AI-assisted computer-aided design (CAD) for industrial products involves two challenging phases. Part-level generation maps diverse forms of user intent, including renders, text descriptions, 2D drawings, and real photographs, to executable programs in a CAD domain-specific language. Assembly-level generation must additionally handle interacting parts, plan mating relations, estimate poses, and place all parts correctly. Existing specialized CAD models are commonly trained on narrow input domains, such as renders or texts, and often generalize poorly, while general-purpose frontier models cover broader inputs but perform inconsistently across CAD domains. We present VisCAD, a foundation model suite designed to provide both broad generalization and strong CAD capability for realistic industrial products. At its core is VisCAD-M1, a 27B model trained through mid-training and post-training for part-level design generation. On PubCADBench and RealCADBench, VisCAD-M1 achieves the highest average part-level score among the evaluated models, reaching 0.5540 compared with 0.5496 for the strongest frontier model. Reusing VisCAD-M1 as a test-time verifier can further raise the score to 0.5797, an approximately 5 percent relative improvement over the previous state of the art. VisCAD also includes a domain-specific harness that leverages frontier models for complex assembly generation and demonstrates advantages over general-purpose harnesses in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.
Agile - denoting "the quality of being agile, readiness for motion, nimbleness, activity, dexterity in motion" - software development methods are attempting to offer an answer to the eager business community asking for lighter weight along with faster and nimbler software development processes. This is especially the case with the rapidly growing and volatile Internet software industry as well as for the emerging mobile application environment. The new agile methods have evoked substantial amount of literature and debates. However, academic research on the subject is still scarce, as most of existing publications are written by practitioners or consultants. The aim of this publication is to begin filling this gap by systematically reviewing the existing literature on agile software development methodologies. This publication has three purposes. First, it proposes a definition and a classification of agile software development approaches. Second, it analyses ten software development methods that can be characterized as being "agile" against the defined criterion. Third, it compares these methods and highlights their similarities and differences. Based on this analysis, future research needs are identified and discussed.
P. Abrahamsson, O. Salo, Jussi Ronkainen et al.· arXiv.org· 728 citations· ⚡54
Context: Software startups are newly created companies with no operating history and fast in producing cutting-edge technologies. These companies develop software under highly uncertain conditions, tackling fast-growing markets under severe lack of resources. Therefore, software startups present a unique combination of characteristics which pose several challenges to software development activities. Objective: This study aims to structure and analyze the literature on software development in startup companies, determining thereby the potential for technology transfer and identifying software development work practices reported by practitioners and researchers. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping study, developing a classification schema, ranking the selected primary studies according their rigor and relevance, and analyzing reported software development work practices in startups. Results: A total of 43 primary studies were identified and mapped, synthesizing the available evidence on software development in startups. Only 16 studies are entirely dedicated to software development in startups, of which 10 result in a weak contribution (advice and implications (6); lesson learned (3); tool (1)). Nineteen studies focus on managerial and organizational factors. Moreover, only 9 studies exhibit high scientific rigor and relevance. From the reviewed primary studies, 213 software engineering work practices were extracted, categorized and analyzed. Conclusion: This mapping study provides the first systematic exploration of the state-of-art on software startup research. The existing body of knowledge is limited to a few high quality studies. Furthermore, the results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.
Nicolò Paternoster, Carmine Giardino, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al.· Information and Software Tec...· 394 citations· ⚡54
The new ChartNet training dataset could improve the accuracy of vision-language models that help analyze business trends or interpret scientific figures.