Visualizing the demand for various resources as a function of the master surgery schedule: A case study.

This paper presents a software system that visualizes the impact of the master surgery schedule on the demand for various resources throughout the rest of the hospital. The master surgery schedule can be seen as the engine that drives the hospital. Therefore, it is very important for decision makers to have a clear image on how the demand for resources is linked to the surgery schedule. The software presented in this paper enables schedulers to instantaneously view the impact of, e.g., an exchange of two block assignments in the master surgery schedule on the expected resource consumption pattern. A case study entailing a large Belgian surgery unit illustrates how the software can be used to assist in building better surgery schedules.Assignment; Case studies; Consumption; Decision; Demand; Exchange; Expected; Image; Impact; Management; Operating room scheduling; Resource management; Scheduling; Software; Studies; Visualization;

A framework for the simulation of structural software evolution

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 ACM.As functionality is added to an aging piece of software, its original design and structure will tend to erode. This can lead to high coupling, low cohesion and other undesirable effects associated with spaghetti architectures. The underlying forces that cause such degradation have been the subject of much research. However, progress in this field is slow, as its complexity makes it difficult to isolate the causal flows leading to these effects. This is further complicated by the difficulty of generating enough empirical data, in sufficient quantity, and attributing such data to specific points in the causal chain. This article describes a framework for simulating the structural evolution of software. A complete simulation model is built by incrementally adding modules to the framework, each of which contributes an individual evolutionary effect. These effects are then combined to form a multifaceted simulation that evolves a fictitious code base in a manner approximating real-world behavior. We describe the underlying principles and structures of our framework from a theoretical and user perspective; a validation of a simple set of evolutionary parameters is then provided and three empirical software studies generated from open-source software (OSS) are used to support claims and generated results. The research illustrates how simulation can be used to investigate a complex and under-researched area of the development cycle. It also shows the value of incorporating certain human traits into a simulation—factors that, in real-world system development, can significantly influence evolutionary structures

The Software Engineering Laboratory: An operational software experience factory

For 15 years, the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) has been carrying out studies and experiments for the purpose of understanding, assessing, and improving software and software processes within a production software development environment at NASA/GSFC. The SEL comprises three major organizations: (1) NASA/GSFC, Flight Dynamics Division; (2) University of Maryland, Department of Computer Science; and (3) Computer Sciences Corporation, Flight Dynamics Technology Group. These organizations have jointly carried out several hundred software studies, producing hundreds of reports, papers, and documents, all of which describe some aspect of the software engineering technology that was analyzed in the flight dynamics environment at NASA. The studies range from small, controlled experiments (such as analyzing the effectiveness of code reading versus that of functional testing) to large, multiple project studies (such as assessing the impacts of Ada on a production environment). The organization's driving goal is to improve the software process continually, so that sustained improvement may be observed in the resulting products. This paper discusses the SEL as a functioning example of an operational software experience factory and summarizes the characteristics of and major lessons learned from 15 years of SEL operations

Open Process Software

Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies by Noah Wardrip-Fruin. (Software Studies Series. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Pp 480. $35.00 cloth.

The computational turn: thinking about the digital humanities

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Towards understanding software: 15 years in the SEL

For 15 years, the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) at GSFC has been carrying out studies and experiments for the purpose of understanding, assessing, and improving software, and software processes within a production software environment. The SEL comprises three major organizations: (1) the GSFC Flight Dynamics Division; (2) the University of Maryland Computer Science Department; and (3) the Computer Sciences Corporation Flight Dynamics Technology Group. These organizations have jointly carried out several hundred software studies, producing hundreds of reports, papers, and documents: all describing some aspect of the software engineering technology that has undergone analysis in the flight dynamics environment. The studies range from small controlled experiments (such as analyzing the effectiveness of code reading versus functional testing) to large, multiple-project studies (such as assessing the impacts of Ada on a production environment). The key findings that NASA feels have laid the foundation for ongoing and future software development and research activities are summarized

Decolonizing Information Narratives: Entangled Apocalyptics, Algorithmic Racism and the Myths of History

In what follows, some contemporary narratives about ‘the information society’ are interrogated from critical race theoretical and decolonial perspectives with a view to constructing a ‘counter-narrative’ purporting to demonstrate the embeddedness of coloniality—that is, the persistent operation of colonial logics—in such discourses

Foreign objects? Web content management systems, journalistic cultures and the ontology of software

Research on ‘digital’ journalism has focused largely on online news, with comparatively less interest in the longer-term implications of software and computational technologies. Drawing upon a six-year study of the Toronto Star, this paper provides an account of TOPS, an in-house web content management system (CMS) which served as the backbone of thestar.com for six years. For some, TOPS was a successful software innovation, while for others, a strategic digital ‘property’. But for most journalists, it was slow, deficient in functionality, aesthetically unappealing and cumbersome. Although several organizational factors can explain TOPS’ obstinacy, I argue for particular attention to the complex ontology of software. Based on an outline of this ontology, I suggest software be taken seriously as an object of journalism, which implies: acknowledging its partial autonomy from human use or authorization; accounting for its ability to mutate indefinitely; and analyzing its capacity to encourage forms of ‘computational thinking

Scraping the Social? Issues in live social research

What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research? This paper seeks to contribute to debates about digital social research by exploring how a ‘medium-specific’ technique for online data capture may be rendered analytically productive for social research. As a device that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to re-structure social research, and this in at least two ways. Firstly, as a technique that is not native to social research, scraping risks to introduce ‘alien’ methodological assumptions into social research (such as an pre-occupation with freshness). Secondly, to scrape is to risk importing into our inquiry categories that are prevalent in the social practices enabled by the media: scraping makes available already formatted data for social research. Scraped data, and online social data more generally, tend to come with ‘external’ analytics already built-in. This circumstance is often approached as a ‘problem’ with online data capture, but we propose it may be turned into virtue, insofar as data formats that have currency in the areas under scrutiny may serve as a source of social data themselves. Scraping, we propose, makes it possible to render traffic between the object and process of social research analytically productive. It enables a form of ‘real-time’ social research, in which the formats and life cycles of online data may lend structure to the analytic objects and findings of social research. By way of a conclusion, we demonstrate this point in an exercise of online issue profiling, and more particularly, by relying on Twitter to profile the issue of ‘austerity’. Here we distinguish between two forms of real-time research, those dedicated to monitoring live content (which terms are current?) and those concerned with analysing the liveliness of issues (which topics are happening?)