Pothole detection and its severity measurement is still an important challenges in urban infrastructure management, where late maintenance directly contributes to vehicle damage, road accidents, and escalating repair costs. Existing automated approaches depend on 2D RGB images and cannot measure physical depth of potholes. In this paper, we present a depthaware pothole detection framework and then compare five architectures: YOLOv8n, YOLOv8nSeg, YOLOv9t, RTDETRL, and RTDETRX for RGB-D sensor fusion-based detection and automated depth measurement. A custom offline augmentation pipeline is used here to simulate adverse road monitoring conditions. All models are trained on the PothRGBD dataset with an 80% training and 20% validation split and evaluated using Precision, Recall, mAP@50, and mAP@50_95. Before measuring the depth data, all depth maps are corrected for camera tilt using RANSAC ground-plane orthorectification and all zero-valued sensor pixels are cast to NaN before any statistic is computed. YOLOv8nSeg achieves the highest mAP@50 of 0.9556 and mAP@50_95 of 0.6758 with the most accurate depth estimate of 2.96 cm with the pixel-precise Dseg algorithm. YOLOv8n achieves the fastest inference at 3.6ms. RTDETRX achieves the highest detection confidence at 92.70%. An important finding is that even after full RANSAC orthorectification, bounding box models overestimate pothole depth by 0.16 to 0.21 cm compared to pixel precise segmentation masks. This confirms that the pavement inclusion bias is structural rather than a calibration artifact.
Agile - denoting "the quality of being agile, readiness for motion, nimbleness, activity, dexterity in motion" - software development methods are attempting to offer an answer to the eager business community asking for lighter weight along with faster and nimbler software development processes. This is especially the case with the rapidly growing and volatile Internet software industry as well as for the emerging mobile application environment. The new agile methods have evoked substantial amount of literature and debates. However, academic research on the subject is still scarce, as most of existing publications are written by practitioners or consultants. The aim of this publication is to begin filling this gap by systematically reviewing the existing literature on agile software development methodologies. This publication has three purposes. First, it proposes a definition and a classification of agile software development approaches. Second, it analyses ten software development methods that can be characterized as being "agile" against the defined criterion. Third, it compares these methods and highlights their similarities and differences. Based on this analysis, future research needs are identified and discussed.
P. Abrahamsson, O. Salo, Jussi Ronkainen et al.· arXiv.org· 728 citations· ⚡54
Context: Software startups are newly created companies with no operating history and fast in producing cutting-edge technologies. These companies develop software under highly uncertain conditions, tackling fast-growing markets under severe lack of resources. Therefore, software startups present a unique combination of characteristics which pose several challenges to software development activities. Objective: This study aims to structure and analyze the literature on software development in startup companies, determining thereby the potential for technology transfer and identifying software development work practices reported by practitioners and researchers. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping study, developing a classification schema, ranking the selected primary studies according their rigor and relevance, and analyzing reported software development work practices in startups. Results: A total of 43 primary studies were identified and mapped, synthesizing the available evidence on software development in startups. Only 16 studies are entirely dedicated to software development in startups, of which 10 result in a weak contribution (advice and implications (6); lesson learned (3); tool (1)). Nineteen studies focus on managerial and organizational factors. Moreover, only 9 studies exhibit high scientific rigor and relevance. From the reviewed primary studies, 213 software engineering work practices were extracted, categorized and analyzed. Conclusion: This mapping study provides the first systematic exploration of the state-of-art on software startup research. The existing body of knowledge is limited to a few high quality studies. Furthermore, the results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.
Nicolò Paternoster, Carmine Giardino, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al.· Information and Software Tec...· 394 citations· ⚡54
Known for his clear and elegant writing style, Bertsekas shaped fields from control and optimization to large-scale computation and artificial intelligence.
