what does the process address, which (kind of) company, what shall be improved, etc.).

IMO, a multi-method (mixed-method) approach as for instance described in

P. O’Leary and I. Richardson. Process reference model construction: implementing an evolutionary multi-method research approach. Software, IET, 6(5):423–430, 2012

is a good idea. Unfortunately, there is no "real" pattern to evaluate a new process. Hence, you often find (massive) case study research, e.g.,

A. Raninen, J. J. Ahonen, H.-M. Sihvonen, P. Savolainen, and S. Beecham. LAPPI: A light-weight technique to practical process modeling and improvement target identification. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, 25(9):915–933, Sept. 2012

Also, experimentation can be done:

M. Kuhrmann, D. M. Fernández, and A. Knapp. Who Cares About Software Process Modelling? A First Investigation About the Perceived Value of Process Engineering and Process Consumption. In PROFES 2013, pages 138–152, 2013

Simulation can also be found. Anyway, there are several aspects to be considered in process validation, e.g., quality of the process (model), feasibility of the model, acceptance, user satisfaction - and much more. It really important to define the information you want to gather. Also important is a clear research design and a rigorous reporting (this is where many contributions lack the most).

Maybe, you also consider having a look at the ICSSP conference series (International Conference on Software and System Process: http://www.icsp-conferences.org/icssp2014).