Joseph T. Catanio

Developing LaSalle's IT graduate certificate program partnered with industry

Many IT-based companies located in the greater Philadelphia area find the need to provide their employees, whose daily activities focus on IT-related responsibilities, with continuing education IT courses. One objective is to keep their employees up to date with the ever changing tools and technologies present and available in the IT workplace. In turn, the company benefits by having a highly trained and competent IT workforce. However, many of these companies find that the traditional forms of college-based continuing education graduate level programs inadequate to fulfill their needs in a timely fashion. Graduate level degrees often take many years to complete and do not provide a quick enough return on investment.To address these needs and concerns, LaSalle University has established and partnered with an external computer science advisory board (CSAB) comprised of top executives within the IT business community. One focus of the CSAB is to help steer the University in the creation of its IT Graduate Certificate Program. To this end, it was determined to implement the program in a phased approach bringing various certificate concentrations on-line as they are established. This paper discusses the ongoing process of working with the board to analyze industry needs and determining what courses and certificates to provide based on University resources.In addition, a questionnaire was distributed to a small number of students to evaluate what students consider to be important factors in both the IT and computer science curriculums. Ultimately, we as educators serve the students and their input is essential to meet their needs. Coupled with information as seen by the student, information as seen by Industry, and information seen by the University, all three perspectives should help to develop a useful and successful IT Graduate Certificate Program.

Relationship analysis in requirements engineering

This research addresses a major shortcoming in today’s requirements analysis techniques—the lack of a rigorous and comprehensive process to explicitly capture the relationship structure of the problem domain. Whereas other analysis techniques lightly address the relationship discovery process, relationship analysis (RA) is a systematic, domain-independent analysis technique focusing exclusively on a domain’s relationship structure. This paper describes RA’s taxonomy of relationship types and corresponding brainstorming questions for eliciting the relationship structure from a domain expert. A preliminary case study analysis of online bookstores using RA as well as a formal experiment have both confirmed RA’s effectiveness in helping the analyst produce significantly higher quality requirements. RA should become an invaluable tool for analysts, irrespective of the software engineering approach taken during systems analysis.

The Effects of Project Management Certification on the Triple Constraint

This research paper describes key information technology IT project management activities in terms of project scope, time, and cost management, namely the triple constraint. The authors contend that the ability to properly manage and execute these activities is the quintessential component that oftentimes drives whether projects succeed or fail. The literature shows that IT projects have a dismal success rate but successful projects have been on the rise. The authors attempt to determine if the increase of successful projects correlates to the increase in the number of certified project managers. Empirical evidence is presented that indicates certified project managers do not perform project scope, time, and cost management activities better than project managers without professional certification credentials.

Requirements Analysis: A Review

- Many software organizations often bypass the requirements analysis phase of the software development life cycle process and skip directly to the implementation phase in an effort to save time and money. The results of such an approach often leads to projects not meeting the expected deadline, exceeding budget, and not meeting user needs or expectations. One of the primary benefits of requirements analysis is to catch problems early and Minimize thier impact with respect to time and money. This paper is a literature review of the requirements analysis phase and the multitude of techniques available to perform the analysis. It is hoped that by compiling the information into a single document, readers will be more in a position to understand the requirements engineering process and provide analysts a compelling argument as to why it should be employed in modern day software development.

The Effects of Integrating On-Going Training for Technical Documentation Teams.

The tools and techniques utilized in the technical communications profession are constantly improving and changing. Information Technology (IT) organizations devote the necessary resources to equip and train engineering, marketing, and sales teams, but often fail to do so for technical documentation teams. Many IT organizations tend to view documentation as an afterthought; however, consumers of IT products frequently base their purchasing decisions on the end user documentations content, layout, and presentation. Documentation teams play a unique role in IT organizations as they help to build and create a public identity through end user manuals and the corporate website, as well as maintain intellectual knowledge through knowledge sharing and management. The technical communicator “makes sense” of complex engineering specifications by creating user-friendly manuals for the layman. The practitioner who compiles and records this complex information is a valuable resource to any IT organization. Therefore, on-going training for technical documentation teams is essential to stay competitive in the fast-paced technical market. Technical communicators in IT organizations who only write end user manuals are becoming a rarity. Research indicates a marked trend toward technical writers in multiple roles and varied responsibilities that include web design and development, and business systems analysis functions. Although these added roles and responsibilities require training on some of the newer software tools and more complex programming tools, technical communicators are experiencing difficulty keeping pace with these tools. This article discusses technical documentation teams in IT organizations and provides an on-going training assessment to help technical documentation managers identify their teams strengths and weaknesses. In addition, measures and results from a study conducted at eight IT organizations, are provided to show the effect of how the integration of on-going training for documentation teams enhances individual competency and improves team performance.

Relationship analysis: a research plan for enhancing systems analysis for Web development

This research addresses a major shortcoming in todays analysis techniques. Neither structured nor object-oriented analysis techniques provide a formal process to identify relationships in a system being modeled. Existing techniques leave the relationship determination implicit; they are supposed to appear as a byproduct of the other analysis activities. We propose a comprehensive, systematic, domain-independent analysis technique, relationship analysis (RA), which focuses exclusively on a domains relationship structure. RA serves two major purposes. First, it helps users, analysts and designers develop a deeper understanding of the application domain through making the relationships explicit. Second, RA results in fuller and richer application analyses and designs. Integration of RA with the object oriented analysis techniques like UP can provide a complete system architect solution.

A Framework to Analyze Software Analysis Techniques

The software community uses a multitude of varying analysis techniques to define the “what” of software artifacts. How do different analysis techniques compare and contrast with each other? This paper presents a new analysis framework to describe and characterize software analysis techniques employed during the specification process.

Training Documentation Teams - A Research Plan

Technical documentation teams play a unique role in organizations as they help to build and create a public identity through end user manuals. In addition many technical documentation teams also provide information for the corporate website, as well as maintain intellectual knowledge through knowledge sharing and management. The technical communicator “makes sense” of complex engineering specifications by creating user-friendly manuals for the layman. The practitioner who compiles and records this complex information is a valuable resource to any organization. Therefore, on-going training for technical documentation teams is essential to stay competitive in the fast-paced technical market. This paper describes a research plan to study how organizations train their technical documentation teams.

A Hands-on Approach to Capstone Design and Implementation

Students planning to work in the software industry are best served by exposure to the type of skills necessary to acquire employment in a software developer capacity. One way to prepare students is to teach students the software development life-cycle process utilizing a design and implementation two-course capstone project. This paper describes a successful teaching approach to the capstone project by utilizing a practical hands-on approach.