As population ageing is observed globally, and technology continues to expand into most parts of our lives, many older adults face challenges in adapting to a world that they feel unprepared to inhabit — one filled with increasingly intertwined and fast-evolving technologies that have become necessary to fully participate in society. The age-related digital divide, caused by the gaps in access, motivation and skills of many older adults to use digital technologies compared to younger people, is now a significant problem for the wellbeing and independence of older adults and requires urgent solutions. Increasing the digital literacy and confidence of older adults may help reduce this gap. However, effective strategies for improving digital literacy in later life must take into account the needs and preferences of older learners. This paper reports on two pilot studies conducted to create and evaluate prototype digital literacy resources to discover effective forms and content. This wo rk draws from literature, related work, and feedback on our prototypes from older adults in local communities. Our findings indicate that older adults often prefer device and task-specific digital literacy resources in printed form as a familiar medium before progressing to digital learning, and value community involvement in ongoing support for the learning process. Resources that use figure-of-speech based language and informative diagrams can also be beneficial to older adults, particularly when learning novel digital tasks. These preliminary insights also highlight the potential for conflicting requirements from a diverse demographic and the need for further exploration of the topic

In an increasingly digitalised world, many older adults face the choice of improving their digital skills or risking social isolation and exclusion from essential services. With older adults expected to represent 16% of the global population by 2050, there is a renewed urgency to improve their digital literacy. Although many in-person and online technology training initiatives exist, they are often not accessible or poorly optimised for older adults. Younger adults, who typically form older adults’ support network, may be key to any solution. However, their help typically serves as a temporary fix until a new issue arises, leading to a cycle of dependency. This pilot study offers insights into the technology experiences of older adults, the ways in which younger individuals assist them, and how both groups stay connected. We conducted small-scale but in-depth user studies with older adults, and an online survey of younger adults, to understand how the technology support process could be improved to promote older adult autonomy and active ageing. Based on our findings, we propose an age-friendly platform that leverages intergenerational exchanges for a personalised learning experience that brings together younger and older adults. The final prototype was well received by participants in the user study. However, further exploration of other aspects of their lives and cultural differences in intergenerational learning, and larger studies of younger and older individuals are needed to co-create a solution that helps bridge the global digital divide while enabling older adults to have more fulfilling lives.

Ethics is recognised as an important concern in the development and operation of software systems. While there are codes of ethics and sets of ethical principles available to software professionals, there is a lack of tool and process support for systematic ethical deliberation at most stages of the software lifecycle. To create and deploy ethical software, it is vital that ethical concerns of software systems are reflected in their artefacts, such as requirements, software architecture, code and test suites, and that software professionals are supported in considering the ethical as well as technical consequences of their decisions. This paper reports on some early work in identifying the challenges of ethical decision making and opportunities for addressing these challenges in the context of software engineering.

There are many aspects involved in the development and operation of a software system, including system artefacts, activities, and infrastructure. Most of these aspects are vulnerable to uncertainty, which can result in risks to system quality and performance. Thus it is important to identify, represent and manage uncertainty in software systems. We hypothesise that using an underlying conceptual framework for characterising uncertainty can facilitate these activities. This paper demonstrates the use of an extensible framework, which defines a foundation for the systematic and explicit consideration of uncertainty in software systems. A software architecture case study is used to illustrate and evaluate the framework. A discussion of potential uses for the framework and future research is also provided.

Modern software systems are subject to frequent changes. Different artefacts of a system, such as requirements specifications, design documents and source code, often evolve at different times and become inconsistent with one another. This differential evolution poses problems to effective software maintenance and erodes trust in artefacts as accurate representation of the system. In this paper, we propose a holistic framework for managing the consistent co-evolution of software artefacts, incorporating: traceability creation and maintenance, change detection, impact analysis, consistency checking and change propagation.

Combinatorial problems appear in numerous settings, from timetabling to industrial design. Constraint solving aims to find solutions to such problems efficiently and automatically. Current constraint solvers are monolithic in design, accepting a broad range of problems. The cost of this convenience is a complex architecture, inhibiting efficiency, extensibility and scalability. Solver components are also tightly coupled with complex restrictions on their configuration, making automated generation of solvers difficult. We describe a novel, automated, model-driven approach to generating efficient solvers tailored to individual problems and present some results from applying the approach. The main contribution of this work is a solver generation framework called Dominion, which analyses a problem and, based on its characteristics, generates a solver using components chosen from a library. The key benefit of this approach is the ability to solve larger and more difficult problems as a result of applying finer-grained optimisations and using specialised techniques as required.

