Majoreconomicupheavalscanhavethesortofe?ectthatSchumpeterforesaw60 yearsagoascreativedestruction.Inscienceandtechnology,equivalentupheavals resultfromeitherscienti?crevolutions(asobservedbyKuhn)ortheintroduction of what Christensen calls disruptive technologies. And in software engineering, there has been no technology more disruptive than outsourcing. That it should so quickly reach maturity and an unparalleled scale is truly remarkable; that it should now be called to demonstrate its sustainability in the current ?nancial turmoil is the challenge that will prove whether and how it will endure. Early signs under even the bleak market conditions of the last 12 months are that it will not only survive, it will ?rmly establish its role across the world of business. Outsourcing throws into sharp focus the entire software engineering life- cle. Topics as diverse as requirements analysis, concurrency and model-checking need to ?nd a composite working partnership in software engineering practice. This con?uence arises from need, not dogma, and the solutions required are those that will have the right e?ect on the associated activities in the world of the application: e.g., reducing the time for a transaction or making the results of a complex analysis available in real-time. While the business of outsourcing continues to be studied, the engineering innovations that make it compelling are constantly changing. It is in this milieu that this series of conferences has placed itself.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Conference on Software Engineering Approaches for Offshore and Outsourced Development, SEAFOOD 2007, Zurich, Switzerland, in February 2007.

The 15 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers constitute a balanced mix of academic and industrial aspects - addressing topical regions such as processes, education, country reports, evaluation and assessment, communication and distribution, as well as tools.

The six Schools and Symposia on Formal Techniques in Real Time and Fault Tolerant Systems (FTRTFT) have seen the eld develop from tentative explo- tions to a far higher degree of maturity, and from being under the scrutiny of a few interested software designers and academics to becoming a well-established area of inquiry. A number of new topics, such as hybrid systems, have been g- minated at these meetings and cross-links explored with related subjects such as scheduling theory. There has certainly been progress during these 12 years, but it is sobering to see how far and how fast practice has moved ahead in the same time, and how much more work remains to be done before the design of a mission-critical system can be based entirely on sound engineering principles underpinned by solid scienti c theory. The Sixth School and Symposium were organized by the Tata Research - velopment and Design Centre in Pune, India. The lectures at the School were given by Ian Hayes (U. of Queensland), Paritosh Pandya (Tata Institute of F- damental Research), Willem-Paul de Roever (Christian Albrechts U. ) and Joseph Sifakis (VERIMAG). There were three invited lectures at the Symposium, by Werner Damm (U. of Oldenburg), Nicholas Halbwachs (VERIMAG) and Yoram Moses (Technion). A sizable number of submissions were received for the Symposium from a- hors representing 16 di erent countries.

This is a collection of papers from the Symposium on Formal Techniques in Real-Time and Fault-Tolerant Systems held at the University of Warwick on 22-23 September 1988. The papers cover a variety of subjects in these areas and illustrate different approaches to modeling safety critical systems. Important notions of time, synchrony, redundancy and replication are examined using assertional reasoning, temporal logic and the logics of knowledge. The volume will be invaluable to researchers in formal modeling of concurrency, real-time and fault-tolerance, and to software engineers in safety-critical applications.

SEAFOOD 2009: Enabling Global Partnerships to Deliver on Business Needs Companies have been outsourcing areas of software development work for many years, either because of the engineering challenges or because the outsourced aspect is not central to their core business. A profound transformation has been a?ecting this model over recent years: a massive transfer of development - tivities from the USA and Europe to a skilled labor force in service-providing countries. This transformation has been driven by the demands of a global bu- ness climate seeking to increase the value delivery of IT investment. However, the ability to realize this value can prove problematic in practice. Of particular concern are the hidden costs of globally distributed models of working, such as understanding and communicating the true business needs across organizational and cultural boundaries. To address such issues, o?shore outsourcing requires di?erent support from in-housedevelopmentandthismeansadaptingfamiliartechniques,processesand tools to this setting, as well as perhaps creating innovative new ones. Coupled with this industry transformation there is hence a pressing need to re-examine thosesoftwareengineeringapproachesthateither facilitate orimpede this model of working. With an inevitable focus on the economy in 2009, business decisions regarding the sourcing of software development projects will come under close scrutiny. It will become increasingly critical to design global partnerships that both clarify cost/bene?ts and enable delivery on business needs.

Originally published in 1932. A wonderful and varied collection of twenty-one stories about cats by a number of well known authors such as Alden, Compton Mackenzie, Mark Twain, Emile Zola, Cicely Hamilton etc. All lovers of cats will enjoy this literature, which observes and creates the portraits of their favourites. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Home Farm Books are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.