sss ssss rrrrrrrrrrr ssss ss rrrr rrrr sssss s rrrr rrrr ssssss rrrr rrrr ssssssss rrrr rrrr ssssss rrrrrrrrr s ssssss rrrr rrrr ss sssss rrrr rrrr sss sssss rrrr rrrr s sssssss rrrrr rrrrr +===================================================+ +======= Quality Techniques Newsletter =======+ +======= June 2005 =======+ +===================================================+ QUALITY TECHNIQUES NEWSLETTER (QTN) is E-mailed monthly to subscribers worldwide to support the Software Research, Inc. (SR), eValid, and TestWorks user communities and to other interested parties to provide information of general use to the worldwide internet and software quality and testing community. Permission to copy and/or re-distribute is granted, and secondary circulation is encouraged, provided that the entire QTN document/file is kept intact and this complete copyright notice appears in all copies. Information on how to subscribe or unsubscribe is at the end of this issue. (c) Copyright 2004 by Software Research, Inc. ======================================================================== Contents of This Issue o Newely Available SQRL Reports o Software Testers Invited: Job Survey o eValid: Latest News, New Features, Updates o Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Collaboration Support Systems o eValid: Usage Recommendations o Mass Customization Information Systems in Business o AVoCS 2005: Automated Verification of Critical Systems o 10th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies o ISoLA Workshop on Formal Methods, Verification, and Validation. o Web Service Challenge o QTN Article Submittal, Subscription Information ======================================================================== Newly Available SQRL Reports Our web address for downloading reports is: http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/sqrl/sqrl_reports.html Contact: Doris Burns, Software Quality Research Laboratory, McMaster University SQRL Report No. 28 Title: Guassian Elimination: a case study in efficient genericity with MetaOCaml Author: Jacques Carette Abstract: The Gaussian Elimination algorithm is in fact an algorithm family - common implementations contain at least 6 (mostly independent) "design choices". A generic implementation can easily be parametrized by all these design choices, but this usually leads to slow and bloated code. Using MetaOCaml's staging facilities, we show how we can produce a natural and type-safe implementation of Gaussian Elimination which exposes its design choices at code- generation time, so that these choices can effectively be specialized away, and where the resulting code is quite efficient. SQRL Report No. 31 Title: COG-PETS: Code Generation for Parameter Estimation in Time Series Authors: Christopher Kumar Anand, Jacques Carette, Andrew Thomas Curtis, David Miller Abstract: We extend previous work on symbolic code generation for efficient solvers in the domain of image and signal processing, to take advantage of recurrence relations for efficiently generating model function values corresponding to a regularly-sampled time series. First- and zeroth-order recurrences are symbolically identified by Maple. Two example applications to Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy and Relaxometry are described, and we show two orders of magintude accelerations for the resulting solvers. ======================================================================== Software Testers Invited: Job Survey Do we know what we do and do not like in our daily job? Martins Gills from Riga Information Technology Institute is conducting a survey among software testers. The goal is to add some sketches to the portrait of software tester. Some say the testers are special persons, but testing itself is actually a quite boring activity. It may depend on the tasks we do. The survey looks for things we prefer or would like to avoid. If you have 5-10 spare minutes for putting multiple-choice answers to a bunch of questions, please visit the link: http://support.dati.lv/tsurvey/index2_en.html There is no registration and no ads. It will be active till the end of July 2005. Summary of the results will appear in QTN later this year. ======================================================================== eValid: Latest News, New Features, Updates eValid is the premier WebSite Quality Testing & Analysis Suite. eValid solutions help organizations maintain e-Business presence, improve WebSite quality and performance, reduce down time, prevent customer loss, and control costs. eValid's Web Analysis and Testing Suite is comprehensive, yet scalable and easy to use, and applies to a wide range of web applications. Because eValid is implemented inside an IE-equivalent browser you are guaranteed to get 100% realistic user experience results. Support for ASPs with Commercial License ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ License restrictions often limit how a consultant or a contractor -- or Application Service Providers (ASPs) firm -- can use eValid and deliver the results to clients. eValid's licensing now includes a new option for ASPs that will simplify life, so both you and your clients can benefit from eValid technology: http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/License/Commercial/asp.support.html Ramping Up of LoadTest Runs ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ In server loading experiments a main goals often is to study how the server complex responds to activity load that "steps up" at regular, pre-programmed intervals. Here's how to do this in eValid LoadTest scenarios: http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/Documentation.5/Loading/ramping.html Playback Startup Sequence ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ To minimize playback de-synchronization as much as possible, the latest eValid builds have a new and more-powerful recording startup sequence. The new startup sequence helps you manage disk cache and cookie processing more