3 research outputs found
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Shared Understanding Within Large Information Systems Projects
This research responds to calls for practice-based research in the field of project management. Undertaken during the development of a sizable public information systems project, it examines the extent to which the professionals engaged in the project shared a common understanding of important matters such as its goals, structure and clients.
The literature review examines the history of project management and its methodologies, the reasons that information systems projects fail, the concept of uncertainty and shared understanding, and risk associated with the development of large scale information systems.
The fieldwork was conducted in 2010. The research adopts an interpretive position and the methodology centred on two series of structured interviews held some eight months apart. Analysis of responses found a low level of shared understanding about all matters investigated amongst the professionals developing the IS.
The overall conclusion of the research is that no evidence was found that the participants in a programme or project have a common, shared understanding of current endeavours and the future envisaged end state. Therefore any project activity that depends on a single shared understanding such as the definition of deliverables and management of the business case, may be ill-founded. Further research into the topic of shared understanding in the context of IS programmes and projects is recommended
Software Visualization in 3D: Implementation, Evaluation, and Applicability
The focus of this thesis is on the implementation, the evaluation and the useful application of the third dimension in software visualization. Software engineering is characterized by a complex interplay of different stakeholders that produce and use several artifacts. Software visualization is used as one mean to address this increasing complexity. It provides role- and task-specific views of artifacts that contain information about structure, behavior, and evolution of a software system in its entirety. The main potential of the third dimension is the possibility to provide multiple views in one software visualization for all three aspects. However, empirical findings concerning the role of the third dimension in software visualization are rare. Furthermore, there are only few 3D software visualizations that provide multiple views of a software system including all three aspects. Finally, the current tool support lacks of generating easy integrateable, scalable, and platform independent 2D, 2.5D, and 3D software visualizations automatically.
Hence, the objective is to develop a software visualization that represents all important structural entities and relations of a software system, that can display behavioral and evolutionary aspects of a software system as well, and that can be generated automatically.
In order to achieve this objective the following research methods are applied. A literature study is conducted, a software visualization generator is conceptualized and prototypically implemented, a structured approach to plan and design controlled experiments in software visualization is developed, and a controlled experiment is designed and performed to investigate the role of the third dimension in software visualization.
The main contributions are an overview of the state-of-the-art in 3D software visualization, a structured approach including a theoretical model to control influence factors during controlled experiments in software visualization, an Eclipse-based generator for producing automatically role- and task-specific 2D, 2.5D, and 3D software visualizations, the controlled experiment investigating the role of the third dimension in software visualization, and the recursive disk metaphor combining the findings with focus on the structure of software including useful applications of the third dimension regarding behavior and evolution
Abstract Using Social Agents to Visualize Software Scenarios
Enabling nonexperts to understand a software system and the scenarios of usage of that system can be challenging. Visually modeling a collection of scenarios as social interactions can provide quicker and more intuitive understanding of the system described by those scenarios. This project combines a scenario language with formal structure and automated tool support (ScenarioML) and an interactive graphical game engine featuring social automomous characters and text-to-speech capabilities. We map scenarios to social interactions by assigning a character to each actor and entity in the scenarios, and animate the interactions among these as social interactions among the corresponding characters. The social interactions can help bring out these important aspects: interactions of multiple agents, pattern and timing of interactions, non-local inconsistencies within and among scenarios, and gaps and missing information in the scenario collection. An exploratory study of thi