Tight Deadlines Research Articles

Global EDF scheduling for parallel real-time tasks

As multicore processors become ever more prevalent, it is important for real-time programs to take advantage of intra-task parallelism in order to support computation-intensive applications with tight deadlines. In this paper, we consider the global earliest deadline first (GEDF) scheduling policy for task sets consisting of parallel tasks. Each task can be represented by a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where nodes represent computational work and edges represent dependences between nodes. In this model, we prove that GEDF provides a capacity augmentation bound of $$4-\frac{2}{m}$$ and a resource augmentation bound of $$2-\frac{1}{m}$$ . The capacity augmentation bound acts as a linear-time schedulability test since it guarantees that any task set with total utilization of at most $$m/(4-\frac{2}{m})$$ where each task’s critical-path length is at most $$1/(4-\frac{2}{m})$$ of its deadline is schedulable on $$m$$ cores under GEDF. In addition, we present a pseudo-polynomial time fixed-point schedulability test for GEDF; this test uses a carry-in work calculation based on the proof for the capacity bound. Finally, we present and evaluate a prototype platform—called PGEDF—for scheduling parallel tasks using global earliest deadline first (GEDF). PGEDF is built by combining the GNU OpenMP runtime system and the $$\text {LITMUS}^\text {RT}$$ operating system. This platform allows programmers to write parallel OpenMP tasks and specify real-time parameters such as deadlines for tasks. We perform two kinds of experiments to evaluate the performance of GEDF for parallel tasks. (1) We run numerical simulations for DAG tasks. (2) We execute randomly generated tasks using PGEDF. Both sets of experiments indicate that GEDF performs surprisingly well and outperforms an existing scheduling techniques that involves task decomposition.

Dying for an iPhone: The Labour Struggle of China’s New Working Class

The presented sociological research analyses the ways in which the integration of the electronics manufacturing industry in global supply chains has intensified labour conflicts and class antagonism. The Taiwanese transnational corporation Foxconn Technology Group holds more than 50 percent of market share in global electronics manufacturing. Its 1.4 million employees in China far exceed its combined workforce in 28 other countries that comprise its global empire. I assess the conditions of a new generation of Chinese workers on the basis of the intertwined policies and practices of Foxconn, international brands (notably Apple), and the local government, as well as the diverse forms of collective actions workers deploy to defend their rights and interests. Within the tight delivery deadlines, some Foxconn workers leveraged their power to disrupt production to demand higher pay and better conditions. While all of these labour struggles were short-lived and limited in scope to a single factory, protestors exposed the injustice of “iSlavery,” garnering wide media attention and civil society support. Contradictions of state-labour-capital relations, however, remain sharp. In the authoritarian regime, notwithstanding the resilience of the Chinese state in the face of sustained popular unrest over the last two decades, my ethnographic study highlights the unstable nature of precarious labour in its hundreds of millions.The published audio is a recording of a talk in the University of Westminster's CAMRI Research Seminar on October 1, 2014, see also http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/ and http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminarsAn article related to this talk has been published open access in the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus: http://www.japanfocus.org/-Pun-Ngai/3981Biography:Jenny Chan was Chief Coordinator of SACOM (Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior) between 2006 and 2009. Educated at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong, she went on to pursue her doctorate in sociology and labour studies as a Reid Research Scholar at University of London. She was awarded the Great Britain-China Educational Trust for dissertation writing (PhD diss. 2014). In September 2014 she joined the University of Oxford as Departmental Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese Studies, the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies. Her recent articles have appeared in Current Sociology, Modern China, The Asia-Pacific Journal, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Global Labour Journal, New Labor Forum, Labor Notes, New Internationalist and New Technology, Work and Employment.http://www.area-studies.ox.ac.uk/dr-jenny-chan

How Being rather than Doing Can Add Value

When the currency of business is “doing,” how do we embrace “being?” When tight deadlines and budget cuts drive us, how can we pursue something you can't see or measure? How can we cultivate a culture of patience when we don't get smoke breaks anymore?How Being Rather Than Doing Can Create Value in the Business World offers the bold proposal that business forget about filling all available time and space with action and allowing, even encouraging, time for employees to BE. Like artists who embrace white space in their work, people who take time to ruminate, to pause, will make fewer brush strokes. And those they do make they do make are that much more articulate and powerful.Learn how to be brave and find those small moments of white space in your business life.

