Robert P. Brazile

GATES: an airline gate assignment and tracking expert system

A description is given of GATES, an expert system that assigns gates to arriving and departing flights at New Yorks John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK). GATES uses flight information and knowledge about current constraints to produce possible gate assignment schedules. GATES is a constraint-satisfaction expert system. To make its decisions, it uses two types of production rule: permissive rules and conflict rules. Permissive rules determine when its appropriate to consider a particular gate for a particular flight, and permit the system to search the next level of rules to obtain an assignment. Conflict rules determine when particular flights cannot be assigned to particular gates. System operators can modify schedules by retracting rules, adjusting tolerances, and deleting information. The system was developed for a PC, thereby providing an efficient and flexible user environment. The approach is extensible to various engineering and industrial problems where limited resources and weakly defined constraints exist and in which scheduling must occur.<<ETX>>

Structural factors that affect global software development learning team performance

A team performance model provided an organizing framework for studying multi-cultural distributed learning teams. Structural equation modeling was used to test for relationships among individual, cultural and attitudes about collaborative work factors and team performance. The paper describes this model and its theoretical basis and reports on results from two pilot projects involving 152 students from the US, Panama, UK, and Turkey. While the model shows satisfactory fit, the results suggest that other factors may also influence how well students work together on global software projects. Future research, followed by model development, should incorporate these factors to capture the complexity of the educational and training environments.

Exploring Collaboration Patterns among Global Software Development Teams

This study examines communication behaviors in global software student teams. The authors of the paper characterize the types of communication behaviors that occur when student teams are engaged in a software development project. The authors present findings from a one-semester study that examined factors contributing to successful distributed programming interactions among students enrolled at the University of Atilim (Turkey), Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá, University of North Texas, and Middlesex University (UK). Using content and cluster analyses techniques, we identified distinct patterns of collaboration and examined how these patterns were associated with task, culture, GPA, and performance of collaborative teams. Our results suggest that communication patterns among global software learners may be related to task type, culture and GPA. It is hoped that these findings will lead to the development of new strategies for improving communication among global software teams.

A Comparison of Team Performance Measures for Global Software Development Student Teams

One of the most difficult tasks for global software development researchers is quantifying the performance of groups and students who participate in these distributed projects. There has been much debate about which factors better correlate with team performance and which best describe a successful team. The purpose of this paper is to compare the different approaches that have been used to evaluate the performance of global software learners and show how these techniques can affect research results. Using data from student groups engaged in global software development projects for the past year, the authors apply a number of different assessment methods and show their effects on different performance indicators. Our study suggests that the selection of appropriate measures to evaluate team performance can dramatically affect how one identifies successful teams.

Global teams: futuristic models of collaborative work for today's software development industry.

This paper emphasises the importance of global teams in the field of software development. The paper presents an approach for setting up pilot studies simulating those key features that make global software development teams particularly attractive to exploit and challenging to manage. The underlying research is supported by a research project funded by the US National Science Foundation with the participation of universities from US, Turkey, Panama and the UK. The paper provides detailed guidelines for setting up simulations resembling globally dispersed software development teams and discusses preliminary data of two pilot studies with involving collaboration between teams residing in the US and the UK. Key concerns of this research are those factors affecting collaborative work when global teams are involved. Such factors include differences caused by distance, culture, time zones and technology.

Teaching Students How to Work in Global Software Development Environments

Given that outsourcing has become a fact of life, it is becoming increasingly obvious that we need to ensure that computer science students are taught the necessary skills to cope with global software development. Unfortunately, the enormous amount of time that it takes to coordinate and support such activities can deter even the most devoted educator. This paper describes a course that used a computer supported collaborative tool help teach distributed teams from Turkey and the US how to work together to solve programming problems. The system contains both collaborative tools that support groups, as well as course management software for helping instructors with administrative tasks. Examples of the usage of the system and data collected from the undergraduate computer science course that used the software are presented. Based on that experience, future plans to refine the system for early detection of problem teams, and the advantages of implementing the software as a Web service are also discussed. This information is designed to provide support for effective multi-institutional learning courses

Computer-supported cooperative environment for requirements elicitation

As the number of jobs in which shared rather than individual work continues to grow, we are being forced to re-examine the way we teach people to work. This paper suggests that in todays workplace, computer programmers must be adept at both technical as well as cooperative skills. It also suggests that we must be prepared to teach students how to work in collaborative environments. Towards this end, we have developed a computer-supported cooperative problem solving environment designed to teach computer science students to elicit software requirements. We believe that requirements elicitation and cooperative skills are highly interrelated and, as such, can be taught more effectively through the use of a computer-supported cooperative environment. The environment encourages cooperative work and yet provides instructors with the ability to monitor both individual and group performance. From our study of students who used the cooperative interface, we found that subjects were able to learn requirements elicitation techniques and, at the same time, gain valuable experience in working together.<<ETX>>

The Challenges of Teaching Students How to Work in Global Software Teams

This paper describes a multi-year project that is examining ways to improve global software learning teams. Students from the University of North Texas, Middlesex, University of Atilim, Middle East Technical University, and Universidad Tecnologica de Panama are teamed and asked to collaborate on a number of different software projects. The paper explains the overall goals for the research project; it describes the student teams and their various assignments; and it presents results from data gathered from the group programming tasks. The findings are presented, and some recommendations for teaching global software development are provided.

Interaction patterns among global software development learning teams

This paper describes a study of the impact of communication behaviors on the performance of global software teams. Using a content analysis technique developed by [10], the researchers first characterized the asynchronous communications among student teams in Panama, Turkey and the US as they worked to complete a global software development project. Cluster analysis was then used to identify groups with similar communication patterns, which is defined as the proportion of time spent on each of the behaviors. Results suggest that particular patterns of communication behaviors are associated with higher performance. More specifically, it appears that communications related to the “contributing” category seem to have the strongest relationship to high performance.

SSRLE: Substitution and Segment-Run Length Encoding for Binary Data in XML

With the increasing use of XML as an information exchange format, there is an increasing need to embed graphics and binary data files within XML documents. This paper describes a technique called substitution and segment-run length encoding (SSRLE) for including binary data in XML documents. Traditional encodings like base 64 and ASCII 85 use a subset of the available printable characters and add considerable space overhead. Alternatives such as packaging and binary XML encodings do not preserve the portability of XML documents. SSRLE uses additional printable characters for substitutions and segment-run lengths to provide savings in terms of the space overhead, with a worst case overhead equal to that of base 64. Our experiments show that SSRLE provides significant space savings for a number of types of different files