Statistical software testing is a promising technique for reducing the software testing burden by applying test cases to the software under test according to a model of the expected usage of the system in operation, called an operational profile. However, current statistical testing techniques have not been put into general practice, as they do not scale well as the complexity of the systems under test increases. In particular, as system complexity increases, the matrices required to generate test cases and perform model analysis can grow dramatically, even exponentially, overwhelming the test generation and analysis applications. In this work, a new technique for representing the operational profile is proposed to mitigate the complexity issue for statistical test case generation. The use of a state-based requirements specification model as the basis of the operational profile leverages parallelism to reduce the visible size of the model. The specification model can then be extended to include conditional probabilities of input data occurrence. * This work also proposes a statistical testing framework using this specification-based operational profile to generate and execute test cases. Such a framework allows us to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of this statistical testing technique.

This book identifies challenges and opportunities in the development and implementation of software that contain significant statistical content. While emphasizing the relevance of using rigorous statistical and probabilistic techniques in software engineering contexts, it presents opportunities for further research in the statistical sciences and their applications to software engineering. It is intended to motivate and attract new researchers from statistics and the mathematical sciences to attack relevant and pressing problems in the software engineering setting. It describes the "big picture," as this approach provides the context in which statistical methods must be developed. The book's survey nature is directed at the mathematical sciences audience, but software engineers should also find the statistical emphasis refreshing and stimulating. It is hoped that the book will have the effect of seeding the field of statistical software engineering by its indication of opportunities where statistical thinking can help to increase understanding, productivity, and quality of software and software production.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th Software Quality Days Conference (SWQD) held in Vienna, Austria, in January 2013. This professional symposium and conference offers a range of comprehensive and valuable opportunities for advanced professional training, new ideas, and networking with a series of keynote speeches, professional lectures, exhibits, and tutorials. The seven scientific full papers accepted for SWQD were each peer-reviewed by three or more reviewers and selected out of 18 high-quality submissions. Further, two keynotes and six short papers on promising research directions were also presented and included in order to spark discussions between researchers and practitioners. The papers are organized into topical sections on risk management; software and systems testing; test processes; model-based development; and process improvement and measurement.

For every weapons system being developed, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) must make a critical decision: Should the system go forward to full-scale production? The answer to that question may involve not only tens of billions of dollars but also the nation's security and military capabilities. In the milestone process used by DOD to answer the basic acquisition question, one component near the end of the process is operational testing, to determine if a system meets the requirements for effectiveness and suitability in realistic battlefield settings. Problems discovered at this stage can cause significant production delays and can necessitate costly system redesign. This book examines the milestone process, as well as the DOD's entire approach to testing and evaluating defense systems. It brings to the topic of defense acquisition the application of scientific statistical principles and practices.

The Eureka Software Factory project (ESF) was set up by a Group of European partners in 1987. Its objective was broadly to improve the large-scale software production process by introducing an industrialised approach to have The Software Factory Challenge social, organisational and technical aspects. The project was set up under the pan-European Eureka programme, and it was funded by the partners together with their national governments. This book is not a history of the ESF project, but rather a presentation of its main ideas and achievements, and an account of how the concepts pioneered by the project have become part of a general movement in both the industrial and academic domains. In this movement, the facility for the production, use and maintenance of large-scale computer artefacts (the Software Factory) is treated in a wide and `organic' way, so as to include concepts such as business value and process improvement; with the development of new technologies being driven by these new, wide requirements. This new approach is in contrast with a narrowly technological one, in which individual tasks like programming are aided by machines but in which the production process as a whole is not supported. The main body of the book is divided into four Parts. Part I gives a short overview of the ESF project and its ideas, and goes on to attempt to place the ESF work in the context of industry as a whole (with reference to both producers and users of Information Technology systems). Part II sets out to explain the technological basis of the Software Factory as seen by ESF and goes on to describe some experimental and pioneering implementations of Factory Support Environments and their constituents. Part III is devoted to the most complete implementation of an ESF Factory Support Environment to date, Kernel/2r. This Section provides a highly detailed discussion of both design and implementation issues. In Part IV addresses what deployment strategies are now available to continue the spread of these ideas in order to meet the goal of better software-based systems (i.e. systems which are safer, more economical to build, more easily changed and more useful than those that have been built up to now). Finally, a Glossary of Terms and a list of References is given. Readers: those who have a professional interest in Information Technology.

This book contains the post-conference proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming. It covers current topics in inductive logic programming, from theoretical and methodological issues to advanced applications.

Stroke is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Stroke survivors often have motorimpairments which contribute to upper limbs dysfunctions, reduced balance, posturalcontrol and reduced mobility and proprioception. These physical symptoms lead toreduced social participation and poor quality of life. Over the past ten years, therehad been an enormous focus on the use of virtual reality (VR) and other technologiesto improve clinical outcomes for people with stroke. These technologies includelarge scale bespoke manufactured immersvie virtual reality system, or home basedrehabilitation device such as the commercially available device Nitendo Wii andMicrosoft XBox. The clinical efficacy of these rehabilitation technologies had beenstudied extensively but our understanding of the underlying mechanism of recoveryinduced by these technologies is poor. There are two aspects of “recovery” must beconsidered. One is the learning compensation strategies where patients acquired“new” skills to improve functional abilities. The other aspect is the neuroplasticitymechanism which leads to cortical map reorganisation. The patient is able to re-usethe same body segments in the same way as they did before the stroke. Publishedstudies generally reported improvement in upper limb function, lower limb function,balance and gait. This leads to the uncertainty whether these technologies areeffective in promoting “recovery” at neural level or functional level. With the advance in technology, monitoring techniques such as neural imaging,motion analysis, and EMGs devices have broad applications in the understandingof neural recovery post stroke. Studies that utilize functional outcome measuresor observational design may be more effective in identifying functional recovery.A combination of the two designs may be helpful to provide new insights on therecovery mechanism induced by rehabilitation devices.