Presidential priorities, congressional control, and the quality of regulatory analysis: an application to healthcare and homeland security

Elected leaders delegate rulemaking to federal agencies, then seek to influence rulemaking through top-down directives and statutory deadlines. This paper documents an unintended consequence of these control strategies: they reduce regulatory agencies’ ability and incentive to conduct high-quality economic analysis to inform their decisions. Using scoring data that measure the quality of regulatory impact analysis, we find that hastily adopted “interim final” regulations reflecting signature policy priorities of the two most recent presidential administrations were accompanied by significantly lower quality economic analysis. Interim final homeland security regulations adopted during the G.W. Bush administration and interim final regulations implementing the Affordable Care Act in the Obama administration were accompanied by less thorough analysis than other “economically significant” regulations (regulations with benefits, costs, or other economic impacts exceeding $100 million annually). The lower quality analysis apparently stems from the confluence of presidential priorities and very tight statutory deadlines associated with interim final regulations, rather than either factor alone.

Complexities of ethnography

UNDERTAKING RESEARCH using an ethnographic approach can be one of the most challenging routes to generating new knowledge in nursing and health care. These challenges can include the time required to gain access to the research site, the duration and complexity of data collection, the role of the researcher and the impact the researcher might have on data collection and analysis. Ethnographic approaches are not new to nursing and health care but this approach to generating new knowledge has not been adopted as widely as other qualitative approaches. One reason for this could be that students undertaking undergraduate or master’s research projects much less frequently gain experience in using ethnography because of the practical and theoretical complexities outlined. As a result, these researchers are less likely to consider ethnography in their future research endeavours. This edition of Nurse Researcher includes two papers that describe the experiences of researchers who have undertaken different types of ethnographic research in very different research settings. In the first paper, Mahon and McPherson (2014) describe their experiences of undertaking a study exploring factors influencing nurses’ decisions to stay or leave bedside nursing using critical ethnography. In the second paper, Pereira de Melo et al (2014) describe the experiences of researchers undertaking three different ethnographic research projects in Brazil. Both offer a fascinating insight into how these researchers managed some of the complexities often encountered when conducting ethnographic research. All researchers will be familiar with the multiple barriers that need to be negotiated and managed before they can access a research setting. Pereira de Melo et al (2014) suggest that these can be particularly challenging in ethnographic research and might include hierarchies that exist between different professional groups and the need not to disrupt routines and protocols. Ethnography draws heavily on prolonged observation as the main means of data collection and this can sometimes be perceived as threatening by those who will be observed. It is for these reasons that researchers need to seek acceptance or trust in the research setting and why observation needs to be for a prolonged period of time. Pereira de Melo et al (2014) suggest that one important way to help overcome some of the access barriers is to discover and build an influential friend. This individual might be able to help negotiate access to the research site and to help the researcher become accepted once in the research site. It is clear that such strategies do not happen by accident and will need to be incorporated into the detailed planning of the research project. As noted, in ethnographic research it is required that researchers engage with participants in their lives for an extended period of time. Pereira de Melo et al (2014) argue that ethnographic researchers should spend at least six months in the research setting and describe this as one of the main limitations when planning ethnographic research. For student researchers, especially those below doctoral level, they describe time as ‘an enemy’ because the students have tight and immoveable deadlines. While students can adopt ethnographic approaches, time restrictions can have an impact on the theoretical maturity of a project. The result is that students are often advised to avoid ethnographic approaches. Offering such advice fails to recognise that the primary objective of much student research is to allow the students to learn more about how to plan and conduct research rather than on the outcome of the research. A prolonged period of engagement in the research setting requires that ethnographic researchers give some detailed consideration to their role in the research process. The researcher is the main data collection instrument in an ethnographic research project so it is inevitable that the individual will Complexities of ethnography

Beware the Rush to Presumption, Part C: A Public Choice Analysis of the Affordable Care Act's Interim Final Rules

Federal agencies issued eight major interim final regulations in 2010 to quickly implement major provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Our previous reviews found that the regulatory impact analyses for these regulations were seriously incomplete, often omitting significant benefits, costs, or regulatory alternatives. Analysis of equity was cursory at best. For these regulations, the quality and use of regulatory analysis fell well below the standards set by other federal agencies and even by HHS. This paper demonstrates that the low-quality analysis was a predictable result of the way that the administration and Congress chose to manage the regulatory process. Presidential and congressional decisions, in turn, reflected the political incentives both actors faced in 2010. This suggests that institutional rather than personal factors explain the poor quality of analysis and decisions that occur when agencies implement important presidential priorities in the face of tight legislative deadlines. To promote transparency and informed decision making, additional checks and balances in the regulatory process are needed to prevent politics from short-circuiting analysis.

