The production of huge amount of data and the emergence of new technologies in the industry sector have introduced new requirements for big data management. Many applications need to interact with several heterogeneous data sources to ingest, harmonise (normalise), persist, analyse and synthesize results to enable informed decisions and draw benefits from data. These operations are ensured by different tools and these tools are heterogeneous and not connected with each other. Besides, the whole tool-chain lacks automation in terms of its deployment, its operational workflow and its orchestration for satisfying the elastic and resilient properties needed by Industry. In this paper, we present FADI, a framework for deploying and orchestrating a Big Data management and analysis platform fully composed of open source tools. FADI has been developed through several research projects, namely, BigData@MA, Grinding 4.0, Quality 4.0 and ARTEMTEC where Industry use cases are used for validation purposes.

Cloud application deployment is becoming increasingly popular for the removal of upfront hardware costs, the pay-per-use cost model and their ability to scale. However, deploying software on the Cloud carries both opportunities and threats regarding energy efficiency. In order to help Cloud application developers learn and reason about the energy consumption of their application on the server-side, we have developed a framework centred on a UML profile for relating energy goals, requirements and associated KPI metrics to application design and deployment elements. Our previous work has focused on the use of such a framework to carry out our run-time experiments in order to select the best approach. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of a complementary approach for providing support at design time based on finer grained deployment models, the specification of Cloud and energy adaptation policies and the use of a discrete event simulator for reasoning on key performance indicators such as energy but also overall performance, delay and costs. The goal is to support the Cloud developer in pre-selecting the best trade-off that can be further tuned at run-time.

Abstract Small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) involved in software development often experience problems in mastering their development processes. This can lead to time and cost overruns or failure to address functional and nonfunctional requirements. In general, this can significantly affect customer satisfaction and hamper business growth potential. This paper reports on a survey conducted in Belgium to assess more precisely which and how SMEs are affected by problems related to development processes. The survey was driven by the ISO29110 lightweight standard focusing on very small entities developing software, ie, whose internal IT department is less than 25 people. Worldwide, and in particular in Belgium, this represents a very large portion of SMEs in business. Survey results highlight the most frequent issues and how they may be linked to organization and project characteristics. The survey is based on a free online self‐assessment tool. Therefore, results go 1 step further than identifying issues encountered in companies: the tool also infers a set of quick‐win high‐level recommendations to solve these issues. Our results are also compared with those reported by other surveys targeting both large and small companies.

While testing is heavily used and largely automated in software development projects, the reuse of test practices across similar projects in a given domain is seldom systematized and supported by adequate methods and tools. This paper presents a practical approach that emerged from a concrete industrial case in the smart card domain at STMicroelectronics Belgium in order to better address this kind of challenge. The central concept is a test knowledge repository organized as a collection of specific patterns named QPatterns. A systematic process was followed, first to gather, structure and abstract the test practices, then to produce and validate an initial repository, and finally to make it evolve later on Testers can then rely on this repository to produce high quality test plans identifying all the functional and nonfunctional aspects that have to be addressed, as well as the concrete tests that have to be developed within the context of a new project. A tool support was also developed and integrated in a traceable way into the existing industrial test environment. The approach was validated and is currently under deployment at STMicroelectronics Belgium.