Allen H. Dutoit

Rationale Management in Software Engineering

This is a detailed summary of research on design rationale providing researchers in software engineering with an excellent overview of the subject. Professional software engineers will find many examples, resources and incentives to enhance their ability to make decisions during all phases of the software lifecycle. Software engineering is still primarily a human-based activity and rationale management is concerned with making design and development decisions explicit to all stakeholders involved.

Fata Morgana - a presentation system for product design

Mobile augmented reality applications promise substantial savings in time and costs for product designers, in particular, for large products requiring scale models and expensive clay mockups (e.g., cars). Such applications are novel and introduce interesting challenges when attempting to describe them to potential users and stakeholders. For example, it is difficult, a priori, to assess the nonfunctional requirements of such applications and anticipate the usability issues that the product designers are likely to raise. In this paper, we describe our efforts to develop a proof-of-concept AR system for car designers. Over the course of a year, we developed two prototypes, one within a university context, the other at a car manufacturer. The lessons learned from both efforts illustrate the technical and human challenges encountered when closely collaborating with the end user in the design of a novel application.

Sysiphus: Enabling informal collaboration in global software development

In global software projects, informal communication across sites is severely hampered, making it difficult to disseminate implicit knowledge. Participants have a partial view of the overall organization, do not have access to the complete rationale behind decisions, and when changes arise, participants from other sites are surprised. Consequently, issues that could be clarified almost immediately require days until the relevant stakeholders are identified, the issues are understood, and a resolution is agreed upon. We focus on the specific problem of externalizing issues with their context, stakeholders, and organizational roles in distributed settings. The challenge is to capture sufficient knowledge as a side effect of development, while structuring it for long-term use. We describe Sysiphus, a distributed environment providing a uniform framework for system models, collaboration artifacts, and organizational models. Sysiphus encourages participants to make communication and issues explicit in the context of system models and become aware of relevant stakeholders

Augmented maintenance of powerplants: a prototyping case study of a mobile AR system

Augmented reality (AR) research has progressed in great strides over the past few years. Most current demonstrations focus on providing robust tracking solutions since this is the most critical issue when demonstrating AR systems. An issue that is typically neglected concerns the online access, analysis and visualization of information. The information required by AR demonstration systems is kept to a minimum, is prepared ahead of time, and is stored locally in the form of three-dimensional geometric descriptions. In complex mobile settings, these simplifying assumptions do not work. The authors report on recent efforts at the TU Munich to analyze the information generation, retrieval, transmission, and visualization process in the context of maintenance procedures that are performed in nuclear power plants. The use of AR to present such information online has significant implications for the way information must be acquired, stored, and transmitted. The paper focuses on pointing out open questions, discussing options for addressing them, and evaluating them in prototypical implementations.

Transatlantic project courses in a university environment

Communication and collaboration is difficult in geographically distributed settings. As a result of globalization, mergers and acquisitions, and scarce skills, software development projects are increasingly more distributed. Hence, teaching software engineering students how to cope with distribution becomes a critical issue. This paper describes our experience with teaching three distributed software engineering project courses. Students from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA and from Technische Universita/spl uml/t Mu/spl uml/nchen in Munich, Germany, collaborated to specify, design and realize software for a real client located at a third site. In doing so, students were exposed first hand to distribution issues, encountering challenges introduced by different cultures, languages, standards and time zones, and facing them with tools such as groupware, videoconferencing, distributed repositories and travel. We conclude this paper with the lessons we learned during these three experiences and the improvements we plan for our next distributed project course.

Rationale-Based Use Case Specification

The requirements specification – as outcome of the requirements engineering process – falls short of capturing other useful information generated during this process, such as the justification for selected requirements, trade-offs negotiated by stakeholders and alternative requirements that were discarded. In the context of evolving systems and distributed development, this information is essential. Rationale methods focus on capturing and structuring this missing information. In this paper, we propose an integrated process with dedicated guidance for capturing requirements and their rationale, discuss its tool support and describe the experiences we made during several case studies with students. Although the idea of integrating rationale methods with requirements engineering is not new, few research projects so far have focused on smooth integration, dedicated tool support and detailed guidance for such methods.

