Practitioners are poorly supported by the scientific literature when managing traceability information models (TIMs), which capture the structure and semantics of trace links. In practice, companies manage their TIMs in very different ways, even in cases where companies share many similarities. We present our findings from an in-depth focus group about TIM management with three different systems engineering companies. We find that the concrete needs of the companies as well as challenges such as scale and workflow integration are not considered by existing scientific work. We thus issue a call-to-arms for the requirements engineering and software and systems traceability communities, the two main communities for traceability research, to refocus their work on these practical problems.
Software-implemented fault tolerance is a widely used technique for achieving high dependability in costsensitive applications. One approach to implementing fault tolerance in software is to use aspect-oriented programming (AOP). This paper investigates the hardware overhead imposed by software mechanisms for time-redundant execution and control flow checking implemented by using AOP. The impacts on static and dynamic memory consumption as well as execution time are measured. The overheads caused by using AOP were shown to be an issue. However, two optimizations to the weaver that reduce the overhead caused by the AOP language weaver were identified. Using these optimizations the overhead was reduced to acceptable or even beneficial levels compared to using standard C.
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