<p>Software development is a highly dynamic process, primarily caused by its foundation in the dynamic human world. Requirements traceability alleviates the detrimental effects of this dynamism by providing increased control over the artifacts of the software development processes and their interrelationships. This thesis investigates how an RT tool should be designed and implemented in order to assist with the tasks of requirements traceability, and outlines a tool that primarily focuses on reducing the work overhead associated with the tasks of implementing requirements traceability in software development projects. Preparatory to the development of the RT tool, the applicability of the traceability models presented in the in-depth study has been confirmed through empirical work. A detailed representation of the models has been compiled, elaborating on the internal representation of artifacts and traces. The models were extended to be able to represent organisational hierarchies, enabling trace information analysis to deduce the context of important decisions throughout the software development processes, an important tool in understanding how requirements are determined. The thesis presents a requirements specification and architecture with a firm foundation in the findings of the in-depth study, outlining an RT tool that addresses important issues concerning the implementation of requirements traceability, in particular focusing on reducing the associated work overhead. Based on the requirements specification and architecture, a evolutionary prototype is developed, giving its users an impression of the functionality of the outlined RT tool. The prototype addresses the issues pointed out by the requirements specification and architectural description, and, throughout development, attention is given the evolvability of the prototype. Consequently, the prototype provides a good foundation for the future development of a complete RT tool.</p>

<p>This master thesis presents a new open source framework for functional testing of Flex applications, FunFX. FunFX is a framework that encourages test-driven development. The project was initiated by BEKK due to Flex’s lack of a proper tool for functional testing. This report will focus on testing, and will describe central concepts within the area of software testing. Similar testing frameworks for other technologies will also be described and compared to FunFX. It will try to document the usefulness of such an open source tool, and try to discover what entry level this framework imposes on the user. During development, test cases using the framework will be created to be able to document both positive and negative aspects of the framework. A usage test was also arranged, to be able to document the framework better. This test session resulted in valuable information about the usability and the reliability of the created tests. The design and implementation are thoroughly described together with each class created, along with their roles in the framework. The issue of synchronization is handled as its own part. To make the implementation decisions easier to understand, the different design patterns used are elaborated. The final result is a framework that has the ability to interact with a Flex application programmatically. When used together with any test unit framework for Ruby, it is a fully functional testing tool for test-driven development. Source code, a deployable library file of the FunFX Flex adapter, and a gem of the FunFX framework, together with a Flash movie showing the framework in use can be found on the attached CD. Keywords: Framework, Flex, Ruby, Open Source, Software testing, Functional testing, Flash, Test-driven development. Keywords: Framework, Flex, Ruby, Open Source, Software testing, Functional testing, Flash, Test-driven development.</p>

<p>Services with a stable API and good backward compatibility is important for component-based software development and service-oriented architectures. Despite its importance, little tool support is currently available to ensure that services are backward compatible. To address this problem a new continuous integration technique has been developed. The idea is to build projects that depend on a service with a new version of the service. This ensures that the development version is compatible with projects that depend on the regular version. A continuous integration server is used to initiate builds. This entails that if a build breaks, the developers get feedback right away, and it is easy to determine which change that caused the broken build. We show that an implementation is feasible by implementing a prototype as a proof of concept. The prototype use Continuum as the underlying build engine and utilize metadata from the Maven Project Object Model (POM). The prototype has support for multiple services. Services can thus be checked for compatibility with each other, in addition to backward compatibility with the regular version. Keywords: Continuous integration, Continuum, Maven, Component-based software development (CBSD), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Test-Driven Development (TDD), agile software development</p>

<p>Educational games have recently caught the attention of educational organizations witnessing newfound potential that is not achievable through traditional lectures. By reviewing findings from authoritative theory, we present the conception and implementation of a prototype educational game for lecture enhancement. The concept is based on the idea of playing a game during lectures, with students answering multiple choice questions using their own mobile phones and receiving instant feedback by watching a large screen displaying animated graphics. It is shown how such a concept is made readily available for students and schools by using regular mobile phones and computers they already possess. We describe an example implementation, along with pedagogical guidelines for usage, and the analysis of how the prototype was received in an authentic setting. Students generally found the prototype easy to use and thought it contributed to increased learning outcome. The prototype was perceived as entertaining, and half the students claimed they would attend more lectures if such a system was being used. In spite of this, 10% of the students felt reluctant to pay for the GPRS/3G data transmission fees resulting from playing the game.</p>

