natural language processing

SPEAR: Distilling Domain-Adaptive Reasoning Skeletons via Sequential Symbolic Alignment in Reinforcement Learning

This work introduces SPEAR (Symbolic Process Evaluation and Alignment Reward), a training-free and plug-and-play process reward method for sequence-level on-policy distillation that effectively bridges the reasoning gap between student and teacher models via sequence-level distillation with efficient dense process rewards.

Slot2Text: Object-Centric Visual Tokenization for Efficient and Spatially Traceable Surgical MLLMs

Slot2Text, a dual-mode surgical MLLM that replaces dense representations of visual input with a compact set of regions encoded as slot latents, establishes compact slot latents as an efficient default visual interface for surgical MLLMs, with grounded reasoning invoked when greater spatial traceability is required.

Application of agile processes in complex systems development projects

The ITEA AGILE project shows that the application of agile software development methods and processes can offer an up to 70% reduction in lead time and costs in a wide range of different industry sectors.

Is management commitment a necessity after all in software process improvement?

Literature and practice has established that the lack of management commitment has been one of the top reasons for a failed SPI (software process improvement) initiative. The paper reports results from an ongoing study aimed at clarifying the role and the meaning of management commitment in SPI initiatives. Results from five focused interviews with SPI professionals are reported together with results from 12 SPI initiatives where the level of management commitment (in terms of concrete signs) was measured in order to test whether it would correlate with the level of success of an SPI initiative. In contrast with the evidence from the literature, the results show that none of the signs of management commitment correlated significantly with the success of the SPI initiatives. It is suggested that the concept of champion may have explained the SPI project success better than management commitment. The paper concludes that many of the SPI initiatives do not require management commitment beyond obtaining the resources needed.

Rethinking the Concept of Commitment in Software Process Improvement

It is shown that current thinking relies on models of commitment that are flawed in both academic and practical sense and four misconceptions are identified in current thinking.

Commitment development in software process improvement: critical misconceptions

Commitment in software process improvement - in search of the process

The role of commitment in software process improvement

This thesis suggests that the commitment phenomenon is better explained through what can be called strategic, operational and personal commitment nets, which can be used for analyzing the unfolding and alteration of commitment towards a specific entity, in this case a software process improvement endeavor, through time and changing circumstances.

Personal Software Process: Classroom Experiences from Finland

Results from the University of Oulu in Finland, where PSP is a mandatory course for students majoring in software engineering, do not indicate a significant improvement in size or effort estimation skills, but the defects found in the unit test phase were decreased.

Preface Agile Software Technologies Software Process Engineering Software Confi Guration Management Support for Extreme Programming Software Process Engineering

This report summarises the main research and development activities carried out on Embedded Software at VTT Electronics in 2002 and aims to enable the industry to utilize the change-driven (i.e., Agile) product …

Experimental software engineering (STESE)

Software engineering theory and practice is still to a large extent based more on faith than on science. Only by contributing to the scientific and empirically grounded body of knowledge within a specific area of application, theory and practice can develop. Experimentation is an important scientific approach to collect empirical data and to test theories as well as to bring light to new phenomena so that theories can be formulated and corrected. This is the background for the emerging field of experimental software engineering. The focus of this minitrack is on experiments and experimental studies performed in academic or industrial settings where the aim is to study the software professionals' work practices related to the development of software. This minitrack is divided in two three-paper sessions. The papers are briefly introduced in the following. The three papers in the first session are experiments performed in an academic setting. Syversen, Anda and Sjoberg report the results from an experiment with 26 subjects where they explore how a use case model can best be applied in an object-oriented development process. Serrano, Calero and Piattini describe how to apply the experimental method in metrics definition for multidimensional data models. Their paper gives an overview of the method including a description of how it was applied. The first session is concluded with a paper authored by Liu and Grandon where they empirically explore with 79 subjects how task performance and domain-specific self-efficacy influence the perceived ease of use of object-oriented analysis techniques. The first two papers in the second session include a set of experiments and an empirical study performed in an industrial setting. Jokela describes five different experiments where the attempt is to assess the quality of the usability engineering processes of four different companies. Jokela explains how the assessment process is iteratively changed and improved based on the results of the earlier experiments. Borjesson and Mathiassen compare two software process improvement initiatives carried out in industry. They focus on factors affecting the implementation success. Dugan, Glinert and Rogers conclude the minitrack by introducing a technology-focused methodology called CAMELOT, which is intended for testing computer supported co-operative work software. They report results from an experiment where the proposed methodology was tried out.

Improving requirements management in extreme programming with tool support - an improvement attempt that failed

While extreme programming (XP) relies on certain principles, it requires an extensive set of tools to enable an effective execution of its practices. In many companies, putting stories on the board may not be sufficient for managing rapidly changing requirements. The objective of This work is to report the results from a study where a requirement management tool - the Storymanager - was developed to meet the needs of a XP project team. The tool was used in a case project where a mobile application for real markets was produced. The tool was dropped by the team only after two releases. The reasons of the process improvement failure are addressed in This work. The principal results show that the tool was found to be too difficult to use and that it failed to provide as powerful a visual view as the paper-pen board method. The implications of these findings are addressed for both the practitioners and researchers in the field.