<p>As our reliance on software has increased, robustness has become an important subject. Software that is not robust enough may lead to frustration, or loss of time or value. Software architecture forms the main structures of applications. Having focus on the quality of an applications architecture may increase the robustness of the application. This thesis tries to find a suitable architectural process for achieving robustness. I report on the findings from ten interviews with software architects from the software industry, around the theme robustness. Interview results are used in order to form a definition of robustness which is wider than the definitions I found in literature. The thesis's main contribution is a proposed process for designing and analyzing robust software architectures that make use of elements from existing methods. The proposed process is grounded on results from interviews, personal experience, and evaluation of existing methods in literature.</p>

<p>Agile software development have in recent years been widely accepted in industry, as well as being the target of much research. XP has been the main focus, while there exist relatively few studies of other Agile methods such as Scrum. This thesis describe an ethnographic study of a Scrum team in a project. The goal is to give a rich description of the use and application of Scrum. Special attention is given to the implications of differences in implementation from theory. Another focus is to reveal the dynamics of teamwork within the project. The main findings are that Scrum was easy to implement, and worked well, but is challenging when used to increase predictability. With regard to teamwork, Scrum supported a shared mental, communication and adaptability. The leadership function is however complex, and requires good interpersonal skills. Keywords: Agile, Scrum, Teamwork, Implementation, Software development, Software engineering</p>

<p>This master thesis is a case study on software reuse within a subset of systems at the Norwegian Directorate of Taxes, Skattedirektoratet (SKD). The systems chosen for our research are the GLD systems; legacy systems which dates back to the late 1980's and early 1990's. Because of historical reasons, these systems are copied and created over and over again in an annual cycle. There are redundancies in code and data between the annual versions, but also across the different GLD systems. The consequence of this is systems with reduced maintainability and possible inconsistencies in code and data. Our objectives with this case study is to determine both the current level of software reuse within a subset of the GLD systems, and the emphasis on reuse in SKD's development process. After determining the status of as-is, we will continue with an investigation of the potential for software reuse within the context of SKD, and how they can achieve systematic software reuse. The contributions of this thesis can be divided into four main themes: * T1: Review of state-of-the-art literature on software reuse * T2: Investigation of reuse level within selected GLD systems * T3: Investigation of SKD's development process * T4: Investigation of opportunities for systematic reuse in SKD The main contributions are: * C1: Review of literature in the field of software reuse * C2: Measurement of the reuse maturity level within the selected GLD systems. * C3: Survey of the software development process and reuse aspects at SKD * C3.1: Results from SKD * C3.2: Results from SKD combined with results from previous surveys on software developers attitude toward software reuse by NTNU * C4: Process which assures reuse Keywords: Systematic software reuse, Reuse maturity, Software development, Software engineering</p>

<p>This thesis looks into the literature in the fields of informal learning, mobile learning and mobile games. A demonstrator is build to test the effect of informal learning and the use of collaborative games in a learning context.</p>

<p>N/A</p>

<p>The use of indoor positioning systems (IPS) is seen as a promising way to support coordination of activities in hospitals. Despite this, little work has been done when it comes to how the data from indoor positioning systems should be visualized to the users. By conducting a case study of a specific work practice at Aker University Hospital in Oslo we have designed visualizations with the aim of investigating the amount of information richness these should have in order to support coordination work. We have also been interested in investigating whether the approach that we have used in this thesis made it possible for the users to use the visualizations in their everyday work, and if it is possible for the users to give informative assessments of them. As little relevant theory exists on how visualizations should be designed we have used methods from the field of usability engineering, and have designed the visualizations as paper prototypes. These have been user tested by test persons with both direct and indirect knowledge about the coordination of activities at the specific work practice. Our work shows that visualizations that had a high degree of information richness were favored. In addition, the possibility to move between different types of visualizations based on the need for information were seen as especially attractive. The test persons that we recruited were able to give informative assessments of the prototypes, but as these were both tailor-made for a specific work practice and tested using simulated scenarios they had a high learning curve. Based on the results from our work we see usability engineering methods as suitable when designing visualizations, although some of them should be left out or modified to fit in with the project in question.</p>

