The success of disaster risk management efforts depends on the ability of multiple stakeholders to share disaster-related information. Semantic integration of such heterogeneous information requires ontology building. The top-down approach of ontology building has several disadvantages to knowledge representation. To support the process of ontology engineering, a bottom-up-approach that utilizes modular Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) with weak dependencies can be used to overcome the disadvantages of the top-down approach. To bridge the availability gap of patterns for representing disaster knowledge, the study identifies existing and emerging patterns that can be used to organize disaster knowledge. Based on the eXtreme Design (XD) methodology and key informant interviews, Competency Questions (CQs) were listed from domain stakeholders. Consequently, corresponding patterns covering the CQs were also identified and developed. This study identifies emerging patterns such as Event Type ODP for representing risky and hazardous events. The QualityCausation ODP is also identified for representing the causality nature of vulnerability. The resulting patterns are aligned to the DOLCE foundational ontology and can be used to organize data in the disaster domain.

[Context] The market for software targeting children, both for education and entertainment, is growing. Existing work, mainly from HCI, has considered the effectiveness of elicitation techniques for eliciting requirements from children as part of a design process. [Objective] However, we are lacking work which compares requirements elicitation techniques when used with children. [Methods] This study compares five elicitation techniques, taking into consideration the effectiveness and efficiency of each technique. Techniques were used with a total of 54 children aged 8-13, eliciting requirements for a museum flight simulator. We compare techniques by looking at the number and type of requirements discovered, perceived participant satisfaction, resources required, perceived usefulness, and requirements coverage of domain specific categories. [Conclusions] We observed notable differences between the techniques, including the effectiveness of observations and relative ineffectiveness of questionnaires. We present a set of guidelines to aid industry in eliciting requirements for child-friendly software.

Problem: The involvement of external stakeholders in capstone projects and project courses is desirable due to its potential positive effects on the students. Capstone projects particularly profit from the inclusion of an industrial partner to make the project relevant and help students acquire professional skills. In addition, an increasing push towards education that is aligned with industry and incorporates industrial partners can be observed. However, the involvement of external stakeholders in teaching moments can create friction and could, in the worst case, lead to frustration of all involved parties. Contribution: We developed a model that allows analysing the involvement of external stakeholders in university courses both in a retrospective fashion, to gain insights from past course instances, and in a constructive fashion, to plan the involvement of external stakeholders. Key Concepts: The conceptual model and the accompanying guideline guide the teachers in their analysis of stakeholder involvement. The model is comprised of several activities (define, execute, and evaluate the collaboration). The guideline provides questions that the teachers should answer for each of these activities. In the constructive use, the model allows teachers to define an action plan based on an analysis of potential stakeholders and the pedagogical objectives. In the retrospective use, the model allows teachers to identify issues that appeared during the project and their underlying causes. Drawing from ideas of the reflective practitioner, the model contains an emphasis on reflection and interpretation of the observations made by the teacher and other groups involved in the courses. Key Lessons: Applying the model retrospectively to a total of eight courses shows that it is possible to reveal hitherto implicit risks and assumptions and to gain a better insight into the interaction between external stakeholders and students. Our empirical data reveals seven recurring risk themes that categorise the different risks appearing in the analysed courses. These themes can also be used to categorise mitigation strategies to address these risks proactively. Additionally, aspects not related to external stakeholders, e.g., about the interaction of the project with other courses in the study programme, have been revealed. The constructive use of the model for one course has proved helpful in identifying action alternatives and finally deciding to not include external stakeholders in the project due to the perceived cost-benefit-ratio. Implications to Practice: Our evaluation shows that the model is a viable and useful tool that allows teachers to reason about and plan the involvement of external stakeholders in a variety of course settings, and in particular in capstone projects.

Context: Software startups need to tackle a lot of challenges as they grow. Therefore, reoccurring strategies are applied that can be captured in form of patterns. Objectives: While more and more of these patterns are published, we aimed to discover to what degree they are applied within different regions of the world. Method: We studied the cases of 7 software startups within 2 incubation hubs in Uganda, by performing qualitative interviews. We focused on 5 patterns from diverse areas of concerns to analyze whether the Ugandan startups' strategies match these patterns. Results: For most of the patterns we found matches. However, in some cases the startups strategies are only partially described by the known pattern. Conclusion: The findings indicate that startup patterns can often be transferred from countries such as Switzerland and Finland to Uganda. we also found some variations from the known patterns in the contexts and solutions applied in Ugandan startups.

In today's software industry many business organizations are realizing that Software Development Outsourcing (SDO) is an imperative and strategic step for their system operation success. Many organizations have or are in the process of implementing such business transformation. This study is to investigate the status quo of strategic SDO in the software industry. To conduct this research, a mixed method exploratory study that consists of a survey and multiple cases has been adopted. The research unveils how industrial software organizations capitalize on SDO as a strategic tool in their product development.

Embedded systems and the open source operating system Linux have been going hand in hand for a long time now. Companies using Linux for their embedded products are praising it for being time and cost efficient when it comes to performance and maintainability. Another solution for embedded systems is a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). The goal of this this paper is to investigate whether a traditional proprietary RTOS can be substituted with embedded Linux, and if this kind of migration can lead to reduced licensing costs and increased general quality of the system. We used a qualitative research method for this case-study. The investigation was conducted with interviews as the main source of information. The result of this study is an empirical model we named 'Embedded Linux Adoption Model'. We concluded that in many cases a proprietary RTOS can be substituted with embedded Linux without affecting the critical needs of the system. The study also showed that many embedded system developers are very receptive to open source solutions and could think of contributing to the community.

