Applications in pervasive computing are typically required to interact seamlessly with their changing environments. To provide users with smart computational services, these applications must be aware of incessant context changes in their environments and adjust their behaviors accordingly. As these environments are highly dynamic and noisy, context changes thus acquired could be obsolete, corrupted or inaccurate. This gives rise to the problem of context inconsistency, which must be timely detected in order to prevent applications from behaving anomalously. In this paper, we propose a formal model of incremental consistency checking for pervasive contexts. Based on this model, we further propose an efficient checking algorithm to detect inconsistent contexts. The performance of the algorithm and its advantages over conventional checking techniques are evaluated experimentally using Cabot middleware.

An approach is presented that automatically determines if a given source code change impacts the design (i.e., UML class diagram) of the system. This allows code-to-design traceability to be consistently maintained as the source code evolves. The approach uses lightweight analysis and syntactic differencing of the source code changes to determine if the change alters the class diagram in the context of abstract design. The intent is to support both the simultaneous updating of design documents with code changes and bringing old design documents up to date with current code given the change history. An efficient tool was developed to support the approach and is applied to an open source system (i.e., HippoDraw). The results are evaluated and compared against manual inspection by human experts. The tool performs better than (error prone) manual inspection. 1.

An approach to support the sustained evolution of traceability links is proposed and outlined. A fine-grained differencing approach on the link endpoints is used to maintain the links in a scalable manner. Here scalable refers to large software systems with thousands of links. Details of the link model and representation are given followed by the process used to evolve traceability links.

A query language for traceability is proposed and presented. The language, TQL, is based in XML and supports queries across multiple artifacts and multiple traceability link types. A number of primitives are defined to allow complex queries to be constructed and executed. Example queries are presented in the context of traceability questions. The technical details of the language and issues of implementation are discussed. 1

Un formalisme pour la traçabilité des transformations par Mathieu Lemoine Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle Faculté des arts et des sciences Mémoire présenté à la Faculté des arts et des sciences en vue de l’obtention du grade de Maître ès sciences (M.Sc.) en informatique

Automatically identifying changes that impact

Information Sciences and Technology iii Intelligent agents and cognitive models are useful for a number of purposes. Unfortunately, limited theory-based tool and language support for the creation of intelligent agents has made it difficult for modelers to create, debug, and reuse agent software. This dissertation explores how to make it easier to create intelligent agents, and especially cognitive models, by taking advantage of established software engineering principles. The benefits of applying software engineering principles to intelligent agent development is demonstrated with the creation of a high-level language and development environment that embodies these principles, and with an evaluation of this language and environment, in use, by students and cognitive modelers. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract—Large organizations like Microsoft tend to rely on formal requirements documentation in order to specify and design the software products that they develop. These documents are meant to be tightly coupled with the actual implementation of the features they describe. In this paper we evaluate the value of high-level topic-based requirements traceability in the version control system, using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). We evaluate LDA topics on practitioners and check if the topics and trends extracted matches the perception that Program Managers and Developers have about the effort put into addressing certain topics. We found that effort extracted from version control that was relevant to a topic often matched the perception of the managers and developers of what occurred at the time. Furthermore we found evidence that many of the identified topics made sense to practitioners and matched their perception of what occurred. But for some topics, we found that practitioners had difficulty interpreting and labelling them. In summary, we investigate the high-level traceability of requirements topics to version control commits via topic analysis and validate with the actual stakeholders the relevance of these topics extracted from requirements. Keywords-latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA); requirements; version control; traceability; topics; requirements engineering I.