Documenting design decision rationale to improve individual and team design decision making: An experimental evaluation

Individual and team decision-making have crucial influence on the level of success of every software project. Even though several studies were already conducted, which concerned design decision rationale documentation approaches, a few of them focused on performances and evaluated them in laboratory. This paper proposes a technique to document design decision rationale, and evaluates experimentally the impact such a technique has on effectiveness and efficiency of individual/team decision-making in presence of requirement changes. The study was conducted as a controlled experiment. Fifty post-graduate Master students performed in the role of experiment subjects. Documented design decisions regarding the Ambient Intelligence paradigm constituted the experiment objects. Main results of the experiment show that, for both individual and team-based decision-making, effectiveness significantly improves, while efficiency remains unaltered, when decision-makers are allowed to use, rather not use, the proposed design rationale documentation technique. Copyright 2006 ACM

Software release planning

One of the most critical activities in software product development is the decisional process that assigns features to subsequent releases under technical, resource, risk, and budget constraints. This decision-centric process is referred to as software release planning (SRP). This briefing will expose a state of the art on SRP. A survey of the most relevant approaches will be presented. Emphasis will be made on their applicability (concerning e.g. type of development process - being more predictive versus more adaptive, type of system - commercial, open source product or mobile app), tool support and degree of validation in industry. One of these approaches, EVOLVE, will be analysed in detail.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

An Explanation Oriented Dialogue Approach and Its Application to Wicked Planning Problems

In this paper we consider an interactive and explanation based dialogue approach to complex and `wicked' planning problems. Wicked problems are essentially imprecisely formulated problems having no clearly defined goals and constraints. The dialogue approach is aimed at reducing the problem complexity during interaction with the human expert. The involved software agents are mostly optimization procedures. The approach contains the following steps: (1) Selection of a specific concern in a proposed solution; (2) Calculation of a stakeholder defined ideal plan; and (3) Comparing the actually generated plan and the prototype based on a similarity measure. The comparison of the actual and the ideal plan looks at aspects of interest for the stakeholder such as resource consumptions or structural properties of the plan. The proposed approach is generic and was applied and customized to three classes of wicked problems: release planning, investment planning, and urban planning. All three applications are described and illustrated in the paper

BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF THE INKOM JOURNAL (ANALISIS BIBLIOMETRIK JURNAL INKOM)

This paper proposed main problems of quantity and quality measurement of the research articles published in INKOM journal for 5 years period in informatics, computers and control system. Those three areas have become research missions of The Research Center for Informatics – Indonesia Institute of Sciences. The aim of this paper is to show how to solve research problems above using bibliometric method to analyze bibliography data available in the journal as well as to offer a summary of the research activity in the area including its most important aspects. Bibliographical data are taken from 76 articles published in the journal from May 2007 to November 2011. This paper also discusses how the method is used to measure article distribution, magazine classification category, article subject distribution, authorship patterns, and institutions distribution contributions. Results of the research show that the majority of articles are contributed by multi authors with degree of collaboration 0,553; the journal has already been widely known by the researchers outside LIPI, researchers from non-LIPI institution dominated more on the publication than from LIPI itself. The quantity of research articles increased in 2011 and used more references from scientific articles than the year before. Besides, the research quality also increased and used more cited articles from scientific journal literature than from books

BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF THE INKOM JOURNAL (ANALISIS BIBLIOMETRIK JURNAL INKOM)

This paper proposed main problems of quantity and quality measurement of the research articles published in INKOM journal for 5 years period in informatics, computers and control system. Those three areas have become research missions of The Research Center for Informatics – Indonesia Institute of Sciences. The aim of this paper is to show how to solve research problems above using bibliometric method to analyze bibliography data available in the journal as well as to offer a summary of the research activity in the area including its most important aspects. Bibliographical data are taken from 76 articles published in the journal from May 2007 to November 2011. This paper also discusses how the method is used to measure article distribution, magazine classification category, article subject distribution, authorship patterns, and institutions distribution contributions. Results of the research show that the majority of articles are contributed by multi authors with degree of collaboration 0,553; the journal has already been widely known by the researchers outside LIPI, researchers from non-LIPI institution dominated more on the publication than from LIPI itself. The quantity of research articles increased in 2011 and used more references from scientific articles than the year before. Besides, the research quality also increased and used more cited articles from scientific journal literature than from books