27th International Conference on CADCAM, Robotics and Factories of the Future 2014

It is a great pleasure to welcome you to the 27th International Conference on CADCAM, Robotics and Factories of the Future, sponsored by the International Society for Productivity Enhancement, Middlesex University, Festo Limited GB, National Instruments UK & Ireland, the Sector Skills Council for Science, Engineering and Manufacturing Technologies and our proceedings publisher Institute of Physics Publications.This is the second time Middlesex University has played host to this longstanding international conference, last time being the 12th edition in 1996. The subject content of the conference remains current, focusing on cutting edge developments in research. The conference themes this year are divided into seven themes, Product Development and Sustainability, Modelling and Simulation, Automation, Robotics and Handling Systems, Advanced Quality Systems Tools and Quality Management, Human Aspects in Engineering Activities, Emerging Scenarios in Engineering Education and Training, and Emerging Technologies in Factories of the Future. The conference is organised into seven sessions running in parallel over three days, providing a platform to speakers from 16 different countries. The programme also features four eminent keynote speakers and a hands-on workshop organised by National Instruments. Organising an event such as this would not be possible without the help of many colleagues. I am grateful to the members of the Organising Committee, the International Scientific Committee, our sponsors and all those colleagues who helped in the review of many abstracts and consequently full papers. This required meticulous attention to detail and strict adherence to very tight deadlines. However large or small a conference is, the effort required to make the local arrangements work for all is not insignificant. The conference organisers acknowledge the particular efforts of Miss Mita Vaghi in providing her expertise in event management and her diligent support and Anete Ashton of IoP Publications for her guidance and help in producing the conference proceedings and online listing. The organisers also recognise the support provided by our sponsors and in particular to Richard Roberts and David Baker from National Instruments, Babak Jahanbani and Phil Holmes from Festo Ltd. Their continued support over the course of the planning period and also during the event itself is very much appreciated.We are also indebted to all the contributors to the conference, particularly the researchers, and practitioners.Professor Mehmet Karamanoglu Conference ChairFurther details, including keynote speakers and committees, are available in the PDF

Acknowledging the Contribution of Referees

As we have explained in our editorial to this issue (12038), IJMR could not function without the support of those referees who give their time freely to ensure that high quality papers are published in journal. The editorial team attempt to select reviewers who are familiar with the topic under consideration and are able to provide a rigorous evaluation of the paper. Occasionally, there may be some compromises as it can be very difficult to obtain reviewers for some areas of research. There have, for example, been papers which have required more that fifteen invitations before we have obtained agreement from three reviewers. Consequently, we are very grateful to those scholars who respond quickly to emails from the editorial team and to those who take on reviews with tight deadlines. Despite difficulties with a small number of papers we have been able to maintain the time to first decision at 69 days. Having a speedy review process is particularly important for IJMR as we always aim to publish state-of-the-art literature reviews. At the same time, we will never compromise on quality and many authors are asked for further minor amendments after their papers have been accepted for publication by the reviewers. The co-editors are keen to expand our database of reviewers and if you would like to contribute to the journal you can register through the IJMR portal at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ijmr. It is our pleasure, on behalf of Wiley Blackwell and BAM, to thank all those listed below who reviewed for the journal in 2013. The majority of reviewers provide diligent and thoughtful feedback that enables authors to develop their papers to the standard required for publication in IJMR. One measure of the quality of reviews is that we now reject very few papers at the second review stage. We would also like to acknowledge the outstanding contributions by a number of scholars who provided excellent reviews over the period. In consultation with the associate editors, David Denyer and Ellen Parker were highly commended for the quality of their reviewing. After very careful consideration, the co-editors decided that there would be a joint award for reviewer of the year in 2013: Martin Friesl (Lancaster University, UK) and Douglas Cumming (York University, Canada) both made outstanding contributions to the journal. Thank you for your continued support of IJMR.

Crisis and quality of work in the Nordic employment regime

The Nordic countries have been renowned for labour markets with high-quality jobs. The key question for the article is whether this also holds in the current financial and Eurozone crisis. Focus is on the initial years of the crisis, and indicators from the European Working Conditions Survey are used to trace changes in job quality. Physical job demands are on a lower level in the Nordic region compared to the European level. Instead, time pressure and working to tight deadlines are more common. In general, the downturn in the economy seems to have decreased the intensity in the work situation of employees. Temporary employment and job insecurity are more present in Finland and Sweden than in Denmark and Norway. Still, the Nordic employment regime is characterized by a large proportion of jobs where employees have influence and autonomy, and are rather satisfied with their job. One possible explanation for these encouraging results is the high level of unionization that has persisted through the crisis.

