Closing the gap between guidance and practice, an investigation of the relevance of design guidance to practitioners using object-oriented technologies

This thesis investigates if object oriented guidance is relevant in practice, and how this affects software that is produced. This is achieved by surveying practitioners and studying how constructs such as interfaces and inheritance are used in open-source systems. Surveyed practitioners framed 'good design' in terms of impact on development and maintenance. Recognition of quality requires practitioner judgement (individually and as a group), and principles are valued over rules. Time constraints heighten sensitivity to the rework cost of poor design decisions. Examination of open source systems highlights the use of interface and inheritance. There is some evidence of 'textbook' use of these structures, and much use is simple. Outliers are widespread indicating a pragmatic approach. Design is found to reflect the pressures of practice - high-level decisions justify 'designed' structures and architecture, while uncertainty leads to deferred design decisions - simpler structures, repetition, and unconsolidated design. Sub-populations of structures can be identified which may represent common trade-offs. Useful insights are gained into practitioner attitude to design guidance. Patterns of use and structure are identified which may aid in assessment and comprehension of object oriented systems.This thesis investigates if object oriented guidance is relevant in practice, and how this affects software that is produced. This is achieved by surveying practitioners and studying how constructs such as interfaces and inheritance are used in open-source systems. Surveyed practitioners framed 'good design' in terms of impact on development and maintenance. Recognition of quality requires practitioner judgement (individually and as a group), and principles are valued over rules. Time constraints heighten sensitivity to the rework cost of poor design decisions. Examination of open source systems highlights the use of interface and inheritance. There is some evidence of 'textbook' use of these structures, and much use is simple. Outliers are widespread indicating a pragmatic approach. Design is found to reflect the pressures of practice - high-level decisions justify 'designed' structures and architecture, while uncertainty leads to deferred design decisions - simpler structures, repetition, and unconsolidated design. Sub-populations of structures can be identified which may represent common trade-offs. Useful insights are gained into practitioner attitude to design guidance. Patterns of use and structure are identified which may aid in assessment and comprehension of object oriented systems

Recognising object-oriented software design quality : a practitioner-based questionnaire survey

Design quality is vital if software is to be maintainable. What practices do developers actually use to achieve design quality in their day-to-day work and which of these do they find most useful? To discover the extent to which practitioners concern themselves with object-oriented design quality and the approaches used when determining quality in practice, a questionnaire survey of 102 software practitioners, approximately half from the UK and the remainder from elsewhere around the world was used. Individual and peer experience are major contributors to design quality. Classic design guidelines, well-known lower level practices, tools and metrics all can also contribute positively to design quality. There is a potential relationship between testing practices and design quality. Inexperience, time pressures, novel problems, novel technology, and imprecise or changing requirements may have a negative impact on quality. Respondents with most experience are more confident in their design decisions, place more value on reviews by team leads and are more likely to rate design quality as very important. For practitioners, these results identify the techniques and tools that other practitioners find effective. For researchers, the results highlight a need for more work investigating the role of experience in the design process and the contribution experience makes to quality. There is also the potential for more in-depth studies of how practitioners are actually using design guidance, including Clean Code. Lastly, the potential relationship between testing practices and design quality merits further investigation

Topic Maps and Entity Authority Records: an Effective Cyber Infrastructure for Digital Humanities

The implicit connections and cross-references between and within texts, which occur in all print collections, can be made explicit in a collection of electronic texts. Correctly encoded and exposed they create a framework to support resource discovery and navigation by following links between topics. This framework provides opportunities to visualise dense points of interconnection and, deployed across otherwise separate collections, can reveal unforeseen networks and associations. Thus approached, the creation and online delivery of digital texts moves from a digital library model with its goal as the provision of access, to a digital humanities model directed towards the innovative use of information technologies to derive new knowledge from our cultural inheritance. Using this approach the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) has developed a delivery system for its collection of over 2500 New Zealand and Pacifc Island texts using TEI XML, the ISO Topic Map technology and innovative entity authority management

Ambient Findability and Structured Serendipity: Enhanced Resource Discovery for Full Text Collections

University Libraries manage increasingly large collections of full text digital resources. These might be repositories of born digital research outputs, e-reserves collections or online libraries of material digitised to provide open access to significant texts. Whatever the content of the material, the structured data of full text resources can be exploited to enhance research discovery. The implicit connections and cross-references between books and papers, which occur in all print collections, can be made explicit in a collection of electronic texts. Correctly encoded and exposed they create a framework to support resource discovery and navigation both within and between texts by following links between topics. Using this approach the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) at Victoria University of Wellington has developed a delivery system for its growing online digital library using the ISO Topic Map technology. Like a simple back-of-book index or a library classification system, a topic map aggregates information to provide binding points from which everything that is known about a given subject can be reached. Topics in the NZETC digital library represent authors and publishers, texts, and images, as well as people and places mentioned or depicted in those texts and images. Importantly, the Topic Map extends beyond the NZETC collection to incorporate relevant external resources which expose structured metadata about their collection. Innovative entity authority records management enables, for example, the topic page for William Colenso to automatically provide access not only to the full text of his works in the NZETC collection but out to another book-length work in the Auckland University’s “Early NZ Books Collection” and to several essays in the National Library’s archive of the Royal Society Journals. It also enables links to externally provided services providing information on Library holdings of print copies of the text. The NZETC system is based on international standards for the representation and interchange of knowledge including TEI XML, XTM, XSL and the CIDOC CRM. The NZETC collection currently includes over 2500 texts covering 110,000 topics

Examining the language demands of informed consent documents in patient recruitment to cancer trials using tools from corpus and computational linguistics

