The growing attention being paid to stakeholders’ needs and desires reflects the growing importance of requirements engineering (RE) in software and systems development. This introduction reviews the RE process: identifying the stakeholders in a project, determining who and how important they are, prioritizing the identified stakeholder roles, and selecting representative individuals or groups from the identified and prioritized stakeholder roles with whom the development team can elicit and validate system requirements. The authors then mention each article in the issue in the context of (more…)
The ultimate source of truth regarding a program is its execution. By instrumenting and tracing a program, we can judge correctness and CPU and memory use as well as interactions with buggy libraries, operating systems, and hardware. However, some of the ways we instrument programs make the program too slow for production use or obfuscate and hide the original problem. Traditional tools allow the instrumentation of separate aspects of a program’s operation. In contrast, the DTrace dynamic-tracing framework provides uniform mechanisms for spying comprehensively and unobtrusively on the operatin (more…)
Dell a company ranked in February 2 5 as the Most Admired Company in the world by em Fortune Magazine em is experiencing problem after problem these days. In the wake of recent scandals surrounding exploding laptops lack luster technical support declining market confidence shrinking market share the sudden removal of CEO Kevin Rollins a class action investor-driven lawsuit kickbacks stock backdating and the return of the venerable Michael Dell can the mammoth computer manufacturer recover and return to the top of the mountain it has just so recently tumbled down …
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Business has never been better. The Apple TV is already a surprise hit while iPhone announcements moved Apple s stock to as high as 97.8 in January. Their stranglehold on the portable media player market remains strong brushing off competition from Redmond and China. They have penetrated the living room with their audio and video streaming devices. Note that I have mentioned four Apple products without mentioning a notebook Mac or a piece of software. The next big thing for Apple could very well be a console game …
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