Software Development Framework Research Articles

Reproducing FSL's fMRI data analysis via Nipype: Relevance, challenges, and solutions.

The "replication crisis" in neuroscientific research has led to calls for improving reproducibility. In traditional neuroscience analyses, irreproducibility may occur as a result of issues across various stages of the methodological process. For example, different operating systems, different software packages, and even different versions of the same package can lead to variable results. Nipype, an open-source Python project, integrates different neuroimaging software packages uniformly to improve the reproducibility of neuroimaging analyses. Nipype has the advantage over traditional software packages (e.g., FSL, ANFI, SPM, etc.) by (1) providing comprehensive software development frameworks and usage information, (2) improving computational efficiency, (3) facilitating reproducibility through sufficient details, and (4) easing the steep learning curve. Despite the rich tutorials it has provided, the Nipype community lacks a standard three-level GLM tutorial for FSL. Using the classical Flanker task dataset, we first precisely reproduce a three-level GLM analysis with FSL via Nipype. Next, we point out some undocumented discrepancies between Nipype and FSL functions that led to substantial differences in results. Finally, we provide revised Nipype code in re-executable notebooks that assure result invariability between FSL and Nipype. Our analyses, notebooks, and operating software specifications (e.g., docker build files) are available on the Open Science Framework platform.

Tailoring the Scrum framework for software development: Literature mapping and feature-based support

Literature faces the lack of studies relating which characteristics of the Scrum framework are adapted. Understanding such variations is useful for prospective software development projects and guiding teams at conducting Scrum customizations.

The RTApipe framework for the gamma-ray real-time analysis software development

In the multi-messenger era, coordinating observations between astronomical facilities is mandatory to study transient phenomena (e.g. Gamma-ray bursts) and is achieved by sharing information with the scientific community through networks such as the Gamma-ray Coordinates Network. The facilities usually develop real-time scientific analysis pipelines to detect transient events, alert the astrophysical community, and speed up the reaction time of science alerts received from other observatories. We present in this work the RTApipe framework, designed to facilitate the development of real-time scientific analysis pipelines for present and future gamma-ray observatories. This framework provides pipeline architecture and automatisms, allowing the researchers to focus on the scientific aspects and integrate existing science tools developed with different technologies. The pipelines automatically execute all the configured analyses during the data acquisition. This framework can be interfaced with science alerts networks to perform follow-up analysis of transient events shared by other facilities. The analyses are performed in parallel and can be prioritised. The workload is highly scalable on a cluster of machines. The framework provides the required services using containerisation technology for easy deployment. We present the RTA pipelines developed for the AGILE space mission and the prototype of the SAG system for the ground-based future Cherenkov Telescope Array observatory confirming that the RTApipe framework can be used to successfully develop pipelines for the gamma-ray observatories, both space and ground-based.

A Framework for Rapid Robotic Application Development for Citizen Developers

It is common knowledge among computer scientists and software engineers that ”building robotics systems is hard”: it includes applied and specialized knowledge from various scientific fields, such as mechanical, electrical and computer engineering, computer science and physics, among others. To expedite the development of robots, a significant number of robotics-oriented middleware solutions and frameworks exist that provide high-level functionality for the implementation of the in-robot software stack, such as ready-to-use algorithms and sensor/actuator drivers. While the aforementioned focus is on the implementation of the core functionalities and control layer of robots, these specialized tools still require extensive training, while not providing the envisaged freedom in design choices. In this paper, we discuss most of the robotics software development methodologies and frameworks, analyze the way robotics applications are built and propose a new resource-oriented architecture towards the rapid development of robot-agnostic applications. The contribution of our work is a methodology and a model-based middleware that can be used to provide remote robot-agnostic interfaces. Such interfaces may support robotics application development from citizen developers by reducing hand-coding and technical knowledge requirements. This way, non-robotics experts will be able to integrate and use robotics in a wide range of application domains, such as healthcare, home assistance, home automation and cyber–physical systems in general.

