Boundary Objects in Design: An Ecological View of Design Artifacts

Traditionally, Systems Analysis and Design (SAD) research has focused on ways of working and ways of modeling. Design ecology – the task, organizational and political context surrounding design – is less well understood. In particular, relationships between design routines and products within ecologies have not received sufficient attention. In this paper, we theorize about design product and ecology relationships and deliberate on how design products – viewed as boundary objects – bridge functional knowledge and stakeholder power gaps across different social worlds. We identify four essential features of design boundary objects: capability to promote shared representation, capability to transform design knowledge, capability to mobilize for action, and capability to legitimize design knowledge. We show how these features help align, integrate, and transform heterogeneous technical and domain knowledge across social worlds as well as mobilize, coordinate, and align stakeholder power. We illustrate through an ethnography of a large aerospace laboratory how two design artifacts – early proto-architectures and project plans – shared these four features to coalesce design processes and propel successful movement of designs across social worlds. These artifacts resolved uncertainty associated with functional requirements and garnered political momentum to choose among design solutions. Altogether, the study highlights the importance of design boundary objects in multi-stakeholder designs and stresses the need to formulate sociology-based design theories on how knowledge is produced and consumed in complex SAD tasks

Representation of User Stories in Descriptive Markup

The environment in which a software system is developed is in a constant state of flux. The changes at higher levels of software development often manifest themselves in changes at lower levels, especially its activities and artifacts. In the past decade, a notable change has been the emergence of agile methodologies for software development. In a number of agile methodologies, user stories have been adopted as a style of expressing software requirements. This thesis is about theory and practice of describing user stories so as to make them amenable to both humans and machines. In that regard, relevant concerns in describing user stories must be considered and treated separately. In this thesis, a number of concerns in describing user stories are identified, and a collection of conceptual models to help create an understanding of those concerns are formulated. In particular, conceptual models for user story description, stakeholders, information, representation, and presentation are proposed. To facilitate structured descriptions of user stories, a User Story Markup Language (USML) is specified. USML depends on the requisite conceptual models for theoretical foundation. It is informed by experiential knowledge, especially conventions, guidelines, patterns, principles, recommended practices, and standards in markup language engineering. In doing so, USML aims to make the decisions underlying its development explicit. USML provides conformance criteria that include validation against multiple schema documents. In particular, USML is equipped with a grammar-based schema document and a rule-based schema document that constrain USML instance documents in different ways. USML aims to be flexible and extensible. In particular, USML enables a variety of user story forms, which allow a range of user story descriptions. USML instance documents can be intermixed with markup fragments of other languages, presented on conventional user agents, and organized and manipulated in different ways. USML can also be extended in a number of ways to accommodate the needs of those user story stakeholders who wish to personalize the language

Conceptual schemas generation from organizacional model in an automatic software production process

Actualmente, la ingeniería de software ha propuesto múltiples técnicas para mejorar el desarrollo de software, sin embargo, la meta final no ha sido satisfecha. En muchos casos, el producto software no satisface las necesidades reales de los clientes finales del negocio donde el sistema operará. Uno de los problemas principales de los trabajos actuales es la carencia de un enfoque sistemático para mapear cada concepto de modelado del dominio del problema (modelos organizacionales), en sus correspondientes elementos conceptuales en el espacio de la solución (modelos conceptuales orientados a objetos). El principal objetivo de esta tesis es proveer un enfoque metodológico que permita generar modelos conceptuales y modelos de requisitos a partir de descripciones organizacionales. Se propone el uso de tres disciplinas, distintas pero complementarias (modelado organizacional, requisitos de software y modelado conceptual) para lograr este objetivo. La tesis describe un proceso de elicitación de requisitos que permite al usuario crear un modelo de negocios que representa la situación actual del negocio (requisitos tempranos). Nosotros consideramos que este modelo, el cual refleja la forma en la que se implementan actualmente los procesos de negocio, es la fuente correcta para determinar la funcionalidad esperada del sistema a desarrollar. Se propone también un proceso para identificar los elementos que son relevantes para ser automatizados a partir del modelo de negocio. Como resultado de este proceso se genera un modelo intermedio que representa los requisitos del sistema de software. Finalmente, presentamos un conjunto de guías sistemáticas para generar un esquema conceptual orientado a objetos a partir del modelo intermedio. Nosotros también exploramos, como solución alternativa, la generación de una especificación de requisitos tardíos a partir del modelo intermedio.Martínez Rebollar, A. (2008). Conceptual schemas generation from organizacional model in an automatic software production process [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/3304Palanci