Wayne W. Ballantyne

Location services in WiMax networks

Location-based services have become a requisite feature for most wireless networks. There are two primary use cases: newer applications such as navigation, tracking of assets and personnel, and Points of Interest lookup, and emergency services (e.g., E911), where the users location is reported to the public safety answering point from which emergency responders are dispatched. Within this space of applications, location accuracies ranging from less than 5 m to hundreds of meters may be acceptable, depending on the specific use case. This article presents the end-to-end framework for location-based services in WiMAX technology, including both the mobile managed location approach with minimal network support as well as different network managed location solutions with assistance from mobile stations.

Measuring effort in a corporate repository

Project management and process improvement are a critical part of software development in an organization, especially for large scale and long-lived software. Metrics can be used as one of the means to evaluate this process. However, traditional methods of measuring effort, for example, focusing on editing time and lines of code produced, do not reflect the true cost to the organization. The organization pays developers for their time, regardless of whether they are writing code or performing other activities. This paper describes an experimental approach to track and measure effort in developer days, using log files from a corporate repository. The data is fine-grained, empirical, and non-invasively collected. Results have been tested on several projects in a large organization over a period of many years.