Este trabalho procurou unir dois temas que, embora sejam muito relevantes, parecem trilhar caminhos independentes na administração: a avaliação de desempenho organizacional e as empresas brasileiras de desenvolvimento de software. Se, por um lado, a avaliação de desempenho organizacional pretende fornecer ferramentas e processos que auxiliem os gestores na condução de seus negócios, por outro lado, o desenvolvimento de software é tido como um setor que gera empregos de alta qualificação e que exporta um produto ou serviço com margens reais bem mais altas que aquelas registradas pela pauta tradicional de exportação. Nesse cenário, uma pesquisa de interesse é entender como é que as empresas brasileiras de desenvolvimento de software fazem avaliação de desempenho organizacional. Para cumprir com os objetivos deste trabalho exploratório, foi utilizada uma abordagem tanto qualitativa (dois estudos de caso) quanto quantitativa (16 respondentes de survey). Como resultados preliminares, há indicação de que existe um processo de amadurecimento da avaliação de desempenho das empresas de desenvolvimento de software e esse amadurecimento inclui a diminuição da importância atribuída ao curtíssimo prazo e o aumento da importância do médio e longo prazos. Estágios mais avançados desse amadurecimento devem incluir níveis cada vez maiores de sistematização das práticas de avaliação de desempenho e também devem privilegiar determinadas dimensões de avaliação. Em relação à percepção e à prática, também como resultados preliminares, percebe-se que as empresas não consideram importante preocuparem-se com as dimensões sociais e de meio-ambiente e não acreditam que eles gerem impactos positivos nos indicadores financeiros e, talvez, por esse motivo, as práticas são pouco maduras. Por fim, e talvez o resultado preliminar mais importante (até surpreendente), as empresas consideram que ter inovação e pessoas motivadas e desenvolvidas tecnicamente são as dimensões mais importantes e as que geram mais impactos positivos nos indicadores financeiros, mas elas não sabem ou não conseguem implementar indicadores para mensurá-las adequadamente. / This study has tried to bind two subjects of utmost importance but that seems to have independent pathways in Management: organizational performance measurement and Brazilian software development companies. On the one hand, organizational performance measurement intends to offer tools and processes so that managers can improve the way they run their businesses; on the other hand, the software development industry generates highly qualified jobs and exports goods and services with higher margins when compared to the Brazilian traditional export basket. As a result, a research of interest should ask how Brazilian software development companies are conducting organizational performance measurement. In order to comply with the goals of this exploratory study, both qualitative (two study cases) and quantitative (16 respondents of a survey) approaches were applied. Preliminary findings show that evidences lead to the existence of a performance measurement maturation process that software development companies undergo. According to this maturation process, companies shift their focus from the short term to the medium and long terms. More matured companies may experience a growing performance measurement systematization, even if it is non-declared at the beginning, and they should also privilege certain measurement perspectives. Regarding perception and practice, preliminary results show that companies do not perceive social and environmental perspectives as important, and they believe these perspectives do not have positive impacts on financial indicators. Consequently, practices related to these perspectives are not matured. Finally, the most important-even surprising-preliminary findings show companies believe that producing innovation and having motivated and well-trained employees are the most important perspectives to their businesses and they have positive impacts on financial indicators. Nevertheless, they do not know or they are unable to adequately implement performance measurement indicators of these perspectives.

In this thesis work, a system for proton beam alignment was studied and optimized in many of its functional areas. The resulting system was named Positioning Alignment Control System (PACS). The PACS system is an integrated and efficient system as a result of the work done on it in the course of this thesis work.

The purpose of this project is to implement an integrated piece of software consisting of a number of graphics programs that support mathematical computation and experimentation in dynamical systems.

<p>The increasing complexity in the development of a configurable real-time system has emerged new principles of software techniques, such as aspect-oriented software development and component-based software development. These techniques allow encapsulation of the system's crosscutting concerns and increase the modularity of the software. The properties of a component that influences the systems performance or semantics are specified separately in entities called aspects, while basic functionality of the property still remains in the component. </p><p>When building a real-time system, different sets of configurations of aspects and components can be combined, resulting in different configurations of the system. The temporal behavior of the system changes and a way to ensure the predictability of the system is needed. </p><p>This thesis presents a tool for aspect-level worst-case execution time analysis, which gives a priori information about the temporal behavior of the system, before the process of composing aspects with components.</p>

