The application of behavioural science to symbol Design

In order to develop a sound basis for the development of design education, we need to study the behaviour of designers. This enquiry focuses on the process of symbol design. A definition of design is offered which takes due account of prior definitions, design methods, psychological theory, the interdisciplinary nature of design, and of greatest importance, the need for a definition which underpins empirical investigation. The nature of symbols is discussed in relation to Semiotics. The difficulties of research are considered and an approach is developed after investigating methods of classifying symbols. The limiting conditions of this approach are specified. The above discussion is integrated into a definition of symbol design and a model of the potential influences on the process is evolved. Two pilot studies of symbol design are reported and refinements to the methodology of such experiments are suggested. Some tentative conclusions emerge from these experiments, which, along with the basic theoretical framework, are used to evaluate a number of design methods. The study concludes with a discussion of future research possibilities

Requirements Prioritization Based on Benefit and Cost Prediction: A Method Classification Framework

In early phases of the software development process, requirements prioritization necessarily relies on the specified requirements and on predictions of benefit and cost of individual requirements. This paper induces a conceptual model of requirements prioritization based on benefit and cost. For this purpose, it uses Grounded Theory. We provide a detailed account of the procedures and rationale of (i) how we obtained our results and (ii) how we used them to form the basis for a framework for classifying requirements prioritization methods

Rationale in Development Chat Messages: An Exploratory Study

Chat messages of development teams play an increasingly significant role in software development, having replaced emails in some cases. Chat messages contain information about discussed issues, considered alternatives and argumentation leading to the decisions made during software development. These elements, defined as rationale, are invaluable during software evolution for documenting and reusing development knowledge. Rationale is also essential for coping with changes and for effective maintenance of the software system. However, exploiting the rationale hidden in the chat messages is challenging due to the high volume of unstructured messages covering a wide range of topics. This work presents the results of an exploratory study examining the frequency of rationale in chat messages, the completeness of the available rationale and the potential of automatic techniques for rationale extraction. For this purpose, we apply content analysis and machine learning techniques on more than 8,700 chat messages from three software development projects. Our results show that chat messages are a rich source of rationale and that machine learning is a promising technique for detecting rationale and identifying different rationale elements.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures. The 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'17