reliably: http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/Documentation.5/Testing/start.recording.html LoadTest Scenario Editor ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ eValid now includes a scenario editor that makes the job of setting up a LoadTest simple. It's got: * Ability to create a server loading scenario that focuses attention on how users and user types are allocated. * Ability edit and re-edit existing or new loadtest scenarios. * Capability to automatically generate the underlying *evl page. Complete details on the scenario editor can be found at: http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/Documentation.5/Loading/scenario.edit.html HTTP Detailed Reporting ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ An enhanced capability for monitoring detailed HTTP download times and download errors has been added to the eValid playback engine. Users can select to have HTTP errors reported as WARNINGs or ERRORs. In addition, detailed timing logs generated by eValid now include the specific byte size and download time of each page component separately. For complete details see: http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/Documentation.5/Settings/project.log.filters.html Product Download Details ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Here is the URL for downloading eValid if you want to start [or re- start] your evaluation: http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/Download.5/down.evalid.5.phtml?status=FORM Contact Us With Your Questions ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ We welcome your questions about eValid and its applications. We promise a response to every question in ONE BUSINESS DAY if you use the WebSite request form: http://www.soft.com/eValid/Information/info.request.html ======================================================================== Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics Part A: Special Issue on Collaboration Support Systems http://www.agentgroup.unimo.it/tsmc06/ Collaboration is a widely applied style to collect a group of people's intelligence. Collaboration support systems serve as an important memory for the group. Ideally, such a system should evolve to become a knowledge base for the collaborators and for those who will use the results of the collaboration. How does one provide effective software structures and tools that will support a large group of people in their work, i.e., assembling, making use of, extracting and working with extensive collections of ideas and multi-media information? This question is still to be solved. The aim of this special issue is to make the point of the situation and to evaluate the state of the art in the field. Possible submissions should relate to both innovative proposals and global views of well-established systems/approaches not published elsewhere. Papers should present approaches relying on computational or mathematical models, and/or be supported by empirical evaluations. This call for papers will be distributed by means of mailing lists, a web site, flyers at relevant conferences and personal contacts of the guest editors. Each submission will be reviewed by three referees. The referees will be recruited among the constituent IEEE Technical Committee members for Collaborative Intelligent Systems, the program committee members of related conferences, and other experienced colleagues. This special issue solicits, but is not limited to, papers on topics that clearly address collaboration support systems, including: * Human requirements for collaboration on distributed computers * Organizational behaviors on collaboration support systems * Formal and abstract models for collaboration support systems * Role and group structures on collaboration support systems * Objects and agents in collaboration support systems * Multi-user interface design for collaboration support systems * Analysis and evaluations of collaboration support systems * Security and privacy issues in collaboration support systems * Information sharing in collaboration support systems * Software engineering for collaboration support systems * Industry and enterprise application case study Guest Editors Dr. Giacomo Cabri Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione Universite di Modena e Reggio Emilia Italy cabri.giacomo@unimore.it Dr. Haibin Zhu Department of Computer Science and Mathematics Nipissing University Canada haibinz@nipissingu.ca Professor Jian-Bo Yang Manchester Business School (East) The University of Manchester United Kingdom jian-bo.yang@manchester.ac.uk ======================================================================== eValid -- Some General Recommendations Here are common eValid problem areas and references to pages that provide general good-practice recommendations. * Functional Testing Recording and playing scripts, with validation, is a sure way to confirm operation of a web site or web application. o Protecting Login Account Names and Passwords If you are recording logging into a site, eValid will need to make a record of your account name and password. For the best security, you should record login and password details in encrypted form. There's an option in the Script Window Dialog to turn on the Encoded Input option that protects critical private information. See: http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/Documentation.5/Testing/encode.input.html> o Initial State Being a fully stateful recording and playback engine, eValid is very sensitive to the initial state when playback begins. Here are some recommendations about to manage your test's Initial State effectively. See: http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/Documentation.5/Testing/initial.conditions.html o Session Cookies Session cookies are remembered inside eValid and the surest way to clear them is to close eValid and launch it again. o Modal Dialogs/Logins Because of the nature of modal dialogs you may not be able to use them