Cost impact analysis for requirements management

Competition and the associated challenges in the automotive industry are increasing. Products are becoming more complex to satisfy growing needs of the consumers and products need to be cheaper and produced quicker. The automotive industry is responding to these challenges, by developing products within collaborative and extended enterprises across diverse geographical location. New customer requirements imply high frequency changes to the initial design requirements. Current unstructured approaches are not robust to deal with the volume and complexity of the nature of product changes in this environment. The aim of this research is to develop two methodologies, one for requirements extraction methodology (REXTRAM) and the second cost impact analysis methodology (CIAM) within the automotive industry. The research was conducted in a collaborative development environment between automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers and Tier 1 Suppliers. The thesis has proposed two novel methodologies. The first methodology (REXTRAM) extracts relevant data from product design documents and industrial domain experts. REXTRAM generates as output a repository of requirements, design parameters and their constraints. The second methodology (CIAM) identifies two types of changes (constraints changing on requirements and constraints changing on design parameters). CIAM combines matrixes and business (cost and time) driver rules to determine incurred (delta) cost of requirement changes. The matrixes exhibit three types of relationships: requirements to requirements; requirements to design parameters and design parameters to design parameters relationships. Case study approach and independent expert are used to illustrate the application and the capability of both methodologies. In this way this research proposes a tested and validated set of methodologies for the extraction of relevant data and the cost impact analysis of requirement changes and its challenges. The resultant methodologies have widespread application in the context of complex mechanical designs. The research also identifies future research directions in the relevant areas.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Data navigation and visualization: navigating coordinated multiple views of data

The field of coordinated and multiple views (CMVs) has been for over a decade, a promising technique for enhancing data visualization, yet that promise remains unfulfilled. Current CMVs lack a platform for flexible execution of certain kinds of open-ended tasks consequently users’ are unable to achieve novel objectives. Navigation of data, though an important aspect of interactive visualization, has not generated the level of attention it should from the human computer interaction community. A number of frameworks for and categorization of navigation techniques exist, but further detailed studies are required to highlight the range of benefits improved navigation can achieve in the use of interactive tools such as CMVs.This thesis investigates the extent of support offered by CMVs to people navigating information spaces, in order to discover data, visualize these data and retrieve adequate information to achieve their goals. It also seeks to understand the basic principle of CMVs and how to apply its procedure to achieve successful navigation.Three empirical studies structured around the user’s goal as they navigate CMVs are presented here. The objective of the studies is to propose a simple, but strong, design procedure to support future development of CMVs. The approach involved a comparative analysis of qualitative and quantitative experiments comprising of categorised navigation tasks carried out, initially on existing CMVs and subsequently on CMVs which had been redesigned applying the proposed design procedure. The findings show that adequate information can be retrieved, with successful navigation and effective visualization achieved more easily and in less time, where metadata is provided alongside the relevant data within the CMVs to facilitate navigation. This dissertation thus proposes and evaluates a novel design procedure to aid development of more navigable CMVs

3-D Visualization of Software Structure

A common and frustrating problem in software engineering is the introduction of new faults as a side-effect of software maintenance. An understanding of all of the relationships that exist between modified software and the rest of a system can limit the introduction of new faults. For large systems, these relationships can be numerous and subtle. The relationships can be especially complex in object-oriented systems that include inheritance and dynamic binding. Software visualization can potentially ease both impact analysis and general program understanding. Software visualization can facilitate program understanding by graphically displaying important software features. However, despite recent success in developing useful and intuitive graphical representations for certain aspects of software, current software visualization systems are limited by their lack of scalability --- the ability to visualize both small and large-scale software entities. This paper demonstrates that three-dim..