Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

A prototype test driven development tool for embedded systems has been developed with hardware-oriented extensions to CPPUnitLite . However xUnit tests are written in the language of the solution; problematic in the development of biomedical instruments as the customer, the “doctor”, does not have “extensive knowledge of the domain”. The biomedical application is often prototyped within MATLAB before movement down to the “plumbing level” on a high-speed, highly parallel, processor to meet the requirement for real-time application in a safe and secure manner “in the surgical theatre” or “on the ward”. A long term research goal is an investigation of how to gain, as with standard business desktop system, the full advantage of using Fit and FitNesse as communication tools under these circumstances. We demonstrate the practical application of using indirection to permit a single set of Fit tests for both MATLAB and embedded system verification for a biomedical instrument.

This paper describes the practices created, adopted and evolved in a Distributed Open Source Project (PyPy) project. PyPy is a hybrid project, combining the different aspects of Agile and Distributed Development within the context of an Open Source community. The project is partially funded by the European Commission through the 6th Framework Program. Influences and adoptions of techniques such as "sprinting" has been a core balancing act for the project since its inception. “Sprints” in the Python community differs from the Scrum version of sprints and in this paper we will present how this evolved agile method acts as a primary method of quality assuring the aspects of distributed and dispersed work style of the PyPy project and insures an ongoing interaction with the Open Source aspects of the project.

Johanna Hunt is a first year DPhil researcher and Associate Tutor at the University of Sussex, and a Research Assistant in Algorithms at the University of Hertfordshire. Her research is concerned with investigating the community of Agile Systems practitioners. She is particularly looking at notions of identity, boundary, communication and space as demonstrable in conversational storytelling and personal narratives from this practitioner-group.

Software product lines are sets of software systems that share common features. Product lines are built as if they were a family of products, identifying those features that change and those that can be reused. There is an evident incompatibility between the requirements of software product lines and agile practices. We report on experiments that used Feature-Driven Development to build software product lines, and describe the minor extensions that were useful for developing software product lines.

Despite the existence of 75 “different” xUNIT frameworks, their domain of application differs only in the programming language, compiler or operating system supported. If one is working in the embedded world, unit testing is still needed, but now our “testing requirements” differ significantly from the testing framework needed for the desktop world. Embedded systems often have significant non-functional requirements, which demand validation at the unit level. In addition, they interact intimately with hardware resources and often have only very limited input/output capabilities – imagine a xUNIT framework where printing to the screen is a technical challenge!

Along with growing popularity of agile methodologies and open source movement, unit testing has become one of the core practices in modern software engineering. It is particularly important in eXtreme Programming [1], which explicitly diminish the importance of other artifacts than source code and tests cases. In XP unit test cases not only verify if software meets functional requirements, but also enable refactoring, alleviate comprehension and provide guidance on how the production code should be used. Therefore, they contribute to many other important practices of XP, which explicitly or implicitly rely on their ability to effectively discover bugs.

Faced with challenges in relation to interpretation of requirements, issues with build and deployment and excessive integration defects, this paper examines how a software team propose using a novel combination of Covey’s ‘First Things First’ principle and Cockburn’s Methodology Shaping, as a potential solution to examine their current process and define a new set of working conventions which will address these issues.

It is widely accepted that the absence of a structured approach to spreadsheet engineering is a key factor in the high level of spreadsheet errors. In this paper we propose and investigate the application of Test-Driven Development to the creation of spreadsheets. Through a pair of case studies we demonstrate that Test-Driven Development can be applied to the development of spreadsheets. A supporting tool under development by the authors is also documented along with proposed research to determine the effectiveness of the methodology and the associated tool.

In order to popularize the Test Driven Development (TDD) practice in Chinese offshore companies, an experimental research was firstly conducted to compare TDD with the traditional waterfall development in a small-scale project. Although the project scale was small and all the subjects were students, this experiment was designed very strictly to guarantee the reliable evaluation of the efficacy of TDD. Furthermore, it is also the first time to evaluate the maintainability and the flexibility of TDD by experiment.

Over the past years, a great number of organizations have started utilizing agile principles and practices in their software development [1, 2]. Despite of the promising experience reports, the deployment of agile practices is a challenging task which requires adjustment and dedication from all the stakeholders involved in the development process [3, 4]. In order to fit the agile practices into organization’s software development context, agile specific guidelines and methods to support their selection, deployment and tailoring are needed [5]. However, the existing software process improvement (SPI) approaches have originally been targeted for the context of the traditional software development thus lacking some central aspects such as iterative process adaptation [5] and procedures for suitable organizational learning [6]. Agile Assessment and Post-Iteration Workshops (PIWs) are technologies that can be used in the deployment of agile software development methods.