directly. Instead, eValid provides a way to construct a reliable script by creating the correct commands via the Script Window Dialog. Check the documentation on modal dialog support and on testing modal logins: http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/Documentation.5/Testing/modal.html http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/Documentation.5/Testing/modal.hints.html o Opaque Objects Certain objects are opaque relative to eValid's internal view of web page properties, and have to be treated differently. These object types include Java Applets and FLASH objects, discussed here: http://www.soft.com/eValid/Applications/java.applet/index.html http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/Documentation.5/Advanced.Testing/flash.cookbook.html In addition, it may be helpful to see how to use eValid's Application Mode: http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/Documentation.5/Advanced.Testing/application.mode.html * Server Loading eValid applies load to a web server using the capability to run multiple eValid browser instances. o Machine Adjustments If you want to get more than ~25 eValid copies running at on time you probably need to make Machine Adjustments to optimize your computer as a server loading engine. See: http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/Documentation.5/Loading/machine.html o Ramping LoadTest Runs The most common form of application includes ramping up server load so you can study how the server performance degrades due to increasing load. http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/Documentation.5/Loading/ramping.html * Site Analysis eValid site analysis runs are a powerful way to confirm website properties. o Avoid Logout During Scan A common problem during a site analysis scan is that eValid logs you out before the scan is done! This happens when you start the scan after logging into a protected area and the eValid search spider navigates you to the "logout" page. The way to avoid this is to make sure that your Blocked URLs List includes "logout" and "signoff". See: http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/Documentation.5/Mapping/exclude.html ======================================================================== Mass Customization Information Systems in Business A book edited by Prof. Dr. Thorsten Blecker Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH), Germany & Prof. Dr. Gerhard Friedrich University of Klagenfurt, Austria http://www.manufacturing.de/calls/mc-it.htm Introduction: Mass customization is a business strategy that aims at satisfying individual customer needs with near mass production efficiency. The advances realized in information technology are critical enablers, which make this strategy function efficiently. Information systems can be implemented to support diverse activities in the mass customization value chain. They assist customers during the product specification phase in order to lead them in a fast-paced manner to the product variants corresponding to their individual requirements. Modern information systems, which support open-innovation even enable customers to participate actively in the product design. Furthermore, mass customization information systems contribute to helping companies mitigate excessive product variety and increase costs' efficiency on the shop floor and logistics through optimal product modeling and production planning and scheduling. The Overall Objective of the Book: In the fields of mass customization information systems, there exists a need for a book enclosing high quality analyses in this area. The scientific community and professionals both will benefit from a book that focuses on this subject. This book should describe the state-of-the-art, innovative theoretical frameworks, advanced and successful implementations as well as latest empirical research findings in the area. The main objective is to bridge theory and practice on the one hand and to fill research gaps and answer open questions on the other hand. The book will improve the understanding of the problems that are encountered during the conception of information systems for mass customization. Furthermore, it provides solution approaches for the mitigation of these problems and simultaneously highlights new directions for future research. The Target Audience: The target audience consists of professionals and scientists working in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence. In addition, industrial engineers and researchers in business administration with a special focus on information systems and IT Management will find this book as an adequate reference that describes current research and presents topics that can be more deepened in the future. Graduate students in the mentioned areas will find practical applications of some theoretical concepts that are already discussed in class. Recommended topics include, but are not limited to, the following: * Customer needs' elicitation * Personalization and advisory systems * Product modeling and configuration systems * Customer Relationship-Management systems * IT-Systems for Enterprise Resource Planning and Supply Chain Management * IT-architecture and infrastructure for mass customization * IT-support for open innovation Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically to: Prof. Dr. Thorsten Blecker Department of Business Logistics and General Management HAMBURG UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY (TUHH) Schwarzenbergstr. 