Establishing flight software reliability: testing, model checking, constraint-solving, monitoring and learning

In this paper we discuss the application of a range of techniques to the verification of mission-critical flight software at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For this type of application we want to achieve a higher level of confidence than can be achieved through standard software testing. Unfortunately, given the current state of the art, especially when efforts are constrained by the tight deadlines and resource limitations of a flight project, it is not feasible to produce a rigorous formal proof of correctness of even a well-specified stand-alone module such as a file system (much less more tightly coupled or difficult-to-specify modules). This means that we must look for a practical alternative in the area between traditional testing and proof, as we attempt to optimize rigor and coverage. The approaches we describe here are based on testing, model checking, constraint-solving, monitoring, and finite-state machine learning, in addition to static code analysis. The results we have obtained in the domain of file systems are encouraging, and suggest that for more complex properties of programs with complex data structures, it is possibly more beneficial to use constraint solvers to guide and analyze execution (i.e., as in testing, even if performed by a model checking tool) than to translate the program and property into a set of constraints, as in abstraction-based and bounded model checkers. Our experience with non-file-system flight software modules shows that methods even further removed from traditional static formal methods can be assisted by formal approaches, yet readily adopted by test engineers and software developers, even as the key problem shifts from test generation and selection to test evaluation.

Occupational stress and job demand, control and support factors among construction project consultants

Occupational stress affects the health and wellbeing of people who work, and the construction industry is recognized as a high-stress working environment. The relationship between job demands, job control, workplace support, and experiences of stress in the South African construction context is investigated, using hierarchical regression, factor analysis and structural equation modeling to explore the strength of thirteen factor relationships with perceived stress. Data were gathered from an on-line questionnaire survey response sample of 676 architects, civil engineers, quantity surveyors, and project and construction managers. Predictors displaying a significant relationship with occupational stress are the presence of work–life imbalance, the need to ‘prove’ oneself, hours worked per week, working to tight deadlines, and support from line managers in difficult situations at work. Existing theories of occupational stress are confirmed but not completely supported. The construction industry should give attention to how the need to work long hours is justified. Organizations should look to improving managerial and collegial support for construction professionals, but be careful in engaging in socializing and project team-building activities. Further research will need to focus more deeply on construction-specific job demand factors; explore why women professionals appear to experience more stress than men; and aim to develop reliable early-warning detection techniques for construction professionals.

Clinical and Translational Imaging: the making of an international journal

Around four years ago, the Board of the Italian Association of Nuclear Medicine (AIMN) began to examine the possibility of launching a new journal as its official organ. The members’ commitment to this new project was strengthened by their awareness of the value of this strategic choice. The idea was to develop an international journal with a global reach that would strengthen the presence of AIMN within its international scientific community of reference, that of molecular imaging. To this end, the involvement of an internationally renowned publisher, equally committed to the field of diagnostic imaging, was felt to be crucial. The founding of the new journal in partnership with Springer thus marked a crucial change in the editorial policy of AIMN. The journal was given a clear mission to provide reviews on clinically relevant topics and research issues in the field of imaging, focusing on developments that are in the process of becoming clinically applicable. Thus, Clinical and Translational Imaging publishes invited reviews that provide in-depth and methodologically sound analyses of the results of basic science and clinical research relevant to the diagnosis and care of patients. Each bimonthly issue, edited by two guest editors, is an updated and readily accessible ‘‘e-booklet’’ that summarizes, through key papers by selected basic and clinical scientists, the state of the art of the topic being covered. This strategy, which required the preliminary identification and ‘‘recruitment’’ of outstanding scientists in each of the fields and sub-fields of interest, ensures high quality and, through a combination of both innovative and well-established procedures, a valid overview of the chosen topic. Today, at the start of the second year of publication, it is time to take stock of the situation. First of all, it is important to point out that the success of any scientific journal depends on the valuable support of scientists willing to devote part of their time to improving the quality of scientific literature. In this regard, we feel that the results of this first year reflect our aim of ensuring high-quality content, which is an essential prerequisite for achieving a higher profile and greater recognition from the scientific community and thus for impacting on clinical practice. To guarantee these high standards of quality and help this journal become an authoritative and selective reference tool, invited papers go through a strict peerreview process. In the course of 2013 about 250 scientists were invited to participate in the peer-review process, and around 100 of them delivered valuable and detailed comments within usually tight deadlines. In particular, the contribution of the Editorial Board, composed of a panel of renowned experts with high citation records, has been outstanding. In addition to reviewing single papers, many of them have been or are actively involved as guest editors of published and forthcoming monothematic issues. As regards the authors, it is worth noting that although the journal, in this start start-up phase, has enjoyed the G. Lucignani Department of Biomedical Sciences and Technologies and Center of Molecular and Cellular Imaging (IMAGO), University of Milan, Milan, Italy