Quantum algorithm for the Navier–Stokes equations by using the streamfunction-vorticity formulation and the lattice Boltzmann method

In this paper, a new algorithm for solving the Navier–Stokes equations (NSE) on a quantum device is presented. For the fluid flow equations, the stream function-vorticity formulation is adopted, while the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is utilized for solving the corresponding system of equations numerically for one time step. Following the nature of the lattice Boltzmann method, the proposed quantum algorithm consists of five major sections: initialization, collision, propagation, boundary condition implementation and calculation of macroscopic quantities. The collision and boundary condition step is quantumly implemented by applying the standard-form encoding approach, while the quantum walk procedure is applied for the propagation step. The algorithm is implemented by using IBM’s quantum computing software development framework Qiskit, while for the verification purposes, two-dimensional (2D) cavity flow is simulated and compared with classical code.

An mHealth App-Based Self-management Intervention for Family Members of Pediatric Transplant Recipients (myFAMI): Framework Design and Development Study.

BackgroundSolid-organ transplantation is the treatment of choice for children with end-stage organ failure. Ongoing recovery and medical management at home after transplant are important for recovery and transition to daily life. Smartphones are widely used and hold the potential for aiding in the establishment of mobile health (mHealth) protocols. Health care providers, nurses, and computer scientists collaboratively designed and developed mHealth family self-management intervention (myFAMI), a smartphone-based intervention app to promote a family self-management intervention for pediatric transplant patients’ families.ObjectiveThis paper presents outcomes of the design stages and development actions of the myFAMI app framework, along with key challenges, limitations, and strengths.MethodsThe myFAMI app framework is built upon a theory-based intervention for pediatric transplant patients, with aid from the action research (AR) methodology. Based on initially defined design motivation, the team of researchers collaboratively explored 4 research stages (research discussions, feedback and motivations, alpha testing, and deployment and release improvements) and developed features required for successful inauguration of the app in the real-world setting.ResultsDeriving from app users and their functionalities, the myFAMI app framework is built with 2 primary components: the web app (for nurses’ and superadmin usage) and the smartphone app (for participant/family member usage). The web app stores survey responses and triggers alerts to nurses, when required, based on the family members’ response. The smartphone app presents the notifications sent from the server to the participants and captures survey responses. Both the web app and the smartphone app were built upon industry-standard software development frameworks and demonstrate great performance when deployed and used by study participants.ConclusionsThe paper summarizes a successful and efficient mHealth app-building process using a theory-based intervention in nursing and the AR methodology in computer science. Focusing on factors to improve efficiency enabled easy navigation of the app and collection of data. This work lays the foundation for researchers to carefully integrate necessary information (from the literature or experienced clinicians) to provide a robust and efficient solution and evaluate the acceptability, utility, and usability for similar studies in the future.International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID)RR2-10.1002/nur.22010

A Platform-Independent Embedded Software Development Framework with a Code Generator to Automatically Configure Peripherals

A Platform-Independent Embedded Software Development Framework with a Code Generator to Automatically Configure Peripherals

Introducing Cloud-Assisted Micro-Service-Based Software Development Framework for Healthcare Systems

In healthcare services, application development is considered the most complex and time-consuming phase. As it is difficult to plan and time-intense, it requires high maintenance. Healthcare applications need strict compliance and the scope of application is immense along with associates, classes in services, and classified system. Application designing in healthcare with the help of traditional approaches such as monolithic and service-oriented architecture (SOA) generate problems in different areas like service availability, remote access to services, service provisioning, scalability, healthcare systems integration with each other. That is why there is a need for less sophisticated and user-friendly healthcare systems, which are easy to plan and develop, inexpensive requirement maintenance, and agile testing. To overcome the aforesaid issues in the domain of healthcare application development, this paper develops a framework of micro services for the development of healthcare services using cloud computing infrastructure. Micro-service-based techniques provide lightly coupled and fine-grained methodology. With the use of micro services technique presented in this work, the efficiency, scalability, and performance are improved. In this research, an approach for development and deployment properly in the cloud for healthcare applications is developed. Thus, it contributes to the system design approach and system analysis. Quantitative and qualitative results are reported showing the advantages of micro services approach used.

