Nancy Mead has been expounding the virtues of requirements prioritization, especially in the area of information security, for over a decade. She advocates avoiding purely informal ad-hoc approaches and suggests a prioritization strategy based on both cost of implementing requirements and the expected value if implemented. Due to critical schedule and resource constraints, we have found that requirements prioritization is a key risk management practice for real project for real clients based courses. This work describes our experiences applying Nancy Meadpsilas requirement prioritization works within such courses and how we educate students on the importance of utilizing this for managing requirements implementation risk in student projects within three universities for both graduate and undergraduates.

No abstract available.

There is strong disagreement among many computer science educators as to whether UML tools can be effectively used in undergraduate computer science courses. Two of the main points of disagreement are whether the tools that exist are appropriate for undergraduate education and whether the learning curve for these tools is too steep for the benefits that they bring. We will discuss both tools for developing class diagrams, appropriate for CS1/CS2 courses as well as tools for developing use-case models, sequence diagrams, etc. – tools appropriate for advanced courses on such topics as object-oriented analysis and design, software engineering, etc.

The purpose of this workshop is to begin the development of an evolving archive of materials to help faculty desiring to run Real-Projects for Real-Clients courses (RPRCC’s) to design such courses and to tailor them to their specific objectives and available resources. A major part of this archive will consist of materials already used in such courses, together with an explanation of which RPRCC-related issues each of the materials addresses as well as the various alternative approaches to addressing each issue.

Fred Brooks' seminal book, "The Mythical Man-Month" (MMM) is a firmly established classic in software engineering. Many of us feel compelled to use this work to help our students appreciate and put into practice the fundamental software engineering concepts contained between its covers. This often amounts to using "passive" lesson plans such as required readings followed by lectures and exams; these rarely fully satisfy our learning objectives. Rather, students often have mixed reactions to MMM with the result that it has little impact on their attitudes and practices, both in and out of the classroom. This paper outlines a more active approach to incorporating MMM into the classroom, one that we have refined over 6 years, at multiple universities and in both graduate and undergraduate courses. It includes learning objectives, a lesson plan, sample materials, an implementation discussion, and an evaluation of the approach's impact.

No abstract available.

We describe how empirical research performed in the context of a software engineering project course can provide results useful to both students in later offerings of the course and to industry. The secondary purpose is to encourage the formation of an effort to share ideas on classroom-based research, to perform research collaboratively, and to share results with both the academic and industrial software engineering communities.

The primary purpose of this tutorial is to show participants how empirical research performed in the context of a Software Engineering project course can provide results useful to both students in later offerings of the course and to industry. The tutorial's secondary purpose is to encourage the formation of an effort to share ideas on classroom-based research, to perform research collaboratively, and to share results with both the academic and industrial software engineering communities.

Workshop Summary The purpose of this workshop is to present an in-depth overview of USC CS577, and to start the processes of: • eliciting from faculty at a variety of colleges and universities the different needs and resource constraints to which they would be subject were they to port CS577 to their home institutions • planning the types of adjustments that can be made to CS577 to meet various sets of constraints

Software development is one of the most economically critical engineering activities. It is unsettling, therefore, that regularly published analyses reveal that the percentage of projects that fail, by coming in far over budget or far past schedule, or by being cancelled with significant financial loss, is considerably greater in software development than in any other branch of engineering. The reason is that successful software development requires expertise in both state of the art (software technology) and state of the practice (software development process). It is widely recognized that failure to follow best practice, rather than technological incompetence, is the cause of most failures. It is critically important, therefore, that (i) computer science departments be able assess the quality of the software development process component of their curricula and that industry be able to assess the efficacy of SPI (software process improvement) efforts. While assessment instruments/tools exist for knowledge of software technology, none exist for attitude toward, knowledge of, or ability to use, software development process. We have developed instruments for measuring attitude and knowledge, and are working on an instrument to measure ability to use. The current version of ATSE, the instrument for measuring attitude toward software engineering, is the result of repeated administrations to both students and software development professionals, post-administration focus groups, rewrites, and statistical reliability analyses. In this paper we discuss the development of ATSE, results, both expected an unexpected, of recent administrations of ATSE to students and professionals, the various uses to which ATSE is currently being put and to which it could be put, and ATSE's continuing development and improvement.

Workshop Summary The purpose of this workshop is to provide university faculty and software development professionals with a background on work already done in developing a tool (ATSE) for measuring students’ attitudes to software process, and to involve them in the exploration of its use and further development. The outcome of this workshop will include guidelines for application of ATSE and other instruments within academic computer science programs and in industrial SPI efforts. The workshop will also involve the participant in the evolution of the various instruments.