TIME PRESSURE, SOCIAL WORK STRESSORS AND BLOOD PRESSURE IN A TEAM OF SEVEN IT-WORKERS DURING ONE WEEK OF INTENSE WORK

Background. In the field of information technology (IT) time pressure is common. Working with tight deadlines together on the same task increases the risk of social stressors referring to tensions and conflicts at work. Purpose. This field study tested both the association of time pressure and social stressors with blood pressure during work. Method . Seven employees ““ staff of a small IT enterprise ““ participated in repeated ambulatory blood pressure measurements over the course of one week. Time pressure and social stressors at work were assessed by questionnaire at the beginning of the study. Results. Multilevel regression analyses of 138 samples revealed higher levels of time pressure to be related to marginally significant increases in mean arterial blood pressure at noon and in the afternoon. In addition, higher levels of social stressors at work were significantly associated to elevated mean arterial pressure in the afternoon. Conclusion. Findings support the view that threats to the social self play an important role in occupational health.Â

Effective use of social media for talent acquisition and recruitment

As revealed by the statistics, use of social media for talent acquisition has climbed by about 50% as compared to 2013. Job seekers are increasingly using platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest to contact recruiters. Recruiters are forming various groups and forums on these platforms to headhunt candidates across various geographies. The penetration of social media in recruitment is fuelled by increasing number of internet users, the shortened cycle and tight deadlines for completing the selection process. Decrease in the usage of traditional ways of hiring and the convenience social media bring to the selection process. Looking at the flip side, screening of candidates via social profiles can be time consuming and misleading. This paper focuses on the constructive usage of social media for ensuring expedited filling of vacancies. It discusses how the supporting tools on social media can help recruiters filter and search appropriate candidates for their vacancies.

Joan Oliver i el Teatre de Txèkhov

Joan Oliver's versions of Chekhov's plays stem from Oliver's interest in the Russian playwright. However, what promoted their continuity and performance was the Agrupació Dramàtica de Barcelona (ADB) and independent theater groups such as Teatre Experimental Català (TEC) or Teatre de la Gavina. Thanks to them, Chekhov's theater would undergo a gradual integration into Catalan theater and literature that would become wide and definitive from the 1980s. For Oliver, his versions of Chekov were a way of contributing to the renovation and consolidation of Catalonia's theater at the extraordinarily difficult moment that Catalan culture experienced during the Spanish post-war period. This article looks at the circumstances surrounding the performance of Oliver's versions from the early 1950s to the late 1960s and their reception by the theater critics of the Barcelona press. The latter, pressed to write short articles to tight deadlines, often failed to give Oliver's text the attention it deserved, and although the playwright's prestige could lead to positive evaluations, these were sometimes of a shallow nature.

Are healthcare middle management jobs extreme jobs?

The purpose of this paper is to explore the incidence of "extreme jobs" among middle managers in acute hospitals, and to identify individual and organizational implications. The paper is based on interviews and focus groups with managers at six hospitals, a "proof of concept" pilot with an operations management team, and a survey administered at five hospitals. Six of the original dimensions of extreme jobs, identified in commercial settings, apply to hospital management: long hours, unpredictable work patterns, tight deadlines with fast pace, broad responsibility, "24/7 availability", mentoring and coaching. Six healthcare-specific dimensions were identified: making life or death decisions, conflicting priorities, being required to do more with fewer resources, responding to regulatory bodies, the need to involve many people before introducing improvements, fighting a negative climate. Around 75 per cent of hospital middle managers have extreme jobs. This extreme healthcare management job model was derived inductively from a qualitative study involving a small number of respondents. While the evidence suggests that extreme jobs are common, further research is required to assess the antecedents, incidence, and implications of these working practices. A varied, intense, fast-paced role with responsibility and long hours can be rewarding, for some. However, multi-tasking across complex roles can lead to fatigue, burnout, and mistakes, patient care may be compromised, and family life may be adversely affected. As far as the authors can ascertain, there are no other studies exploring acute sector management roles through an extreme jobs lens.

