There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

物件導向軟體之架構(Object-Oriented Software Construction)探討

A problem frame is a generic, abstract description of the structure of a problem. Using a problem frame requires selecting a candidate frame from a catalog and mapping the specific parts of the problem into the principal parts of the frame. In this paper we present five patterns, one for each of Jackson's original problem frames. We hope that by writing about problem frames as patterns, we can make the frames themselves and their structure more explicit, and so expose problem frames to a wider audience.

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Problem frame patterns: an exploration of patterns in the problem space

¶ Abstract. Canonical abstract prototypes are an innovative means for specifying and exploring visual and interaction design ideas. Intermediate between abstract task models and realistic or representational prototypes, canonical abstract prototypes provide designers with a standardized vocabulary for expre ssing visual and interaction designs independent of details of appearance and behavior. This common abstract design vocabulary facilitates comparison of designs as well as recognition and description of common design patterns. This paper introduces the basic concepts of abstract prototypes and covers recent refinements in the modeling notation and the set of canonical abstract components. Learn more about usage-centered design, including training in canonical abstract prototypes, at http://www.forUse.com. Abstract Prototypes

From Abstraction to Realization: Canonical Abstract Prototypes for User Interface Design REVISED

Object oriented systems often need to detect when objects have changed. Due to aggregation and aliasing, programmers must explicitly identify changes to objects in most object oriented systems. We describe a program monitoring technique which takes account of aggregation and aliasing, and which can be used to detect changes automatically. Automatic change detection can simplify programming and design, so producing more reliable systems with less effort.

Change detection for aggregate objects with aliasing

Extreme Programming and other Agile methods have a dedicated customer role that acts as the interface between development teams and their clients, sponsors, and end-users. The customer is critical to agile projects, but there is little research, experience, or advice about effective practices required to fill that role. We present a set of patterns describing the key roles on a customer team, and the practices that enable customers to fill those roles. By adopting these roles and practices, customers and development teams can increase the velocity and reliability of their projects, and ensure all participants in a project, not just the developers, can work at a sustainable pace.

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Programmers are from Mars, customers are from Venus: a practical guide for customers on XP projects

Java provides a specification for a user-defined general purpose equivalence operator for objects, but collections such as Set have more stringent requirements. This inconsistency breaks polymorphism: programmers must take care to follow Set's contract rather than the more general Object contract if their object could enter a Set. We have dynamically profiled 30 Java applications to better understand the way programmers design their objects, to determine whether they program with collections in mind. Our results indicate that objects which enter collections behave very differently to objects which do not. Our findings should help developers understand the impact of design choices they make, and guide future language designers when adding support for collections and/or equality.

/pdf/understanding-the-impact-of-collection-contracts-on-design-1atlk7kecz.pdf

James Noble

Papers

Problem frame patterns: an exploration of patterns in the problem space

From Abstraction to Realization: Canonical Abstract Prototypes for User Interface Design REVISED

Change detection for aggregate objects with aliasing

Programmers are from Mars, customers are from Venus: a practical guide for customers on XP projects

Understanding the impact of collection contracts on design