Independent Verification and Validation of FPGA-Based Design for Airborne Electronic Applications

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are finding increasing number of applications in high integrity safety critical systems of aerospace and defence industry. Though FPGA design goes through various development processes, it is widely observed that the critical errors are observed in the final stages of development, thereby impacting time and cost. The risk of failure in complex embedded systems is overcome by using the independent verification and validation (IV&V) technique. Independent verification and validation (IV&V) of FPGA-based design is essential for evaluating the correctness, quality, and safety of the airborne embedded systems throughout the development life cycle and provides early detection and identification of risk elements. The process of IV&V and its planning needs to be initiated early in the development life cycle. This chapter describes the IV&V methodology for FPGA-based design during the development life cycle along with the certification process.

An Investigation on Quality Perspective of Software Functional Artifacts

Software engineering process and practices paramount the crisis of cost, quality, and schedule constraints in developing software products. This chapter surveys the quality improvement techniques for the two fundamental artifacts of software product development, namely the architecture design and the source code. The information from top level research databases are compiled and an overall picture of quality enhancement in current software trends during the design, development, and maintenance phases are presented. This helps both the software developers and the quality analysts to gain understanding of the current state of the art for quality improvement of design and source code and the usage of various practices. The results indicate the need for more realistic, precise, automated technique for architectural quality analysis. The complex nature of the current software products requires the system developed to be beyond robust and resilient and building intelligent software that is anti-fragile and self-adaptive is favored. Innovative proposals that reduce the cost and time are invited.

A Systematic Literature Review on Risk Assessment and Mitigation Approaches in Requirement Engineering

Risk assessment and management practice is an organized way to identify, analyze, and assess the impacts of risks and mitigate them when they arise. Risk can occur in any phase of software development and is a significant step for better supervision of threats. The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze existing risk assessment and management techniques from a historical perspective that address and study risk management and perception of risk. The chapter presents extensive summary of existing literature on various techniques and approaches related to requirements defects, defect taxonomy, its classification, and its potential impact on software development as the main contributions of this research work. The primary objective of this study was to present a systematic literature review of techniques/methods/tools for risk assessment and management. This research successfully identifies and discovers existing risk assessment and management techniques, their limitations, taxonomies, processes, and identifies possible improvements for better defect identification and prevention.

Requirement-Based Test Approach and Traceability for High-Integrity Airborne Embedded Systems

One of the biggest challenges in the development of airborne embedded systems is to ensure that the aircraft subsystem meets all its user specifications and ascertain that no important functionality is missing which leads to development of an incorrect product. This chapter proposes a methodology for achieving requirement traceability and thereby performing requirement-based testing for efficient test and evaluation of aircraft subsystems. This methodology integrates requirement traceability throughout the software development life cycle along with requirement-based testing for high-integrity software systems. The methodology has been found to be most effective in revealing errors and optimizes testing by preventing repetition of test cases across test platforms. This unique contribution has the potential to revolutionize the research world in software engineering.

Improving Construction Management Through Advanced Computing and Decision Making

This chapter proposes an algorithm to make the bidding dynamic by not only awarding tenders on basis of cost quoted in tenders (biding cost) but also on contractor ratings. The ratings of contractors are computed using historical performance of contractor. The chapter empirically identifies the factors to rate the contractors. The historical values associated with the performance rating parameters are then combined using the “controlled values” which one assumed to standard across the industry, to yield the overall weighted rating of firms. This rating is then combined with the bidding cost, thereby making the selection of contractor dynamic. The selected contractor is paid bidding cost. The algorithm is executed a hypothetical value to illustrate the approach. A web-based tool had been proposed to automate the process of making the bidding dynamic.

I-Way

This study addresses the problem of effectively searching and selecting relevant requirements for reuse meeting stakeholders' objectives through knowledge discovery and data mining techniques maintained over a cloud platform. Knowledge extraction of similar requirement(s) is performed on data and meta-data stored in central repository using a novel intersective way method (i-way), which uses intersection results of two machine learning algorithm namely, K-nearest neighbors (KNN) and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). I-way is a two-level extraction framework which represents win-win situation by considering intersective results of two different approaches to ensure that selection is progressing towards desired requirement for reuse consideration. The validity and effectiveness of results of proposed framework are evaluated on requirement dataset, which show that proposed approach can significantly help in reducing effort by selecting similar requirements of interest for reuse.

Improving Financial Estimation in Construction Management Through Advanced Computing and Decision Making

The firm or the government invites bids against the tender whenever it requires third party to provide services to it like undertaking construction projects, delivery of material, etc. Interested parties gives their bid prices in sealed envelopes and the lowest bid rate wins the contract. However, contractor, in order to win the contract, may not estimate the cost of the project accurately as the estimation of factors contributing to the costs may be based on educated guesswork according to the past experiences. This increases the chances of the final cost of the project to go up in the end, which is to be borne by contractor. Hence, accurate and effective cost estimation is required. This chapter proposed an algorithm to provide a proper way for the contractors to estimate the accurate cost of the project for which they provide bids. This chapter provides an effective solution to the problem of inaccurate cost estimation. The algorithms are automated using a web-based tool.

Markov Decision Theory-Based Crowdsourcing Software Process Model

The word crowdsourcing, a compound contraction of crowd and outsourcing, was introduced by Jeff Howe in order to define outsourcing to the crowd. It is a sourcing model in which individuals or organizations obtain goods and services. These services include ideas and development of software or hardware, or any other business-task from a large, relatively open and often rapidly-evolving group of internet users; it divides work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. It has been used for completing various human intelligence tasks in the past, and this is an emerging form of outsourcing software development as it has the potential to significantly reduce the implementation cost. This chapter analyses the process of software development at a crowdsourced platform. The work analyses and identifies the phase wise deliverables in a competitive software development problem. It also proposes the use of Markov decision theory to model the dynamics of the development processes of a software by using a simulated example.

An Analysis of UI/UX Designing With Software Prototyping Tools

In an age where everyone is carrying a smart phone, it is of utmost importance to make efficient use of the upcoming technologies. This indicates the rise in number of applications being created for mobile devices. As a result, mobile user interface designing has become a significant part of application designing. There has been an increasing number of devices today providing powerful graphics capabilities helping users to deal with huge amount of information. However, the prototyping tools currently being used in the industry are lacking features and are not addressing some of the prime issues like user friendliness, functionalities, representation, and enforcement. This chapter presents a tool based on an analysis of different popular prototyping tools in the industry which will overcome some or all of the major issues faced by application designers. The authors describe the prototyping tool's concept, design, features, as well as how it is suitable for making great user interfaces helping application designers to design exactly what they want.

Agile Team Measurement to Review the Performance in Global Software Development

This chapter is aimed at studying the key performance indicators of team members working in an agile project environment and in an extreme programming software development. Practitioners from six different XP projects were selected to respond to the survey measuring the performance indicators, namely, escaped defects, team member's velocity, deliverables, and extra efforts. The chapter presents a comparative view of Scrum and XP, the two renowned agile methods with their processes, methodologies, development cycles, and artifacts, while assessing the base performance indicators in XP setup. These indicators are key to any agile project in a global software development environment. The observed performance indicators were compared against the gold standard industry benchmarks along with best, average, and worst-case scenarios. Practitioners from six agile XP projects were asked to participate in the survey. Observed results best serve the practitioners to take necessary course corrections to stay in the best-case scenarios of their respective projects.