I arrived at NCSU on Wednesday, June 14 so this was more of an orientation week for me. Dr. Annie Anton and Shawn Page picked me up from the airport as well as one of my mom's friends. Shawn is a student here at NCSU and he too is currently working with Dr. Anton on the SMaRT Project. They brought me to my room in the Avent Ferry Hall and Dr. Anton told me that it use to be a hotel. I have a really nice room, fully equipped all to myself. The only thing missing in my room is a stove, but it's not like I know how to cook or anything. They also brought me to the EGRC (Engineering Research Center) building so I'd know how to walk there the next day. My mom's friend then took me back to her place in Chapel Hill so I could spend the first night away from home with a home cooked meal. What I learned is I'll be eating out a lot from now on. The next day Dr. Anton showed me around campus, where all the great places to eat were (as well as all the not so great places). I was struck by how huge the campus was compared to Santa Clara University. Everything seemed to be a half an hour walk away. She also introduced me to Dr. Vicki Jones who I'll also we working with, Dr. Bob Funderlic who is Dr. Anton's mentor, Glorias who is the receptionist, Jenny who helped me settle in the building, and Jason and Thomas who I'll be sharing the office with. (Jason is an MS student and Thomas is a Ph.D. student) There are many others who I can only remember their faces. I'll mention them later as I get to know them better. Well that's it for my first visit at NCSU. On Friday I learned how to use the Public Safety service offered at NCSU. It's actually a really long, funny, scary story of how stupid I can be sometimes. I only put it in to remind myself of it.
For this week, I looked through some the first few chapters of an XML book that Dr. Anton gave to me and I tried to find as many sites as I can which will help me to learn XML or Extensible Markup Language. The site that I end up using is Sun's Tutorial. For the following weeks, what I probably be doing in addition to learning XML is looking through two research projects that Dr. Anton is working on. The first project is SMaRT or Scenario Management and Requirements Tool. Most likely, I would be doing the XML part of it. The second research focuses on security and privacy policy. I will be learning more about this project during the coming weeks.
This week, I met someone new. Her name is Bengi and she is a Ph.D student from Turkey. Bengi, Thomas, Jason and I were able to got out for lunch together a few times. One of the places is a coffee house called Vine Yard. Another place we went to is a cafeteria called The Shuttle and it's located right next to the building where I work at. Thomas also started these gatherings called SWERG(Software Engineering Requirement Group). What we do is every Tuesday and Thursday Thomas would sent out an e-mail with the name and location of the movie and whoever can make it, comes. Since I don't have a car here, Thomas picks me up. This Tuesday, we went to watch a free movie, "Dreaming of Joseph Lees" at the Witherspoon Student Center.
For this week, I continued my readings on XML. In addition, Thomas and I went through two chapters of Dr. Anton's thesis on GBRAM (Goal-Based Requirements Analysis Method), a paper titled "Strategies for Developing Policies and Requirements for Secure Electronic Commerce Systems" written by Dr. Annie Anton and Dr. Julie Earp (MGMT) and found a few privacy policies offered online. We are still in the process of trying to find a security policy. In addition, we also read most of Dr. Anton's papers about GBRAM, GBRAT (Goal Based Requirements Analysis Tool), and SMaRT (Scenario Management and Requirements Tool). GBRAT is just a tool that provides functionality to GBRAM and SMaRT is an extension of GBRAT. All of this research will be relevant for the case study we'll be doing in the next few weeks. We plan on applying SMaRT, which incorporates GBRAM to existing privacy and security policies to see if the policies have missed any requirements that are necessary to the system. It is important to understand that it is important to be able to extract goals from available sources of information about the desired system during the requirements analysis and specification process. Dr. Anton's research demonstrates that by applying this method to extract the goals, the development process of the system will flow smoothly and the potential of discovering new requirements for the system later during the development process will decrease. The reason for this is the method provides a bridge that links the communication gap of stakeholders or those interested in the system and analysts. It offers heuristics which analysts and developers of the system apply to translate and understand the language and conventions used by stakeholders and thus finding the desired goals. Once all the goals are analyzed and refined, they may be operationalized in the Systems Requirements Document.
Before I left for the weekend, Thomas and I continued from last week trying to clarify the confusions we had about GBRAM (Goal-Based Requirements Analysis Method) and the paper written by Dr. Annie Anton and Dr. Julie Earp. We wanted to make sure we understood it properly before going on and analyzing the privacy policies we collected. From the four privacy policies that we were able to obtain, we decided to look at Amazon's privacy policy first. We tried to find as many privacy goals as we can and noted them on a spreadsheet before our first official meeting analyzing privacy policies together with Dr. Anton on July 6.
I left early Friday to go back to my mom's friends house. On Saturday, the house was very crowded and exciting because her sisters and brothers and their family came back to Chapel Hill. On July 2 which was a Sunday we all went to a lake house (Lake Norman) and stayed there until July 4. I had a terrific time riding on their boat, swimming in the lake and jet skiing. In addition, we also stopped by an outlet center in Charlotte where I spent way too much money. I came back to Chapel Hill on July 4th, and that night I went to the University of North Carolina to see fireworks. It was the first time I saw a flower design.
On July 9 at exactly midnight, I stood in line at "The Regulator", a bookstore on Ninth Street in Durham (it's near Duke University) waiting to get my copy of the fourth Harry Potter book and also hoping I would get my picture in the newspaper. It was a historical moment for me. Around half past midnight, I came to my senses (realizing the line was too long) and I decided I should stop by Barnes and Noble. Fortunately, the line at Barnes was moving faster and I got my book around 1:15am.
Also this week, Dr. Anton and Thomas took me to a Waffle House. I have never been to a Waffle House before and I am not sure if they have any on the west coast. I had a pecan waffle chili cheese hash browns, and of course...sweet tea. Everyone here drinks sweet tea and it's nothing like I ever had before. It was a delicious lunch. Dr. Anton also let me try some of her grits, another item I have never tried before.
This week I only saw Bowfinger. However, the others also went to see American History X.
This week, as a part of the research we went through
Amazon, eBay and Travelocity's privacy policy. We have a sort of a
systematic approach to going over these policies. We'd go into
Dr. Anton's office, sit at her black, squared table (get comfortable...hmm)
and start analyzing. Dr. Anton
would type in the privacy goals that we find into her trusty spreadsheet.
The columns are nicely labeled (It look something like this):
| No. | Goals | Agents | Conflicts | Obstacles | Scenarios | Constraints | Preconditions | Postconditions | Issues |