If the level of adoption of software engineering best practice is to be increased in industry, then an appreciation of its importance must be conveyed to computer science students. Accomplishment of this goal is often severely hampered by the fact that many computer science faculty view the software process as intellectually shallow and that many computer science students come to the field with an aversion to the oppressive discipline which they perceive to be required to follow it. We have devised a method of forcing students to recognize the necessity of software engineering best practice by bringing them to the realization that without it they will fail, not in their course work, but in real-world software development projects. The method has been tested twice at Stevens Institute and is about to be used at a number of other universities. Evaluation of results is being done through the use of two standard instruments, the Felder Learning Styles Inventory and the Academic Locus of Control Scale and of a novel Attitude Toward Software Engineering (ATSE) instrument designed by the authors.

The notion that a definition of a variable is dead is used by optimizing compilers to delete code whose execution is useless. We extend the notion of deadness to that of partial deadness, and define a transformation, the revival transformation, which eliminates useless executions of a (partially dead) definition by tightening its execution conditions without changing the set of uses which it reaches or the conditions under which it reaches each of them.

The GCD and Banerjee tests are the standard data dependence tests used to determine whether a loop may be parallelized/vectorized. In an earlier work, (1991) the authors presented a new data dependence test, the I test, which extends the accuracy of the GCD and the Banerjee tests. In the original presentation, only the case of general dependence was considered, i.e., the case of dependence with a direction vector of the form (*,*,...,*). In the present work, the authors generalize the I test to check for data dependence subject to an arbitrary direction vector.>

Article Free Access Share on Extending the I test to direction vectors Authors: Kleanthis Psarris Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New JerseyView Profile , Xiangyun Kong Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New JerseyView Profile , David Klappholz Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New JerseyView Profile Authors Info & Claims ICS '91: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on SupercomputingJune 1991 Pages 330–340https://doi.org/10.1145/109025.109106Online:01 June 1991Publication History 1citation190DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations1Total Downloads190Last 12 Months3Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

The I test is a subscript dependence test which extends both the range of applicability and the accuracy of the GCD and Banerjee tests (U. Banerjee, 1976), standard subscript dependence tests used to determine whether loops may be parallelized/vectorized. It is shown that the I test is useful when, in the event that a positive result must be reported, a definitive positive is of more use than a tentative positive and when insufficient loop iterations are known for the Banerjee test to apply.>

The Banerjee test is commonly considered to be the more accurate of the two major approximate data dependence tests used in automatic vectorization/parallelization of loops, the other being the GCD test. From its derivation, however, there is no simple explanation of why the Banerjee test should be nearly as accurate as it is given credit for. We present a set of sufficient conditions for the Banerjee test's accuracy, and explain its perceived accuracy in actual practice by proving that under circumstances which occur extremely frequently in actual code, the Banerjee test is, in fact, not approximate, but perfectly accurate.

FATCAT (Fortran Advanced Technology Code Analysis Tool) is a software tool designed to aid the programmer in maintaining, modifying, and enhancing substantial production programs (a thousand to over a million lines long). FATCAT is also extremely useful in aiding the programmer in parallelizing Fortran code. FATCAT analyzes sequential code written in ANSI Fortran '77. It also 'understands' Cray Fortran (CFT) extensions, such as recursion and pointer variables. Like some cross-reference-table producing tools, FATCAT also understands the effects on variable usage of COMMON and EQUIVALENCE statements. Unlike most such tools, however, it also accounts for the effects of SUBROUTINE and FUNCTION calls, including recursive calls, of array subscripting, and of dereferencing CFT-style pointer variables.>

Refined Languages (Refined Fortran, Refined C, etc.) are extensions of their parent languages in which it is possible to express parallelism, but impossible to create races or deadlocks. Where strictly deterministic behavior is desired, multiple executions of a Refined Fortran program with the same input data can be guaranteed to either compute the same results or terminate with the same run-time errors regardless of differences in scheduling. Where asynchronous behavior is desired, freedom from races can be guaranteed. The Refined Languages approach achieves its goal by extending sequential imperative programming languages with data- (rather than control-) oriented constructs, and by viewing the expression of parallelism in data- (rather than control-) oriented terms. Earlier versions of Refined Fortran are discussed in [1]-[2]; the present work supersedes and extends work reported in these earlier publications.