In this extended abstract, we present the ecosystemability assessment method as a means to assess the extent to which a software system, represented by its architecture and its development environment, supports the vision of ecosystem.

Existing studies show that open source projects may enjoy high levels of socio-technical congruence despite their open and distributed character. Such observations are yet to be confirmed in the case of larger open source ecosystems in which developers contribute to different projects within the ecosystem. In this paper, we empirically study the relationships between the developer coordination activities and the project dependency structure in the Ruby ecosystem. Our motivation is to verify whether the ecosystem context maintains the high socio-technical congruence levels observed in many smaller scale FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) projects. Our study results show that the collaboration pattern among the developers in Ruby ecosystem is not necessarily shaped by the communication needs indicated by the dependencies among the ecosystem projects.

Software development is today done in teams of software developers who may be distributed all over the world. Software development has also become to contain more social aspects and the need for collaboration has become more evident. The importance of teaching development methods used in collaborative development is of importance, as skills beyond traditional software development are needed in this modern setting. A novel, student centric approach was tried out at Tampere University of Technology where a new environment called KommGame was introduced. This environment includes a reputation system to support the social aspect of the environment and thus supporting the learners collaboration with each other. In this paper, we present the KommGame environment and how it was applied on a course for practical results.

Knowledge representation, acquisition, and sharing in software development projects is challenging due to the involvement of different kinds of stakeholders and large heterogeneous repositories of artifacts. In this paper, we argue that the concept of a concern can be used to facilitate the management of knowledge concerning the various system artifacts. Concerns represent pieces of knowledge pertaining to various viewpoints and interests of the stakeholders. In order to represent concerns, we propose the use of a non-intrusive role-based mechanism called a fragment. Using this mechanism, tacit knowledge can be made explicit by mapping stakeholders interests to artifact repositories, concern-based queries can be addressed to the repositories, and concerns can be combined to produce new knowledge. A concern-based prototype tool environment for knowledge management has been built and used for evaluating the approach in the context of industrial case studies.

The transfer and sharing of successful educational methods across countries is viewed as both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is to benefit from the successful experiences of other educational systems. The challenge is how to transfer and adapt such educational methods. This paper proposes open source software a concrete transfer method of educational experiences. This approach is illustrated with an example learning management system originally built in Finland and recently made open source for Tunisian universities as a primary target.

Abstract In the current trend of software engineering, patterns and profiles lend themselves as two powerful complementary mechanisms for documenting and enforcing design rules. In this paper, we study how unified tool support can be achieved for patterns and profiles by interpreting them as role‐based structural descriptions and exploiting existing tool support for role modeling. The approach is realized using so‐called design profiles, which allow both validation and generation of models according to rules expressed in the patterns and profiles. A prototypical tool environment supporting the approach has been developed. The practical applicability of the approach is demonstrated by specifying design rules of the enterprise Java beans (EJB) platform and by producing an environment for designing EJB‐based applications. We also discuss possible usage scenarios in the context of this case study. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In a multi-site software development setting, creational and validational activities can be distributed and carried out by separate teams. An example of such a distributed development setup is when a system implemented in site A needs to be validated in a remote site B with regard to the component interaction rules dictated by the system architecture. In the current software engineering practice, support has mainly focused on the software creation paying less attention to the needs of the validation phase, which however is becoming increasingly important due to global software engineering practices. This paper argues that systematic support should be provided to the software validation based on the assumptions used in the software creation using the example of component interactions. Furthermore, the paper presents validational tool support for such a systematic process applied to an industrial project. The findings and experiences of the case study are also reported.

Provides notice of upcoming conference events of interest to practitioners and researchers.

Learning complex software platforms is a challenging task. This paper studies the problem of platform learning from the viewpoint of multidimensional separation of concerns in software systems. In this approach, concerns are used to identify and specify the kinds of learning tasks and interactions that should be supported by a learning environment for software platforms. The approach has been applied to build a concern-based learning environment for a Nokia GUI platform. A generic concern management tool has been used to build the r environment.

A concern-based approach to support software comprehension and analysis is proposed. Concerns represent various aspects of a system, like features, architectural solutions, units of work, etc., which are interesting for some stakeholders. Using concern-based queries on the software artefacts, new derived information on the system can be exposed. The results of the queries are also represented as concerns and added to the concern repository. The approach thus supports the analyzer in gradually building up an understanding on the subject system to be analyzed.

The abstract syntax of a graphical modeling language is often defined by a metamodel. Typically, a metamodel is given as a class diagram, serving as the grammar of the modeling language. Especially in the case of complex metamodels, there is a need for tool support for assisting the creation ofmodels. In this paper, we propose a method for taskdriven creation of models, assuming that the metamodel has been given as a UML class diagram.

Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) is Java's component architecture for server-side distributed enterprise applications. The architecture of EJB applications is based on well-established solutions common to most distributed business systems, To utilize the architecture in an optimal way, proven EJB specific design solutions have been identified and collected as a set of design patterns. The use of these EJB design patterns as a tightly interconnected pattern system can significantly ease the development process of EJB based applications and improve the quality of the produced software. We will study in this paper how a general architectural tool (Fred) can be used to generate an EJB programming environment, when given the specifications of the EJB design patterns as input. This environment can be viewed as an architecture-centric wizard that guides the user through the development of the application, following the EJB design patterns.