A Research Report submitted to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Engineering, 18 October 2019 / The technology advancement of the latter half of the twentieth century and into this century has been the most significant driver of the emergence of Systems Engineering as a critical skill in the development of complex systems. Not only did the advancement of technology affected the products, but, also the manner in which these products are being developed, manufactured, operated, supported and maintained. The challenges confronting many organisations seeking to implement Systems Engineering in their projects are far from trivial. The current practices and culture in most of these organisations often constrain the adoption of Systems Engineering. A survey research was conducted to investigate the status of Systems Engineering at a South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) using one of its business unit, namely Defence, Peace, Safety and Security (DPSS) as a unit of measure. The research instrument for the study was developed based on the international standards and capability maturity models of Systems Engineering, to assess the status of Systems Engineering and to investigate whether an association exist between the status of Systems Engineering and a Competency Area or Job Category at DPSS. The results showed that the majority in the Competency Areas within DPSS utilises the specific practices associated with the technical processes of Systems Engineering in their projects and that there is no association between the status of Systems Engineering and Competency Area or Job Category. However, the study also shows that there is still room for improvement. / PH2020

Software quality is one of success factors in software development. Usability and user experience (U&UX) as a part of software quality is becoming more and more important. Although, there has been successful attempts to formalize specific parts of U&UX there is still a need for a systematic framework of U&UX evaluation. This thesis is aimed to study the state of the art in U&UX evaluation in order to develop a single framework that comprises existing knowledge on the topic. Furthermore, the U&UX evaluation framework is aimed to support product development in industry and provide a versatile guide for U&UX practitioners. The study is based on reference based systematic review. The literature review covers both scientific publications and industrial grade papers. The papers to be reviewed were selected by their relevance to the study goals and credibility of the source. The result of this is three layer U&UX evaluation framework. First layer of the Model features breakdown structure of usability and user experience. Total number of usability and context of use attributes is 217. Second layer of the model contains guidelines of how to perform usability evaluation. Third layer features validation strategies and guidelines on how to expand the Model. In order to enable practical use of the Model both static and dynamic validation should take place. There are many models in place attempting to formalize U&UX evaluation. However, most of them focuses on particular branch of usability or are too broad to be applied practically without adaption. Furthermore, there are many resources offering practical usability and user experience checklists or guidelines. However, most of them lack connection with industry standards such as ISO/IEC 9126. The Model presented in this thesis attempts to fill the gap between high level industry standards and cook book style U&UX guidelines.

Today wireless technologies are increasing in the automation systems used in homes and buildings. More electrical devices are used in a house to save time, money, and energy because they are relatively inexpensive and easy to install; these devices even allow smart components such as mobile tablets and computer connectivity. To connect all these devices for data transmission purposes and easy access, the KNX is the best choice. The KNX standard is an open standard for home and building automation. KNX standard supports different communication media such as Twisted pairs, Power line, Radio Frequency, and tunnelling IP. KNX system is a bus system for building control, making all electrical and smart devices in a KNX system use the same transmission method and exchange telegrams via a shared bus network. To check and control all the electrical devices in a home or an apartment takes time; that is why there is a massive need for applications to make every room’s controlling process much easier and take a much shorter time. This project is about designing and implementing a visualization application for windows and .NET for managing and comparing input data with the actual data. This application is equipped with a KNX bus driver to communicate with hardware in a building. The practical part of the application is to take some raw data and then sort them in a specific way to minimize the time of controlling the process of the KNX devices in a building.

Att utveckla applikationer kräver mer än kod. Docker förenklar och accelererar utveckling av mjukvara, samtidigt som det ger utvecklare friheten att använda sig av olika verktyg, metoder och publiceringsmiljöer. Prevas utvecklar idag många system som använder sig av MS SQL Server och .NET i Docker men saknar ett smidigt sätt att testa systemen innan leverans. Målet med projektet är att skapa en prototyp åt Prevas i Karlstad som gör det möjligt att smidigt testa och säkerställa förväntad funktionalitet hos MS SQL-serverbaserade applikationer. Resultatet av projektet är ett program som gör det möjligt att testa kommunikationen mellan en MS SQL Server och en applikation, samt presentera resultatet för användaren i en webbklient. Vår prototyp visar att det är möjligt att utveckla ett sådant system. Dock finns det delar av systemet som behöver utredas t.ex. nedladdning av testresultat, robust felhantering, samt att utveckla den till en mer generell lösning som går att anpassa efter databasens struktur. / Application development requires more than skills in writing good code. Tools like Docker can accelerate the development of software and it gives the developer the freedom to change the tools, methods, and deployment environments. Prevas is developing systems that use MS SQL Servers and .NET environments in Docker but they need to make it more effective by automating the process of testing the database before deployment. The goal of this project is to create a prototype for Prevas that makes it possible to easily test and ensure expected functionality of MS SQL Server based applications. The result of the project is a program that makes it possible to test the communication between a database and an application as well as present the outcome in a web client for the user. Our prototype shows that the development of similar systems is possible but there are pieces of the system that needs further development. Some examples include downloading the results of the tests, robust error handling methods, as well developing a more general application to adapt the system to a database structure.