Obtaining informed consent (IC) is an ethical imperative, signifying participants’ understanding of the conditions and implications of research participation. One setting where the stakes for understanding are high is randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which test the effectiveness and safety of medical interventions. However, the use of legalese and medicalese in ethical forms coupled with the need to explain RCT-related concepts (e.g. randomization) can increase patients’ cognitive load when reading text. There is a need to systematically examine the language demands of IC documents, including whether the processes intended to safeguard patients by providing clear information might do the opposite through complex, inaccessible language. Therefore, the goal of this study is to build an open-access corpus of patient information sheets (PIS) and consent forms (CF) and analyze each genre using an interdisciplinary approach to capture multidimensional measures of language quality beyond traditional readability measures. A search of publicly-available online IC documents for UK-based cancer RCTs (2000-17) yielded corpora of 27 PIS and 23 CF. Textual analysis using the computational tool, Coh-Metrix, revealed different linguistic dimensions relating to the complexity of IC documents, particularly low word concreteness for PIS and low referential and deep cohesion for CF, although both had high narrativity. Key part-of-speech analyses using Wmatrix corpus software revealed a contrast between the overrepresentation of the pronoun ‘you’ plus modal verbs in PIS and ‘I’ in CF, exposing the contradiction inherent in conveying uncertainty to patients using tentative language in PIS while making them affirm certainty in their understanding in CF

An investigation into the impact of nine catchment characteristics on the accuracy of two phosphorus load apportionment models

Funding: No funding was provided for this study aside from supervisory support through Harper Adams University.Peer reviewedPostprin

Assessing land use influences on isotopic variability and stream water ages in urbanising rural catchments

Funding This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust under Grant RPG-2018-375. Acknowledgements We are grateful to the Leverhulme ISOLAND project (RPG-2018-375) for funding and we are especially grateful to Dr A. Neill for his assistance with the creation of Figure 4.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Assessing land use effects on ecohydrological partitioning in the critical zone through isotope-aided modelling

Research Funding Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung. Grant Numbers: 033W034A, 16LW0156 Leibniz Association Einstein Foundation Berlin Einstein Stiftung Berlin. Grant Number: ERU-2020- 609 Leverhulme Trust Article Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Inheritance usage patterns in open-source systems

This research investigates how object-oriented inheritance is actually used in practice. The aim is to close the gap between inheritance guidance and inheritance practice. It is based on detailed analyses of 2440 inheritance hierarchies drawn from 14 open-source systems. The original contributions made by this paper concern pragmatic assessment of inheritance hierarchy design quality. The findings show that inheritance is very widely used but that most of the usage patterns that occur in practice are simple in structure. They are so simple that they may not require much inheritance-specific design consideration. On the other hand, the majority of classes defined using inheritance actually appear within a relatively small number of large, complex hierarchies. While some of these large hierarchies appear to have a consistent structure, often based on a problem domain model or a design pattern, others do not. Another contribution is that the quality of hierarchies, especially the large problematic ones, may be assessed in practice based on size, shape, and the definition and invocation of novel methods – all properties that can be detected automatically

Protocol of a multi-centre randomised controlled trial of a web-based information intervention with nurse-delivered telephone support for haematological cancer patients and their support persons

BACKGROUND: High rates of anxiety, depression and unmet needs are evident amongst haematological cancer patients undergoing treatment and their Support Persons. Psychosocial distress may be minimised by ensuring that patients are sufficiently involved in decision making, provided with tailored information and adequate preparation for potentially threatening procedures. To date, there are no published studies evaluating interventions designed to reduce psychosocial distress and unmet needs specifically in patients with haematological cancers and their Support Persons. This study will examine whether access to a web-based information tool and nurse-delivered telephone support reduces depression, anxiety and unmet information needs for haematological cancer patients and their Support Persons. METHODS/DESIGN: A non-blinded, parallel-group, multi-centre randomised controlled trial will be conducted to compare the effectiveness of a web-based information tool and nurse-delivered telephone support with usual care. Participants will be recruited from the haematology inpatient wards of five hospitals in New South Wales, Australia. Patients diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, Burkitt’s lymphoma, Lymphoblastic lymphoma (B or T cell), or Diffuse Large B-Cell lymphoma and their Support Persons will be eligible to participate. Patients and their Support Persons will be randomised as dyads. Participants allocated to the intervention will receive access to a tailored web-based tool that provides accurate, up-to-date and personalised information about: cancer and its causes; treatment options including treatment procedures information; complementary and alternative medicine; and available support. Patients and Support Persons will complete self-report measures of anxiety, depression and unmet needs at 2, 4, 8 and 12 weeks post-recruitment. Patient and Support Person outcomes will be assessed independently. DISCUSSION: This study will assess whether providing information and support using web-based and telephone support address the major psychosocial challenges faced by haematological patients and their Support Persons. The approach, if found to be effective, has potential to improve psychosocial outcomes for haematological and other cancer patients, reduce the complexity and burden of meeting patients’ psychosocial needs for health care providers with high potential for translation into clinical practice. .The study is funded by Cancer Institute New South Wales (10/THS/2-14). This research was also supported by a Strategic Research Partnership grant provided by Cancer Council New South Wales to the Newcastle Cancer Control Collaborative, and infrastructure funding from the Hunter Medical Research Institute. Dr. Jamie Bryant is supported by an Australian Research Council Post-Doctoral Industry Fellowship. A/Prof Christine Paul is supported by an NHMRC Career Development Fellowship. Dr. Flora Tzelepis was supported by a Leukaemia Foundation of Australia and Cure Cancer Australia Foundation Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship