Using a number of complementary approaches to model, analyse and interpret metric and other data records of the evolution of systems from various application areas, the project has made significant advances in detecting the effect of feedback and related dynamics in their evolution. Results obtained to date, supported by theoretical reasoning, support the view that software process improvement must focus on the global process including its feedback mechanisms. In addition to technical aspects of the process, organisation, management, marketing, user support and other factors must also be considered. This paper discusses the conceptual framework within which this question is raised, presents preliminary evidence to support tentative conclusions and indicates how the issue might be further investigated. We then combine these alternative strategies within an asychronous control structure of a parallel algorithm, implemented on a distributed memory multiprocessor machine.
Binary compatibility is a novel concept for language design.
We argue that the description of the term binary compatibility in the Java language specification allows for many possible interpretations. We discuss the various interpretations and their ramifications, and suggest one interpretation, which is best in our view. In this report, we investigate the problem of symbolic knowledge extraction from trained neural networks, and present a new extraction method. Although neural networks have shown very good performance in terms of learnability, generalizability and speed in many application domains, one of their main drawbacks lies in their incapacity to provide an explanation to the underlying reasoning mechanisms that justify a given answer. As a result, their use in many application areas, for instance in safety-critical domains, has become limited.