CONTENTS

Write a letter to the editor

COLUMNS

Strategic Software Engineering

Qualitative SIMPLE
By John McGregor

Teams planning to adopt the software product line strategy often must develop a series of justifications and evaluations before receiving approval for full adoption. The initial justifications are usually intended to convince a manager to approve funds to conduct a more detailed study. SIMPLE, Structured Intuitive Model of Product Line Economics, provides a technique for modeling the costs and benefits of a software product line over its life time.

Java at Large

Mining Edgar Tender Offers
By Douglas Lyon

A new set of problems appears when attempting to parse unstructured financial narratives (even in a domain restricted area). The question of how to best approach this problem remains open. After a Dutch auction is over, we should be able to mine the results and summarize them in a semi-automatic manner. This remains a topic of current research.

Business Objects

Applications At Your Service
By Mahesh Dodani

Corporate management always pushes for better IT utilization, greater ROI, integration of historically separate systems, and faster implementation of new systems; but some things are different now. Legacy systems must be reused rather than replaced, because with even more constrained budgets, replacement is cost-prohibitive.

Guest Column

First Person Shooter Game
By Rex Cason II, Erik Larson, Jonathan Robertson, Jonathan Frisch, George Trice III and Dr. Lakshmi Prayaga

3D game development is an exciting activity for many students. But getting a handle on 3D game development for novices may be a daunting task.

Book review

Software Testing: Interview Questions
Reviewed by Charles Ashbacher

The IBM Rational Unified Process (RUP) has become a de-facto standard for the development of large software projects. The RUP is very flexible, as it is composed of a series of operational plug-ins that allow organizations to select the modules that they can use to configure a process that matches their development needs and methodology.

REFEREED ARTICLES

Adapting the User Interface of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for Novice Users
By Ying Zou, Michael Lerner, Alex Leung, Scott Morisson and Matt Wringe

Novice users, such as first year undergraduate students, often have difficulty in understanding many of the features provided in an IDE and have a hard time locating the appropriate menu elements. We propose an Adaptive User Interface (AUI) architecture which provides a simplified UI for the Eclipse IDE. The AUI assists novice users in using complex IDEs. We develop adaptive algorithms that modify the existing menu system for the Eclipse IDE based on statistical user interaction patterns.

Mapping and Visiting in Functional and Object-Oriented Programming
By Kurt Nørmark, Bent Thomsen, and Lone Leth Thomsen

Mapping and visiting represent different programming styles for traversals of collections of data. Mapping is rooted in the functional programming paradigm, and visiting is rooted in the object-oriented programming paradigm.

An Extended Component Model and its evaluation for Reliability & Quality
By R. Senthil, D. S. Kushwaha and A. K. Misra

Component based Software Engineering focuses on software components and generic connectors that compose them into one unit. A component model needs to define the following things: (i) what components are, i.e. their syntax and semantics; and (ii) how to compose these components, i.e. the semantics of their composition.

Methodological Proposal for Business Process Management sustained in the use of Patterns
By Pedro Bonillo, Nancy Zambrano and Eleonora Acosta

This paper presents a taxonomy of patterns and its representation through an Architecture Definition Laguages (ADL) into an architecture of processes, services, and canon objects in the business process management domain.

OUTLOOK

A brief outlook to the next issue