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Requirements views, such as coverage and status views, are an important asset for monitoring and managing software development projects. We have developed a method that automates the process of reconstructing these views, and we have built a tool, REQANALYST, that supports this method. This paper presents an investigation as to which extent requirements views can be automatically generated in order to monitor requirements in industrial practice. The paper focuses on monitoring the requirements in test categories and test cases. In order to retrieve the necessary data, an information retrieval technique, called Latent Semantic Indexing, was used. The method was applied in an industrial study. A number of requirements views were defined and experiments were carried out with different reconstruction settings for generating these views. Finally, we explored how these views can help the developers during the software development process

The design of a secure RFID identification scheme is a thought-provoking challenge, and this paper deals with this problem adopting a groundbreaking approach. The proposed protocol, called Noent, is based on cryptographic puzzles to avoid the indiscriminate disclose of the confidential information stored on tags and on an innovative role reversal distance-bounding protocol to distinguish between honest and rogue readers. The protocol provides moderate privacy protection (data and location) to single tags but its effectiveness increases hugely when it is used to protect a large population of tags (e.g., protection against inventory disclosure). Moreover, in comparison with classical approaches, Noent does not require an online database, which facilitates key updating and mitigates desynchronization attacks.

Workspace awareness support is mandatory for group support systems. It allows users not only to follow actions of others, but to understand and respond to any changes others make to the workspace. In this paper, we present a novel approach for asynchronous awareness support by offering different filters to retrieve relevant awareness information and visualizing the evolution of the shared artifact. We illustrate our approach with a tool for collaborative non-linear storytelling in which users can jointly create a story graph of interconnected audio files. Such a story graph is an example for a non-linear story. We describe the development of a prototype that visualizes how the collaborative story has evolved over time. We evaluate our approach for asynchronous awareness support in an experiment with 40 participants exploring story graphs of different complexity. The evaluation results show that our visualization approach helps group members to assess who has modified the shared story, how it was modified, what exactly has been modified, and when it has been modified.

Large and complex projects, such as infrastructure, often require the collaboration of multiple parties and disciplines, where an structured interdisciplinary methodology is necessary: Systems Engineering. This field traditionally relied on a document based approach, but is currently transitioning to a model based variant, with the Systems Modeling Language as one of its main standards. Visual modeling platforms, such as Enterprise Architect, allow to design and construct models in SysML. However, these tools lack proper measurement and visualization functionality to deal with project specific meta-model architectures. To overcome these limitations a software tool was developed using the extract-abstract-present paradigm: VoSMA. Also, multiple measurements were developed applying the Goal-Question-Metric approach, and different visualization methodologies were explored to present this information. Three SysML tunnel projects were analyzed as test case studies to assess the usefulness and correctness of the generated data, and multiple feedback sessions were conducted with experienced systems engineers. The results are very promising and indicate that the data generated may greatly benefit project development. Based on the results of the evaluation and the achieved progress, some suggestions and possible future directions were provided at the end of this study.

Software architecture plays an important part in program comprehension, which is one of the most time consuming tasks in software development. If software developers don’t properly share their architectural knowledge with team members, the team will act based on an incomplete or even possibly incorrect view on the code base, and this can lead to architectural degradation. Recently there has been a surge of collaboration, communication and sharing with the advent of Web 2.0 applications. In this thesis we have investigated how Web 2.0 can be used to support software architecture management. In particular in the area of architecture documentation, architecture retrieval, and collaboration. We created an approach which applies Web 2.0 concepts such as traceability, integration, usability, navigability, and user experience, to software architecture management. This approach is supported by a prototype tool called ArchWiki, which has features such as traceability between different artifacts (e.g. source code, architectural diagrams, architectural documentation), context-sensitive views, hyperlinks, notifications, tags, and bookmarks. We performed an initial evaluation study to assess ArchWiki. In this study we found that Web 2.0 has the potential to support software architecture knowledge management.