Internships are widely recognized as a high-impact educational practice that effectively prepares students for successful careers in the computing industry. Unfortunately, not all students have equal access to computing internships. Students are often expected to find internships independently, but their classes generally do not teach them the skills needed to search for computing internships or to succeed in a technical interview. Furthermore, at a university in a rural area with little or no public transportation, students may not be able to accept an internship offer unless they have a car and enough time to travel to and from a work site in a nearby city. These problems are especially severe for students of opportunity (e.g., students with low socioeconomic status, first-generation students): the exact students for whom an internship can have the greatest impact. To address this problem, our university is starting a software development center to provide campus-based internships in which student teams develop software products for clients. Students hired by the center will benefit from dedicated workspace on or near our campus, ongoing training in common software development practices (e.g., version control, project management, requirements engineering) that are not covered consistently in a classroom setting, and on-site mentoring from experienced software professionals. We believe that this co-curricular experience will improve participants' ability to begin and persist in a career in software development after graduation. We will discuss our experience with several pilot projects and our vision and goals for the center.

We present a framework for reasoning with preferences in the context of Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE). Our choice of preference language, conditional importance networks (CI-nets), is motivated by the occurrence in requirements engineering of qualitative preferences and tradeoffs involving sets of items; such preferences are expressed more naturally in CI-nets than in other representations. Building on our past experience with CI-nets, we are improving the scalability and usability of CI-nets for specifying and analyzing requirements preferences. We discuss our ongoing work and long-term plans, including efforts to develop more efficient methods to identify conflicting preferences among possible requirements, guide negotiation of resolutions to such conflicts, and improve traceability and comprehension of requirements preferences.

To produce an optimal component-based software system for a given application, it is necessary to consider both the required functionality of the system and its stakeholders' preferences over various non-functional properties. We propose a new modular end-to-end framework for component-based system development that combines formal specification and verification of functional requirements with a novel method for representing and reasoning with stakeholders' qualitative preferences over properties of the system. This framework will facilitate the use of formal verification to ensure system correctness while making it easier to identify truly optimal component-based system designs.

For a Web service composition to satisfy a user's needs, it must not only provide the desired functionality, but also have nonfunctional properties (e.g., reliability, availability, cost) that are acceptable to the user. In the recent past, several techniques have been developed and deployed to identify a composite service that conforms to the functional requirements and is also optimal with respect to the user-defined preferences over non-functional properties. However, these composition techniques are limited to using one formalism for specifying the required functionality, in short, the existing techniques cannot identify optimal (w.r.t. non-functional properties) composite services that are required to satisfy functional requirements described in multiple formalisms. We have previously proposed a meta-framework for service composition that involves decomposing the required functionality into a boolean combination of atomic requirements, which are expressed using different formalisms. This meta-framework supports the use of multiple formalisms and their corresponding composition algorithms within a single scenario. In this paper, we integrate support for unconditional preferences over nonfunctional requirements into this composition meta-framework. We show that for a large class of problems, local selection of preferred service(s) can yield the most preferred composite service that satisfies the desired functional requirements.

In goal-oriented requirements engineering, a goal model graphically represents relationships between the required goals (functional requirements), tasks (realizations of goals), and optional goals (non-functional properties) involved in designing a system. It may, however, be impossible to find a design that fulfills all required goals and all optional goals. In such cases, it is useful to find designs that provide the required functionality while satisfying the most preferred set of optional goals under the goal model's constraints. We present an approach that considers expressive qualitative preferences over optional goals, as these can model interacting and/or mutually exclusive subgoals. Our framework employs a model checking-based method for reasoning with qualitative preferences to identify the most preferred alternative(s). We evaluate our approach using existing goal models from the literature.

We study the problem of substitution of components in a composite service, especially in the setting where the substitute is composed in an asynchronous fashion. By asynchronous composition, we mean that the participants in the composition are not required to synchronize on the input/output actions as long as the input to one participant always follows the corresponding output from another. We show that such asynchronous composition can be realized by synchronous composition of the participating components along with an appropriate buffer process. We obtain the condition which, when satisfied by a service Q1', allows Q1' to act as a correct substitute for Q1in a composition of services Q1and Q2. Our work extends prior results on substitutability where the conditions relied on synchronous composition and/or on the structural equivalence between the substitute and the component being replaced.