95, 21073 Hamburg, Germany Tel.: +49 (0) 40 42878 3525; Fax: +49 (0) 40 42878 2200 E-mail: blecker@ieee.org ======================================================================== AVoCS '05: Fifth International Workshop on Automated Verification of Critical Systems University of Warwick, UK, 12-13 September 2005 http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~avocs05 Workshop e-mail address: avocs05@dcs.warwick.ac.uk The aim of this workshop is to encourage interaction and exchange of ideas among members of the international research community. Particularly, we hope to achieve integration and transfer of knowledge between academia and industry. The workshop subject is to be interpreted broadly and inclusively. It covers all aspects of automated verification (model checking, theorem proving, specification, etc) pertaining to various types of critical systems, be it safety-critical, business-critical, or performance-critical. The technical programm will consist of invited talks, regular papers, and short presentations. The workshop will be relatively informal, with an emphasis on discussion. Previous AVoCS workshops were held at the University of Oxford (2001), the University of Birmingham (2002), the University of Southampton (2003), and the Royal Society in London (2004). Topics Topics addressed include: - Specification and Refinement - Requirements Capture and Analysis - Model Checking: Theory, Tools and Applications - Abstract Interpretation - Theorem Proving - Software and Hardware Verification - Verification of Probabilistic and/or Real-Time Systems - Verification of Distributed Protocols including Security - Performance and Dependability Evaluation - Case Studies Proceedings Preliminary proceedings will be published by the University of Warwick and distributed at the workshop. This will include preliminary versions of regular papers, and abstracts of short presentations. After the workshop, authors of regular papers will have an option to prepare a final version for proceedings in Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (Elsevier), and to submit a full version for a special issue of a high-quality international journal. ======================================================================== 10th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies - Ada-Europe 2005 20 - 24 June 2005, York, UK http://www.ada-europe.org/conference2005.html The University of York, sponsored by Ada-Europe and in cooperation with ACM's Special Interest Group in Ada, organizes this year the "10th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies - Ada-Europe 2005" from 20 to 24 June in York. The conference offers nine tutorials, including a look at Ada 2005, a full technical program of refereed papers, a collection of industrial presentations reflecting current practice and challenges, three eminent invited speakers, an exhibition, and a social program. The 9 excellent tutorials cover a broad range of topics, including: developing web-aware applications in Ada, correctness by construction, real-time Java, architecture analysis and design, Ravenscar and SPARK, containers in Ada 2005, software fault tolerance, requirements engineering for dependable Systems, and a half day tutorial (at a reduced rate) on the new features of Ada 2005, presented by four of its designers: John Barnes, Alan Burns, Pascal Leroy and Tucker Taft. Technical Program: 21 fully refereed and carefully selected papers on the latest research on Ada-related issues, including new tools, applications and industrial practice and experience. A collection of 10 industrial presentations reflecting current practice and challenges. Springer Verlag publishes the proceedings of the conference, as LNCS Vol. 3555. Keynote Speakers: John McDermid discusses model-based development of safety-critical software. Martyn Thomas presents "Extreme Hubris" in which the principles of Extreme Programming are examined and shown to be misguided and dangerous, and in which an alternative Manifesto for Reliable Software is proposed. Bev Littlewood talks about assessing the dependability of software-based systems. The exhibition opens in the mid-morning break on Tuesday and runs continuously until the end of the afternoon break on Thursday. The exhibitors include the following vendors: AdaCore, Aonix, ARTiSAN Software, Esterel Technologies, Green Hills Software, I-Logix, LDRA Software Technology, PolySpace Technologies, Praxis High Integrity Systems, Silver Software, TNI Europe. York is a beautiful and historical (small) city in the north of the UK. It has a first class university with one of the best Computer Science departments in the world. The Department has been involved with the development of programming languages for a number of years (indeed it ran the first series of technical meetings on Ada in the 1970s). It is pleased to host this meeting on reliable software technology. York can be reached easily by train from London (approximately 2.3 hours), Manchester airport (2 hours), Leeds/Bradford Airport (1 hour). The conference is held at the Royal York Hotel which is adjacent to the York train station a few minutes from the centre of York and the Minster (Cathedral). The conference's social program includes a wine and buffet reception on Tuesday evening at Bedern Hall, a 14th century hall which was used as a refectory of the vicars of York Minster, and the conference banquet on Wednesday evening at the National Railway Museum. This York-based Museum is the largest railway museum in the world, responsible for the conservation and interpretation of the British national collection of historically significant railway vehicles and other artifacts. The Museum contains an unrivaled collection of locomotives, rolling stock, railway equipment, documents and records. ======================================================================== 2005 IEEE ISoLA Workshop on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification, and Validation 23-24th September 2005 Loyola College Graduate Center, Columbia, MD (USA) With a Special track theme: Formal Methods in Human and Robotic Space Exploration http://sttt.cs.uni-dortmund.de/isola2005 ISoLA is a forum for developers, users, and researchers to discuss issues related to the adoption and use of rigorous tools for the specification analysis, verification, certification, construction, test, and maintenance of systems from the point of view of their different application