Sharif Digital Repository

Agile Software Development is regarded as an effective and efficient approach, mainly due to its ability to accommodate rapidly changing requirements, and to cope with modern software development challenges. There is therefore a strong tendency to use agile software development methodologies where applicable; however, the sheer number of existing agile methodologies and their variants hinders the selection of an appropriate agile methodology or method chunk. Methodology evaluation tools address this problem through providing detailed evaluations, yet no comprehensive evaluation framework is available for agile methodologies. We introduce the Comprehensive Evaluation Framework for Agile... 

Model-Driven Development (MDD) has become a familiar software engineering term in recent years, thanks to the profound influence of the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). Yet MDD, like MDA itself, defines a general framework, and as such is a generic approach rather than a concrete development methodology. Methodology support for MDA has been rather slow in coming, yet even though several MDA-based methodologies have emerged, they have not been objectively analyzed yet. The need remains for a critical appraisal of these methodologies, mainly aimed at identifying their achievements, and the shortcomings that should be addressed. We provide a review of several prominent MDA-based methodologies,... 

A considerable amount of energy is lost in the parabolic trough solar collectors due to the poor capability of working fluid in full absorption of the concentrated solar irradiation across the receiver tube. A new hybrid method is recommended here to cover up such deficiency by simultaneously using a rotary absorber tube and magnetic field inducer with nanofluid. Results showed that the combination effects of the receiver rotation and the magnetic field improve the convection mechanism in the absorber and increase both energetic and exergetic performance of the collector. The study reveals that there is an optimal rotational speed in the each magnetic field intensity for different... 

This paper studies a number of well-known noise estimation techniques and provides a comparative performance analysis of them in speech enhancement platform. Two types of evaluation data that simulate consistent and inconsistent noisy conditions are prepared in the presence of six noise types at different SNR levels. The performance of speech enhancement systems and the spectrum distance of the estimated and original noise spectrums are used as evaluation criteria. The evaluations indicate that a simple VAD method outperforms noise estimation methods in most of the consistent noisy conditions  

Process-centered Software Engineering Environments, or PSEEs, are intended for the definition, modification, and enactment of software process models, they thus bring software development processes into effect. Even though research efforts in process-centered software engineering abound, PSEE technology has not received the attention that it deserves. In order to create a concise but effective and practically applicable evaluation framework for PSEEs, this paper first presents a survey of PSEEs and highlights the current state of the art of the technology. The PSEEs which have been reviewed herein have been regarded as software systems, and as such, have been characterized in terms of their... 

It has become essential to scrutinize and evaluate software development methodologies, mainly because of their increasing number and variety. Evaluation is required to gain a better understanding of the features, strengths, and weaknesses of the methodologies. The results of such evaluations can be leveraged to identify the methodology most appropriate for a specific context. Moreover, methodology improvement and evolution can be accelerated using these results. However, despite extensive research, there is still a need for a feature/criterion set that is general enough to allow methodologies to be evaluated regardless of their types. We propose a general evaluation framework which addresses... 

A novel method for combining bigram model and Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) is introduced for language modeling. The motivation behind this idea is the relaxation of the bag of words assumption fundamentally present in latent topic models including the PLSA model. An EM-based parameter estimation technique for the proposed model is presented in this paper. Previous attempts to incorporate word order in the PLSA model are surveyed and compared with our new proposed model both in theory and by experimental evaluation. Perplexity measure is employed to compare the effectiveness of recently introduced models with the new proposed model. Furthermore, experiments are designed and... 

Agile Software Development is regarded as an effective and efficient approach, mainly due to its ability to accommodate rapidly changing requirements, and to cope with modern software development challenges. There is therefore a strong tendency to use agile software development methodologies where applicable; however, the sheer number of existing agile methodologies and their variants hinders the selection of an appropriate agile methodology or method chunk. Methodology evaluation tools address this problem through providing detailed evaluations, yet no comprehensive evaluation framework is available for agile methodologies. We introduce the Comprehensive Evaluation Framework for Agile... 

