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Advanced Development Projects

II/1/2 Advanced Development Projects

UNU-IIST's advanced development projects have the overall aim of self sufficiency, of helping developing countries produce their own high quality software. This is done in two ways by these projects -- through training Fellows from developing countries at UNU-IIST in software development and through the development, with particular emphasis on the initial stages of domain analysis and requirements capture, of prototype implementations. Projects are done with partner institutions from developing countries who can engineer the prototypes further into commercial systems.

The project domains concentrate on infrastructure, such as the transportation, financial, health care, education, social services, manufacturing, telecommunications, public utilities (in general) and administration sectors. These are important in any economy, and typically are particularly in need of development in developing countries.

These projects generally follow a standard development method, modelled closely on the RAISE formal method but emphasizing in particular the initial domain analysis. Four main stages can be recognized:

Domain analysis

involves a broad study of the relevant domain, its intrinsic aspects, its particular technologies, the roles of the people involved, perhaps its role in a wider socio-economic context. Domain analysis produces informal narratives and terminologies as well as formal, mathematical models (expressed in the RAISE Specification language, RSL). Domain analysis is validated by domain experts -- who may well not be software experts.

Requirements capture

produces informal narratives, terminologies and formal models for the actual system to be developed. These are typically extensions of the corresponding documents from the domain analysis (although the scope may be more restricted). Validation involves domain experts and, if possible, potential users.

Software architecture

involves refining the formal model from requirements capture, mainly decomposing the "state" type of the system and so decomposing the specification into a number of modules. Refinement may be justified informally or formally with a justification tool.

Software implementation

Development projects aim to develop prototypes rather than fully engineered systems; full development and exploitation is done by the partner institution(s) . Some of the code development may involve automatic translation.

Advanced Development Projects
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