RESUMEN

Software process assessments are typically the first step to commencing software process improvement. Small software companies find that many assessment methods are linked to plan-driven improvement models and can be expensive in terms of the resources required. The authors support these claims with statistics from the Irish software industry and present a lightweight assessment method called Adept. Adept unifies an existing plan-driven assessment method and an adapted, risk-based Agility/Discipline Assessment method. Adept has a low resource overhead and does not dictate either a plan-driven or agile process improvement model, making it an attractive assessment method for small software companies. This article is part of a special issue on Software Engineering Challenges in Small Software Organizations.

RESUMEN

Surface-volume reactions occur in many physical systems such as biological and industrial processes. Though traditionally modeled as a surface, the reaction zone is usually a thin layer (often a gel) abutting a flowing fluid or gas. Therefore, one would expect a more realistic model for the reacting zone to include the effects of transport in the gel. In this paper we examine the BIAcore, a device for measuring rate constants which has this geometry. To explain anomalous measurements from the device, it has been proposed that some flow penetrates into the dextran (gel) layer, thus enhancing transport. To analyze the reversible kinetics, asymptotic and singular perturbation techniques are used, yielding linear and nonlinear integrodifferential equations. Explicit and asymptotic solutions are constructed for cases motivated by experimental design. The results indicate that such flow penetration effects are bound to be negligible in surface-volume reactions, regardless of the flow model used.