With the rise of cloud computing and the migration to web-based applications, scalable systems have become highly desirable. And while developing software is hard, designing a scalable system is even harder. The microservice architecture is an attempt to improve the scalability but may introduce additional challenges. In order to correctly implement the microservice architecture, it is important to understand how the different mechanisms used in the architecture affect the quality of the application. The purpose of this research is to show how to evaluate microservice applications and how much they can differentiate from each other. A literature study and an architectural analysis are performed by reviewing research related to web applications and microservices. Subsequently, the empirical data is collected by evaluating and comparing two different microservice applications based on their quality characteristics. The results of the literature study indicate that performance efficiency, compatibility, reliability, security, maintainability and portability are the most relevant quality characteristics of the microservice architecture. Furthermore, the architectural analysis describes how microservices affect these quality characteristics. Lastly, the evaluation showed that different approaches can significantly alter the strength of the different characteristics. For this specific comparison between the two selected applications, it was determined that the biggest differentiating factor is the asynchronous and synchronous messaging. To conclude, the results show it is possible to evaluate a microservice application by its qualities. Additionally, while microservice applications may use completely different technologies, the fundamental concept behind them remains the same. What differs is the approaches used and how they affect the quality characteristics.

I denna rapport beskrivs det arbete och resultat som utförts i kursen TDDD96- Kandidatprojekt i programvaruutveckling. Teamet som utvecklade projektet bestod av åtta civilingenjörsstudenter som studerar på data- eller mjukvaruutvecklingsprogrammet. Projektet gick ut på att utveckla en virtuell gimbal-kamera till Sjöräddningssällskapet som skulle hålla en låg latens, låg energiförbrukning och vara modulärt utbytbar. I utvecklingsprocessen användes en modifierad version av den agila arbetsmetoden Scrum. Det finns även individuella delrapporter som behandlar ämnen kopplade till projektet.

Electronic commerce is becoming a growing industry as information technology has been gradually diversifying the business industry. As a result, there is greater competition between online businesses to attract and retain customers. To overcome this challenge, it is proposed that by implementing a new Inspirational Filter Application to a company’s web store’s filter will increase the growth of returning costumers. This new application is based on loose filters, which goes beyond traditional sorting mechanisms based on color and size. This technology expands searches into inspirational categories such as occasion, material and style, allowing the customer to online shop with greater variety and efficiency. By developing this application alongside with Scandinavian web shop, Boozt Fashion AB, the success rate is tracked after the establishment of this application.

Internet of things (IoT) blir bara större och större varje år och nya enheter läggs till hela tiden. Även om en stor del av dessa enheter är kontinuerligt använda finns det fortfarande väldigt många enheter som står inaktiva och sitter på oanvänd processorkraft som kan användas till att utföra maskininlärnings beräkningar. Det finns för nuvarande väldigt många metoder för att kombinera processorkraften av flera enheter för att utföra maskininlärnings uppgifter, dessa brukar kallas för distribuerade maskininlärnings metoder. huvudfokuset av detta arbetet är att utvärdera olika distribuerade maskininlärnings metoder för att se om de kan implementeras på IoT enheter och i fallet metoderna kan implementeras ska man mäta hur effektiva och skalbara dessa metoderna är. Den distribuerade maskininlärnings metoden som blivit implementerad i detta arbete kallas för ”MultiWorkerMirrorStrategy” och denna metod blev utvärderar genom en jämförelse på träningstiden, tränings precisionen och utvärderings precisionen av 2,3 och 4 Raspberry pi:s med en icke distribuerad metod vilket endast använt sig av 1 Raspberry pi. Resultatet av mätningarna visade att trots att processorkraften ökar för varje enhet som lagts till i clustret blir träningstiden högre samtidigt som resterande mätningar var desamma. Genom att analysera och diskutera dessa resultat drogs slutsatsen att den overhead som skapats av att enheterna kommunicerar med varandra är alldeles för hög vilket resulterar i att den implementerade metoden är väldigt ineffektiv och kan inte skallas upp utan att någon typ av optimering läggs till. / Internet of things is growing every year with new devices being added all the time. Although some of the devices are continuously in use a large amount of them are mostly idle and sitting on untapped processing power that could be used to compute machine learning computations. There currently exist a lot of different methods to combine the processing power of multiple devices to compute machine learning task these are often called distributed machine learning methods. The main focus of this thesis is to evaluate these distributed machine learning methods to see if they could be implemented on IoT devices and if so, measure how efficient and scalable these methods are. The method chosen for implementation was called “MultiWorkerMirrorStrategy” and this method was evaluated by comparing the training time, training accuracy and evaluation accuracy of 2,3 and 4 Raspberry pi:s  with a nondistributed machine learning method with 1 Raspberry pi. The results showed that although the computational power increased with every added device the training time increased while the rest of the measurements stayed the same. After the results were analyzed and discussed the conclusion of this were that the overhead added for communicating between devices were to high resulting in this method being very inefficient and wouldn’t scale without some sort of optimization being added.

Följande rapport beskriver ett projektarbete inom kursen TDDD96 Kandidatprojekt i pro-gramvaruutveckling vid Linköpings universitet som genomfördes våren 2021 av sju studen-ter. Projektet innefattade utvecklingen av en mobilapp med målet att skapa en digital im-plementation av den psykologiska behandlingsformen beteendeaktivering. Resultatet avprojektet blev en komplett mobilapp med samtlig nödvändig funktionalitet för beteende-aktivering och en användarmanual för att underlätta användandet av appen och behand-lingsformen. Följande rapport innefattar även sju fördjupande individuella delar relevantatill området rapporten behandlar.

<p>Det finns övrigt digitalt material (t.ex. film-, bild- eller ljudfiler) eller modeller/artefakter tillhörande examensarbetet som ska skickas till arkivet.</p>