State of agile contracting in the software industry and the public sector, results of a systematic mapping of the literature

Context: Agile approaches are the answer to the rigid framework for traditional software development. These focus on creating products based on communication and continuous collaboration between the client and supplier, which are detailed characteristics in documents; it is also true that the contractual agreements for such approaches continue to be structured according to the restrictions of the traditional development of software products. Meticulous specifications and restrictions such as time, cost and scope are just some of the fixed conditions of the contractual agreement. In this sense, traditional contracts do not respond adequately to agile software development and, for this reason, agile contracts emerge as a framework of agreement that stipulates the conditions that are clearly necessary to allow development under these approaches. Methodology: a systematic mapping of the literature is presented that aims to show a current panorama of agile contracting for software development and its application in different sectors of the economy with an emphasis on the public sector. Results: The results obtained show few examples of the application of agile contracts, especially in the public sector; suggesting research opportunities and the generation of proposals in this context. Conclusions: It has been concluded that the contracting methods used by public institutions can be an obstacle to agile approaches. In addition, this document presents recommendations for adjusting contracts that seek to facilitate developments approached from the perspective of agile approaches in the public sector.

DD-FoG: Intelligent Distributed Dynamic FoG Computing Framework

Nowadays, 5G networks are emerged and designed to integrate all the achievements of mobile and fixed communication networks, in which it can provide ultra-high data speeds and enable a broad range of new services with new cloud computing structures such as fog and edge. In spite of this, the complex nature of the system, especially with the varying network conditions, variety of possible mechanisms, hardware, and protocols, makes communication between these technologies challenging. To this end, in this paper, we proposed a new distributed and fog (DD-fog) framework for software development, in which fog and mobile edge computing (MEC) technologies and microservices approach are jointly considered. More specifically, based on the computational and network capabilities, this framework provides a microservices migration between fog structures and elements, in which user query statistics in each of the fog structures are considered. In addition, a new modern solution was proposed for IoT-based application development and deployment, which provides new time constraint services like a tactile internet, autonomous vehicles, etc. Moreover, to maintain quality service delivery services, two different algorithms have been developed to pick load points in the search mechanism for congestion of users and find the fog migration node. Finally, simulation results proved that the proposed framework could reduce the execution time of the microservice function by up to 70% by deploying the rational allocation of resources reasonably.

An adaptive 3D virtual learning environment for training software developers in scrum

ABSTRACT Scrum is one of the most used frameworks for agile software development because of its potential improvements in productivity, quality, and client satisfaction. Academia has also focussed on teaching Scrum practices to prepare students to face common software engineering challenges and facilitate their insertion in professional contexts. Furthermore, advances in learning technologies currently offer many virtual learning environments to enhance learning in many ways. Their capability to consider the individual learner preferences has led a shift to more personalised training approaches, requiring that the environments adapt themselves to the learner. We propose an adaptive approach for training developers in Scrum, including an adaptive virtual learning environment based on Felder's learning style theory. Although still preliminary, our findings show that students who used the environment and received instruction matching their preferences obtained sightly higher learning gains than students who received a different instruction than the one they preferred. We also noticed less variability in the learning gains of students who received instruction matching their preferences. The relevance of this work goes beyond the impact on learning gains since it describes how adaptive virtual learning environments can be used in the domain of Software Engineering.

E-Portal Software Development Framework in Emerging Cloud Computing Environment

Cloud computing is an emerging new technology context that introduces promising environment for computer applications. This context put the enormous resource capabilities of the globe under the disposal of the development lifecycle of a software system. The new emerging concept of cloud computing is turning web service into eUtility that can be delivered over the internet to consumers who are normally software application developers and consumers. eUtility has announced the start of new eCommerce era where eUtility is metered due to its usage by consumers. This paper is presenting a framework to model the evolutional impact of eUtility on software engineering lifecycle and introduces E-Portal concepts as software integration points to the cloud.