Building Agility for Developing Agile Design Information Systems

Abstract:Agile manufacturing relies heavily on the quality of information that organizations have and on their ability to organize and reuse it. Constant inflow of information and knowledge is the fuel of agile manufacturing. In the process of forming virtual enterprises, these new organizations have to be equipped with information systems that integrate their present legacy technology and improve upon it. To support the quick formation of virtual organizations, one must have the ability to develop such systems quickly. Over the past few years we have evolved, through collaborative projects with industry, an approach composed of methods and an information infrastructure calledn-dim that improves the ability of becoming agile manufacturers of information systems, by responding quickly to information needs of new and evolving organizations. Following an analysis of the requirements of information systems for agile design, we discuss this approach; describe some of the infrastructure features; and present several examples of simple applications that illustrate them. We summarize by discussing the advantages and limitations of our approach.

Communication metrics for software development

We present empirical evidence that metrics on communication artifacts generated by groupware tools can be used to gain significant insight into the development process that produced them. We describe a test-bed for developing and testing communication metrics, a senior level software engineering project course at Carnegie Mellon University, in which we conducted several studies and experiments from 1991-1996 with more than 400 participants. Such a test-bed is an ideal environment for empirical software engineering, providing sufficient realism while allowing for controlled observation of important project parameters. We describe three proof-of-concept experiments to illustrate the value of communication metrics in software development projects. Finally, we propose a statistical framework based on structural equations for validating these communication metrics. Index Terms—Empirical software engineering, communication, statistics, structural equations. ——————————F—————————— 1I NTRODUCTION ETRICS applied to software artifacts have proven to be useful in measuring the impact of a tool or method in the context of a software project. In some cases, they enabled specific problems in the engineering processes to be identi- fied, thus demonstrating the value of metrics and other in- strumentation for process improvement. However, software code is only one of the many artifacts produced during soft- ware development. Moreover, it is often available only late in the process. The infrastructure and the resources needed to collect metrics on code are also non-negligible, and often prevents their use for identifying problems as they occur. Communication artifacts, such as electronic mail, memo- randa, or records generated by groupware tools, represent a different perspective on the development process. They are available throughout the project, they capture information about a more comprehensive set of artifacts (e.g., code, pro- cess, organization, politics, morale), and their form is inde- pendent of implementation technology, development infra- structure, or even the existence of a product. Metrics ap- plied to such communication artifacts can, therefore, pro- vide significant insight into the development process that produced them. In this paper, we discuss the design and evaluation of a set of communication metrics for software development. Our goal is to develop metrics that enable the assessment of a tool or a method in the context of a project. Our long-term goal is to provide metrics that help identifying problems as they occur. In Section 2, we illustrate possible uses of these metrics with an example.

The basic object system: supporting a spectrum from prototypes to hardened code

BOS is a prototype-based, object-oriented toolkit aimed at better supporting evolutionary software development. BOS attempts to support a spectrum of activities in one environment---ranging from rapid prototyping to code hardening. Features enabling rapid prototyping include a prototype-based object model, an interpreted language, run-time argument constraints, position and keyword arguments, and a user interface toolkit. BOS also provides features for code hardening such as multi-methods, multiple inheritance, external code wrapping mechanisms, and interfaces to other packages such as database management systems. BOS thus enables the end-to-end programming of software in an integrated and unified environment. BOS has been used to develop several full-size applications which have been evaluated and delivered externally.

IBistro: a learning environment for knowledge construction in distributed software engineering courses

We have taught several distributed software engineering project courses with students and real clients. During these projects, students in Pittsburgh and Munich, Germany collaborated in the development of a single system. Our experiences showed that software development is communication intensive and requires the collaboration of many stakeholders. Communication is challenging in distributed contexts: participants do not all know each other and work at different times and locations; the number of participants and their organization change during the project; and participants belong to different communities. Hence, to deal with the global marketplace, it is critical to provide students with distributed collaboration skills. To improve the teaching of collaboration in software engineering, we propose iBistro, an augmented, distributed, and ubiquitous communication space. iBistro aims to overcome problems resulting from miscommunications and information loss in informal or casual meetings. iBistro enables distributed groups to collaborate and cooperate in software projects and therefore provides an environment for learning in diverse aspects such as project management, programming skills, and social skills. With the addition of techniques from artificial intelligence, such as student modeling, and intelligent support mechanisms, such as computer supported group formation, distributed tutoring becomes feasible.