Robust static resource allocation of DAGs in a heterogeneous multicore system

In this study, we consider an environment composed of a heterogeneous cluster of multicore-based machines used to analyze satellite data. The workload involves large data sets and is subject to a deadline constraint. Multiple applications, each represented by a directed acyclic graph (DAG), are allocated to a dedicated heterogeneous distributed computing system. Each vertex in the DAG represents a task that needs to be executed and task execution times vary substantially across machines. The goal of this research is to assign the tasks in applications to a heterogeneous multicore-based parallel system in such a way that all applications complete before a common deadline, and their completion times are robust against uncertainties in execution times. We define a measure that quantifies robustness in this environment. We design, compare, and evaluate five static resource allocation heuristics that attempt to maximize robustness. We consider six different scenarios with different ratios of computation versus communication, and loose and tight deadlines.

Sea-changes: Melville-Forster-Britten: The Story of Billy Budd and its Operatic Adaptation. By Hanna Rochlitz.

During the autumn of 1948, after discussions with E. M. Forster, Benjamin Britten decided that Billy Budd would be his next opera, with Forster and Eric Crozier as librettists. Between those initial discussions and the first performance at Covent Garden a little more than three years later, on 1 December 1951, Britten, now in his late thirties, fulfilled many other commitments: the completion of the Spring Symphony, the composition of Let’s Make an Opera (The Little Sweep), an edition of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and various smaller works, including Lachrymae and the Six Metamorphoses after Ovid. There were also many performances with Peter Pears and the English Opera Group, often involving extensive travel, not to mention nurturing the fledgling Aldeburgh Festival, which had been launched in June 1948. Britten’s energy and productivity were never more remarkable than at this stage of his career. Yet it should be no surprise if the famed ambiguities and equivocations of his compositions sometimes turn out to have as much to do with loose ends and acceptable compromises—determined by tight performance deadlines and the pressing need to move on to other things—as with the modernist aspiration to embody ambivalence as multivalently as possible in any finished work. That this is likely to be true of Billy Budd is reinforced by the composer’s decision to produce a revised two-act version of the opera during the autumn of 1960, nine years after the first performance of the original four-act version, and the differences between the two, as well as the reasons why each version took the form it did, have been exhaustively discussed by many writers down the years. Now the documentary evidence of the work’s fraught and speedy genesis is given an even more comprehensive dusting down by Hanna Rochlitz. Rochlitz justifies her claim that she is the first scholar ‘to give extensive consideration to all the currently available material’ (p. 27). It is regrettable, given the high level of quotation from so many diverse sources, that the book’s Index is so sketchy. Yet, even when she might not always seem to allow for the full range of ideas considered by some of those sources, Rochlitz still offers several useful corrections to earlier commentators.

Priority Based Hybrid Automation Testing Tool

Software testing is an important means to ensure software quality and to improve software reliability. As the size and complexity of software applications is continually growing, manual testing becomes infeasible in such arena. Automation of the software testing process saves time and provides better utilization of resources and thus, plays a significant role in the testing activity. This paper presents a hybrid testing tool which extends the support to automatic testing by providing functionality of both GUI and Code based testing. Moreover, it also prioritizes modules under test to achieve a certain degrees of confidence in the testing of web applications that are under tight project deadlines. The proposed hybrid approach allows to combine the benefits of both approaches while keeping a simple interface and treating the two types of tests in a unified fashion.

Flood modelling for cities using Cloud computing

Abstract Urban flood risk modelling is a highly topical example of intensive computational processing. Such processing is increasingly required by a range of organisations including local government, engineering consultancies and the insurance industry to fulfil statutory requirements and provide professional services. As the demands for this type of work become more common, then ownership of high-end computational resources is warranted but if use is more sporadic and with tight deadlines then the use of Cloud computing could provide a cost-effective alternative. However, uptake of the Cloud by such organisations is often thwarted by the perceived technical barriers to entry. In this paper we present an architecture that helps to simplify the process of performing parameter sweep work on an Infrastructure as a Service Cloud. A parameter sweep version of the urban flood modelling, analysis and visualisation software “CityCat” was developed and deployed to estimate spatial and temporal flood risk at a whole city scale – far larger than had previously been possible. Performing this work on the Cloud allowed us access to more computing power than we would have been able to purchase locally for such a short time-frame (∼21 months of processing in a single calendar month). We go further to illustrate the considerations, both functional and non-functional, which need to be addressed if such an endeavour is to be successfully achieved.