Both modularity and loose-coupling properties inherent to the self-adaptive systems offer the opportunity for ad-hoc service compositions, dynamic change and adaptation. To provide such a dynamic and self-adapting behavior, developers emphasize special self-management policies. ASSL (Autonomic System Specification Language) is a formal tool where such policies might be formally specified, validated and implemented. Intrinsically, the ASSL-developed policies are very strict and may impose quite restrictive behavior, which sometimes is undesirable. To solve the problem, we are currently developing special mechanisms for ASSL that help to specify policies that might evolve in order to satisfy system goals changing in the course of system adaptation. This paper presents our work on a mechanism imposing special loose self-management policies introducing flexibility into the self-adapting behavior.

Constraints are used to solve combinatorial problems in a variety of industrial and academic disciplines. However most constraint solvers are designed to be general and monolithic, leading to problems with efficiency, scalability and extensibility. We propose a novel, architecture-driven constraint solver generation framework called Dominion to tackle these issues. For any given problem, Dominion generates a lean and efficient solver tailored to that problem. In this paper, we outline the Dominion approach and its implications for software architecture specification of the solver.

Wireless sensor networks are often used by experts in many different fields to gather data pertinent to their work. Although their expertise may not include software engineering, these users are expected to produce low-level software for a concurrent, real-time and resource-constrained computing environment. In this paper, we introduce a component-based model for wireless sensor network applications and a language, Insense, for supporting the model. An application is modelled as a composition of interacting components and the application model is preserved in the Insense implementation where active components communicate via typed channels. The primary design criteria for Insense include: to abstract over low-level concerns for ease of programming; to permit worst-case space and time usage of programs to be determinable; to support the fractal composition of components whilst eliminating implicit dependencies between them; and, to facilitate the construction of low footprint programs suitable for resource-constrained devices. This paper presents an overview of the component model and Insense, and demonstrates how they meet the above criteria.

Modern software development practices show that there is significant diversity in the product, process and geographical location of software development due to economical, technical and logistical constraints. Such diverse development demands flexibility in the software engineering methodology. In this paper, we propose the cellular development methodology (CDM), an architecture-driven approach to flexible software development. CDM derives the development process and its architecture from the software architecture of product. The software development process is structured and customised as a network of cooperating cells. Our contribution is a cellular approach to software development based on the software architecture of the end product whereby a network of configurable cells yield customisable, potentially distributed software development processes which in turn produce software that is highly tailored to user requirements.

Software that cannot evolve is condemned to atrophy: it cannot accommodate the constant revision and re-negotiation of its business goals nor intercept the potential of new technology. To accommodate change in software systems, we have defined an active software architecture to be: dynamic in that the structure and cardinality of the components and interactions are changeable during execution; updatable in that components can be replaced; decomposable in that an executing system may be (partially) stopped and split up into its components and interactions; and reflective in that the specification of components and interactions may be evolved during execution. Here we describe the facilities of the ArchWare architecture description language (ADL) for specifying active architectures. The contribution of the work is the unique combination of concepts including: a /spl pi/-calculus based communication and expression language for specifying executable architectures; hyper-code as an underlying representation of system execution that can be used for introspection; a decomposition operator to incrementally break up executing systems; and structural reflection for creating new components and binding them into running systems.

The changing needs of modern application systems demand new and radical software architectures to support them. The attraction of persistent systems is that they define precisely the extent to which they are open, thereby allowing the dynamically changing resource requirements of applications to be tracked accurately within the persistent environment. Thus, an ever-growing body of work is being established to study the nature of running applications, and to use the information gleaned, to improve the run-time execution of these applications. Here we propose a new architectural approach to constructing persistent systems that accommodates, and thus is compliant to, the needs of particular applications. By separating policy from mechanism in all components, the architecture may be tailored to the policy needs of the application. (Policy may be regarded as strategy for achieving a goal, such as a cache eviction algorithm, whereas mechanism is the method by which the objective is achieved, such as the physical movement of the cache lines. As we see later, policy and mechanism are composable to form new mechanism.) We first propose a generic architecture for compliance, and then show how it may be instantiated. Finally, we describe an example of how the architecture operates in a manner that is compliant to a target application. We postulate, since we have not yet measured, that the benefits of compliant architectures will be a reduction in complexity, with corresponding gains in flexibility, portability, understandability in terms of failure semantics, and performance. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.