Earticle

The primary consequence of the transition to multicore processors is that applications will increasingly need to be parallelized to fully exploit the throughput gains now becoming available. Unfortunately, parallel programming is no doubt much more tedious and errorprone than serial programming. Software vendors have begun efforts to educate developers and provide them with better tools for multicore programming. But many of the tools available are still works in progress. This paper presents a preliminary study of the usability of the state-of-the-art threading tools for multicore programming. We report on our evaluation of the usability of two Intel threading tools: Intel Thread Profiler - a visual profiling tool for monitoring the parallelism gain of parallel applications and Intel Thread Checker - a sophisticated tool for finding potential deadlocks and data race conditions in a parallel code.

This paper presents a hierarchical test model and automated test framework for robot software components of RTC(Robot Technology Component) combined with hardware module. The hierarchical test model consists of three levels of testing based on V-model : unit test, integration test, and system test. The automated test framework incorporates four components of test data generation, test manager, test execution, and test monitoring. The proposed testing model and its automation framework is proven to be efficient for testing of developed robotic software components in terms of time and cost. The feasibility and effectiveness of proposed architecture for robot components testing are illustrated through an application example along with embedded robotic testbed equipped with range sensor hardware and its software component modeled as an RTC.

In this paper we focus on the relationship between the error rate which is one of the representative reliability measures in Apache web servers and the system parameters which reflect on the web server's system performance, and develop a probability model to describe it. More specifically, we implement a simple client server system and carry out an experiment to measure both the error rate and the system parameters. As the result on quantitative evaluation of the proposed logit model, it is shown that our model could fit the empirical error rate with varying the number of threads.

Since the introduction of object-oriented (OO) development techniques into industrial practices for software development, many Function Point (FP) technique adaptations have been proposed to improve estimations on the size of a software application. Most research works only deal with OO modifications to the previous version of the FP Counting Practices Manual (4.1) or they do not include some important UML specifications such as the composition relationship between classes. In this paper, we propose rules to identify Internal Logic Files (ILF) and External Interface Files (EIF) using analysis class diagrams. These rules were defined in accordance with the recommendations included in the FP Counting Practices Manual 4.2.1. We also present the results obtained by applying our rules to software size estimation case studies performed with undergraduate and graduate students. These results have proved our proposal to be at least equally accurate and consistent with the original FP technique.

We describe and analyze the experiences from a cross-platform mobile middleware project. Our aim is to identify best practices and provide guidelines for solving similar problems in the context of cross-platform-targeted programming in mobile as well as other environments. The main deliverable of the observed project was a cross-platform implementation of a protocol for maintaining DHT-based peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, with an emphasis on mobile operation. The target platforms of the software were Symbian OS, mobile Maemo Linux, and desktop/server Linux distributions. Considering the large number of incompatible mobile platforms in the market, the fluency of cross-platform mobile software development is of particular importance. The observations in our work include the importance of maintaining the relevant conventions of the various platforms in the code and understanding the asymmetric difficulty in porting code between different platforms. We also determine the amount of cross-platform support related code in an example software module.