<p>This thesis presents results of the estimation effort improvement study for a major consultant company in Norway. The company have already established an effort estimation process, but want additional help in improving the estimation process and tools. Two major problems are identified; some estimates have very low accuracy, and they use multiple estimation tools and methodologies. Part of the main research on the state of practice was to determine the effort estimation models used and effort estimation accuracy. To better understand how the effort estimation process worked we compared the effort estimation practice against best practices and looked further into the relation between estimation models and expert judgement. The last part of the state of practice research was to check project reports to see if they used a common tool and had a risk checklist. The main part of the work has consisted of researching the state of practice at the consultant company and comparing it against known best practices and proposing improvements. Based on literature available this thesis presents practical improvements for the estimation process. The state of practice was determined by conducting interviews and going through project reports. The state of practice showed that they lacked a too for early effort estimation, so we conducted a case study for early estimation using use case point. This thesis proposes solutions to issues on tools and practices. The main contribution is a powerful effort estimation template.</p>

<p>MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) are today a multi-bilion dollar industry where typically thousands of players interact in a virtual world. Two of the main complaints of the MMOG community are the lack of interaction with the virtual universe, and the repetitive gameplay patterns. Introducing a virtual alimentary chain for the targets would allow for a much more exciting experience since the genetic evolution of the opponents would make each fight more unique, and collaboration among player community would be necessary to keep a sustainable balance in the virtual world. As these kind of games are designed for many thousands of players in real-time, a lot of compute power will be needed to simulate the genetic evolution. Parallel computing can greatly improve the performance, assuming the software is properly designed with parallelizations in mind. A couple of different schemes will be considered. Trying to fetch the ecology studies, a prototype architecture is presented here. A non-linear genotype-phenotype transformation mechanism (also called morphogenesis) has been designed with the purpose of obtaining Lotka-Volterra equations result. These research will lead to discussions and conclusion, hopefully guiding further development in this area.</p>

<p>This report presents the results of the development of a portal for open source software. The work is done in collaboration with Keymind Computing AS in context of the European ITEA project COSI. The purpose of this project is to develop a portal so that companies that got commodity software they want to go open source with can do so without loosing control of the development. The portal is built up using already existing tools to fulfill as many tasks as possible. The thesis also try to explain why making a portal for the release of open source by looking at the history of open source. Some of the focus here is on the development of the Open Source 2.0 which i identified by the growing interest among software companies to release their software under and open license.</p>

<p>The use of Open Source Software (OSS) has increased in both the industry and the public sector. The software intensive industry integrates OSS into their products, participates in the development of OSS products, and develops its own OSS products. The understanding of how and why the industry is approaching OSS is so far limited. To help fill this gap, this thesis intends to explore how and why the software intensive industry approaches OSS. This is done by performing an extensive literature study and by executing a web-based survey. This survey is distributed to a near representative sample of companies from the Norwegian software intensive industry and to a convenience sample of participants in the ITEA 2 research program. The research presented here shows that OSS components are widely used in the software intensive industry. Close to 50% of the Norwegian software intensive industry uses OSS in its development. The industry is mainly motivated to use OSS by practical reasons. OSS components provide functionality of high quality and the industry is satisfied with its use of these components. When using OSS, the industry benefits from the availability of source code, and easy access to components and information about these components. Companies participate in OSS projects because they use the software and because of the learning effect of this participation. The participation is however limited. However, some companies provide commercial services related to the OSS projects they participate in. Releasing a product as OSS attracts more users and customers to a product. These community members may contribute with implemented code, feedback, and requirements. There are, however some side-effects related to releasing an OSS product and companies should be aware of these consequences. The main contributions of this thesis are new understanding of how and why companies approach OSS, a reusable research design, and experiences performing survey research.</p>

<p>The aim of the project has been to look at how the knowledge about statistics of use might influence the usage of a wireless network. The project has been conducted in cooperation with Wireless Trondheim. A public display was set up at a café that has the wireless network available. It showed different sorts of statistics collected from the network control system, in addition to news and advertisements. No significant increase in use was experienced during the period when the screen was up, and the project needs to be conducted in a larger scale to see more obvious results. However, the project has provided Wireless Trondheim with insight on how public displays can be used to increase the awareness and hence the usage of the wireless network. Keywords: Digital signage, public displays, wireless networks, awareness, context, XML-feeds</p>

<p>This report is for my research of Collaboration Instance Manager of UbiCollab project. UbiCollab want to be the platform for ubiquitous collaborative active. UbiCollab project aims to develop a distributed collaborative platform which makes people in distributed space ubiquitous collaborate with friends and colleagues. Collaboration instance manager (CIM) is a core component of the UbiCollab platform, which manage such collaborative activities. My research topics of CIM include in the P2P network development by using JXME, the data synchronization through this P2P network and how to manage these synchronized date by using a local file system. The result of my research is a CIM system, which deployed as OSGI bundle. User can use that do some collaborative active. This CIM system manage the service level of data synchronization, other modules and applications can use that to handle data synchronization between each other without know the details of how to implement it. For that purpose I first reviewed the related theories of distributed systems, ubiquitous systems, mobile systems and CSCW. After that review I researched on some alternatives for developing such system and choose the candidate technologies for my prototype. Secondly I analyzed the requirements of UbiCollab and designed the prototype. Based on that design, I implemented and tested that CIM system based on agreed common scenarios and developed a simple GUI for show the utility. Finally, I evaluate the system by analysis system requirements and scenario criteria.</p>

