Software Engineering and Development

Software engineering is one of the most knowledge intensive jobs. Thus, having a good knowledge management (KM) strategy in these organisations is very important. This book examines software processes from a knowledge perspective flow, in order to identify the particular knowledge needs of such processes to then be in a better position for proposing systems or strategies to address those needs. Its possible benefits are illustrated through the results of a study in a software maintenance process within a small software organisation. Furthermore, software product line architecture is regarded as one of the crucial piece of entity in software product lines. The authors of this book discuss the state of the art of software product line engineering from the perspectives of business, architecture, process and organisation. In recent years, domain-specific languages have been proposed for modelling applications on a high level of abstraction. Although the usage of domain-specific languages offers clear advantages, their design is a highly complex task. This book presents a pragmatic way for designing and using domain-specific languages. Other chapters in this book examine the development of numerical methodologies for inverse determination of material constitutive model parameters, discuss some of the reasons for the irrelevancy of software engineering to the robotic community, review the evolution of robotic software over time, and propose the use of Ant Colony Optimisation, a kind of metaheuristic algorithm, to find general property violations in concurrent systems using a explicit state model checker.