Hung, Kwong Chin. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 15-16). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts also in Chinese.

As software becomes increasingly important to all aspects of industry, there is a need to encourage practitioners to adopt best practice so as to improve the quality of the processes in use, and therefore achieve targets relating to time, budget and quality. The software development industry in Australia is dominated by a myriad of small firms. This presents a challenge in terms of determining the current practices of industry participants, and in devising improvement initiatives which are feasible for small organisations. Currently, the level of adoption of best practice among local software developers is unknown. To help improve the software industry, it is necessary to determine the current status of use of practices and techniques. Furthermore, the effectiveness of assessment-based software process improvement for small organisations needs to be evaluated. The objective of this research is to understand the extent of software development practices currently in use, and to evaluate the effectiveness of assessment-based software process improvement initiatives for small firms. To achieve this objective, an extensive mail survey of the Queensland software industry was conducted to identify and compare best practice in software development with current practice. The survey was based on the software best practice questionnaire used by the European Software Institute. Following on from this, a detailed evaluation of a process improvement program in 22 small firms was carried out. The program used the Rapid Assessments for Process Improvement for software Development (RAPID) model and method. RAPID is based on ISO/IEC 15504 (SPICE) and includes eight processes: requirements elicitation, software development, configuration management, quality assurance, project management, problem resolution, risk management, and process establishment. The evaluation analysed the process capability of the firms as reported from one-day software process assessments and also the extent of improvement as recorded at follow-up meetings held 7 to 16 months after the assessment. Both quantitative and qualitative techniques were used to analyse the assessment reports. The study confirmed that there is wide variation in the extent of adoption of software development best practice in terms of the individual practices, as well as the organisations. While project management planning and customer involvement practices are widely adopted, the use of metrics for estimating and testing are barely used by the organisations that responded to the survey. Overall, practices of a technical nature are more widely adopted compared to techniques related to support and management. Organisations involved in developing commercial off-the-shelf software have higher adoption than firms which do not develop such systems, and adoption of best practice is associated with the size of the development group. The leaders in adoption have significantly better practices when compared to the laggards for 40 of the 44 practices included in the survey. Furthermore, organisations from the finance, insurance and utilities sectors exhibited higher adoption of best practice compared to organisations from other sectors. The overall adoption of 48 percent implies that the organisations which responded have adopted, on average, almost half of the best practices in the questionnaire. While this overall adoption rate places the Queensland software industry in a competitive position compared to adoption of firms in European countries, there is scope for improvement. The process improvement assessments of 22 firms also confirmed that the capability of technical processes is higher than that of management processes; and suggested that higher capability is associated with the proportion of experienced staff and the proportion of staff with post graduate qualifications. Higher process capability is also associated with firms undertaking projects of lengthy durations. Most of the processes were rated at the lowest levels. Almost one third of all the processes were rated as incomplete (level 0) and 46 percent were rated as performed (level 1). The evaluation of the process improvement program was conducted by analysing the 22 assessment reports, and the 20 final reports from the follow-up meetings. The extent of improvement is associated with the proportion of technical staff and the proportion of formally qualified staff. The evaluation revealed that assessment-based process improvement programs are effective for small firms, regardless of the maturity of the processes at the time of the assessment. As well as detailing the process capability of 22 small software firms, this study provides an interesting insight into the actions, reasons for inaction, and reactions of the firms as far as implementing the recommendations from the assessments. Analysis of the reactions of the participants of this program suggests that for small firms, mentoring, training and organisation stability are important factors, while senior management support may not be an issue of concern. The study indicates that small firms can benefit from a low cost process improvement program with a restricted scope, a short time frame to evaluation, and mentoring from external assessors/consultants. It is also crucial that the firm is not disrupted by internal or external events during the course of the software process improvement program. Furthermore, this study provides a contribution to assessment methods by validating the RAPID model and method, and providing recommendations to improve the RAPID method. The outcomes from this research have the potential to better equip practitioners and consultants to undertake software process improvement, hence increasing the success of small software development firms in domestic and global markets.

