In a modern computing curriculum, large project courses are essential to give students hands-on experience of working in a realistic software engineering project. Assessing such projects is, however, extremely challenging. There are various aspects and tradeoffs of assessments that can affect the course quality. Individual assessments can give fair grading of individuals, but may loose focus of the project as a group activity. Extensive teacher involvement is necessary for objective assessment, but may affect the way students are working. Continuous feedback to students can enhance learning, but may be hard to combine with fair assessment. Most previous work is focusing on some specific assessment aspect, whereas we in this paper present an assessment model that consists of a collection of assessment activities, each covering different aspects. We have applied, developed, and improved these activities during a seven-year period. To evaluate the usefulness of the model, we perform questionnaire-based surveys over a two-years period. Furthermore, we design and execute an experiment that studies to what extent students can perform fair peer assessment and to what degree the assessments of students and teachers agree. We analyze the results, discuss findings, and summarize lessons learned.

Larger project courses, such as capstone projects, are essential in a modern computing curriculum. Assessing such projects is, how- ever, extremely challenging. There are various aspects and trade-offs of assessments that can affect the quality of a project course. Individual assessments can give fair grading of individuals, but may loose focus of the project as a group activity. Extensive teacher involvement is necessary for objective assessment, but may affect the way students are working. Continuous feedback to students can enhance learning, but may be hard to combine with fair assessment. Most previous work is focusing on some specific assessment aspect, whereas we in this paper present an assessment model that consists of a collection of assessment activities, each covering different aspects. We have applied, developed, and improved these activities during a six-year period and evaluated their usefulness by performing a questionnaire-based survey.

This paper reviews the use of time, clocks, and clock synchronization protocols in cyber-physical systems (CPS). Recent advances in the area of timing suggest avenues of research and potential new application areas. We discuss how introducing timestamps and clocks can help overcome issues such as latency, jitter, and determining correct execution order. Furthermore, we show how system complexity can be reduced and distribution as well as parallelism can be done deterministically. We also point to recent work in raising time to first class citizen status in modeling and implementation. In particular, we describe design and execution environments of CPS and specialized hardware such as predictable timing architectures where time plays a key role.

Operational semantics and attribute grammars are examples of formalisms that can be used for generating compilers. We are interested in finding similarities and differences in how these approaches are applied to complex languages, and for generating compilers of such maturity that they have users in industry.

As a specific case, we present a comparative analysis of two compilers for Modelica, a language for physical modeling, and which contains numerous compilation challenges. The two compilers are OpenModelica, which is based on big-step operational semantics, and JModelica.org, which is based on reference attribute grammars.

We contend that repeatability of execution times is crucial to the validity of testing of real-time systems. However, computer architecture designs fail to deliver repeatable timing, a consequence of aggressive techniques that improve average-case performance. This paper introduces the Precision-Timed ARM (PTARM), a precision-timed (PRET) microarchitecture implementation that exhibits repeatable execution times without sacrificing performance. The PTARM employs a repeatable thread-interleaved pipeline with an exposed memory hierarchy, including a repeatable DRAM controller. Our benchmarks show an improved throughput compared to a single-threaded in-order five-stage pipeline, given sufficient parallelism in the software.

Teaching larger software engineering project courses at the end of a computing curriculum is a way for students to learn some aspects of real-world jobs in industry. Such courses, often referred to as capstone courses, are effective for learning how to apply the skills they have acquired in, for example, design, test, and configuration management. However, these courses are typically performed in small teams, giving only a limited realistic perspective of problems faced when working in real companies. This paper describes an alternative approach to classic capstone projects, with the aim of being more realistic from an organizational, process, and communication perspective. This methodology, called the company approach, is described by intended learning outcomes, teaching/learning activities, and assessment tasks. The approach is implemented and evaluated in a larger Masters student course.

Maintenance costs can be substantial for organizations with very large and complex software systems. This paper describes research for reducing anomaly report turnaround time which, if successful, would contribute to reducing maintenance costs and at the same time maintaining a good customer perception. Specifically, we are addressing the problem of the manual, laborious, and inaccurate process of assigning anomaly reports to the correct design teams. In large organizations with complex systems this is particularly problematic because the receiver of the anomaly report from customer may not have detailed knowledge of the whole system. As a consequence, anomaly reports may be wrongly routed around in the organization causing delays and unnecessary work. We have developed and validated machine learning approach, based on stacked generalization, to automatically route anomaly reports to the correct design teams in the organization. A research prototype has been implemented and evaluated on roughly one year of real anomaly reports on a large and complex system at Ericsson AB. The prediction accuracy of the automation is approaching that of humans, indicating that the anomaly report handling time could be significantly reduced by using our approach.

EOOLT 2010 was the third edition of the EOOLT workshop series. The workshop is intended to bring together researchers and practitioners fromdifferent equation-based object-oriented (EOO) modeling language communities. This year’s workshop also expands the scope to include the whole design space of languages for cyber-physical systems, where physical dynamics are mixed with networks and software. The workshop gathered 31 participants to present and discuss thirteen different papers grouped into the four areas of real-time oriented modeling languages and tools, modeling language design, simulation and model compilation, and modeling and simulation tools.

When teaching software engineering courses it is highly important to have good text books that are well-founded, up-to-date, and easily accessible to students. However, currently available text books on the market are either very broad or highly specialized, making it hard to select appropriate books for specific software engineering courses. Moreover, due to the rapidly changing subject of software engineering, books tend to become obsolete, which make students hesitate to buy books even if they are part of the listed course literature. In this paper, we briefly explain and discuss an approach of using a web-based system for creating collaborative and peer-reviewed text books that can be customized individually for specific courses. We describe and discuss the proposed system from a use case perspective.