<p>Hardware has come a long way to support pervasive computing and workflow management, whilst software has fallen behind. Existing systems lack the ability to make decisions that corresponds with user intents and are unable to handle complex context-rich workflow conflicts. Since workflow systems are meant to facilitate normal workers, we have looked at how workflows can be generated and adapted without prior knowledge of programming. The approach is based on the elaboration of so called calm technologies, bringing user interference to a minimum. We propose ways of automating the process of obtaining context, generating workflows, making plans, and schedule resources before execution. Obtaining context is proposed done by a Context service which delivers tailored context information through abstraction. To create workflows, the only thing a user needs to know is what he wants to achieve. The rest is generated. The planning mechanism used is the Scheduling service first proposed in our depth study. As a part of this, we describe a method for how to simulate future context for better planning purposes, decreasing the need for adaption and replanning caused by context changes. When several actors execute workflows in an environment, conflicts will occur. We have made a proof-of-concept implementation of the Arbitration architecture from our depth study. This approach used case-based reasoning to recognise conflicts between workflows and select a solution. We set out to find a way to store a conflict representation as a CBR-case so it can be recognised in a different context and enable the service to recognise conflicts that are similar in nature. We found that a case could be stored using ontologies to describe the nature of the workflow constituents that make up the conflict. In addition, context and state triggers are proposed. These filter the cases that can not be conflicts, due to current contextual information or other states, before the CBR framework computes similarity of the cases against the current workflows. Using an expert system supporting fuzzy logic, it could speed up the similarity computations required to recognise conflicts. After running some scenarios, we found that the system was able to detect known conflicts in a different context and discover prior unknown. This was achieved because of the similarity in nature to a known conflict.</p>

<p>In many applications, large-scale ontologies have to be constructed and maintained. A manual construction of an ontology is a time consuming and resource demanding process, often involving some domain experts. It would therefore be beneficial to support this process with tools that automates the construction of an ontology. This master thesis has examined the use of association rules for suggesting associations between words in text. In ontology learning, concepts are often extracted from domain specific text. Applying the association rules algorithm on the same text, the associations found can be used to discover candidate relations between concepts in an ontology. This algorithm has been implemented and integrated in GATE, a framework for natural language processing. Alongside the association rules algorithm, several information extraction and natural language processing techniques have been implemented, in which this algorithm is built upon. This has resulted in a framework for ontology learning. A qualitative evaluation of the associations found by the system has shown that the associations found by the association rules algorithm has promising results for detecting relations between concepts in an ontology. It has also been found that this algorithm is dependent on an accurate extraction of keywords. Further, a subjective evaluation of GATE has shown that it is suited as a framework for ontology learning.</p>

<p>In agile software development, acceptance test-driven development is sometimes mentioned, and some have explored the possibilities. This study investigates if a non-technical individual can write executable specifications based on domain specific languages from three different frameworks. Fit, which is an acceptance testing framework based on HTML forms, CubicTest which is an acceptance testing framework that uses modeling through Eclipse, and RSpec, a BDD framework for specifying system behavior through examples. This study involves an experiment where the perceived effectiveness and understandability of the three frameworks are evaluated. 10 students participated in a one and a half hour experiment for which they had prepared themselves for, by having one week to acquire overview of their assigned framework. The experiment was held in a computer laboratory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. After results were gathered and analyzed, statistical hypothesis testing was unfortunately not able to reject the null-hypothesis of the study. No conclusions could therefore be drawn. The results of the study are discussed and possible improvements and further work is mentioned.</p>

<p>This project has been carried out as a contribution to the UbiCollab project. The project aims to provide a platform for the support of ubiquitous collaboration. UbiCollab tries to support collaboration in the users' natural environment, and draws upon research in areas such as user mobility and ubiquitous computing to achieve this. The platform provides functionality such as location-awareness, integration with the physical environment and mobility support. UbiCollab is based on service oriented architecture (SOA), and integration of computerized services and service management are key aspects of the platform. A previous pre-study has been performed by this author in the autumn of 2006 to compile a set of requirements and propose an architecture for a user-centered and collaborative service management system. This work builds on that study, and provides the design and implementation of a service management system for UbiCollab. The system aims to provide users with the tools to effortlessly discover, provide, and consume services. Users will also be able to take advantage of new services as they become available in dynamically changing environments. Work done on the service management system consists of the design and implementation of several platform components and their application programming interfaces (APIs). In addition a set of applications to test the flexibility and functionality of the platform, as well as the completeness of the APIs, have been designed and implemented. What sets the service management system in UbiCollab apart from similar systems is the focus on end-users and collaboration. User-friendliness is achieved by creating a pluggable service discovery system where the inherent complexity of service discovery protocols are hidden from the user. In addition discovery of services by pointing at the service of interest with an RFID device is supported. The use of pointing provides a natural way of communicating. Collaboration is supported by allowing users to share their services (publish) in defined groups, and consume services shared by other users.</p>

