In most software engineering project, users are only involved in the beginning of the project as a help to design the requirements specification but users can be involved after this phase too, but is it effective to do so? With this report we would like to investigate how effective it is to involve users after the requirements specification has been written and approved. To find out how effective it is to involve the users we try some fast and simple involvement techniques on a quite far gone project. These techniques include ethnographic studies, prototypes and surveys. We also interviewed a couple of people who work with usability and finally delivered a report with our results to them to find out if they found our result relevant. By also documenting how much time we spent involving users we will show to which degree user involvement is effective. We found out that a couple of fast techniques could get very much result in the form of usability enhancing suggestions to the developers.

The society strives for sustainable development, in the construction industry it is expressed through sustainable building. Energy and LCC analyzes increases the ability to make conscious decisions in the process. A problem in the construction industry is that energy and LCC analysis is not used to the desired extent, as they are perceived as complicated and time consuming. The report aims to achieve a more sustainable building through increased use of energy and LCC analyzes.The goal is to show how BIM can be used to improve the efficiency of the energy and LCC analyzes.The study was conducted with a literature review and a case study to answer which information that is required in a BIM model to perform energy and LCC analyzes. The study also shows which software can be used in BIM based energy and LCC analyzes and how the analyzes can be carried out efficiently.The result shows that effective analyzes may be performed if the BIM-model contains the relevant information for making analyzes.

There are several methods and models within the areas of software engineering on how to proceed during a software development process. For each of these methods and models there are benefits and drawbacks, depending on how you choose to look at them. A difference of principle between the different models is that they either advocate iterative development or not. In parts of software engineering one makes use of different methods depending on which is most fitting in a specific situation. There are several methods on how to recieve more qualitative data from the end-users during the requirement collection, but the reappearing pattern is still user centric participation, which means that the user participates more actively in part of or the entire development process.

When the use of encryption amongst the regular computer user grows morewidespread than ever it makes the life of the IT-forensics experts difficult.Hampering the judicial investigations that otherwise could have lead to convictions.In this report we will treat the subject of crypto analysis with a focus on decrypting files and devices encrypted with the software TrueCrypt. A solution will be presented that can facilitate the future work involving encryption. The application DFEAT that has been developed during the writings of this report is faster than the corresponding software EFDD, and attacks both partitions and bitwise copies of entire harddrives where PKF fails.DFEAT is a lightweight application that is almost 50 times smaller compared to EFDD and 200 times smaller than PKF's portable version..

This bachelor thesis portray a project where the main task were to develop a computer based system prototype for handling of absence report at the upper secondary school af Chapman in Karlskrona. The project has been conducted in cooperation with students from the university programs software engineering and information economy at Blekinge Institute of Technology. Our task as MDA-students have been to survey the process of absence report of today through field studies and give a proposal of a graphical user interface which later were developed by the software engineers. The thesis also handles the cooperation with other students from other university programs..

Summary Title: How to make decisions on software based servicedevelopment in the mobile handset industry.?The Rapid Model for Holistic Application Evaluation Authors: Per-Inge AnderssonPatrik Dreveborn Tutors: Björn Regnell, Department of Computer Science,Lund UniversityRobert Wenglén, School of Economics and Management,Lund University Problem formulation: Academically the questions of finding out what constitutes a sound decision base and finding out how to handle the issue of a holistic approach must be addressed in order to make a well balanced and relevant decision model. The core question is which decision criteria to include and which drivers are important in estimating the status of the criteria? Practically to provide Sony Ericsson with a formalized evaluation process for decisions on software development that is transparent, objective and challengeable. Purpose: Academically to contribute to the field of decision making research by elaborating on how to make a holistic, rapid and rational decision model.

The exclusion of visually impaired from the information flow presented to us through signs was what led me into this project. With a growing amount of information being presented to us on signs and digital information surface the need of communicating this information in a way that could be read by visually impaired is evident. Looking into different ways of communication, my goal was to create something that filled the need of the visually impaired without branding them as disabled. Having a close relative with bad eyesight is became evident on how much it limited her in her everyday life, not being able to navigate herself without the support of her husband. Through interviews with her and others with varying diagnoses I reached an insight in their situation. To my surprise they still favored a visual form of communication before an auditory or tactile form, because it?s easy to survey and quick to interpret.

