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Context: The changes that are taking place with respect to environmental sensitivity are forcing organizations to adopt a new approach to this problem. Implementing sustainability initiatives has become a priority for the social and environmental awareness of organizations that want to stay ahead of the curve. One of the business areas that has, more than others, proven to be a vital asset and a potential ally of the environment, is the area of Information Technology (IT). Through this area, Green IT practices advocate sustainability in and by IT. However, organizations have a significant handicap in this regard, due to the lack of specific Green IT standards and frameworks that help them carry out this type of sustainability practices. Objective: We have developed the “Governance and Management Framework for Green IT” (GMGIT), which establishes the necessary characteristics to implement Green IT in organizations, from the point of view of the governance and management of this area. After developing and validating a first version of this framework, we have performed a set of improvements, obtaining the GMGIT 2.0, which we want to validate. Method: We have conducted a series of empirical validations at international level based on case studies, whose characteristics and results are presented in this study. Results: The results of this multi-case study show an example of the current situation of organizations in Green IT, as well as the resolution of problems encountered during the validations conducted with the GMGIT 1.0. Conclusion: The findings obtained demonstrate the usefulness, applicability, and validity of the framework when implementing, auditing, and improving Green IT in organizations in a systematic and progressive manner.

in UndeterminedIn a team, people sometimes leave the team and become replaced by new persons with less experience, and sometimes people participate in new activities and thereby obtain new knowledge. Different processes, in terms of different management strategies, can be followed, e.g., to introduce people to new tasks so they get new knowledge. There is a need to investigate the long term effects of different strategies on a team's software product knowledge. This paper presents an initial approach for how this type of knowledge can be modeled as a stochastic process. Metrics representing the long term effects on knowledge are derived, and two different example strategies are investigated numerically. Based on this it is discussed how the model can be further elaborated and evaluated.

The aim of the project described in this report was to develop improved support for both students and advisors in the different phases of Master’s thesis projects in software engineering. The work was done in several steps, including a web-based survey among students; an interview study with students, supervisors and examiners; formulation of a support framework; and evaluation of the developed support. The main results of the project are improved understanding of the challenges of thesis projects, a support framework for different project phases, and examples of concrete support for different situations. We believe that the findings are relevant for Master’s thesis projects in areas other than software engineering.

To be able to survive in the long run the medical device industry of today needs effective development processes and ways to secure quality. These development processes and quality assurance processes must follow the different laws and regulations over the world depending on what market the organisations are established on. Organisations have been developing medical devices and systems over many years but now this type of products contain more and more software. The development of software is often appended in to the existing development and quality assurance processes and these processes may not be the most efficient and correct processes when it comes to software. This paper presents the results from an interview study with the purpose to survey how the medical device companies work today, what development processes and quality assurance techniques they use and how laws and regulations affect their way of working. Safety is very essential for the medical device organisations and all the interviewed organisations consider the software in their medical device as safety critical. Risk and risk analysis is an important part of the safety thinking and is frequently performed by the organisations. However established and systematic techniques to analyse risks of the medical devices are not so frequently used as expected. The intension is that the results from the study could be used as a help to find more adapted processes and techniques for software development in the medical device domain. The results have also been used to derive a set of requirements on new techniques and methods in the area. The derived requirements can serve as guidance to researchers aiming at improving processes, methods and techniques in the medical device domain.

ispartof: MARTES project report nrpages: 83 status: published

During recent years we have seen several large-scale crises. The 9/11 terror attacks, tsunamis, storms, floods and bombings have all caused a great deal of damage. A common factor in these crises has been the need for information and one important source of information is usually Web sites. In this work we investigate and design an overload control system for Web sites that are vital in crises. The overload control system uses content adaption to dynamically control Web site performance

During recent years we have seen several large-scale crises. The 9/11 terror attacks, tsunamis, storms, floods and bombings have all been unpredictable and caused a great deal of damage. One common factor in these crises has been the need for information and one important source of information is usually web sites. In this work three new sets of web server access logs are presented and analyzed, one of which represent the traffic to the major news site, Aftonbladet, in Sweden after the bombings in London, 7th of July 2005. The differences in document popularity between the crisis logs and the other logs are investigated.

Software inspection has proven to be an effective way to increase the quality of software products. A new reading technique suggested for software inspection, usage-based reading (UBR), has been tested in previous studies, where it showed good defect detection efficiency during inspection of design documents. This study addresses the question whether this is true also for inspections of requirements documents. The idea behind UBR is to let prioritized use-cases direct the reviewer’s focus on important parts of the document. Using graduate students as subjects, the UBR approach for inspection of requirement specification was compared with a checklist approach. All defects were classified according to their severity for the function of the final software. The result shows that reviewers using UBR do not find more defects and use more time than those using a checklist. In conclusion, in comparison with a checklist approach, UBR does not make the inspection of requirements specifications more efficient.