<p>Rising complexity in the development of real-time systems has made it crucial to have reusable components and a more flexible way of configuring these components into a coherent system. Aspect-oriented system development (AOSD) is a technique that allows one to put a system’s crosscutting concerns into"modules"that are called aspects. Applying AOSD in real-time and embedded system development one can expect reductions in the complexity of the system design and development. </p><p>A problem with AOSD in its current form is that it does not support predictability in the time domain. Hence, in order to use AOSD in real-time system development, we need to provide ways of analyzing temporal behavior of aspects, components and resulting system (made from weaving aspects and components). Aspect analyzer is a tool that computes the worst-case execution time (WCET) for a set of components and aspects, thus, enabling support for predictability in the time domain of aspect-oriented real-time software. </p><p>A limitation of the aspect analyzer, until now, were that no verification had been made whether the aspect analyzer would produce WCET values that were close to the measured or computed (with another WCET analysis technique) WCET of an aspect-oriented real-time system. Therefore, in this thesis we perform a verification of the correctness of the aspect analyzer using a number of different methods for WCET analysis. These investigations of the correctness of the output from the aspect analyzer gave confidence to the automated WCET analysis. In addition, performing this verification led to the identification of the steps necessary to compute the WCETs of a piece of program, when using a third party tool, which gives the ability to write accurate input files for the aspect analyzer.</p>

<p>During the last years the need for real-time database services has increased due to the growing number of data-intensive applications needing to enforce real-time constraints. The COMponent-based Embedded real-Time database (COMET) is a real-time database developed to meet these demands. COMET is developed using the AspeCtual COmponent-based Real-time system Development (ACCORD) design method, and consists of a number of components and aspects, which can be composed into a number of different configurations depending on system demands, e.g., Quality of Service (QoS) management can be used in unpredictable environments. </p><p>In embedded systems with requirementson high up-time it may not be possible to temporarily shut down the system for reconfiguration. Instead it is desirable to enable dynamic reconfiguration of the system, exchanging components during run-time. This in turn sets demands on the feedback control of the system to adjust to these new conditions, since a new time variant system has been created. </p><p>This thesis project implements improvements in COMET to create a more stable database suitable for further development. A mechanism for dynamic reconfiguration of COMET is implemented, thus, enabling components and aspects to be swapped during run-time. Adaptive feedback control algorithms are also implemented in order to better adjust to workload variations and database reconfiguration.</p>

<p>Increasing complexity of real-time systems and demands for enabling their configurability and tailorability are strong motivations for applying new software engineering principles such as aspect-oriented and component-based software development. The integration of these two techniques into real-time systems development would enable: (i) efficient system configuration from the components in the component library based on the system requirements, (ii) easy tailoring of components and/or a system for a specific application by changing the behavior (code) of the component by aspect weaving, and (iii) enhanced flexibility of the real-time and embedded software through the notion of system configurability and component tailorability.</p><p>In this thesis we focus on applying aspect-oriented and component-based software development to real-time system development. We propose a novel concept of aspectual component-based real-time system development (ACCORD). ACCORD introduces the following into real-time system development: (i) a design method that assumes the decomposition of the real-time system into a set of components and a set of aspects, (ii) a real-time component model denoted RTCOM that supports aspect weaving while enforcing information hiding, (iii) a method and a tool for performing worst-case execution time analysis of different configurations of aspects and components, and (iv) a new approach to modelling of real-time policies as aspects.</p><p>We present a case study of the development of a configurable real-time database system, called COMET, using ACCORD principles. In the COMET example we show that applying ACCORD does have an impact on the real-time system development in providing efficient configuration of the real-time system. Thus, it could be a way for improved reusability and flexibility of real-time software, and modularization of crosscutting concerns.</p><p>In connection with development of ACCORD, we identify criteria that a design method for component-based real-time systems needs to address. The criteria include a well-defined component model for real-time systems, aspect separation, support for system configuration, and analysis of the composed real-time system. Using the identified set of criteria we provide an evaluation of ACCORD. In comparison with other approaches, ACCORD provides a distinct classification of crosscutting concerns in the real-time domain into different types of aspects, and provides a real-time component model that supports weaving of aspects into the code of a component, as well as a tool for temporal analysis of the weaved system.</p> / Report code: LiU-TEK-LIC-2003:23.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