<p>This Master’s thesis describes an evaluation of the stream-based knowledge pro-cessing middleware framework DyKnow in multi-UAV traffic monitoring applica-tions performed at Saab Aerosystems. The purpose of DyKnow is “to providegeneric and well-structured software support for the processes involved in gen-erating state, object, and event abstractions about the environments of complexsystems." It does this by providing the concepts of streams, sources, computa-tional units (CUs), entity frames and chronicles.</p><p>This evaluation is divided into three parts: A general quality evaluation ofDyKnow using the ISO 9126-1 quality model, a discussion of a series of questionsregarding the specific use and functionality of DyKnow and last, a performanceevaluation. To perform parts of this evaluation, a test application implementinga traffic monitoring scenario was developed using DyKnow and the Java AgentDEvelopment Framework (JADE).</p><p>The quality evaluation shows that while DyKnow suffers on the usability side,the suitability, accuracy and interoperability were all given high marks.</p><p>The results of the performance evaluation high-lights the factors that affect thememory and CPU requirements of DyKnow. It is shown that the most significantfactor in the demand placed on the CPU is the number of CUs and streams. Italso shows that DyKnow may suffer dataloss and severe slowdown if the CPU istoo heavily utilized. However, a reasonably sized DyKnow application, such as thescenario implemented in this report, should run without problems on systems atleast half as fast as the one used in the tests.</p>

Sectra Communications is today developing cryptographic products for high assurance environments with rigorous requirements on separation between encrypted and un-encrypted data. This separation has traditionally been achieved through the use of physically distinct hardware components, leading to larger products which require more power and cost more to produce compared to systems where lower assurance is required. An alternative to hardware separation has emerged thanks to a new class of operating systems based on the "separation kernel" concept, which offers verifiable separation between software components running on the same processor comparable to that of physical separation. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the feasibility in developing a product based on a separation kernel and which possibilities and problems with security evaluation would arise. In the thesis, a literature study was performed covering publications on the separation kernel from a historical and technical perspective, and the development and current status on the subject of software evaluation. Additionally, a software crypto demonstrator was partly implemented in the separation kernel based Green Hills Integrity operating system. The thesis shows that the separation kernel concept has matured significantly and it is indeed feasible to begin using this class of operating systems within a near future. Aside from the obvious advantages with smaller amounts of hardware, it would give greater flexibility in development and potential for more fine-grained division of functions. On the other hand, it puts new demands on developers and there is also a need for additional research about some evaluation aspects, failure resistance and performance. / Sectra Communications utvecklar idag kryptoprodukter med högt ställda krav på separation mellan krypterad och okrypterad data. Traditionellt har denna separation gjorts i hårdvara med fysiskt åtskilda komponenter, vilket lett till större produkter, högre energiförbrukning och högre tillverkningskostnader än motsvarande system för lägre säkerhetsnivåer. Ett alternativ till hårdvaruseparation har framkommit tack vare en ny typ av operativsystem baserat på ett koncept kallat "separationskärna", som erbjuder verifierbar separation mellan mjukvarukomponenter på en processor likvärdig med fysisk separation. Syftet med examensarbetet var att undersöka möjligheten att basera en produkt på ett sådant system samt vilka ytterligare möjligheter och problem med säkerhetsevaluering av produkten som uppstår. I examensarbetet utfördes en litteraturstudie av publikationer om separationskärnan ur ett historiskt och tekniskt perspektiv, samt den historiska utvecklingen inom säkerhetsevaluering av mjukvara och dess nuvarande status. Dessutom implementerades delar av ett mjukvarukrypto som en demonstrationsenhet baserad på Integrity från Green Hills Software, vilket är ett realtidsoperativsystem byggt kring en separationskärna. Arbetet visade att separationskärnan som koncept har nått en hög mognadsgrad och att det är rimligt att börja använda denna typ av operativsystem till produkter med mycket högt ställda säkerhetskrav inom en snar framtid. Det skulle förutom uppenbara vinster med minskad mängd hårdvara även ge större flexibilitet vid utvecklingen och möjlighet till exaktare uppdelning av funktioner. Samtidigt ställer det andra krav på utvecklarna och det behövs ytterligare utredning om vissa aspekter av hur evalueringsförfarandet påverkas, systemens feltolerans samt prestanda.

