Software based systems incrementally provide critical services to users. Mobile telephone systems, for example, are used in circumstances in which the malfunctioning may have disastrous consequences.
During the last years, software has been incorporated in devices used in daily life,…

In spite of years of research and development, formal structured estimation of time and effort required to develop a Management Information System (MIS) is still an open problem. Usual estimation techniques applied by now are supported by the not so…

In today’s world, in both the public or private organizations, there exists the problem that the organizations have to create value, are changing, but the tools to measure them are not. On the other hand, in the current economy, the…

Numerical Taxonomy aims to group in clusters, using so-called structure analysis of operational taxonomic units (OTUs or taxons or taxa) through numerical methods.
These clusters constitute families. Structural analysis, based on their phenotypic characteristics, exhibits the relationships, in terms of…

The Standardization of a development process for systems of medium complexity, entirely supported by an integrated development environment, could mean a double contribution to the industry of systems development. On the one hand it would contribute to the reduction of…

Ontology mapping involves the task of finding similarities among overlapping sources by using ontologies. In a Federated System in which distributed, autonomous and heterogeneous information sources must be integrated, ontologies have emerged as tools to solve semantic heterogeneity problems. In…

We present point slicing, a new slicing technique for imperative programs that gives an answer to the question Which sentences can be executed if sentence p is executed?, very common in program testing, debugging, and understanding tasks and, as far…

As a contribution to consider software projects to be risk investments, it is important the full standardization of either the planning methodology (as a subset of project management methodology) and the effort estimation method. We think there is important and…

Using COTS software promises faster time-to-market, which can yield substantial advantages over competitors with regards to earlier placement of a new product on a market. At the same time, component-based software introduces risks, such as unknown quality properties of the…

During the last years a lot of projects and lines of research have emerged from different proposals trying to find the best way to reach data integration. Two powerful techniques have appeared separately – ontology and contextual information – in…