52,208 research outputs found
Are Delayed Issues Harder to Resolve? Revisiting Cost-to-Fix of Defects throughout the Lifecycle
Many practitioners and academics believe in a delayed issue effect (DIE);
i.e. the longer an issue lingers in the system, the more effort it requires to
resolve. This belief is often used to justify major investments in new
development processes that promise to retire more issues sooner.
This paper tests for the delayed issue effect in 171 software projects
conducted around the world in the period from 2006--2014. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the largest study yet published on this effect. We found no
evidence for the delayed issue effect; i.e. the effort to resolve issues in a
later phase was not consistently or substantially greater than when issues were
resolved soon after their introduction.
This paper documents the above study and explores reasons for this mismatch
between this common rule of thumb and empirical data. In summary, DIE is not
some constant across all projects. Rather, DIE might be an historical relic
that occurs intermittently only in certain kinds of projects. This is a
significant result since it predicts that new development processes that
promise to faster retire more issues will not have a guaranteed return on
investment (depending on the context where applied), and that a long-held truth
in software engineering should not be considered a global truism.Comment: 31 pages. Accepted with minor revisions to Journal of Empirical
Software Engineering. Keywords: software economics, phase delay, cost to fi
Imaginative Value Sensitive Design: How Moral Imagination Exceeds Moral Law Theories in Informing Responsible Innovation
Safe-by-Design (SBD) frameworks for the development of emerging technologies have become an ever more popular means by which scholars argue that transformative emerging technologies can safely incorporate human values. One such popular SBD methodology is called Value Sensitive Design (VSD). A central tenet of this design methodology is to investigate stakeholder values and design those values into technologies during early stage research and development (R&D). To accomplish this, the VSD framework mandates that designers consult the philosophical and ethical literature to best determine how to weigh moral trade-offs. However, the VSD framework also concedes the universalism of moral values, particularly the values of freedom, autonomy, equality trust and privacy justice. This paper argues that the VSD methodology, particularly applied to nano-bio-info-cogno (NBIC) technologies, has an insufficient grounding for the determination of moral values. As such, an exploration of the value-investigations of VSD are deconstructed to illustrate both its strengths and weaknesses. This paper also provides possible modalities for the strengthening of the VSD methodology, particularly through the application of moral imagination and how moral imagination exceed the boundaries of moral intuitions in the development of novel technologies
Modeling, Simulating, and Parameter Fitting of Biochemical Kinetic Experiments
In many chemical and biological applications, systems of differential
equations containing unknown parameters are used to explain empirical
observations and experimental data. The DEs are typically nonlinear and
difficult to analyze, requiring numerical methods to approximate the solutions.
Compounding this difficulty are the unknown parameters in the DE system, which
must be given specific numerical values in order for simulations to be run.
Estrogen receptor protein dimerization is used as an example to demonstrate
model construction, reduction, simulation, and parameter estimation.
Mathematical, computational, and statistical methods are applied to empirical
data to deduce kinetic parameter estimates and guide decisions regarding future
experiments and modeling. The process demonstrated serves as a pedagogical
example of quantitative methods being used to extract parameter values from
biochemical data models.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures, to be published in SIAM Revie
The Field-tested and Grounded Technological Rule as Product of Mode 2 Management Research
management research, technological
Prolific Inventor Productivity and Mobility: A Western/Asian com-parison. Evidence from US Patent Data for 12 Countries
This paper provides new insights into the role of individual inventors inthe innovation process. Individuals are central in this creative process becauseinnovation is not simply a product of firms and organizations; it requiresindividual creativity (Rothaermel and Hess, 2007). We focus our analysis on prolific inventors (a rich sub category of inventors) because they contribute sohugely to national invention totals (Le Bas et al., 2010) and tend to produceinventions that have more economic value (Gambardella et al., 2005; Gay et al.,2008). Converging empirical evidence has established the significance ofprolific inventors (Ernst et al., 2000). Previous studies of prolific (or “key”)inventors have focused more on the firms in which they work or on the industriesin which the firms operate. Narin and Breitzman’s (1995) seminal work on thetopic is based on an analysis of only four firms in a single sector and a recentpaper by Pilkington et al. (2009) uses only two firms. In contrast to these studieson small samples, we use a very large data set which includes thousands ofinventors in thousands of firms from several countries.Artykuł przedstawia nowe spojrzenie na rolę indywidualnych wynalazców w procesie tworzenia innowacji. Wynalazcy indywidualni stanowią element centralny procesu twórczego. Innowacja nie jest produktem firm i organizacji, wymaga indywidualnej kreatywności (Rothaermel i Hess 2007). Badanie koncentruje się na analizie płodnych wynalazców. Wynalazcy tej kategorii mają najwyższy udział w generowaniu ogółu wynalazków (Le Bas et al. 2010) o wysokiej wartości ekonkomicznej (Gambardella et al. 2005). Poprzednie badania kluczowych wynalazców skupiały się analizie firm, w których pracują lub w branżach, w których te firmy działają
Choosing effective methods for design diversity - How to progress from intuition to science
Design diversity is a popular defence against design faults in safety critical systems. Design diversity is at times pursued by simply isolating the development teams of the different versions, but it is presumably better to "force" diversity, by appropriate prescriptions to the teams. There are many ways of forcing diversity. Yet, managers who have to choose a cost-effective combination of these have little guidance except their own intuition. We argue the need for more scientifically based recommendations, and outline the problems with producing them. We focus on what we think is the standard basis for most recommendations: the belief that, in order to produce failure diversity among versions, project decisions should aim at causing "diversity" among the faults in the versions. We attempt to clarify what these beliefs mean, in which cases they may be justified and how they can be checked or disproved experimentally
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