Nobuhiro Kataoka

Risk Management Method Using Data from EVM in Software Development Projects

The main objective of risk management is to reduce factors that will give negative influence to project. However, it is difficult to specify the risk of actualizing beforehand. In this paper, we first analyze real cases of software development projects that adopted risk management but failed, and identify the root causes. Next, we propose a permanent monitoring agency that predicts future risks generation using quantitative data captured by earned value management technique. The proposal of this paper was applied an actual software development organization and ensured effectiveness.

A Mass Data Update Method in Distributed Systems

Abstract Today, distributed business systems are used widely, and the consistency of their databases are maintained by the distributed transactions. On the other hand, a great deal of data is often updated in a lump-sum in the business systems. And, since the non-stop service has become general, it is necessary to perform this lump-sum update concurrently with the online transactions that service to users. So, some methods are utilized to avoid the influences on the online transactions, like the mini-batch that splits a lump-sum update into small transactions and executes them one after another. However, in the distributed systems, since it has to be executed by the distributed transactions, there is a problem on the efficiency to update a great deal of data by this method. For this problem, we propose to apply an update method to the distributed systems, which utilizes the records of data about the time to avoid conflicts between the lump-sum update and the online transactions. Moreover, through experiments using a prototype, we confirmed that it can update data more efficiently than the chain of small transactions even in the distributed systems.

A Method to Identify Critical Software Process Improvement Area Using Quality Function Deployment

This paper first discusses an issue in identifying critical software process improvement area. Next a method on how to use quality function deployment is described. Since the end of year 2003, ISO/IEC 15504 has become International Standard for Software Process Assessment, and we can observe increased use of this process model in industries and governmental organizations. ISO/IEC 15504 does not only improve compliance to the model by use of assessment reports, but also identifies critical process improvement area by use of benchmarks, risks, effectiveness measure, and organizational needs as candidate information. In this paper, use of quality function deployment in identifying critical software process improvement area is proposed, with aid of example from real project application.

An Implementation of Concurrency Control between Batch Update and Online Entries

Abstract Databases of business systems are generally updated by two methods: the online entries reflect the input from a lot of terminals immediately; the batch update updates a great deal of data in a lump. Here, the batch update usually takes time. So, in the case where it is performed as a single transaction by using the lock, the conflicting online entries wait for a long while. For this problem, we had proposed the temporal update method, and showed the both can be executed concurrently by it. However, to process them by a serializable schedule, the execution timing of the online entries has to be divided by the batch update. So, it raises a problem that there are still latencies of some online entries by this. In this article, we propose four concurrency control methods to shorten this wait. And, we show their implementations and evaluation results. Moreover, we show the appropriate method should be chosen based on the operational requirements

Design technique for enhancing software quality and development suitability

Taking software designing as a technical procedure will greatly contribute to the enhancement of software quality and development efficiency. To take it as a technical procedure means to get some specific processes from specifications by means of design, which also means that it is inevitable in the present technology. When dealing with software, the method of realizing a specific process covers a fairly wide scope compared with hardware, mechanisms and systems, which weakens the relationship between specifications and processes, and it eventually deteriorates the quality and aggravates the development efficiency. Hence, we present a software design technique as a single set of three items for a method of taking it as a technical procedure. This paper covers concise functional partitioning, an assessmentminded software structure and selection of the best technique, which is the most important, and it also describes the reasons for the said items.

A Proposal of Transaction Processing Method for MongoDB

At present, to deal with a large amount of variety data in the database, various NoSQL databases have been proposed and put to practical use. However, since most of them support the transaction processing only on the single data, there is the problem that the plural data cannot be updated in a lump with maintaining the ACID properties. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a method to process plural data as a single transaction for MongoDB, which is a kind of document oriented NoSQL database. Concretely, each data has both of the before and after update fields, and the state of the transaction is managed. Then, in the case of before the commit, the former data is queried; after the commit, the latter data is queried. By this method, we show that the plural data can be updated as a transaction with the specified isolation level.

Integrity maintenance system of database query under updating

In many mission-critical systems, databases are updated by transaction processing, and are queried by batch processing to make statistics and so on. It is necessary that both processing can be executed at the same time for the efficient operation. The method, which manages the history of the data and queries a snapshot of the past time to avoid the influence of the present updating, was proposed. However, there is a problem that even if the error data had been corrected just before querying, it is not reflected in the snapshot. In this paper, we propose a method, by which the correction of the data done after the time of the snapshot is reflected in it, and show the integrity of the querying result maintained even while data are being updated. Moreover, we applied this method to a mission-critical system, and confirmed that it was effective.