2 Principal contact: This year our primary goal was to improve on the performance of our TREC-8 system. In addition to improving the system directly, we worked on a number of tools to aid our development. We continued our work on a tool for automatic scoring of system responses, a “judge” program. We designed a tool for doing regression testing of question answering systems. W...

Software engineers strive to understand software’s evolution and make software better and more reliable. In the last decade, software’s life cycle became an interesting research area. However, software evolution could be analyzed from different aspects. In the study, we focused on analyzing structural software changes between software’s versions. We used the WatiN project and observed its struc...

Supply Chain Agility is vital for organisations wanting to remain competitive in today’s dynamic business environment. There is increasing interest in deploying Business Intelligence (BI) in the Supply Chain Management (SCM) context to improve Supply Chain (SC) Agility. However, there is limited research exploring BI contributions to SC Agility. In this research-in-progress paper we propose a m...

Software readability and comprehension are important factors in software maintenance. There is a large body of research on software measurement, but the actual factors that make software easier to read or easier to comprehend are not well understood. In the present study, we investigate the role of method chains and code comments in software readability and comprehension. Our analysis comprises...

The Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model has been widely adopted in many companies. Anecdotal evidence and trade journals have reported significant improvements after firms have adopted the SCOR model. Although practitioners have been enthusiastic about implementing and using the SCOR model in their operations, the SCOR model has not been empirically validated. The purpose of this stu...

So-called little, or domain-specific languages (DSLs), have the potential to make software maintenance simpler: domain-experts can directly use the DSL to make required routine modifications. At the negative side, however, more substantial changes may become more difficult: such changes may involve altering the domain-specific language. This will require compiler technology knowledge, which not...

The field of modern financial economics assumes that people behave with extreme rationality, but they do not. Furthermore, people’s deviations from rationality are often systematic. Behavioral finance relaxes the traditional assumptions of financial economics by incorporating these observable, systematic, and very human departures from rationality into standard models of financial markets. We h...

So far we’ve focused on model checking algorithms that assume a computation structure is given. It should come as no surprise that our goal is to perform model checking of programs given as code, so today we’ll describe techniques that allow us to apply model checking in this setting. There are several challenges to doing so, foremost among them the fact that the statespace of programs may be i...

Although Japan represents the single largest Asian market and 10% of the global software outsourcing market, little is understood about how Japanese companies make software project outsourcing decisions. Tried-and-tested outsourcing models consistently fail to predict the outsourcing decisions of Japanese companies, leaving global software development companies with little usable guidance in th...