Software Engineers' Information Seeking Behavior in Change Impact Analysis - An Interview Study

Software engineers working in large projects must navigate complex information landscapes. Change Impact Analysis (CIA) is a task that relies on engineers' successful information seeking in databases storing, e.g., source code, requirements, design descriptions, and test case specifications. Several previous approaches to support information seeking are task-specific, thus understanding engineers' seeking behavior in specific tasks is fundamental. We present an industrial case study on how engineers seek information in CIA, with a particular focus on traceability and development artifacts that are not source code. We show that engineers have different information seeking behavior, and that some do not consider traceability particularly useful when conducting CIA. Furthermore, we observe a tendency for engineers to prefer less rigid types of support rather than formal approaches, i.e., engineers value support that allows flexibility in how to practically conduct CIA. Finally, due to diverse information seeking behavior, we argue that future CIA support should embrace individual preferences to identify change impact by empowering several seeking alternatives, including searching, browsing, and tracing.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehensio

Influence of Context on Decision Making during Requirements Elicitation

Requirements engineers should strive to get a better insight into decision making processes. During elicitation of requirements, decision making influences how stakeholders communicate with engineers, thereby affecting the engineers' understanding of requirements for the future information system. Empirical studies issued from Artificial Intelligence offer an adequate groundwork to understand how decision making is influenced by some particular contextual factors. However, no research has gone into the validation of such empirical studies in the process of collecting needs of the future system's users. As an answer, the paper empirically studies factors, initially identified by AI literature, that influence decision making and communication during requirements elicitation. We argue that the context's structure of the decision should be considered as a cornerstone to adequately study how stakeholders decide to communicate or not a requirement. The paper proposes a context framework to categorize former factors into specific families, and support the engineers during the elicitation process.Comment: appears in Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Acquisition, Representation and Reasoning with Contextualized Knowledge (ARCOE), 2012, Montpellier, France, held at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-12

Law and Engineering: In Search of the Law-Science Problem

Lawyers and scientists both have the intellectual conceit that a well-defined problem is not only a necessary, but almost a sufficient, condition for a successful solution. Mashaw examines the applied science of engineering in the context of health and safety regulation, focusing on the law-science interface at the NHTSA

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Knowledge practices in design: The role of visual representations as 'epistemic objects'

We use a detailed study of the knowledge work around visual representations to draw attention to the multidimensional nature of `objects'. Objects are variously described in the literatures as relatively stable or in flux; as abstract or concrete; and as used within or across practices. We clarify these dimensions, drawing on and extending the literature on boundary objects, and connecting it with work on epistemic and technical objects. In particular, we highlight the epistemic role of objects, using our observations of knowledge work on an architectural design project to show how, in this setting, visual representations are characterized by a `lack' or incompleteness that precipitates unfolding. The conceptual design of a building involves a wide range of technical, social and aesthetic forms of knowledge that need to be developed and aligned. We explore how visual representations are used, and how these are meaningful to different stakeholders, eliciting their distinct contributions. As the project evolves and the drawings change, new issues and needs for knowledge work arise. These objects have an `unfolding ontology' and are constantly in flux, rather than fully formed. We discuss the implications for wider understandings of objects in organizations and for how knowledge work is achieved in practice

Durable Digital Objects Rather Than Digital Preservation

Long-term digital preservation is not the best available objective. Instead, what information producers and consumers almost surely want is a universe of durable digital objects—documents and programs that will be as accessible and useful a century from now as they are today. Given the will, we could implement and deploy a practical and pleasing durability infrastructure within two years. Tools for daily work can embed packaging for durability without much burdening their users. Moving responsibility for durability from archival employees to information producers would also avoid burdening repositories with keeping up with Internet scale. An engineering prescription is available. Research libraries’ and archives’ slow advance towards practical preservation of digital content is remarkable to outsiders. Why does their progress seem stalled? Ineffective collaboration across disciplinary boundaries has surely been a major impediment. We speculate about cultural reasons for this situation and warn about possible marginalization of research librarianship as a profession.

The malleability of disciplinary identity

Master's Project (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017This paper tracks the progress of a beginning undergraduate writer's disciplinary becoming. Much research in disciplinary identity focuses on graduate students and advanced undergraduate writers; however, sites of disciplinary identity formation also occur early on during the required first-year writing course. These sites are crucial because they inform the student writer's entrance into the academic conversation, and reveal the extent to which early assumptions about disciplinary roles affects further disciplinary identity formation. Drawing from Ivanič's framework of writer identity, this case study reveals the ever-shifting tensions of "disciplinary becoming." The analysis captures how a writer's discursive self shifts from a static disciplinary identity to a more malleable disciplinary identity through a cross-analysis of two separate writing assignments in order to learn how the student's petroleum engineer identity is performed, contradicted and re-negotiated. I argue that this shift will enable writing knowledge transfer and overall identity formation

Assessment of work-based reports: an analysis of assessment frameworks

In Britain engineering professional development has traditionally been seen as a three phase process consisting of a period of engineering formation, a period of training and a period during which engineering responsibilities are demonstrated. An individual could submit evidence of these activities and become registered as a Professional Engineer. Increasing numbers of people employed in the role of engineer do not have formal engineering qualifications and a part or all their engineering formation is carried out within engineering companies or organizations. These people therefore do not have the academically authenticated credentials to register as professional engineers but if they are ignored then the pool of registered engineers will cease to be representative of the profession. The Engineering Council, the body responsible for registering engineers in the UK, has acknowledged the changes in the structure of the profession and has introduced an alternative route for assessing the knowledge and understanding that underpins the competence of a professional engineer. Individual engineers can demonstrate that they have an adequate engineering formation through any combination of academic qualifications and a technical report on some aspect of their professional engineering work. The introduction of the technical report requires the Professional Engineering Bodies to carry out an assessment outside the traditional assessment framework of the Universities. This paper reviews and analyses the requirements of assessment systems and derives the components of such a system that will ensure that the results of the assessment of a work-based technical report will be respected and be seen as assuring comparable standards to the academic routes to engineering formation. By examining assessment separately from the processes of teaching and learning, the paper also reveals the extent of an assessment process and its costs

Illinois Technograph v. 078, iss. 6 Mar. 1963

published or submitted for publicatio