The accuracy, ease of use, and execution time of the finite element method based software Maxwell coupled to the system simulation software Simplorer was evaluated for simulation of hydropower generator - power grid interaction. A generator test rig were modelled in Maxwell and coupled to Simplorer with a strong circuit coupling as a single machine infinite bus system. The accuracy of the model was measured by comparing the simulated output power oscillation frequency and damping characteristics to the measured ones after a torque step. The result shows that the difference in output power oscillation frequency between the model and the generator test rig was small, and that the difference in damping characteristics was significant. The usability of the software package was found to be fair, as were the execution times.

This thesis evaluates several aspects of the cognitive modeling tools, using a questionnaire as the survey method. We try to assess the the suitability for cognitive modeling task of the cognitive modeling tools, from the perspective of international community of cognitive modeling tool users. Part of this assessment is done with respect to general usability of software and the rest is specialized for the cognitive modeling issues. Frequency and correlation analyses reveal that there is a significant relationship between suitability as a software product and suitability as a cognitive modeling tool. Specifically, there are correlations between the features of the tool involving flexibility, presentation of input and output and the process of design, implementation and evaluation of a cognitive modeling tool, while these processes are negatively related to adversely effecting features of the tool, such as having to do extra tasks that are not related to the actual task. Our study confirms that a cognitive modeling tool can also be evaluated from the perspective of a general purpose software product, and also gives clues about directions for improvement to tool developers.

There are two popular approaches when developing a software system, the first being System Analysis/System Design (SA/SD) and the second being an Object-Oriented (00) approach. In either approach a poor design inevitably produces a poor application. Thus, being able to evaluate the quality of a systems design is advantageous.The Design Metrics Research Team at Ball State University has developed metrics that measure the quality of software systems. From this research the metric D(G) (a composite of the metrics De and D) has been shown to be very effective when used to determine fault prone modules in a system. However, D(G) has been primarily applied to systems developed using the SA/SD approach. This thesis translated D(G) to an 00 setting and empirically evaluated D(G) to determine if D(G) is a good predictor of error-prone classes. The results indicate that De and Di are indeed good predictors of error-prone classes. Of the classes highlighted by De, 67% had errors, while 100% of the classes highlighted by D; had errors. / Department of Computer Science

The Design Metrics Research Team at Ball State University has developed a quality design metric D(G), which consists of an internal design metric Di, and an external design metric De. This thesis discusses applying design metrics to the ROCC-Radar On-line Command Control project received from Harris Corporation. Thus, the main objective of this thesis is to analyze the behavior of D(G), and the primitive components of this metric.Error and change history reports are vital inputs to the validation of design metrics' performance. Since correct identification of types of changes/errors is critical for our evaluation, several different types of analyses were performed in an attempt to qualify the metric performance in each case.This thesis covers the analysis of 666 FORTRAN modules with approximately 142,296 lines of code. / Department of Computer Science

