11269210
A Tool to Support Collaborative Software Requirements Management
The system requirements specification (SRS) is a highly dynamic document that grows and evolves throughout a software development project, and it is critical that it be carefully engineered and managed. Because the SRS fulfils many roles and is of interest to a diversity of stakeholders, its management should be a collaborative process supported by an automated tool. Commercial requirements management tools are at present insufficiently versatile to support collaboration between a multidisciplinary and potentially distributed team of stakeholders. The requirements for such a collaborative tool are herein presented, alongside the design of a prototype and the findings of its application in a case study.
18739764
New Branches, Old Roots: A Study of Methods and Techniques in Web/Hypermedia Systems Design
Abstract Despite claims in the literature that “traditional” methods and techniques are inadequate and poorly matched to the demands of the Web design context, the findings from a field survey of Web/hypermedia systems designers in Ireland indicate quite the contrary. in general, the notion of “method” in the traditional sense seems to have been largely displaced by hybrid aggregations of techniques and other method fragments – selected on the basis of usefulness and purposefully blended within an overarching framework of an in-house development process.
16451824
Web-based systems design: a study of contemporary practices and an explanatory framework based on “method-in-action”
This paper reports the findings of a detailed study of Web-based systems design (WBSD) practices in Ireland based on data collected over a 3-year period (2002–2005), the objectives of which were to (1) contribute towards a richer understanding of the current “real-world” context of WBSD by characterising the profile of a typical project (team size, timeframe, nature of requirements, etc.) and identifying the key challenges, constraints, and imperatives (i.e. “mediating factors”) faced by Web-based system designers, and (2) understand how those contextual parameters and mediating factors influence the activity of WBSD as regards the selection and enactment of whatever design practices are therefore engaged (i.e. the use of methods, procedures, etc.). Data was gathered through a survey which yielded 165 usable responses, and later through a series of semi-structured qualitative interviews. Using grounded theory, an explanatory conceptual framework is derived, based on an extension of the “method-in-action” model, the application of which to WBSD has not been previously investigated in depth. It is proposed that this framework of WBSD issues is valuable in a number of ways to educators, researchers, practitioners, and method engineers.
7987492
Reconsidering the "Software Crisis": A Study of Hypermedia Systems Development
With the advent and growth of the Web, hypermedia information systems have propagated within and beyond organizations. Much concern has been expressed about the quality of hypermedia systems being developed and the apparent absence of disciplined development practices. There has been talk that the infamous “software crisis” is afflicting hypermedia systems development, allegedly brought about by shoddy project management, inadequate requirements analysis and planning, and ad hoc “quick and dirty” development approaches. This paper reports on the findings of a survey of 438 organisations in Ireland, the objectives of which were to test the validity of assertions of a “hypermedia crisis”, and to explore what mechanisms if any are being used to guide and control hypermedia systems development. The preliminary conclusions are that hypermedia development is much more disciplined that popularly believed, and the state of practice is much healthier than depicted by many academic researchers.
6168223
A Survey of Multimedia and Web Development Techniques and Methodology Usage
The authors present survey results which suggest that no uniform approach exists for multimedia systems development and that practitioners are not using the multimedia models cited in the literature. It is concluded that developers need new techniques that capture requirements and integrate them within a systems development framework.
9385354
The Hugin Tool for Learning Bayesian Networks
In this paper, we describe the Hugin Tool as an efficient tool for knowledge discovery through construction of Bayesian networks by fusion of data and domain expert knowledge. The Hugin Tool supports structural learning, parameter estimation, and adaptation of parameters in Bayesian networks. The performance of the Hugin Tool is illustrated using real-world Bayesian networks, commonly used examples from the literature, and randomly generated Bayesian networks.
34671312
Hugin - The Tool for Bayesian Networks and Influence Diagrams
53225813
Architecture - A performance comparison through benchmarking and modeling of three leading supercomputers: blue Gene/L, Red Storm, and Purple
6040707
A Performance and Scalability Analysis of the BlueGene/L Architecture
Based on a set of measurements done on the 512-node 500MHz prototype and early results on a 2048 node 700MHz BlueGene/L machine at IBM Watson, we present a performance and scalability analysis of the architecture from low-level characteristics to large-scale applications. In addition, we present predictions using our models for the performance of two representative applications from the ASC² workload on the full BlueGene/L configuration of 64K nodes. We have compared the measured values for several of the benchmarks in our suite against the predicted numbers from our performance models. In general, the error bars were relatively low. A comparison between the performance of BlueGene/L and the ASCI Q, the largest supercomputer in the US, is presented, also based on our predictive performance models.
14275613
An empirical performance analysis of commodity memories in commodity servers
This work details a performance study of six different types of commodity memories in two commodity server nodes. A number of micro-benchmarks are used that measure low-level performance characteristics, as well as two applications representative of the ASC workload. The memories vary both in terms of performance, including latency and bandwidths, and in terms of their physical properties and manufacturer. The two server nodes analyzed were an Itanium-II Madison based system, and a Xeon based system. All memories can be used within both of these processing nodes. This allows the performance of the memories to be directly examined while keeping all other factors within a node the same (processor, motherboard, operating system etc.). The results of this study show that there can be a significant difference in application performance depending on the actual memory used - by as much as 20%. The achieved performance is a result of the integration of the memory into the node as well as how the applications actually utilize it.