Dominikus Herzberg

Touching factor: software development on tablets

Mobile devices have been making their way into our everyday life for quite some time, and especially the market for tablets is increasing. They are used at home for entertainment purposes as well as in professional environments, helping to ensure productivity. A large and constantly growing amount of apps for basically every task is available. With one exemption: programmers are still bound to the classic PC setup and hardly use a tablet for software development. The reason for this is simple: their tool chain does not fit the small screens. The space constraints on tablets demand a paradigm shift. We propose a prototype sketch of a development environment based on a concatenative programming language. Concatenative programming has a strong focus on composing words out of other words, supporting a minimalistic and concise approach to programming. This approach perfectly fits into the mobile world and allows developers to write programs for tablets on tablets.

Specifying computer-based counseling systems in health care

Computer-based counseling systems in health care play an important role in the toolset available for medical doctors to inform, motivate and challenge their patients according to a well-defined therapeutic goal. The design, development and implementation of such systems require close collaboration between users, i.e. patients, and developers. While this is true of any software development process, it can be particularly challenging in the health counseling field, where there are multiple specialties and extremely heterogeneous user groups. In order to facilitate a structured design approach for counseling systems in health care, we developed (a) an iterative three-staged specification process, which enables early involvement of potential users in the development process, and (b) a specification language, which enables an author to consistently describe and define user interfaces and interaction designs in a stepwise manner. Due to the formal nature of our specifications, our implementation has some unique features, like early execution of prototypes, automated system generation and verification capabilities.

A language for advanced protocol analysis in automotive networks

The increased use and interconnection of electronic components in automobiles has made communication behavior in automotive networks drastically more complex. Both communication designs at application level and complex communication scenarios are often under-specified or out of scope of existing analysis techniques. We extend traditional protocol analyzers in order to capture communication at the level of abstraction that reflects application design and show that the same technique can be used to specify, monitor and test complex scenarios. We present CFR (channel filter rule) models, a novel approach for the specification of analyzers and a domain-specific language that implements this approach. From CFR models, we can fully generate powerful analyzers that extract design intentions, abstract protocol layers and even complex scenarios from low level communication data. We show that three basic concepts (channels, filters and rules) are sufficient to build such powerful analyzers and identify possible areas of application.

Using formal specification techniques for advanced counseling systems in health care

Computer-based counseling systems in health care play an important role in the toolset available for doctors to inform, motivate and challenge their patients according to a well-defined therapeutic goal. In order to study value, use, usability and effectiveness of counseling systems for specific use cases and purposes, highly adaptable and extensible systems are required, which are - despite their flexibility and complexity - reliable, robust and provide exhaustive logging capabilities. We developed a computer-based counseling system, which has some unique features in that respect: The actual counseling system is generated out of a formal specification. Interaction behavior, logical conception of interaction dialogs and the concrete look & feel of the application are separately specified. In addition, we have begun to base the formalism on a mathematical process calculus enabling formal reasoning. As a consequence e.g. consistency and termination of a counseling session with a patient can be verified. We can precisely record and log all system and patient generated events; they are available for advanced analysis and evaluation.

Software Engineering for Telecommunications Systems

Although from todays point of view many commonalities seem to exist between the two, the telephone system and the Internet were historically created with different aims and design philosophies in mind and are based on different technologies. The telephone system was designed primarily for voice communication between humans; even data services like transmission of facsimiles (fax) used tone modulation techniques over the voice channel. The telephone system uses circuit and packet switching to establish a dedicated connection with guaranteed quality of service (QoS) for the duration of a call. The Internet, on the other hand, was designed for flexible data exchange between computers with the capability to compensate single points of failure—it was intended as a network for military purposes in the first place. The Internet uses packet switching for efficient communications with best effort QoS. Keywords: telecommunications; software; internet; system design; distribution; room; layering; OSI; planes

Idee und Organisation von Open Source

Nicola Marsden ist Professorin im Studiengang Software Engineering an der Hochschule Heilbronn. Als Psychologin liegt ihr Schwerpunkt auf dem sozialen Prozess in der Softwareentwicklung, der Medienund Sozialpsychologie und der computervermittelten Kommunikation. Nach zehnjähriger Tätigkeit in der Industrie, in der sie unter anderem Organisationen bei der Einführung von IT-Systemen unterstützte, promovierte sie über Stereotype über Internet-Nutzende. Sie ist derzeit Dekanin der Fakultät Produktion und Logistik, Software Engineering und Verfahrensund Umwelttechnik.