CONTENTS

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COLUMNS

Strategic Software Engineering

Agile Software Product Lines, Deconstructed
By John McGregor

Neither “agile” nor “product line” refers to a single universally accepted definition. Rather each refers to a class of methods that share certain characteristics. I will briefly characterize each class of methods trying not to alienate too many people along the way.

Java at Large

The μ-law CODEC
By Douglas Lyon

The UlawCodec has several constructors, each has, as it main goal, to construct a μ-law encoded byte array in a private storage area. The only way to obtain access to this storage area is via the getUlawData and setUlawData methods. This is due, in part, to a series of parallel data structures that must maintain their consistency.

Real Men Do JavaScript!
Programming the World in a Browser
By Dave Thomas

One of the major factors limiting developers was the lack of industrial strength programming environments they had come to love. While there has been a lack of good tools for many years, this has been improving substantially of late.

What's Your Information Agenda?
By Mahesh Dodani

Understanding your data has three major elements: consistent definition of business and technical terms, data assessment and profiling, and data modeling that is aligned with service and process models. In many cases, the business and technical community use different terms and have a different understanding of its meaning.

Cyber Databases

Using Technologies to Improve E-Learning
By Won Kim

During the past decade e-learning has made steady progress in its adoption in corporate training programs, for-credit courses in educational institutes, and continuing education programs. Many learning management systems, both commercial and open source, are available. There is a variety of types of e-learning , ranging from videos of instructors delivering instructions – overlaid with PowerPoint pages, to people watching CDs on their computers or browsing the Web for materials on specific topics of interest.

Guest Column

From The Business Motivation Model (BMM) To Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
By Birol Berkam

This article proposes relationships to bridge the BMM to SOA based IT level specifications. Examples are presented using the language of business experts, analysts and designers according to CIM level specifications of the OMG's MDA (Model Driven Architecture).

REFEREED ARTICLES

An MOF2-based Services Metamodel
By Harshavardhan Jegadeesan, and Sundar Balasubramaniam

An Object Model for Sensor Data Integration
By Dalen Kambur , Mark Roantree, and John Murphy

The levels of interest in pervasive computing and ubiquitous sensing are significant enough to see the development and deployment of sensing technology all around us. One can also see the emergence of applications such as environmental monitoring and ambient assisted living which leverage the data gathered and present us with applications that seek to improve our daily lives.

Requirements analysis for large scale systems
By Roger Johnson, George Roussos, and Luca Vetti Tagliati

In the last few decades, a number of methodologies and formalisms have been proposed to support the difficult task of gathering and analysing user requirements. At the moment, a large part of the computer science community agrees in recognising the use case methodology as a de-facto standard for capturing and documenting functional requirements.

A Matching Approach for Object-Oriented Formal Specifications
By Fathi Taibi, Fouad Mohammed Abbou, and Md Jahangir Alam

Software merging is needed at different stages of software development to combine the artifacts created or modified by the parallel work of the different developers involved in the project. An accurate matching approach is the key to successful software merging as well as to conflicts identification.

Extension of Object-Oriented Software Testing Techniques to Agent Oriented Software Testing
By Praveen Ranjan Srivastava, Karthik Anand V, Mayuri Rastogi, Vikrant Yadav, and G Raghurama

Agents autonomously work in dynamic and uncertain environments. Each agent senses the environment and acts accordingly. Since the environment in which the agent reside change dynamically, the construction of the agents should be such that it is able to accomplish the desired tasks by collaborating with other agents. There is little literature that describes software testing for agents.

Converting Specifications in a Subset of Object-Z to Skeletal Spec# Code for both Static and Dynamic Analysis
By Xiufeng Ni, and Cui Zhang

cmUML - A UML based Framework for Formal Specification of Concurrent, Reactive Systems
Jagadish Suryadevara, Lawrence Chung, and Shyamasundar R.K.

Complex software systems possess concurrent and reactive behaviors requiring precise specifications prior to development. Lamport's transition axiom method is a formal specification method which combines axiomatic and operational approaches. On the other hand Unified Modeling Language (UML), a de facto industry standard visual language, lacks suitable constructs and semantics regarding concurrency aspects.

OUTLOOK

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