The study reveals improvement areas in terms of lead time and quality in a traditionalsoftware development process of a large manufacturing-oriented organization, andidentifies four obstacles to the application of a Lean software development frameworkin order to achieve such improvements. The data from interviews are matched tofour predefined categories. These categories are evaluated using value streammapping and a framework of seven common improvement areas in softwaredevelopment. A large project and task tracking system indicate that lead time is a realproblem in the process. The most significant improvement area is wait time forchange approval meetings. A second prominent improvement area is the large amountof approval handshakes. At least a few of these handshakes are always approved, thusadding unnecessary lead time to the process. The four most imminent obstacles in adopting lean software development areidentified through estimating the efficiency of two in-house derivations of Scrum andKanban. The first obstacle is deep vertical but narrow horizontal expertise amongdevelopers. With some systems, there’s only one developer who knows how tomaintain the product. This makes it impossible to work as a team which is animperative principle of lean. A second obstacle is how the teams are arrangedorganizationally. They have a functional setup over three departments and threemanagers, which to some extent create a silo mentality, rendering cooperationdifficult. A third obstacle is how the teams are arranged geographically. Split over twolocations, manufacturing and headquarters, they have different customers, objectivesand a plain unfamiliarity with another that has reduced the will and opportunity tocommunicate and coordinate. A fourth obstacle is the inherent conflict between theprescriptive activities of ITIL, optimized for IT operational services,  and theadaptability of agile methodologies, optimized for rapid change and empiricaldecisions. ITIL fulfills a sometimes uncalled for need to get all changes approvedthrough several layers of management. The study concludes that Lean software development is in conflict with manytraditional values of a manufacturing organization. Although lean may be prevalent inother parts of the organization, this does not necessarily include the IT function. ITstill seems to have hard time grasping the lean concepts of flow, waste and value.