In visual programming the developer specifies her code, using visual tools. Within the range of visual programming languages lay icon-based languages, form-based languages, and diagram languages.Mediator is a multimedia authoring tool that allows the user to create interactive CD-ROM presentations, dynamic HTML pages and Flash projects, without any coding or scripting. The user can create interactivity in her project, using event driven and icon-based visual programming, through a ?drag and drop? user interface. This report intends to determine some of the qualifications of a tool of this kind, as well as its limitations.The report is based on a case study, in which a smaller software application was to be updated using Mediator 9.

This master?s degree project concerns the combination of a multi dwelling passive house with solar energy for the generation of electricity and domestic hot water (DHW). Different alternatives with either solar thermal systems or photovoltaic (PV) systems are compared with two reference alternatives producing DHW from electricity or district heating. The economical comparison uses a life cycle cost (LCC) perspective based on the present value of expenditures for investment, energy and annual operating and maintenance.The energy yields from the solar energy systems were calculated by hand and with simulation software. Calculation and dimensioning of PV systems were carried out with a software called PVSYST.

Discussions of structural racism has now moved to the forefront of the Swedish society, and many researchers have sought to understand what form it takes, how it is manifested, how it is exploited and challenged. At the core of this debate we find the media, and its logic embedded with mechanisms of simplification and polarization.Media is our key source of knowledge and information, why it also affects our norms, beliefs and preconceptions. Media thus has the power to mediate, amplify or challenge how we conceptualize the world, and subsequently our (unconscious) racist beliefs.To investigate how media content is influenced by underlying colonial or racist assumptions and stereotypes thus becomes a way to investigate our understanding of reality.In accordance with postcolonial thought, structural and symbolic racism is embedded in language and hidden in images, and surface in the form of domination and feminization, and the portrayal of the subaltern ?Other? as passive and irrational.This paper thus departs from postcolonial theory and media logic to undercover hidden patterns of structural, symbolic and historically contingent racism in one of Sweden?s most prominent in-depth foreign TV-magazines, namely Korrespondenterna.Adopting Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper explores to what extent racist and colonial stereotypes are reproduced and/or challenged in Korrespondenterna?s representation of Sub-Saharan Africa.In line with postcolonial theory it is found that historically contingent racialized stereotypes are prevalent in Korrespondenterna, and that tendencies of portraying Africa and Africans as passive, feminine and irrational are prevailing.It is thus argued that media logic, imbedded with mechanisms of simplification, polarization and intensification, contributes to the use of colonial stereotypes in media, and thus to the mediation of structural and symbolic racism..

Vårterminen 2006.

In today?s IT world where software is constructed in a rapid pace, testing has become a crucial area to master when testing has to be done at a greater speed. To still be able to handle the demands of high quality software, companies have to spend more resources on testing and introduce test automation. By automating test cases the testers can gain time which they can spend on doing more complex testing and thereby increase the quality of the software.In this thesis we have helped Extenda AB, who delivers systems to retail companies, to introduce test automation in one of their customer specific projects. This has been done using their own in-house ?capture/replay? tool ECP (Extenda Cashier Player).We have also derived a process that explains how Extenda can introduce test automation on other customer projects.

In February 2002 the European commission put forward a proposal for a new directive on The patentability of computer-implemented inventions, but which during my work on this essay has not been decided on yet. The directive has divided the decision-makers in the union, the commission and parliament, into two different positions regarding by which range computer-implemented inventions should be patentable. The parliament has amended the commissions proposal in a substantial way and the legal process has caused a heated debate both within the unions administration and among various interest groups both in favour of and against a patent on computer-implemented inventions. The loudest protests have come from a group that feels threatened by a possible software patent: Open Source. In this study I examine both the arguments by the decision-makers and by the lobbying for and against the proposal.

This Degree project summarizes how it is to work in the CAD program Revit Architecture. This was done because AQ Arkitekter in Eskilstuna is interested in how Revit works. Especially compared to AutoCad which is the software they are using today. Will their work become more efficient with the new software?The starting point was to find out how it is to work with Revit when you only used AutoCAD Architecture before.

The purpose of this essey is through empirical methods investigate usability factors on Video On Demand applications for the Internet. More specificly we will focus on a application called Voddler. The purpose is to identify usability problems that exist in Voddler, and present the reader with suggestions on possible solutions. This could be used as guidelines to how to design for usability in this kind of system. We will use an online survey to investigate Voddler usability and use this data as a basis for our analysis.