<p>Semantic search is a research area in which the goal is to understand the users intended meaning of the query. This requires disambiguation of the user query and interpreting the semantics of the query. Semantic search would thus improve the users search experience through more precise result sets. Moreover, ontologies are explicit conceptualizations of domains, defining concepts, their properties, and the relations among them. This makes ontologies semantic representations of specific domains, suitable to use as a basis for semantic search applications. In this thesis we explore how such a semantic search system based on ontologies may be constructed. The system is built as a query reformulation module that uses an underlying search engine based on Lucene. We employ text mining techniques to semantically enrich an ontology by building feature vectors for the concepts of the ontology. The feature vectors are tailored to a specific document collection and domain, reflecting the vocabulary in the document collection and the domain. We propose four query reformulation strategies for evaluation. The interpretation and expansion of the user query is based on the ontology and the feature vectors. Finally the reformulated query is fired as a weighted query into the Lucene search engine. The evaluation of the implemented prototype reveals that search is in general improved by our reformulation approaches. It is however difficult to give any definite conclusion to which query types benefit the most from our approach, and which reformulation strategy improves the search result the most. All four of the reformulation strategies seem to on average perform quite equally.</p>

<p>Mobile phones are increasingly becoming common property, which we carry with us practically all of the time. Self-services are also becoming more and more common. Along with the self-service society comes the need to access services at any time, any place, which the mobile phone can provide for. Use of a self-service usually requires exchange of information by means of electronic forms. Finding good solutions for representing forms on mobile phones is a demanding challenge. On the one hand, the small displays and keyboards introduce several design challenges. On the other hand, users with special needs, such as users with cognitive impairments, call for solutions that address accessibility and universal design. This report documents an investigation on how to make electronic forms feasible on mobile phones. The investigation focused on universal design of mobile form user interfaces. Based on the expected potential of multimodality, two target groups were chosen: ‘people with cognitive disabilities that lead to moderate text-reading problems’, and ‘people with cognitive disabilities that lead to moderate number-reading problems’. We investigated the validity of a hypothesis containing two assertions: (1) that specific techniques and form controls can make electronic forms feasible on mobile phones as well as relieve the burden of the users, and (2) that offering visualisation of information as an additional modality in electronic forms on mobile phones can be beneficial for the cognitive processing of content in such forms. The research method used in the investigation comprised several parts: A literature study and a semi-structured theme interview formed a background for setting success criteria for the feasibility of forms on mobile phones and making design choices. Paper prototyping was conducted by making a paper mock-up of a selected case, kindergarten applications, which illustrated how the design choices could appear. The paper mock-up evolved through several iterations, and served as a design specification for a J2ME prototype, which was made in order for users to better be able to evaluate the design decisions. The design evolved further during the prototyping in J2ME, as necessary improvements were discovered. The final part of the research method was a walkthrough evaluation. Ten users went through the form and were afterwards asked to state their opinion on specific design aspects. The results from the walkthrough evaluations provided material to use when assessing the validity of the hypothesis. The investigation led to a list of success criteria with suggestions on how to achieve several of them. We attempted to achieve four of these criteria, by making several design decisions. The final user interface of the kindergarten form had aspects we were concerned about, and addressed in the walkthrough evaluations The most important results of the evaluations were: They were all positive towards a technique used for decreasing the information intensity. None of the users claimed to have problems with or dislike the form control ‘drop-down box’ and a technique used to maintain the form context when drop-down boxes were expanded. ‘Choose’ commands may be unnecessary. The solution for indicating form size and progress was understood by all. A graphical modality presenting kindergartens in a map, accommodating people with text-reading problems, was preferred by seven of the ten users, while none of the users preferred the graphical modality presenting points of time as clock icons, accommodating people with number-reading problems. The results led us to conclude that the first assertion seem to be correct, depending on the outcome of further, suggested tests. We assume that professionally made clock icons, combined with a technique suggested by one of the evaluators would have made more people prefer this presentation. We also se no reason why multimodality, acknowledged to be beneficial for the processing of cognitive content, should be less beneficial on mobile phones, and believe that also the second assertion is true. A number of efforts for further investigations are suggested.</p>