Nowadays, software systems are getting more and more complex. To tackle this challenge most diverse techniques, such as design patterns, service oriented architectures (SOA), software development processes, and model-driven engineering (MDE), are used to improve productivity, while time to market and quality of the products stay stable. Multiple of these techniques are used in parallel to profit from their benefits. While the use of sophisticated software development processes is standard, today, MDE is just adopted in practice. However, research has shown that the application of MDE is not always successful. It is not fully understood when advantages of MDE can be used and to what degree MDE can also be disadvantageous for productivity. Further, when combining different techniques that aim to affect the same factor (e.g. productivity) the question arises whether these techniques really complement each other or, in contrast, compensate their effects. Due to that, there is the concrete question how MDE and other techniques, such as software development process, are interrelated. Both aspects (advantages and disadvantages for productivity as well as the interrelation to other techniques) need to be understood to identify risks relating to the productivity impact of MDE. Before studying MDE's impact on productivity, it is necessary to investigate the range of validity that can be reached for the results. This includes two questions. First, there is the question whether MDE's impact on productivity is similar for all approaches of adopting MDE in practice. Second, there is the question whether MDE's impact on productivity for an approach of using MDE in practice remains stable over time. The answers for both questions are crucial for handling risks of MDE, but also for the design of future studies on MDE success. This thesis addresses these questions with the goal to support adoption of MDE in future. To enable a differentiated discussion about MDE, the term MDE setting'' is introduced. MDE setting refers to the applied technical setting, i.e. the employed manual and automated activities, artifacts, languages, and tools. An MDE setting's possible impact on productivity is studied with a focus on changeability and the interrelation to software development processes. This is done by introducing a taxonomy of changeability concerns that might be affected by an MDE setting. Further, three MDE traits are identified and it is studied for which manifestations of these MDE traits software development processes are impacted. To enable the assessment and evaluation of an MDE setting's impacts, the Software Manufacture Model language is introduced. This is a process modeling language that allows to reason about how relations between (modeling) artifacts (e.g. models or code files) change during application of manual or automated development activities. On that basis, risk analysis techniques are provided. These techniques allow identifying changeability risks and assessing the manifestations of the MDE traits (and with it an MDE setting's impact on software development processes). To address the range of validity, MDE settings from practice and their evolution histories were capture in context of this thesis. First, this data is used to show that MDE settings cover the whole spectrum concerning their impact on changeability or interrelation to software development processes. Neither it is seldom that MDE settings are neutral for processes nor is it seldom that MDE settings have impact on processes. Similarly, the impact on changeability differs relevantly. Second, a taxonomy of evolution of MDE settings is introduced. In that context it is discussed to what extent different types of changes on an MDE setting can influence this MDE setting's impact on changeability and the interrelation to processes. The category of structural evolution, which can change these characteristics of an MDE setting, is identified. The captured MDE settings from practice are used to show that structural evolution exists and is common. In addition, some examples of structural evolution steps are collected that actually led to a change in the characteristics of the respective MDE settings. Two implications are: First, the assessed diversity of MDE settings evaluates the need for the analysis techniques that shall be presented in this thesis. Second, evolution is one explanation for the diversity of MDE settings in practice. To summarize, this thesis studies the nature and evolution of MDE settings in practice. As a result support for the adoption of MDE settings is provided in form of techniques for the identification of risks relating to productivity impacts. / Um die steigende Komplexität von Softwaresystemen beherrschen zu können, werden heutzutage unterschiedlichste Techniken gemeinsam eingesetzt. Beispiele sind, Design Pattern, Serviceorientierte Architekturen, Softwareentwicklungsprozesse oder modellgetriebene Entwicklung (MDE). Ziel dabei ist die Erhöhung der Produktivität, so dass Entwicklungsdauer und Qualität stabil bleiben können. Während hoch entwickelte Softwareentwicklungsprozesse heute schon standardmäßig genutzt werden, fangen Firmen gerade erst an MDE einzusetzen. Jedoch zeigen Studien, dass der erhoffte Erfolg von MDE nicht jedes Mal eintritt. So scheint es, dass noch kein ausreichendes Verständnis dafür existiert, inwiefern MDE auch Nachteile für die Produktivität bergen kann. Zusätzlich ist bei der Kombination von unterschiedlichen Techniken damit zu rechnen, dass die erreichten Effekte sich gegenseitig negieren anstatt sich zu ergänzen. Hier entsteht die Frage wie MDE und andere Techniken, wie Softwareentwicklungsprozesse, zusammenwirken. Beide Aspekte, der direkte Einfluss auf Produktivität und die Wechselwirkung mit anderen Techniken, müssen aber verstanden werden um den Risiken für den Produktivitätseinfluss von MDE zu identifizieren. Außerdem, muss auch die Generalisierbarkeit dieser Aspekte untersucht werden. Das betrifft die Fragen, ob der Produktivitätseinfluss bei jedem Einsatz von MDE gleich ist und ob der Produktivitätseinfluss über die Zeit stabil bleibt. Beide Fragen sind entscheidend, will man geeignete Risikobehandlung ermöglichen oder künftige Studien zum Erfolg von MDE planen. Diese Dissertation widmet sich der genannten Fragen. Dafür wird zuerst der Begriff MDE Setting'' eingeführt um eine differenzierte Betrachtung von MDE-Verwendungen zu ermöglichen. Ein MDE Setting ist dabei der technische Aufbau, inklusive manueller und automatische Aktivitäten, Artefakten, Sprachen und Werkzeugen. Welche Produktivitätseinflüsse von MDE Settings möglich sind, wird in der Dissertation mit Fokus auf Änderbarkeit und die Wechselwirkung mit Softwareentwicklungsprozessen betrachtet. Dafür wird einerseits eine Taxonomie von Changeability Concerns'' (potentiell betroffene Aspekte von Änderbarkeit) vorgestellt. Zusätzlich, werden drei MDE Traits'' (Charakteristika von MDE Settings die unterschiedlich ausgeprägt sein können) identifiziert. Es wird untersucht welche Ausprägungen dieser MDE Traits Einfluss auf Softwareentwicklungsprozesse haben können. Um die Erfassung und Bewertung dieser Einflüsse zu ermöglichen wird die Software Manufaktur Modell Sprache eingeführt. Diese Prozessmodellierungssprache ermöglicht eine Beschreibung, der Veränderungen von Artefaktbeziehungen während der Anwendung von Aktivitäten (z.B. Codegenerierung). Weiter werden auf Basis dieser Modelle, Analysetechniken eingeführt. Diese Analysetechniken erlauben es Risiken für bestimmte Changeability Concerns aufzudecken sowie die Ausprägung von MDE Traits zu erfassen (und damit den Einfluss auf Softwareentwicklungsprozesse). Um die Generalisierbarkeit der Ergebnisse zu studieren, wurden im Rahmen der Arbeit mehrere MDE Settings aus der Praxis sowie teilweise deren Evolutionshistorien erhoben. Daran wird gezeigt, dass MDE Settings sich in einem breiten Spektrum von Einflüssen auf Änderbarkeit und Prozesse bewegen. So ist es weder selten, dass ein MDE Setting neutral für Prozesse ist, noch, dass ein MDE Setting Einschränkungen für einen Prozess impliziert. Ähnlich breit gestreut ist der Einfluss auf die Änderbarkeit.Zusätzlich, wird diskutiert, inwiefern unterschiedliche Evolutionstypen den Einfluss eines MDE Settings auf Änderbarkeit und Prozesse verändern können. Diese Diskussion führt zur Identifikation der strukturellen Evolution'', die sich stark auf die genannten Charakteristika eines MDE Settings auswirken kann. Mithilfe der erfassten MDE Settings, wird gezeigt, dass strukturelle Evolution in der Praxis üblich ist. Schließlich, werden Beispiele aufgedeckt bei denen strukturelle Evolutionsschritte tatsächlich zu einer Änderung der Charakteristika des betreffenden MDE Settings geführt haben. Einerseits bestärkt die ermittelte Vielfalt den Bedarf nach Analysetechniken, wie sie in dieser Dissertation eingeführt werden. Zum Anderen erscheint es nun, dass Evolution zumindest zum Teil die unterschiedlichen Ausprägungen von MDE Settings erklärt. Zusammenfassend wird studiert wie MDE Settings und deren Evolution in der Praxis ausgeprägt sind. Als Ergebnis, werden Techniken zur Identifikation von Risiken für Produktivitätseinflüsse bereitgestellt um den Einsatz von MDE Settings zu unterstützen.