Global software engineering has become a fact in many companies due to real necessity in practice. In contrast to co-located projects global projects face a number of additional software engineering challenges. Among them quality management has become much more difficult and schedule and budget overruns can be observed more often. Compared to co-located projects global software engineering is even more challenging due to the need for integration of different cultures, different languages, and different time zonesacross companies, and across countries. The diversity of development locations on several levels seriously endangers an effective and goal-oriented progress of projects. In this position paper we discuss reasons for global development, sketch settings for distribution and views of orchestration of dislocated companies in a global project that can be seen as a "virtual project environment". We also present a collection of questions, which we consider relevant for global software engineering. The questions motivate further discussion to derive a research agenda in global software engineering.

No abstract

In these days the trend "everything, every time, everywhere" becomes more and more apparent. As consequence of this trend everyone has a lot of small or invisible devices in his direct environment, e.g. mobile phones, PDAs, or music players. Also some network technologies to connect the different devices like (W)LAN or Bluetooth moved mainstream. Today in most domains the considered devices and technologies are integrated in isolated applications with fixed hardware settings. But humans live in changing environments and have varying requirements, so they need customizable systems which adapt dynamically. As many different types of devices exist, it is a big challenge to integrate them within one system. In this paper we introduce a concept that enables dynamic integration of heterogeneous devices at run time. Although our concept is at an early stage we built a promising implementation in the domain of assisted training to validate the basic principles.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Dynamic integration methods for unknown data sources and services at system design time are currently primarily driven by technological standards. Hence, little emphasis is being placed on integration methods. However, the combination of heterogeneous data sources and services offered by devices across domains is hard to standardize. In this paper, we will shed light on the interplay of self-adaptive system architectures as well as bottom-up, incremental integration methods relying on formal knowledge bases. An incremental integration method has direct influences on both the system architecture itself and the way these systems are engineered and operated during design and runtime. Our findings are evaluated in the context of a case study that uses an adapted bus architecture including two tool prototypes. In addition, we illustrate conceptually how control loops such as MAPE-K can be enriched with machine-readable integration knowledge.

No abstract