Este trabalho visa agilizar e sistematizar o desenvolvimento de softwares educacionais, maximizando suas chances de favorecer a aprendizagem, através da descrição de cada uma de suas etapas, desde a primeira coleta de requisitos até a avaliação da aprendizagem, compondo, desta forma, uma metodologia. Para atingir essa meta, é importante favorecer a estruturação da integração da equipe de desenvolvimento com os professores e estudantes, durante o planejamento educacional, a implementação e a avaliação. Como produto desta metodologia, construiu-se um software educativo (cujo contexto é equilíbrio químico focado em ensino no nível médio), e sua eficiência em termos de aprendizagem foi avaliada experimentalmente, através de uma atividade educacional, em ambiente de ensino presencial. Ao final deste processo investigativo, constatou-se o fato de que a etapa de design da interface tem tanta importância quanto a etapa do planejamento educacional. Além disso, discute-se a necessidade de haver um especialista em educação no time, pois há indícios de que sua presença seja mais determinante para o sucesso do produto do que a dos demais profissionais (por exemplo: programadores, designers, roteiristas, etc). Assim, conclui-se que a proposta metodológica feita neste trabalho otimiza a participação dos integrantes da equipe, direcionando suas habilidades para as atividades necessárias, e que essa estratégia se reflete em bons produtos de software. / The aim of this work is to systematize the development of an educational software, maximizing its capacity to support learning, through the description of each one of its phases, from the first requirement analysis to the evaluation of learning, putting a methodology together. To achieve this goal, it is important to supply a framework for the integration of the development team with teachers and students, during the educational project, the implementation and evaluation. As a product of this methodology, an educational software (whose context is chemical equilibrium, for high school) was built, and its efficiency (in terms of learning) was experimentally evaluated through an educational activity, on a presence teaching environment. In the end of this investigative process, it is verified that the interface’s design phase is as important as the educational planning phase. In the end of this work is discussed the need of an expert in education on the team, because there is an indication that his presence is more significant for the success of the product than the presence of other professionals (for instance: programmers, designers, writers, etc). Therefore, it follows that the methodological proposition made in this work optimizes the participation of the members of the team, routing their abilities to the required activities, and that this strategy reflects in good software products.

Este trabalho visa agilizar e sistematizar o desenvolvimento de softwares educacionais, maximizando suas chances de favorecer a aprendizagem, através da descrição de cada uma de suas etapas, desde a primeira coleta de requisitos até a avaliação da aprendizagem, compondo, desta forma, uma metodologia. Para atingir essa meta, é importante favorecer a estruturação da integração da equipe de desenvolvimento com os professores e estudantes, durante o planejamento educacional, a implementação e a avaliação. Como produto desta metodologia, construiu-se um software educativo (cujo contexto é equilíbrio químico focado em ensino no nível médio), e sua eficiência em termos de aprendizagem foi avaliada experimentalmente, através de uma atividade educacional, em ambiente de ensino presencial. Ao final deste processo investigativo, constatou-se o fato de que a etapa de design da interface tem tanta importância quanto a etapa do planejamento educacional. Além disso, discute-se a necessidade de haver um especialista em educação no time, pois há indícios de que sua presença seja mais determinante para o sucesso do produto do que a dos demais profissionais (por exemplo: programadores, designers, roteiristas, etc). Assim, conclui-se que a proposta metodológica feita neste trabalho otimiza a participação dos integrantes da equipe, direcionando suas habilidades para as atividades necessárias, e que essa estratégia se reflete em bons produtos de software. / The aim of this work is to systematize the development of an educational software, maximizing its capacity to support learning, through the description of each one of its phases, from the first requirement analysis to the evaluation of learning, putting a methodology together. To achieve this goal, it is important to supply a framework for the integration of the development team with teachers and students, during the educational project, the implementation and evaluation. As a product of this methodology, an educational software (whose context is chemical equilibrium, for high school) was built, and its efficiency (in terms of learning) was experimentally evaluated through an educational activity, on a presence teaching environment. In the end of this investigative process, it is verified that the interface’s design phase is as important as the educational planning phase. In the end of this work is discussed the need of an expert in education on the team, because there is an indication that his presence is more significant for the success of the product than the presence of other professionals (for instance: programmers, designers, writers, etc). Therefore, it follows that the methodological proposition made in this work optimizes the participation of the members of the team, routing their abilities to the required activities, and that this strategy reflects in good software products.