<p>Over the last decade, the amount of commercial interest in Open Source has been growing rapidly. This has led to commercially driven Open Source projects. Those projects have problems keeping their newcomers and needs ways to ease the joining process. Therefore we ask these research questions: RQ1: Which obstacles are encountered by Newcomers to Apache Derby when Joining? RQ2: What can be done to ease the Joining process? There has been very little research on what the OSS projects can do in this area. As a consequence it is hard to find good reliable theory to cross-reference this research. If the research is successful, it can contribute to the literature on joining in OSS projects. This literature will then contain all obstacles encountered by newcomers to OSS projects and ways to mitigate these. In this master's thesis Canonical Action Research was used to study the Open Source project Apache Derby. Canonical Action Research is a qualitative research method where the researchers enters the environment they are researching to extract the data needed. We have three contributions in this thesis. The first contribution is a list of obstacles in the joining process of Apache Derby. The second contribution is suggestions on how a project can mitigate the contribution barriers we found. The third contribution is a refined version of CAR to use when studying Open Source Software Development. The list of obstacles is a contribution specific to the Apache Derby project, and it is very unlikely that other non Apache projects will benefit from it. Our suggestions on how a project can mitigate contribution barriers are potentially generalizable. Different projects have different structures, and some of the contribution barriers might therefore not apply to them all. The refined CAR model is general for all research on OSS projects. This is the result we think can have the biggest impact on the research community if proven successful.</p>

<p>In a service-oriented architecture (SOA), parts of software applications are made available as services. These services can be combined across multiple applications, technologies, and organizations. As a result, functionality can be more easily reused, and new business processes can be assembled at a low cost. However, as more functionality is exposed outside of the traditional boundaries of applications, new approaches to security are needed. While SOA shares many of the security threats of traditional systems, the countermeasures to some of these threats may differ. Most notably, eavesdropping, data tampering, and replay attacks must be countered on the message level in a complex SOA environment. In addition, the open and distributed nature of SOA leads to new ways of handling authentication, authorization, logging, and monitoring. Web Services are the most popular way of realizing SOA in practice, and make use of a set of standards such as WS-Security, XML Encryption, XML Signature, and SAML for handling these new security approaches. Guidelines exist for development of secure software systems, and provide recommendations for things to do or to avoid. In this thesis, I use my findings with regard to security challenges, threats, and countermeasures to create a set of security guidelines that should be applied during requirements engineering and design of a SOA. Practical use of these guidelines is demonstrated by applying them during development of a SOA-based system. This system imports personal data into multiple administrative systems managed by UNINETT FAS, and is designed using Web Services and XML-based security standards. Through this practical demonstration, I show that my guidelines can be used as a reference for making appropriate security decisions during development of a SOA.</p>

<p>This report aims to describe and improve a system recovery process in large-scale storage systems. Inevitable, a recovery process results in the system being loaded with internal replication of data, and will extensively utilize several storage nodes. Such internal load can be categorized and generalized into a maintenance workload class. Obviously, a storage system will have external clients which also introduce load into the system. This can be users altering their data, uploading new content, etc. Load generated by clients can be generalized into a production workload class. When both workload classes are actively present in a system, i.e. the system is recovering while users are simultaneously accessing their data, there will be a competition of system resources between the different workload classes. The storage must ensure Quality of Service (QoS) for each workload class so that both are guaranteed system resources. We have created Dynamic Tree with Observed Metrics (DTOM), an algorithm designed to gracefully throttle resources between multiple different workload classes. DTOM can be used to enforce and ensure QoS for the variety of workloads in a system. Experimental results demonstrate that DTOM outperforms another well-known scheduling algorithm. In addition, we have designed a recovery model which aims to improve handling of critical maintenance workload. Although the model is intentionally intended for system recovery, it can also be applied to many other contexts.</p>

<p>XQuery is a flexible language for querying XML data across a variety of storage methods. This thesis is a part of iAD, an ongoing research effort in next generation information access solutions. iAD is hosted by Fast Search & Transfer, a company developing their next search engine platform MARS. This project seeks to investigate the utilisation of XQuery as a query language for MARS. The result of this project is a novel method of translation, dubbed “Tainting Dependencies” (TD), which seeks to avoid unecessary denormalisation of intermediate results, and is designed specifically for translation to MARS’ relational algebra. This method supports a large subset of XQuery features. Furthermore, we have developed a prototype implementation which supports basic constructs such as FLWOR and sequence construction. TD is then compared head-on to a similar method dubbed “Loop Lifting”, and the results of this comparison is evaluated through discussion. The outcome of this project is a novel and well-documented method for translation of XQuery to MQL – a method which is designed to perform equally or better than existing implementations.</p>