[Context and motivation] Stakeholder requirements are notoriously informal, vague, ambiguous and often unattainable. The requirements engineering problem is to formalize these requirements and then transform them through a systematic process into a formal specification that can be handed over to designers for downstream development. [Question/problem] This paper proposes a framework for transfo...

Design Patterns are informal descriptions of tested solutions to recurring problems. Most design tools have little or no support for documenting the presence and usage of patterns in code. Reverse engineering is therefore often required to recover Design Patterns from code in existing projects. Knowledge of what Design Patterns have been used can aid in code comprehension, as well as support re...

Ideally, a system’s design starts with a formal model. However, in the real world, many systems are designed without a formal model in mind. For these systems, it is hard to show that a formal model meets the informal design. In this paper, we demonstrate on the example of the composable Message Scheduled System (MSS) architecture how to bridge the gap between a rather informal description and ...

The usual way to describe the semantics of MIB objects is just to give an informal English text explaining each object’s behavior. Informal descriptions are vague and incomplete. They are open to misinterpretation and may lead to inconsistent implementations. In this work we propose the use of Action Semantics as a simple and powerful tool for the formal description of the behavior of MIB objec...

Virtual laboratory experiments can be a useful self-learning and teaching tool for Strength of Materials. Three modules (Material Module, Bending Module, and Torsion Module) were developed and integrated with the engineering core course (ENGR 2153) offered during the Spring semester each year by the College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma. An overview of these modules is presented ...

Due to an increasingly distributed workforce, teams are often separated by organizational, geographical or temporal boundaries, which cause substantial collaboration and knowledge exchange problems. Accordingly, tool-support for collaboration and knowledge sharing is particularly important for distributed teams. In this paper, we discuss how knowledge exchange in the domain of software developm...

We present a tool for measuring the Function Point software metric from the specification of a software system expressed in the form of an Entity Relationship diagram plus a Data Flow Diagram (ER-DFD). First, the informal and general Function Point counting rules are translated into rigorous rules expressing properties of the ER-DFD. Then, the rigorous rules are ∗ Corresponding author: tel ++39...

The Community Bar is a groupware tool supporting informal awareness and casual interaction for small communities of intimate collaborators. Its conceptual design is primarily based on a comprehensive sociological theory called the Locales Framework, with extra details supplied by other theoretical model of awareness. It is also influenced by the Microsoft SideShow system: it displays basic awar...

This article introduces a youth-initiated practice: online social networking that is transforming our society in important ways and has vast implications for research concerning online behavior, the social and psychological aspects of online learning and the institution of education. In this paper, the author introduces the socio-technical features that characterize social networking systems an...

Carneades is a computational model of argument, based on the state-of-theart of argumentation theory in philosophy. This article presents a diagramming method for Carneades, similar to Wigmore charts, and illustrates how to map legal evidence using this method. With suitable computer support, in the form of a special purpose argument diagram editor, users need not understand the mathematics of ...