Software Transparency III

Continuing on Software Transparency ...

I just recalled that seeing it from a requirements engineeing perspective, the work of Steve Fickas and Martin Feather is of fundamental importance.
I am referring to their classical paper Requirements Monitoring in Dynamic Environments.

I beliieve it is also important to take a look at Requirements-based monitors for real-time systems from Peters and Parnas.

Another research is worth mentioning: Bill Robison is working with monitors for some time, a recent work from him is: Implementing Rule-Based Monitors within a Framework for Continuous Requirements Monitoring.

Software Transparency II

After posting a brief description of what I believe Software Transparency should mean, I found several references to this keyword (using Google).

1. A company that registered the term transparency software as a trade mark. They sell database reverse engineering tools.
2. A blog note by Dana Blankenhorn on ZDNet commenting on the announcement by Palamida of an auditing product that helps software transparency. It also mentions GroundWork, a company that sells IT infrastructure monitoring.
3. Reflective is a company that sells software testing technology, it uses the term in a restricted way, for the consuption of software developers.
4. Eric Sink reporting on the concept of transparency at Microsoft. It is not a conincidence that it comes from the Visual Studio group.
5. A note from Dana Blankenhorn on Corante with the title "Open Source Transparency", brings up the key point: "you can see the code". However, who will understand it, and yet, who guarantees that the code you see is the code that is running.
   
6. Prof. Tanimoto presented a keynote at VL/HCC 05 where he links transparency to interfaces:

Transparency is an aspect of software comprising openness in design, glass-box features, and support for interactive inspection.

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03/20/09

Please see other notes on the topic following the tags.

More details on software transparency are available here.

Requirements Engineering Digital Library

Last week, the 9th edition of WER was held in Rio de Janeiro.

WER is a workshop designed to discuss requirements engineering (RE) in the ibero-american context, and uses three different languages (Portuguese, Spanish and English).

One of the main characteristics of WER is its open acess digital library, WERpapers.

There, you will be able to find peer reviewed articles in several RE topics. Most of the material is in Spanish or Portuguese, but some are in English.

Another useful resource of peer reviewed material is the Time Constrained Requirements Engineering (TCRE) workshop held at RE´02. It is also open acess.

Enjoy them.

Software Transparency

Transparency has been, for long, a general requirement for democratic societies. The right to be informed and to have access to the information has been an important issue on modern societies.

People want to be informed in a proper way. As such, transparency is a well regard characteristic for organizations.

However, as software permeates several aspects of our society, at some point in the future, software engineers will need to deal with yet another demand: transparency. In such foreseen environment, engineers will need to have methods, techniques and tools to help make transparent software.

I am starting to work on the idea of software transparency. If you may: look at your browser under view and and under view code, this is an initial idea towards the big challenge that lies ahed: how to make transparent software. I will soon post a more detailed note about the topic.

If you are also interesed on that, drop a comment.