<p>The overall aim of this Master Thesis was to achieve a long life-time for the Miles Platform by enabling loose coupling between its various components and tools. The Miles Platform is a software development platform consisting of several interconnected tools and components. For this platform to survive future changes in technology it must be possible to replace the various components without requiring large changes to the surrounding dependent components. Based on a preceding prestudy, a layered Proof of Concept was implemented and evaluated with respect to the success of the implementation, coupling (modifiability) and amount of work. Simple prototypes involving the two first layers, namely the RESTful and the Atom Publishing Protocol based layers were implemented. The final prototype included all three layers, which involved using Semantic Web technology in addition the RESTful Atom Publishing Protocol. Only a few non-blocking issues are unresolved for this final prototype. Both the RESTful, Atom Publishing Protocol and Semantic layer contributed to maintaining a stable interface on top of the issue tracker component. By enforcing stable interfaces and serving as wrappers or intermediares between the issue trackers and their dependent components, each layer contributed to achieving looser coupling, if not in all dimensions. If the issue trackers have many dependent components that needs customization in order to communicate with the issue trackers, and the issue trackers are expected to be replaced one or preferably several times, a positive return on investment are expected from this Proof of Concept.</p>

<p>Ensuring robustness in software is as important as ever, with the increasing significance of information technology in our lives. Users of any IT system expect and require a high level of uptime. The earlier a threat to robustness is discovered in the development of a system, the cheaper it is to handle. Allowing robustness to come into focus at an early stage of development has been the objective of this master thesis. This thesis is a continuation of the work that we did in the autumn 2007 (Skjervold and Haga 2007), where we created a requirement specification for a tool that can aid system developers in realizing robustness during their design. This requirement specification was based upon interviews with software development companies in Trondheim, one which we performed usability testing with in this thesis. We have developed a tool based upon the requirements from our previous work, along with some additional requirements in the early phases of this thesis. After developing a first version of the tool, a usability test was performed on 11 students. The feedback we got was evaluated and the implementation was updated correspondingly. A second test was performed, focusing on both the usability and the value of the tool, with four system developers from a software development company in Trondheim. The responses to the usability were divided, but mostly positive, and helpful. Some of the changes suggested were implemented, and the rest was inserted as further work. For the value of the tool, there were strong opinions amongst the four developers, as expected, followed by a constructive discussion. The consensus was that the tool had good potential, but the professional developers felt it needed some improvements and changes. Most of these suggested improvements were too time consuming to address in this thesis, and are therefore inserted as further work. This report consists of four parts. Part I describes the state of the art and requirement specification. In Part II the experiments that was run are described and evaluated, and finally the implementation of the tool is shown in Part III. In Part IV the bibliography and appendices are shown.</p>

<p>The World Wide Web has become a vast and often chaotic source of all sorts of information and services. Computers have become the tool of the modern knowledge worker, and the Web constitutes both office and library. The current tools of the Web are unable to utilize its full potential, which limits the efficiency of the knowledge workers. The goal of the Semantic Web, and Semantic Web Services, is to solve this problem by introducing an evolution of the Web that is understandable for machines and humans. The objective of this master thesis was to extend the evaluation in my project on Semantic Web Services frameworks from fall 2007, by evaluating a framework implementation. The evaluation was to focus on the framework implementation's ability to realize the goals of Semantic Web Services, how easy a Semantic Web Service could be created for the given implementation, and to evaluate the available documentation and tools. The goal of the evaluation was to come up with suggestions for improvements for the framework implementation. The WSMO framework and its WSMX implementation was chosen as subject of the evaluation, based on the evaluation from the first project. The framework was evaluated by implementing a Semantic Web Service from a constructed scenario. The development of this service resulted in positive and negative experiences with the WSMX implementation, experiences that were used in the evaluation. The evaluation focused on WSMX, the available documentation, and the two tools WSMT and WSMO Studio. The results of the evaluation were suggestions for improvements for WSMX, the documentation, and the tools. By making the changes and additions that were suggested, I believe that the development of Semantic Web Services for the WSMX implementation of the WSMO framework could be made easier.</p>

