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It is of general agreement that quality issues should be considered very early in the software development process, to mitigate risks and to facilitate the achievement of the overall software system. Moreover, the architecture of the system drives the whole development process. The fulfillment of nonfunctional quality requirements by a candidate architecture is crucial to select the convenient architecture on which the whole system will be articulated.

This work deals with the specification of quality requirements for software architecture, introducing a technique based on the ISO 9126-1 standard.

http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2003_03/article2

The Web services honeymoon is over. Numerous enterprises have built their Web services pilot projects and have proven to themselves that this most recent evolution of distributed computing technology can reduce integration and development costs substantially. In addition, critical Web services standards are falling into place, and vendors are coming to market with robust security and management products. It is time for forward-looking enterprises to take the next step.

http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=7380

Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) 1.4.1 introduces three new garbage collection algorithms, effectively doubling the number that existed in J2SE 1.4.0. The new techniques target applications needing high throughput or minimal pause time during execution. This article examines the new algorithms in the broader context of Java garbage collection and provides some hints about when they are appropriate.

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-2003/jw-0307-j2segc.html

Your XP team needs to understand how to interact with the project sponsors (the people who pay for the software) in a way that speaks their language, but doesn’t compromise the principles XP tells us are important.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-xp020403/

For large enterprise systems, a strategy of design for evolvability is a necessity. This approach does not distinguish between development and maintenance; maintenance is simply continued product development. A common practice has been to engage a large development team for several years, followed by years of maintenance by an inadequately small team, followed by a major effort to replace the system. An alternative and potentially more practical approach is to keep an adequately sized development team in place to constantly evolve and maintain the software in a sustainable manner.

Before systems can be evolved, they must be evolvable. Transforming legacy systems to the point where evolvable software development again makes sense is accomplished through legacy system modernization.

http://interactive.sei.cmu.edu/news@sei/columns/the_cots_spot/cots-spot.htm

Distributed systems require that computations running in different address spaces, potentially on different hosts, are able to communicate. “Raw” communications via sockets require applications to engage in application-level protocols to encode and decode messages. The design of such protocols is cumbersome and time consuming.

RPC (Remote Procedure Call) abstracts the communication interface to the level of a procedure call. RPC, however, does not translate well into distributed object systems. To match the semantics of object invocation, distributed object systems require RMI (Remote Method Invocation) [1].

http://www.cuj.com/webonly/2003/0304/web0304c/web0304c.htm

The Data Access Object pattern has become a standard part of the J2EE developer’s arsenal. What most developers don’t know is that one of its variations allows for much easier testing. Simulated data access objects bring together the best of DAO, mock objects, and layered testing, letting you simultaneously improve both your testing results and your overall development method.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-sdao/

Requirements specification is the requirements engineering task during which analyzed requirements are properly documented for use by their intended audiences. Traditionally, this involved the requirements team using a word processing program to produce a single requirements specification document during an initial requirements phase of a project.

However, trends in system development have made the numerous problems with this approach abundantly clear. Improvements in requirements tools have not only enabled better requirements management; they have also enabled the automatic generation of consistent, current, audience-specific requirements specifications that far better meet the needs of their individual audiences.

http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2003_03/column6

Grid Application Framework for Java (GAF4J) is a lightweight framework that abstracts all grid semantics from the application logic and provides a simpler programming model that lines up smoothly with common JavaTM programming models. GAF4J abstracts the details of interfacing with a grid middleware, which is assumed to be the Globus Toolkit, for transferring files to remote nodes, starting remote jobs, and monitoring their execution status

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/gaf4j

Xmingwin makes it practical to generate Windows programs from a Linux server. This column gives a recipe for setting up Xmingwin, and outlines the most important reasons for doing so.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-sc10.html

Use cases are popular for modeling, yet people often struggle when writing them. They understand the basic concepts of use cases, but find that actually writing useful ones turns out to be harder than they expect. One factor contributing to this difficulty is that we lack objective criteria to help judge the quality of use cases. Many people find it difficult to articulate the characteristics of an effective use case.

This book examines the problems people encounter while writing use cases. It describes simple, elegant, and proven solutions to the specific problems of writing use cases on real projects.

Cockburn et all.

http://www.aw.com/catalog/academic/product/1,4096,0201721848,00.html?type=PRE

Het succes van procesverbetering bij IT-service management valt vaak tegen. Niet door de traditionele scheiding tussen ontwikkeling en beheer, maar door de interne focus. Het hek moet open. De intrede van het IT-servicecenter, in nauwe afstemming met de klant. En een kostenbeheermodel, speciaal voor IT-service.

http://www.informatie.nl/

SERC is overgenomen door CIBIT Adviseurs|Opleiders. CIBIT en SERC zijn beide eind jaren tachtig opgericht als kenniscentrum op het gebied van ‘kennis & ICT’. SERC onderscheidt zich met advies op het gebied van software engineering en software kwaliteit. CIBIT is als adviseur en opleider actief op het vlak van ICT architectuur, portals en kennismanagement. SERC blijft haar relaties bedienen onder de eigen naam.

http://www.serc.nl/content/SERC_onderdeel_CIBIT.shtml