Service-Oriented Software Engineering is based on concepts and principles for constructing complex enterprise systems in which services as building block of the system, are distributed in large networks. The main goal of the service-oriented methodologies is to define a process for development and maintenance of service-based systems. Most of the Service-Oriented methodologies are not mature enough compared with traditional software development methodologies such as Object-Oriented or Component-Based. Hence, defining an evaluation framework will be useful for comparing methodologies for identifying their strengths and weaknesses, defining new methodologies or extending existing... 

In the present study, the turbulent flow of water/Al2O3 nanofluid in a tubular heat exchanger with two twisted-tape inserts has been numerically investigated in the three-dimensional coordinate. This numerical simulation has been done by using FVM, and all of the equations have been discretized by second-order upwind method. For coupling velocity–pressure equations, SIMPLEC algorithm has been used. The investigated parameters of the present study are Reynolds numbers at the range of 10,000–30,000, the effect of twist ratio of twisted-tape inserts from 2.5 to 4, co-swirl flow and counter-swirl flow of two twisted-tapes inside the tube and volume fractions of nanofluid from 1 to 4%. The... 

In the present study, the turbulent flow of water/Al2O3 nanofluid in a tubular heat exchanger with two twisted-tape inserts has been numerically investigated in the three-dimensional coordinate. This numerical simulation has been done by using FVM, and all of the equations have been discretized by second-order upwind method. For coupling velocity–pressure equations, SIMPLEC algorithm has been used. The investigated parameters of the present study are Reynolds numbers at the range of 10,000–30,000, the effect of twist ratio of twisted-tape inserts from 2.5 to 4, co-swirl flow and counter-swirl flow of two twisted-tapes inside the tube and volume fractions of nanofluid from 1 to 4%. The... 

Flow movement in unsaturated soil can be expressed by a partial differential equation, named Richards equation. The objective of this study is the finding of an appropriate implicit numerical solution for head based Richards equation. Some of the well known finite difference schemes (fully implicit, Crank Nicolson and Runge-Kutta) have been utilized in this study. In addition, the effects of different approximations of moisture capacity function, convergence criteria and time stepping methods were evaluated. Two different infiltration problems were solved to investigate the performance of different schemes. These problems include of vertical water flow in a wet and very dry soils. The... 

A considerable amount of energy is lost in the parabolic trough solar collectors due to the poor capability of working fluid in full absorption of the concentrated solar irradiation across the receiver tube. A new hybrid method is recommended here to cover up such deficiency by simultaneously using a rotary absorber tube and magnetic field inducer with nanofluid. Results showed that the combination effects of the receiver rotation and the magnetic field improve the convection mechanism in the absorber and increase both energetic and exergetic performance of the collector. The study reveals that there is an optimal rotational speed in the each magnetic field intensity for different... 

Purpose: This paper aims to study the thermal and thermo-hydraulic performances of ferro-nanofluid flow in a three-dimensional trapezoidal microchannel heat sink (TMCHS) under uniform heat flux and magnetic fields. Design/methodology/approach: To investigate the effect of direction of Lorentz force the magnetic field has been applied: transversely in the x direction (Case I);transversely in the y direction (Case II); and parallel in the z direction (Case III). The three-dimensional governing equations with the associated boundary conditions for ferro-nanofluid flow and heat transfer have been solved by using an element-based finite volume method. The coupled algorithm has been used to solve... 

One of the technologies based on information technology used today is the VANET network used for inter-road communication. Today, many developed countries use this technology to optimize travel times, queue lengths, number of vehicle stops, and overall traffic network efficiency. In this research, we investigate the critical and necessary factors to increase the quality of VANET networks. This paper focuses on increasing the quality of service using multi-agent learning methods. The innovation of this study is using artificial intelligence to improve the network's quality of service, which uses a mechanism and algorithm to find the optimal behavior of agents in the VANET. The result...