Abstract

Abstract
Many of the current approaches used in teaching and learning in engineering education are not the most appropriate to prepare students for the challenges they will face in their professional careers. The active involvement of students in their learning process facilitates the development of the technical and professional competencies they need as professionals. This article describes the organisation and impact of a mini-conference and project work - the creation of a software product and its introduction in the market - aimed at the development of professional competencies in general and writing skills in particular. The course was evaluated by assessing the students' perception of the development of a number of professional competencies through a questionnaire completed by 125 students from two consecutive year groups. The results indicate that the project work and the mini-conference had a positive impact on students' perceptions of the development of professional competencies. © 2012 Copyright SEFI.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Since wireless sensor network applications are ever growing in scale and complexity, managers require strong formal guarantees that any changes done to the system can be enacted safely. This paper presents the formalisation and analysis of the semantics of policies, tiny software artefacts used to orchestrate wireless sensor network applications. The semantics of policies is formalised in terms of traces augmented with information concerning the constraints under which traces are executed. These traces are composed according to the network topology and subsequently analysed using the mCRL2 model-checking tool. The analysis allows for the detection of semantical inconsistencies that may lead to dangerous or unwanted behaviour of the application based on the policy configuration. An analysis of policies in a real-world system is provided, showing how to verify security and resource usage properties. © 2012 IEEE.

Abstract
Modern software systems must support a high degree of variability to accommodate a wide range of requirements and operating conditions. This paper introduces the Abstract Behavioural Specification (ABS) language and tool suite, a comprehensive platform for developing and analysing highly adaptable distributed concurrent software systems. The ABS language has a hybrid functional and object- oriented core, and comes with extensions that support the development of systems that are adaptable to diversified requirements, yet capable to maintain a high level of trustworthiness. Using ABS, system variability is consistently traceable from the level of requirements engineering down to object behaviour. This facilitates temporal evolution, as changes to the required set of features of a system are automatically reflected by functional adaptation of the system's behaviour. The analysis capabilities of ABS stretch from debugging, observing and simulating to resource analysis of ABS models and help ensure that a system will remain dependable throughout its evolutionary lifetime. We report on the experience of using the ABS language and the ABS tool suite in an industrial case study. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.