Software testing, one of the most important methods for quality assurance, has become too expensive and error prone for complex modern software systems. Test automation aims to reduce the costs of software testing and to improve its reliability. Despite advances in test automation, there are...

During the past two decades, increasingly powerful and capable information technologies have made information more accessible and valuable so that it has become the prime resource for business; ahead of the traditional resources of land, labour and capital. Improved information acquisition,...

Although existing laboratory research shows that software is often used inefficiently, relatively little is known about (a) how efficiently software is used in a real work environment and (b) the factors that influence the efficiency of individual users. The present research consists of an...

To sustain a market for software components, component producers and consumers must agree on contracts. These contracts must specify each party's obligations. To ensure that both sides meet their obligations, they must also agree on standards for monitoring contracts and assigning blame for...

Peer-to-peer systems, networks of egalitarian nodes without a central authority, can achieve massive scalability and fault tolerance through the pooling together of individual resources. Unfortunately, most nodes represent self-interested, or rational, parties that will attempt to maximize their...

Disk schedulers in operating systems are generally work-conserving; they schedule a request immediately after the previous request has finished. Such schedulers need multiple outstanding requests to make good decisions. Unfortunately, many applications issue synchronous, almost-continuous...

Admission controls, such as trunk reservation, are often used in loss networks to optimise their performance. Since the numerical evaluation of performance measures is complex, much attention has been given to finding approximation methods. The Erlang Fixed-Point (EFP) approximation, which is...

We focus on mixtures of factor analyzers from the perspective of a method for model-based density estimation from high-dimensional data, and hence for the clustering of such data. This approach enables a normal mixture model to be fitted to a sample of n data points of dimension p, where p is...

The bispectrum and third-order moment can be viewed as equivalent tools for testing for the presence of nonlinearity in stationary time series. This is because the bispectrum is the Fourier transform of the third-order moment. An advantage of the bispectrum is that its estimator comprises terms...

In the last decade, with the expansion of organizational scope and the tendency for outsourcing, there has been an increasing need for Business Process Integration (BPI), understood as the sharing of data and applications among business processes. The research efforts and development paths in...