The number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) (hereinafter referred to as drone) is rising in both, private and commercial applications. This makes it necessary that a drone remains under full control of the owner at any time. Most drones are controlled wirelessly by protocols in the 2.4 GHz band. The most commonly used protocols are DSMX (Spektrum), ACCST D16 EU-LBT (FrSky), DEVO (Walkera) and S-FHSS (Futaba). While it has been known that the DSMX protocol is vulnerable to attacks, the security of the other protocols was an open question.

The continuous technological evolution of smartphones regarding their performance, networking facilities, and memory capacity, as well as various sensors, leads to a significant increase of a device’s energy requirements. Hence, energy demand is one of the most limiting factors of battery-driven, mobile devices. Improving energy demand by software optimisation often relies on simulated energy demand data. This paper evaluates two approaches for actually measuring real energy data with the goal to build an efficient and cost-effective basis for future research. The main question underlying this paper is: Is the preciseness of energy data provided by a smartphone’s operating system reliably close to the preciseness of data obtained via classic (i.e., hardwarebased) measurement approaches. We defined a case study to evaluate this question. Our evaluation results show that software-based energy measures have an acceptable preciseness for comparative measures and are thus sufficient for research that warrants or requires total values.

Most mobile and embedded devices are battery powered. Hence, their uptime depends on the energy consumption of the used components. Developers made severe effort to optimize hardware components in order to reduce their energy consumption. However, in this paper we show that one also has to consider energy awareness in terms of software. In this study we focus on sorting algorithms, which are not only used directly by the user of a device but also very often implicitly by other algorithms. Our experiments show,that different sorting algorithms consume different amounts of energy. In detail, the experiments show that there is no direct correlation between the time complexity of an algorithm and its energy consumption.

An international survey on risk management in software development with off-the-shelf (OTS) components is reported upon and discussed. The survey investigated actual risk-management activities and their correlations with the occurrences of typical risks in OTS component-based development. Data from 133 software projects in Norway, Italy, and Germany were collected using a stratified random sample of IT companies. The results show that OTS components normally do not contribute negatively to the quality of the software system as a whole, as is commonly expected. However, issues such as the underestimation of integration effort and inefficient debugging remain problematic and require further investigation. The results also illustrate several promising effective risk-reduction activities, e.g., putting more effort into learning relevant OTS components, integrating unfamiliar components first, thoroughly evaluating the quality of candidate OTS components, and regularly monitoring the support capability of OTS providers. Five hypotheses are proposed regarding these risk-reduction activities. The results also indicate that several other factors, such as project, cultural, and human-social factors, have to be investigated to thoroughly deal with the possible risks of OTS-based projects.

Model-driven development, using UML, has become the most dominant development paradigm, in software industry. To be correctly and efficiently applied, systematic teaching and learning are key prerequisites for benefiting from new technologies. This is especially true for an industrial setting since traditional classroom training approaches are often not applicable due to time and cost reasons, which, in turn, led to the development of e-learning and blended learning approaches. Based on numerous applications of our modular blended learning approach for teaching object-oriented software development with UML [1] an attempt has been made to improve the design, the organization and the execution of the blended learning arrangement. Therefore, we collected data on the learning environment, the learners´ behavior and preferences. The results from the questioning in an industrial setting, although far from being representative because of the small number of respondents, give some interesting insights in the needs and expectations of learners and the usage of different elements of blended learning arrangements which could serve as hypotheses for later in depth studies. One of these hypotheses is, that coaching may serve very well the explored learning needs and preferences and makes training programs effective and sustainable.

Component-based software development (CBSD) is becoming more and more important since it promotes reuse to higher levels of abstraction. As a consequence, many components are available being either open-source software (OSS) or commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS). However, it is still unclear how the decision for acquiring OSS or COTS components is made in practice. This paper describes an empirical study on why project decision-makers selected COTS instead of OSS components, or vice versa. The study was performed as an international survey in Norway, Italy and Germany. It focused on decision making on using off-the-shelf (OTS) components. We have gathered answers from 83 projects using only COTS components and 44 projects using only OSS components. Results of this study show significant differences and commonalities of integrating OSS or COTS components. Moreover, the study illustrates several research questions that warrant future research.

With the rapid rate of innovation in software engineering, teaching and learning of new technologies have become challenging issues. The provision of appropriate education is a key prerequisite for benefiting from new technologies. Experience shows that typical classroom education is not as effective and efficient as it could be, therefore, e-learning approaches are becoming more and more popular. However, typical e-learning suffers from a lack of social communication and control over the progress of learning. This paper describes a blended learning approach based on industrial and academic experience in the area of object-technology, which mixes traditional classroom education with e-learning. Although both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, the synergy effects clearly outperform the isolated benefits of the single approaches on business, content, and quality level

The paper presents a controlled experiment, focusing on the impact of applying quality design principles such as the ones provided by P. Coad and E. Yourdon (1991) on the maintainability of object oriented designs. Results, which repeat the findings of a previous study, strongly suggest that such design principles have a beneficial effect on the maintainability of object oriented designs. It is argued that object oriented designs are sensitive to poor design practices because the cognitive complexity introduced becomes increasingly unmanageable. However, as our ability to generalize these results is limited, they should be considered as preliminary, i.e., it is very likely that they can only be generalized to programmers with little object oriented training and programming experience. Such programmers can, however, be commonly found on maintenance projects. As well as additional research, external replications of this study are required to confirm the results and achieve confidence in these findings.

Presents a controlled experiment focusing on the following issues. (1) Are object-oriented design documents easier to understand and modify than structured design documents? (2) Must they comply with quality design principles, such as the ones provided by Coad and Yourdon (1991)? (3) What is the impact of such design principles on the understandability and modifiability of design documents? The results of the experiment strongly suggest that such design principles have a beneficial effect on the maintainability of object-oriented design documents. However, there is no strong evidence regarding the alleged higher maintainability of object-oriented design documents over structured design documents. Furthermore, the results suggest that object-oriented design documents are more sensitive to poor design practices, in part because their cognitive complexity becomes increasingly unmanageable. However, as our ability to generalise these results is limited, they should be considered as preliminary, i.e. it is very likely that they can only be generalised to programmers with little object-oriented training. However, such programmers can be commonly found on maintenance projects