Software Engineering Commons^™

Intelligent Systems Development In A Non Engineering Curriculum, Emily Brand, William Honig, Matthew Wojtowicz

William L Honig

Much of computer system development today is programming in the large - systems of millions of lines of code distributed across servers and the web. At the same time, microcontrollers have also become pervasive in everyday products, economical to manufacture, and represent a different level of learning about system development. Real world systems at this level require integrated development of custom hardware and software.

How can academic institutions give students a view of this other extreme - programming on small microcontrollers with specialized hardware? Full scale system development including custom hardware and software is expensive, beyond the range of any …

Precis: A Design-Time Precision Analysis Tool, Mark L. Chang, Scott Hauck

Mark L. Chang

Currently, few tools exist to aid the FPGA developer in translating an algorithm designed for a general-purpose-processor into one that is precision-optimized for FPGAs. This task requires extensive knowledge of both the algorithm and the target hardware. We present a design-time tool, Precis, which assists the developer in analyzing the precision requirements of algorithms specified in MATLAB. Through the combined use of simulation, user input, and program analysis, we demonstrate a methodology for precision analysis that can aid the developer in focusing their manual precision optimization efforts.

Model Checking In The Absence Of Code, Model And Properties, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo

David LO

Model checking is a major approach in ensuring software correctness. It verifies a model converted from code against some formal properties. However, difficulties and programmers ’ reluctance to formalize formal properties have been some hurdles to its widespread industrial adoption. Also, with the advent of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components provided by third party vendors, model checking is further challenged as often only a binary version of the code is provided by vendors. Interestingly, latest instrumentation tools like PIN and Valgrind have enable execution traces to be collected dynamically from a running program. In this preliminary study, we investigate what can …

Mining Scenario-Based Specifications With Value-Based Invariants, David Lo, Shahar Maoz

David LO

There have been a number of studies on mining candidate specifications from execution traces. Some extract specifications corresponding to value-based invariants, while others work on inferring ordering constraints. In this work, we merge our previous work on mining scenario-based specifications, extracting ordering constraints in the form of live sequence charts (LSC), a visual specification language, with Daikon, a tool for mining value-based invariants. The resulting approach strengthens the expressive power of the mined scenarios by enriching them with scenario-specific value-based invariants. The concept is illustrated using a preliminary case study on a real application.

Software Reuse: Architecture, Process And Organization For Business Success, Ivar Jacobson, Martin Griss, Patrik Jonsson

Martin L Griss

No abstract provided.