<p>For most young people growing up today, video games have been a part of their life on the same level as music, films, and other entertainment. They regard video games as a fun, exciting, and absorbing source of entertainment and stimulation. Transferring these properties into an educational context can prove to be very valuable and motivational. In this master thesis, the introduction of video game development with the XNA game development platform in software architecture projects at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) is evaluated. This includes an evaluation of a 2D XNA game library used in the projects. In addition, we present an assessment of the effort and time spent required to grasp the necessary 3D concepts and techniques involved in producing 3D games with XNA. We also describe our improvements and extensions of the game library to support and include 3D features, based on the evaluation and assessment. The students of the course had the choice between the traditional project (a robot simulation) and the new XNA project. We find that the students who chose the XNA project were more motivated, struggled less, and thus required less assistance. On the other hand, the XNA students admitted to over focusing on the gameplay of their game, at the expense of the software architecture. This should even out when more learning material specific to the XNA project becomes available. 40% of the XNA students used the game library in their project. Overall, they were satisfied with the usefulness and usability of it, but did not think it helped them focus less on technical matters and more on the architecture.</p>

<p>JExercise is a programming assistance tool used by students working on exercises for the programming course TDT4100. A prototype of Jexserver, a server for automatically grading students' submissions, was developed in fall 2007 to grade exercises for the course. The Jexserver prototype is now further developed into a production-quality system, tested on students attending TDT4100 with a range of exercises, and a simulated exam is staged to test the performance. The system performance of Jexserver is found to be sufficiently good to use it to host a digital exam, and the conclusion is that Jexserver is ready to be used as the primary exercise grading tool for TDT4100 and other programming courses. The JExercise client itself is extended to be able to submit exercises directly to Jexserver with zero configuration, improving student usability. Finally, Jexserver is successfully integrated with it's learning, the learning management system used by NTNU, by implementing the IMS Tool Interoperability Guidelines, and by specifically targeting the implementation at it's learning, the user interface is also seamlessly integrated, providing a coherent solution with JExercise, Jexserver and it's learning.</p>

<p>Social network services like Facebook, and instant messaging services like MSN Messenger have gained an enormous popularity in just a few years, and are undoubtedly popular among users.hat happens when these networks are combined with information about the user’s location? This master’s thesis has investigated if people are willing to use systems that share the users’ location for the purpose of locating friends. It is also investigated if users’ of systems that shares their location behave in a different ways as a consequence of this location sharing. Finally, this thesis investigated if users of location sharing systems will get the feeling of loosing their personal privacy, and how privacy mechanisms can help the users not to get this feeling. These questions were investigated by developing a location-tracking social network service called The FriendRadar, which was developed for usage in Wireless Trondheim. Pupils from Trondheim Katedralskole were equipped with wireless devices to test the system in the environment. The logged data of the system was analysed and the users answered a questionnaire after the test period was completed. One user also participated in an interview. The results of these investigations show that the users did not use The FriendRadar very much, but according to the users answer to the questionnaire it seems that users are willing to use systems that share their location with others, if the benefit is that they can locate them back. It also indicates that the users do act in different ways because of the possibility to share their location. Users seem to use the fact that others can see their location deliberately to tell other their locations, but they do not avoid doing any actions. Further, it seems like spontaneous actions possibly can happen as a consequence of users seeing other’s location. Users of the system did not show concerns about privacy while using the system, but they could imagine this being a problem in a system with larger user mass. The most important privacy mechanisms for a future location-tracking systems, seems to be able to turn the system off and reciprocity in location sharing. Together these results shows that if the right amount of privacy mechanisms are implemented to a location-tracking system, the system can both be privacy preserving and useful for the users.</p>