Global digital libraries depend on the cooperation between many independent/autonomous organizations. The configuration of the local sub-systems in a global distributed digital library depends both on the requirements from the global system as well as from the local environments. The local administrators in the different organizations play a crucial and often neglected role in spreading global distributed digital libraries. The main goal of this thesis has been to add an operational local node, with local collections, to a global georeferenced distributed digital library network. The pilot installation was done with Alexandria Digital Library as the global georeferenced distributed digital library network, and Galleri Nor from the National Library of Norway was used as a local collection for the NTNU ADL node. The conclusions of this thesis have been reached through an investigation of theory concerning distributed georeferenced digital libraries and an investigation of problems and solutions associated with the pilot installation of the NTNU ADL node with Galleri Nor as the local collection. The main findings and recommendations from this work can be summarized as follows: 1. Digital libraries are characterized by the use of many different standards, formats, and technologies. This has an impact on the configuration of these systems. The complexity of digital libraries must be dealt with so that local administrators can install and configure digital library nodes without needing to be experts in all the different standards, formats, and technologies used in the digital libraries. A configuration tool can be used to add a layer of abstraction between the local administrator and the complexity of a digital library. Lowering the requirements of skills needed in order to install and configure a digital library with local collections can increase the expansion of the digital library technology. An increase in the number of nodes in a distributed digital library will most likely increase the number of available collections, and the increase of available collections will increase the value of the distributed digital library network for information seekers. As more information seekers realize the value of the distributed digital library network more organizations will seek to become part of such a global network. Addressing the problems the local administrators face in the configuration and installation process in order to make a more user-friendly system is the first step in the right direction on the path towards a global distributed digital library system. 2. Documentation must be written with a complexity and a terminology that can be easily understood by the user groups of the system. It is important to know for whom the documentation is written. The documentation is an important part of the puzzle for solving the problems related to the configuration of a digital library with local collections. In digital libraries, as in all other software systems, the user groups have to be identified. The documentation must meet the needs and use the right terminology at the right knowledge-level for each user group. Three user groups are identified in this thesis: software developers, local administrators, and information seekers. 3. It is possible to add existing Norwegian collections to a global georeferenced distributed digital library, and to make the local collections available for a global audience. One main difference between georeferenced digital libraries and digital libraries in general, is that georeferenced digital libraries provide new access points to collections where spatial literacy can be used to solve problems and satisfy information needs. The problems described in this thesis are not specific for global georeferenced digital libraries, but will affect all global digital libraries with distributed nodes in the same way. Existing Norwegian collections can be added to a global georeferenced distributed digital library network regardless of the content of the collection, or which metadata formats and standards used. The prerequisite of this thesis was to use the Alexandria Digital Library and add a collection from the National Library of Norway to the local NTNU ADL node. Galleri Nor was chosen as the collection from the National Library. The theory part of this thesis investigates digital libraries and what the georeferenced information paradigm offers in the context of digital libraries. The theory gives an overview of georeferencing in digital libraries and which technologies and problems associated with this relatively new paradigm. Special attention is given to the Alexandria Digital Library system. The possibilities this system offers are discussed in the ADL chapter. The State of the Art part of the thesis compares different georeferenced systems and investigates the concept of a fully fledged georeferenced digital library and how different systems compare to this concept. The Installation of the NTNU pilot system, Discussion, and Possible improvements and recommendations chapters give an overview of the installation and issues related to the installation and configuration of a local node (from a local administrator’s point of view), and how these issues may be addressed through possible solutions and further work.

Colonies of social insects are capable of solving complex tasks that far exceed the abilities of each individual insect. The colonies do not use any supervisor or blueprint to organize their work, instead the solutions emerge from the interactions between the insects and their environment. Two of the tasks that social insects perform are clustering of corpses and sorting of brood. In this thesis we describe our work with creating swarms of simple agents that perform similar tasks. Previous research within this field has hand-coded the behavior of the individual agents and then seen if a swarm of the agents is capable of solving the desired task. We take a different approach and evolve the individual behavior by evaluating the patterns that are formed by the swarm. We evolve swarms to solve three different types of tasks: Clustering, patch sorting, and annular sorting. The first two tasks involves the grouping of identical objects, and the grouping of different types of objects into separate groups. Annular sorting involves the creation of a targe-like structure that contains circular bands. This task has not been solved successfully in the past, and we are able to create a dense and well separated structure.

We have discussed two related topics in this thesis: the design of location models and spatio-temporal databases for indoor positioning systems. We conclude our work with a short recapitulation of the main issues presented and a justification of the limitations, followed by suggestions for further research and our final thoughts. 8.1 Location Modeling Different aspects of location modeling were discussed, among them symbolic, geometric and hybrid location models. We found that only the hybrid form is suited for our purposes, that is to accurately position objects within a domain and relay this information to users in an understandable way. As a modeling technique, we proposed a solution using basic constructs of UML with added extensions. We created a domain model containing objects and relationships between them which we deem as relevant for indoor location aware systems, including the geometric extent of locations and transitions. 8.2 Spatio-Temporal Databases We defined spatio-temporal databases as databases which manage data on geometrical objects that change (movement is also considered as a form of change). Although research in this area has received much attention in the past decade, no functional spatio-temporal systems are available. Purely spatial database systems however are. We therefore proposed a solution based on timestamping spatial data, thus capturing its temporal aspects and in effect making it spatio-temporal. In order to create a conceptual model of such a database for indoor location aware applications, we used our own domain model for location modeling and proposed extensions to it in order to capture specific spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal aspects. We used the conceptual model to create a prototype database, demonstrating the concepts proposed by us.

The misuse case methodology is an approach for eliciting security requirements in software development projects. Misuse cases are an extension of the well-known use case methodology, and use the same basic types of diagrams and documentation forms. This thesis presents a study of the introduction and application of the misuse case methodology in a development team in the computer software industry. A qualitative research approach, with workshops and interviews has been applied to determine the usability and effectiveness of misuse cases. In addition, the practioners' perception of the method has been investigated, as this is believed to be an important factor for the adoption of the method in the team's engineering process. The results show that the method was easy to learn, easy to use and gave a good result compared to the time and resources used.