A roadmap of problem frames research

It has been a decade since Michael Jackson introduced problem frames to the software engineering community. Since then, he has published further work addressing problem frames as well as presenting several keynote addresses. Other authors have researched problem frames, have written about their experiences and have expressed their opinions. It was not until 2004 that an opportunity presented itself for researchers in the field to gather as a community. The first International Workshop on Advances and Applications of Problem Frames (IWAAPF'04) was held at the International Conference on Software Engineering in Edinburgh on 24th May 2004. This event attracted over 30 participants: Jackson delivered a keynote address, researchers presented their work and an expert panel discussed the challenges of problem frames. Featuring in this special issue are two extended papers from the workshop, an invited contribution from Jackson in which he positions problem frames in the context of the software engineering discipline, and this article, where we provide a review of the literature

Assessing Student Performance in a Theoretical Computer Literacy Course

Students studying to become Chartered Accountants at a large South African Open Distance Learning (ODL) institution are failing an introductory course in computer literacy at an alarming rate. Over a period of five years the responsible lecturers proposed various methods to students on how to study and prepare for the examination of the subject, with some degree of success. The literature suggests that the problem emerges even before school level or at least as early on as primary school education. In an ODL environment students are faced with the absence of a classroom environment, a facility which many students, fresh from school, still have a need for. However, having marked a few thousand scripts twice a year over the past five years, the lecturers identified a number of sub problems all part of the larger problem of students having to use English as their second or third language to master a content subject. Other problems include ignorance of the study material and an inability to determine the relevance of a formulated answer to a question.Management Accountin

A holistic method for improving software product and process quality

The concept of quality in general is elusive, multi-faceted and is perceived differently by different stakeholders. Quality is difficult to define and extremely difficult to measure. Deficient software systems regularly result in failures which often lead to significant financial losses but more importantly to loss of human lives. Such systems need to be either scrapped and replaced by new ones or corrected/improved through maintenance. One of the most serious challenges is how to deal with legacy systems which, even when not failing, inevitably require upgrades, maintenance and improvement because of malfunctioning or changing requirements, or because of changing technologies, languages, or platforms. In such cases, the dilemma is whether to develop solutions from scratch or to re-engineer a legacy system. This research addresses this dilemma and seeks to establish a rigorous method for the derivation of indicators which, together with management criteria, can help decide whether restructuring of legacy systems is advisable. At the same time as the software engineering community has been moving from corrective methods to preventive methods, concentrating not only on both product quality improvement and process quality improvement has become imperative. This research investigation combines Product Quality Improvement, primarily through the re-engineering of legacy systems; and Process Improvement methods, models and practices, and uses a holistic approach to study the interplay of Product and Process Improvement. The re-engineering factor rho, a composite metric was proposed and validated. The design and execution of formal experiments tested hypotheses on the relationship of internal (code-based) and external (behavioural) metrics. In addition to proving the hypotheses, the insights gained on logistics challenges resulted in the development of a framework for the design and execution of controlled experiments in Software Engineering. The next part of the research resulted in the development of the novel, generic and, hence, customisable Quality Model GEQUAMO, which observes the principle of orthogonality, and combines a top-down analysis of the identification, classification and visualisation of software quality characteristics, and a bottom-up method for measurement and evaluation. GEQUAMO II addressed weaknesses that were identified during various GEQUAMO implementations and expert validation by academics and practitioners. Further work on Process Improvement investigated the Process Maturity and its relationship to Knowledge Sharing, resulted in the development of the I5P Visualisation Framework for Performance Estimation through the Alignment of Process Maturity and Knowledge Sharing. I5P was used in industry and was validated by experts from academia and industry. Using the principles that guided the creation of the GEQUAMO model, the CoFeD visualisation framework, was developed for comparative quality evaluation and selection of methods, tools, models and other software artifacts. CoFeD is very useful as the selection of wrong methods, tools or even personnel is detrimental to the survival and success of projects and organisations, and even to individuals. Finally, throughout the many years of research and teaching Software Engineering, Information Systems, Methodologies, I observed the ambiguities of terminology and the use of one term to mean different concepts and one concept to be expressed in different terms. These practices result in lack of clarity. Thus my final contribution comes in my reflections on terminology disambiguation for the achievement of clarity, and the development of a framework for achieving disambiguation of terms as a necessary step towards gaining maturity and justifying the use of the term “Engineering” 50 years since the term Software Engineering was coined. This research resulted in the creation of new knowledge in the form of novel indicators, models and frameworks which can aid quantification and decision making primarily on re-engineering of legacy code and on the management of process and its improvement. The thesis also contributes to the broader debate and understanding of problems relating to Software Quality, and establishes the need for a holistic approach to software quality improvement from both the product and the process perspectives

An Empirical investigation of software project schedule behavior.

Two intensive, longitudinal case studies were conducted at IBM Hursley Park. There were several objectives to these case studies: first, to investigate the actual behaviour of the two projects in depth; second, to develop conceptual structures relating the lower-level processes of each project to the higher-level processes; third, to relate the lower-level and higher-level processes to project duration; fourth, to test a conjecture forwarded by Bradac et al i. e. that waiting is more prevalent during the end of a project than during the middle of a project. A large volume of qualitative and quantitative evidence was collected and analysed for each project. This evidence included minutes of status meetings, interviews, project schedules, and information from feedback workshops (which were conducted several months after the completion of the projects). The analysis generated three models and numerous insights into software project behaviour. The models concerned software project schedule behaviour, capability and an integration of schedule behaviour and capability. The insights concerned characteristics of a project (i. e. the actual progress of phases and milestones, the amount of workload on the project, the degree of capability of the project, tactics of management, and the sociotechnical aspects of a project) and characteristics of process areas within a project (i. e. waiting, poor progress and outstanding work). Support for the models and the insights was sought, with some success, from previous research. Despite the approach taken in this investigation (i. e. the collection of a large volume of evidence and the analyses of a wide variety of factors using a very broad perspective), this investigation has been unable to pinpoint definite causes to explain why a project will or will not complete according to its original plan. One `hint' of an explanation are the differences between the socio-technical contexts of the two projects and, related to this, the fact that tactics of management may be constrained by a project's socio-technical context. Furthermore, while the concept of a project as a distinct entity seems reasonable, the actual boundaries of a project in an organisation's `space-time' are ambiguous and very difficult to properly define. Therefore, it may be that those things that make a project difficult to distinguish from its surrounding organisation are interwoven with the socio-technical contexts of a project, and may be precisely those things that explain the progress of that project. Recommendations, based on the models, the insights and the conclusions, are provided for industry and research