Carmen Zannier

A model of design decision making based on empirical results of interviews with software designers

Despite the impact of design decisions on software design, we have little understanding about how design decisions are made. This hinders our ability to provide design metrics, processes and training that support inherent design work. By interviewing 25 software designers and using content analysis and explanation building as our analysis technique, we provide qualitative and quantitative results that highlight aspects of rational and naturalistic decision making in software design. Our qualitative multi-case study results in a model of design decision making to answer the question: how do software designers make design decisions? We find the structure of the design problem determines the aspects of rational and naturalistic decision making used. The more structured the design decision, the less a designer considers options.

On the success of empirical studies in the international conference on software engineering

Critiques of the quantity and quality of empirical evaluations in software engineering have existed for quite some time. However such critiques are typically not empirically evaluated. This paper fills this gap by empirically analyzing papers published by ICSE, the prime research conference on Software Engineering. We present quantitative and qualitative results of a quasi-random experiment of empirical evaluations over the lifetime of the conference. Our quantitative results show the quantity of empirical evaluation has increased over 29 ICSE proceedings but we still have room to improve the soundness of empirical evaluations in ICSE proceedings. Our qualitative results point to specific areas of improvement in empirical evaluations.

Comparing decision making in agile and non-agile software organizations

Our ability to improve decision making in software development hinges on understanding how decisions are made, and which approaches to decision making are better than others. However, as of yet there are few studies examining how software developers make decisions in software design, especially studies that place agile approaches in the context of decision making. In this paper, we present results of a multi-case study of design decision making in three software organizations of varying levels of agility. We show an agile organization produced a culture that supported communication and debate about alternatives to design decision more than 2 organizations of lesser agility.

Foundations of agile decision making from agile mentors and developers

There are few studies of how software developers make decisions in software design and none that places agile in the context of these decision making processes. In this paper, we present results of interviewing agile software developers and mentors to determine how design decision making aligns with rational decision making or naturalistic decision making. We present results of twelve case studies evaluating how agile professionals make design decisions, comparing mentor perspectives to developer perspectives. We describe our interview technique, content analysis used to analyze interview transcripts, and the interpretation of our results, to answer the question: how do agile designers make design decisions? Our results show that naturalistic decision making dominates design decision making but is supported by rational decision making.

A qualitative empirical evaluation of design decisions

In this paper, we motivate examining software design decision making and provide the process by which the examination will occur. The objective is to provide qualitative results indicative of rational or naturalistic software design decision making. In a rational decision a decision maker evaluates decision alternatives and potential outcomes for each alternative using a utility function and probabilities of the outcome of each alternative. The utility function assigns a value to each possible alternative based on its outcome. The goal of rational decision making is selecting the optimal alternative. A naturalistic decision manifests itself in dynamic and continually changing conditions, embodies real-time reactions to these changes, embraces ill-defined tasks, and has a goal of selecting a satisfactory alternative. The proposed empirical qualitative study consists of inductive and deductive interviewing and deductive observations.

Social Factors Relevant to Capturing Design Decisions

We present results from a qualitative study of design decision making that used interviews, observations and participatory observations to describe inherent traits of software design decision makers. We find that designers do not always strive for optimal design solutions, that designers do not always consider alternatives when making design decisions, and that alternatives are considered more often in groups of people having a casual conversation. We highlight that tool support for capturing design rationale and intent should first recognize the way decisions are inherently made in software environments and we provide a summary of our results as an indicator of requirements for such tools.

Tool support for complex refactoring to design patterns

The abstract should summarize the contents of the paper and should Using design patterns is seen to improve the maintainability of software systems. Applying patterns often implies upfront design while agile methods rely on software architecture to emerge. We bridge this gap by applying complex refactoring towards patterns to improve software design. Complex refactorings are based on existing tool-supported refactorings, knowledge of the application to be changed, knowledge of design patterns, and the capability to generate necessary code for a given design pattern. We present complex refactorings to J2EE design patterns and describe requirements of complex refactoring and accompanying tool support.

Tool support for refactoring to design patterns

Using design patterns improves the maintainability of software systems. Applying patterns often implies upfront design while Agile Methods rely on software architecture to emerge. We bridge this gap by applying refactoring towards patterns to improve software design. We propose complex refactoring to J2EE design patterns and describe requirements of complex refactorings and accompanying tool support.