<p>Mobile phone gaming has seen an enormous growth over the last decade and many countries now have more cell phone subscriptions than they have people. Combined with the ever increasing interest in games, the mobile gaming market still hasn't reached it's full potential. Newer and more powerful phones with interesting features hit the market every day. Many of those features are directed at locating position, and that opens up for the prospect of location-based gaming. This branch of gaming is still in the starting phase, and public awareness is relatively low. Meanwhile, developers and operators explore the opportunities that are yet to be tested. In this project, we have developed a game to test different aspects related to infrastructure, network and playability in location-based mobile gaming. From the testing of GSM and UMTS networks, results show that basic network properties such as CellID can be utilized to make challenging and social games. Furthermore, the tests hinted at UMTS as the best suited network to perform location-based gaming, as the smaller and less overlapping zone structure, response times and bandwidth facilitates a multiplayer game better than the GSM network. This is not a global truth, though, since EDGE increases the GSM response times and bandwidth to an acceptable level. As long as a suitable mapping of game zones and real-world cells can be made, GSM is still a candidate in many environments. Developers face new challenges with location-based gaming, as testing no longer can be confined to the development environment. Extensive field testing is vital to both flesh out techincal issues as well as gameplay-related issues. Outdoor distances makes testing take longer time, and communication between test team and developers is harder than in a studio. Finally, playtesting shows that most people are open to the idea of physical movement as input when playing in a virtual reality. When incorporating social elements and multiplayer options in a dynamic setting, location-based games can be seen as a replacement for a friendly football game or similar outdoor activities. When such an approach can be made, while keeping communication and team-feeling among players high, the full potential of location-based gaming migh be unlocked.</p>

<p>Both global software development and agile approaches have gained significant popularity. Companies even show interest in applying agile approaches in distributed development to combine the advantages of both approaches. This is done despite their differences in key tenets. In their most radical forms, agile and global software development can be placed in each end of a plan-based/agile spectrum because of how work is coordinated. This study describes how four global software development projects applying agile methods coordinate their work. The findings show that there are at least three approaches to distributed Scrum; local Scrum independent of remote team’s approach, multiple Scrum teams coordinated with Scrum of Scrums and geographic transparency and a single distributed Scrum team. It was also found that trust is needed to reduce the need of standardization and direct supervision when coordinating work in a global software development project, and that electronic chatting supports mutual adjustment. Further, co-location and modularization mitigates communication problems, enables agility in at least part of a global software development project, and renders the implementation of Scrum of Scrums possible. Proper mechanisms to provide transparency are needed to achieve mutual adjustment.</p>

<p>The main goal of this project was to create new game concepts for mobile and social games. The project was a continuation of the depth study performed by the project in the course TDT 4570, Game Technology, at NTNU. The focus of this project was slightly more shifted toward the social side of mobile multiplayer games compared to the depth study. Additionally the project group were to create a prototype game using one of the concepts implemented in Java ME. The project group performed a prestudy of the technologies required to create the prototype(such as Java ME and features specific to mobile phones, such as location), as well as looking at games from a general viewpoint, but also by looking more closely at mobile and social games, current game genres, and multiplayer games available on mobile platforms and looking at how these games implement social game mechanisms. Several concepts were conceived and described during the project, with concepts from both the depth study and concepts created specifically in this project. The textit{Platform-puzzler} concept was chosen to be implemented as the prototype game. The prototype game is a 2D side scrolling platform multiplayer platform game with puzzle elements. The game was implemented in a development process, and at the end of the process the game was tested by two testers not from the project group. The test allowed the project group to assess how it performed in a simulated setting using emulators, as well as testing to see how the cooperative elements of the game performed, and additionally the test was performed in two sessions were in the first session the two testers were located in the same room, whereas in the second test the were located in the same room. The test session performed on the prototype indicated to the project group that there for the prototype game there were quite clear differences between playing the game in the same versus playing the game in different rooms. This indicates further that special care must be taken when designing and creating cooperative games for mobile platforms. The additional research performed by the project group also indicate to the project group that creating mobile and social games for mobile platforms is highly viable, and that social gameplay mechanisms can strengthen the experience of playing games.</p>

<p>In news articles the focus on named entities is quite common and usually a news case is tied around a person, a company, or similar. One challenge from an information retrieval point of view is that one entity often have more than one way of referring to it. This means that when users use news search engines they have to use the exact same name for the entity as the articles they are interested in use. Therefore the usage of synonyms to refer to the same entity forms the basis of this thesis. We explore the idea of using Wikipedia as a data source for building a large dictionary of named entities and their synonyms. An entity dictionary like that would be very interesting because it make it possible to link synonyms to the same entity. The evaluation shows that Wikipedia is well suited as a source of named entities and synonyms as the semi-structure aids in recognizing the entities and related synonyms. The use of the dictionary in a modified search solution shows on the other hand mixed results. On problem with evaluating a solution like this is that the precision of the different synonyms is usually very high for popular entities, and when we combine different synonyms in the same query we end up giving more weight to the results that use multiple synonyms.</p>