John R. Durrett

Teaching distributed multidisciplinary software development

To create a more realistic distributed collaborative environment, three Texas universities - Texas Christian University, the University of Texas at Arlington and Texas Tech University - developed an innovative method for teaching collaborative software development in distributed multidisciplinary environments.

Assessment of a resource limited process for multidisciplinary projects

Collaborative multidisciplinary team based education is increasingly recognized as a necessary component in the preparation of technical students for the workplace. This article presents a quantified assessment of a limited-resource process for teaching software product development combining students in computer science, engineering, and business at multiple universities within existing curriculum. Results indicate that the approach is useful in a resource restricted setting, as well as a providing an evolutionary step to the development of full-scale curricular changes that aim to provide students the skills needed to function in an increasingly distributed, multidisciplinary product development environment.

A hybrid analysis and architectural design method for development of smart home components

Accurate requirements provide the foundation for successful product development. Determining accurate requirements is difficult in many cases and is especially problematic in new and rapidly evolving domains. Development of smart home technologies provides such a challenge due to their dynamic design environment consisting of emergent technology, with minimal existing systems to evaluate, few standards, and users with vague ideas of the benefits or the possibilities. The most troubling problem, however, is how to optimize user satisfaction considering the wide range of user types and preferences and the dynamic system environment created by constant introduction of new products. For early development in this user-focused environment, we propose a new approach based on the synthesis of well established techniques from software engineering, management theory, and hardware product development. We propose the fusion of the use case and house of quality analysis models, simulators, and prototypes, and information processing theory coordination techniques.

Contingency theoretic methodology for agent-based, web-oriented manufacturing systems

The development of distributed, agent-based, web-oriented, N-tier Information Systems (IS) must be supported by a design methodology capable of responding to the convergence of shifts in business process design, organizational structure, computing, and telecommunications infrastructures. We introduce a contingency theoretic model for the use of open, ubiquitous software infrastructure in the design of flexible organizational IS. Our basic premise is that developers should change in the way they view the software design process from a view toward the solution of a problem to one of the dynamic creation of teams of software components. We postulate that developing effective, efficient, flexible, component-based distributed software requires reconceptualizing the current development model. The basic concepts of distributed software design are merged with the environment-causes-structure relationship from contingency theory; the task-uncertainty of organizational- information-processing relationships from information processing theory; and the concept of inter-process dependencies from coordination theory. Software processes are considered as employees, groups of processes as software teams, and distributed systems as software organizations. Design techniques already used in the design of flexible business processes and well researched in the domain of the organizational sciences are presented. Guidelines that can be utilized in the creation of component-based distributed software will be discussed.

An organizational behavior approach for managing change in information systems

Summary form only given. The primary concern of system designers, both organizational and software, is in providing the most effective structure through which the individual activities are harmonized, and directed toward the accomplishment of the organizations goals. In this paper basic principles from the science of organizational behavior are combined with well-established design principles from information systems to explore a new design model for information systems. A new model or architecture called software teams is proposed for rapidly changing, intelligent environments to facilitate the creation and ongoing evolution of a distributed IS that is fluid, just like the evolving organizations it needs to support.