domains. To bridge the gap between designers and developers of (formal methods based) rigorous tools, and users in engineering and in other disciplines, it fosters and exploits synergetic relationships among scientists, engineers, software developers, decision makers, and other critical thinkers. In particular, by providing a venue for the discussion of common problems, requirements, algorithms, methodologies, and practices, ISoLA aims at supporting researchers in their quest to improve the utility, reliability, flexibility and efficiency of tools for building systems and users in their search of adequate solutions to their problems. Applications and case studies with a conceptual message and experience papers with a clear link to tool construction are all encouraged. Particularly welcome are Regular contributions, Survey papers, Student Papers and Tool demonstrations concerning Use of * Deduction and model-checking * System construction and transformation techniques * Program analysis * Compositional and refinement-based methodologies * Testing and test-case generation * Tool environments and tool architectures * Agent techniques, * Coordination technologies Application Areas: * Electrical engineering, embedded systems, and controllers * Integration (legacy systems) * Interoperability (HW/SW, MEMs, ) * Pervasive Computing * Financial and banking sectors, E-commerce * Real-time, hybrid, and safety critical systems * Robotic Systems for Space Exploration * Telecommunications * Transportation and aviation Keynote Speaker: John C. Knight (U. Virginia, USA) Why Are Formal Methods Still Not Used More Widely? ======================================================================== Web Services Challenge Held at the IEEE Conference on e-Business Engineering (ICEBE-05) Oct 18-20, 2005, Beijing, China Supported by IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Electronic Commerce (TCEC) Centre for e-Transformation Research (CTR), Hong Kong Baptist University Founder R&D Centre, Beijing IBM China Research Lab http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/~ctr/wschallenge/ Background Web services discovery and composition are two indispensable capabilities required by the emerging service-oriented architecture to enable the next-generation e-Business applications. Following the great success of the first Web Services Challenge held in Hong Kong in March 2005, a similar competition geared towards the management of web services will be held at ICEBE 2005. The competition solicits industry and academic researchers that develop software components and/or intelligent agents that have the ability to discover pertinent web services and compose them to create higher-level functionality. Competition Overview This competition will be limited to syntactical matching based on the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Participants will be required to *identify* and *compose* WSDL-specified services based on their input and output messages as specified in a directory of WSDL documents. Although the technical details of this second contest will be similar to the first one, an enlarged web services repository will be used for the evaluation. Each finalist will be required to register and attend the conference to give presentation and demonstration for final evaluation. Competitors of Web Services Challenge will be evaluated based on the *design* and *functional capabilities* of their component/agent. (A) Design Participants are required to submit a technical description of their software agent or component of no more than 2 pages. This description and local evaluation will be used to judge and rate the design of the entry. The 2-page description should follow the IEEE Computer Society format as specified by the main conference and will be published as a poster paper in the general proceedings for all accepted finalists. (B) Functional capabilities This challenge will be separated into the following two functional competitions. Competition A: Service Discovery Capabilities Participants will be provided with a directory of web services specifications and a specific discovery request as represented by the provided input messages and the required output messages. The participants component/agent will be required to find all services that meet the requirements . Competition B: Service Composition Capabilities Given the same service repository provided in Competition A, the participants will be provided with another discovery request. In this competition, the request can only be fulfilled by the composition of multiple services. The participant will be required to supply the sequence and list of services that meet the requirements. Participants are encouraged to contact the competition chair to express interest in the contest and the platform they plan to use for the system development. More detailed technical description as well as preliminary sample WSDL descriptions and service repository can be found at http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/~ctr/wschallenge/ William K. Cheung (Chair) Centre of e-Transformation Research Department of Computer Science Hong Kong Baptist University Hong Kong, China Email: william@comp.hkbu.edu.hk ======================================================================== ======================================================================== ------------>>> QTN ARTICLE SUBMITTAL POLICY <<<------------ ======================================================================== QTN is E-mailed around the middle of each month to over 10,000 subscribers worldwide. To have your event listed in an upcoming issue E-mail a complete description and full details of your Call for Papers or Call for Participation at <http://www.soft.com/News/QTN-Online/subscribe.html> QTN's submittal policy is: o Submission deadlines indicated in "Calls for Papers" should provide at least a 1-month lead time from the QTN issue date. 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