Social Debt in Software Engineering: Insights from Industry

Social debt is analogous to technical debt in many ways: it represents the state of software development organisations as the result of “accumulated” decisions. In the case of social debt, decisions are about people and their interactions. Our objective was to study the causality around social debt in practice. In so doing, we conducted exploratory qualitative research in a large software company. We found many forces together causing social debt; we represented them in a framework, and captured anti-patterns that led to the debt in the first place. Finally, we elicited best practices that technicians adopted to pay back some of the accumulated debt. We learned that social debt is strongly correlated with technical debt and both forces should be reckoned with together during the software process

Absolute calibration in vivo measurement systems

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is currently investigating a new method for obtaining absolute calibration factors for radiation measurement systems used to measure internally deposited radionuclides in vivo. Absolute calibration of in vivo measurement systems will eliminate the need to generate a series of human surrogate structures (i.e., phantoms) for calibrating in vivo measurement systems. The absolute calibration of in vivo measurement systems utilizes magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to define physiological structure, size, and composition. The MRI image provides a digitized representation of the physiological structure, which allows for any mathematical distribution of radionuclides within the body. Using Monte Carlo transport codes, the emission spectrum from the body is predicted. The in vivo measurement equipment is calibrated using the Monte Carlo code and adjusting for the intrinsic properties of the detection system. The calibration factors are verified using measurements of existing phantoms and previously obtained measurements of human volunteers. 8 refs

A Framework for Constructive Design Rationale

This paper proposes a framework for describing design rationale as a constructive notion rather than a fixed record of design reasoning. The framework is based on two views: an instance-based view of design rationale as an ordered set of decisions, and a state-space view of design rationale as a space of solution alternatives. The two views are connected with each other using the function-behaviour-structure (FBS) ontology. Constructive design rationale is defined and categorised based on reformulations of the function, behaviour or structure of the rationale. The drivers of the different reformulations are represented in the situated FBS framework

Subsuming the BPM Life Cycle in an Ontological Framework of Designing

Abstract. This paper proposes a framework to represent life-cycle activities performed in business process management (BPM). It is based on the functionbehaviour-structure (FBS) ontology that represents all design entities uniformly, independently of the specific stages in their life cycle. The framework specifies a set of distinct activities that operate on the function, behaviour and structure of a business process, subsuming the different life-cycle stages within a single framework. This provides an explicit description of a number of BPM issues that are inadequately addressed in current life-cycle models. They include design-time analysis, flexibility of tasks and sub-processes, interaction between life-cycle stages, and the use of experience