Requirements dilemma

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Knowing ‘what’ to build is an integral part of an Information System Development, and it is generally understood that this, which is known as Requirements, is achievable through a process of understanding, communication and management. It is currently maintained by the Requirements theorists that successful system design clarifies the interrelations between information and its representations. However, this belief can be shown to be based on flawed assumptions, as there are persistent reports of failures, indicating that there is a gap between the theory and the practice, and that this gap needs to be bridged. A year long in-depth case study of a project group, starting with their strategy announcement and ending with the commissioning system hand-over meeting, followed the group in their ‘doing’ of the Requirements. These mundane meetings were recorded and transcribed, forming a detailed data set of ‘what-is-done’ and ‘how-it-is-done’. The developed research approach adhesively maintained the practical situation, aiming to investigate and make sense of the here-and-now actions of the scoping and defining processes that were at work. The results of the investigation led the researcher to question previous beliefs and assumptions in Requirements, because of ambiguities that were uncovered, also because there was no sufficiently distinct process found that could assuredly be labelled as Requirements. This phenomenon evoked further questioning of “how strange?”, which triggered the testing of the validity of the Requirements theory. The second stage adapted an analysis framework on decision-making in order to reveal a causal connection between the actions found in the ‘doing’ and in the stocks of knowledge that form the Requirements theory. This phase analysed the operationalization of the theory to examine its commensurate, incommensurate and defective activities. The analysis revealed the existence of other dominant processes that affect the Requirements theory, leaving it underdetermined, with no true causal connections that can be established. This led to the inevitable conclusion that the current Information Systems thinking on Requirements is on the horns of a dilemma without any prospective resolution, because of the elliptical misalignment between the theoretical and the empirical worlds.EPSRC research grant number 00302238 partly funded this wor

Literature in Estonia

http://www.ester.ee/record=b1203590*es

A Note on Edwards' Hypothesis for Zero-Temperature Ising Dynamics

We give a simple criterion for checking the so called Edwards' hypothesis in certain zero-temperature, ferromagnetic spin-flip dynamics and use it to invalidate the hypothesis in various examples in dimension one and higher.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

A Glimpse of Estonian Literature

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Case Study Report On A Project Management Approach Towards Transferring IS Ownership

This case study paper is about the changes made and the actions that were taken to mitigate a perceived likelihood of IT system rejection on a large IT project three months prior to delivery and handover, after encountering difficulties which included business disengagement, requirements ambiguities, problems of multiple software applications integration, and uncertainty over delivery and acceptance. Based on the analysis of the semi-structured interviews, documentation data and observation, the provisional analysis is reported upon in this paper. Our findings demonstrate that the changed project management approach was underpinned with the objective of transferring IS ownership, this being achieved through the depoliticalization of the business process, using user led workshops. In this on-going research, we begin to realise that ownership is a major factor in gaining user acceptance of the system

A Radial Velocity and Calcium Triplet abundance survey of field Small Magellanic Cloud giants

We present the results of a pilot wide-field radial velocity and metal abundance survey of red giants in ten fields in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The targets lie at projected distances of 0.9 and 1.9 kpc from the SMC centre ($m-M=18.79$) to the North, East, South and West. Two more fields are to the East at distances of 3.9 and 5.1 kpc. In this last field we find only a few to no SMC giants, suggesting that the edge of the SMC in this direction lies approximately at 6 kpc from its centre. In all eastern fields we observe a double peak in the radial velocities of stars, with a component at the classical SMC recession velocity of $\sim 160$ km s$^{-1}$ and a high velocity component at about 200 km s$^{-1}$, similar to observations in H{\small I}. In the most distant field (3.9 kpc) the low velocity component is at 106 km s$^{-1}$. The metal abundance distribution in all fields is broad and centred at about [Fe/H] $\sim -1.25$, reaching to solar and possibly slightly supersolar values and down to [Fe/H] of about -2.5. In the two innermost (0.9 kpc) Northern and Southern fields we observe a secondary peak at metallicities of about $\sim -0.6$. This may be evidence of a second episode of star formation in the centre, possibly triggered by the interactions that created the Stream and Bridge.Comment: emulateapj format, accepted by ApJ Letters (Replaced because of some processing errors