Applying virtual reality to teach the software development process to novice software engineers

Software development is a complicated process that requires experienced human resources to produce successful software products. Although this process needs experience from the individuals, it is hard to provide this experience without encountering real incidents during the software development process. To fill this gap, this study proposes a Virtual Reality Based Software Development Framework (VR-SODEF), which provides an interactive virtual reality experience for individuals learning about the tasks of software development starting from requirement analysis through software testing. In the VR-SODEF, the participant takes on the role of a novice software developer being recruited into a virtual software development organisation who should work alongside five virtual characters, played by artificial intelligence. This exclusive viewpoint draws participants from the 2D separation of the classical experience and virtually into the world of the software development itself. Participants experience the intense dramatic elements created for simulation and confront the challenges of virtual software practitioners in a somewhat uncompromising virtual simulation environment. To examine the efficiency of the VR-SODEF, it was tested on 32 computing students, with results indicating that virtual reality can be an effective educational medium, especially for skills that might traditionally be acquired through experience rather than traditional classroom-based teaching.

Formal Modeling and Analysis of Entity Framework Using Alloy

Formal methods provide multiple benefits when applied in the software development process. For instance, they enable engineers to verify and validate models before working on their implementation, leading to earlier detection of design defects. However, most of them lack flexibility to be applied in agile software development projects. Alloy is a lightweight formal modeling language with a friendly tool that facilitates the agile approaches application. Unfortunately, its industrial adoption is hampered by the lack of methods and tools for current software development frameworks, such as Entity Framework. This platform is usually chosen by agile projects following the code-first approach that allows automatic generation of a database from domain classes coded in the C# language. We present a new method and tool for the formal specification and analysis of Entity Framework projects with Alloy. The proposal allows engineers to start the software development using Alloy for modeling, validation and verification, automatically translate Alloy specifications to C# domain classes and then generate the corresponding database with Entity Framework. We validate our approach with a real case study: an application required by a gas supplier company.

GQCP: The Ghent Quantum Chemistry Package.

The Ghent Quantum Chemistry Package (GQCP) is an open-source electronic structure software package that aims to provide an intuitive and expressive software framework for electronic structure software development. Its high-level interfaces (accessible through C++ and Python) have been specifically designed to correspond to theoretical concepts, while retaining access to lower-level intermediates and allowing structural run-time modifications of quantum chemical solvers. GQCP focuses on providing quantum chemical method developers with the computational "building blocks" that allow them to flexibly develop proof of principle implementations for new methods and applications up to the level of two-component spinor bases.

Fully-automated root image analysis (faRIA)

High-throughput root phenotyping in the soil became an indispensable quantitative tool for the assessment of effects of climatic factors and molecular perturbation on plant root morphology, development and function. To efficiently analyse a large amount of structurally complex soil-root images advanced methods for automated image segmentation are required. Due to often unavoidable overlap between the intensity of fore- and background regions simple thresholding methods are, generally, not suitable for the segmentation of root regions. Higher-level cognitive models such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) provide capabilities for segmenting roots from heterogeneous and noisy background structures, however, they require a representative set of manually segmented (ground truth) images. Here, we present a GUI-based tool for fully automated quantitative analysis of root images using a pre-trained CNN model, which relies on an extension of the U-Net architecture. The developed CNN framework was designed to efficiently segment root structures of different size, shape and optical contrast using low budget hardware systems. The CNN model was trained on a set of 6465 masks derived from 182 manually segmented near-infrared (NIR) maize root images. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves a Dice coefficient of 0.87 and outperforms existing tools (e.g., SegRoot) with Dice coefficient of 0.67 by application not only to NIR but also to other imaging modalities and plant species such as barley and arabidopsis soil-root images from LED-rhizotron and UV imaging systems, respectively. In summary, the developed software framework enables users to efficiently analyse soil-root images in an automated manner (i.e. without manual interaction with data and/or parameter tuning) providing quantitative plant scientists with a powerful analytical tool.

Comparing different serious games strategies for teaching the SCRUM Framework

Access to new technologies is slowly changing classrooms and theirdynamics. Gamification has been a widely used approach, and its benefits are still being studied. This paper aims to present a serious game which assists in teaching the SCRUM (software development) framework in higher education disciplines. For this, a virtual game has been created containing two different ways of playing, and its performance as a support tool to traditional teaching methodologies has been analyzed. Through a planned experiment, it was possible to identify a direct positive impact on students Learning Gain.

Assessment of the Impact of the Hybrid Software Development Approach

The paper focuses on enhancing the current or modern software development practices in Information Technology (IT) organizations. The research paper aims to address the gap between various hybrid software development approaches and existing practices that contribute to software development practices. The methodology adopted here is to obtain data from software professionals and understand how the current practices in the software development industry have contributed to the productivity of the employees and the IT organization, which has been done with the help of a survey questionnaire and by analyzing existing research articles and papers on the software development practices. This research is a conceptual model focused on a modern hybrid approach for software development, rather than focusing on a single software development approach, which can help IT organization increase productivity and deliver business value beyond customer expectations. The cost to build and time to market a software product or a software service can reduce by integrating the required software development practices. Today, staying relevant in the competitive market can be made easier by choosing the best available software development practices, frameworks, and models to fit an organization’s value and knowledge system. The conceptual model aims to reduce the gap between various hybrid software development approaches and existing practices contributing to software development. The paper concludes by discussing the benefits of the hybrid software development approach and urge IT organizations to adopt it as per their software development requirements and customer requirements.

Software Framework for Testing of Automated Driving Systems in the Traffic Environment of Vissim

As the complexity of automated driving systemss (ADSs) with automation levels above level 3 is rising, virtual testing for such systems is inevitable and necessary. The complexity of testing these levels lies in the modeling and calculation demands for the virtual environment, which consists of roads, traffic, static and dynamic objects, as well as the modeling of the car itself. An essential part of the safety and performance analysis of ADSs is the modeling and consideration of dynamic road traffic participants. There are multiple forms of traffic flow simulation software (TFSS), which are used to reproduce realistic traffic behavior and are integrated directly or over interfaces with vehicle simulation software environments. In this paper we focus on the TFSS from PTV Vissim in a co-simulation framework which combines Vissim and CarMaker. As it is a commonly used software in industry and research, it also provides complex driver models and interfaces to manipulate and develop customized traffic participants. Using the driver model DLL interface (DMDI) from Vissim it is possible to manipulate traffic participants or adjust driver models in a defined manner. Based on the DMDI, we extended the code and developed a framework for the manipulation and testing of ADSs in the traffic environment of Vissim. The efficiency and performance of the developed software framework are evaluated using the co-simulation framework for the testing of ADSs, which is based on Vissim and CarMaker.

Analysis of driving styles of a GP2 car via minimum lap-time direct trajectory optimization

This paper addresses the problem of the link between the driving style of an ideal driver, modelled as an optimal controller, and fundamental set-up parameters of a vehicle in the GP2 motorsport class. The aim is to evaluate quantitatively how set-up parameters, like distribution of aerodynamic loads, weight and roll stiffness between front and rear axles, affect the driving style, encoded in the shape of the optimal trajectory and in the acceleration, brake and steer inputs. To this aim, we develop an optimization code that includes a double-track vehicle model capable of solving the minimum lap-time problem (MLTP) on a given track. The track is represented via NURBS curves and the MLTP is framed and solved as an optimal control problem by transcription into a nonlinear program using direct collocation. To assess the accuracy of the vehicle model and the optimization pipeline, we also validate our results against real telemetry data. The developed software framework lends itself to easily perform both sensitivity analysis and concurrent trajectory planning and set-up parameter optimization: this is obtained by simple promotion of static parameters of interests to variables in the optimal control problem. Some results along these lines are also included.