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

Many languages and language extensions include annotations on pointer variables suchas "read-only," "unique," and "borrowed"; many more annotations have been proposed but not implemented. Unfortunately, all these annotations are described individually and formalised independently - assuming they are formalised at all. In this paper, we show how these annotations can be subsumed into a general capability system for pointers. This system separates mechanism (defining the semantics of sharing and exclusion) from policy (defining the invariants that are intended to be preserved). The capability system has a welldefined semantics which can be used as a reference for the correctness of various extended type systems using annotations. Furthermore, it supports researchin new less-restrictive type systems that permit a wider range of idioms to be statically checked.

Capabilities for Sharing: A Generalisation of Uniqueness and Read-Only

Containment of objects is a natural concept that has been poorly supported in object-oriented programming languages. For a predefined set of ownership contexts, this paper presents a type system that enforces certain containment relationships for run-time objects. A fixed ordering relationship is presumed between the owners. The formalisation of ownership types has developed from our work with flexible alias protection together with an investigation of structural properties of object graphs based on dominator trees. Our general ownership type system permits fresh ownership contexts to be created at run-time. Here we present a simplified system in which the ownership contexts are predefined. This is powerful enough to express and enforce constraints about a system's high-level structure. Our formal system is presented in an imperative variant of the object calculus. We present type preservation and soundness results. Furthermore we highlight how these type theoretic results establish a containment invariant for objects, in which access to contained objects is only permitted via their owners. In effect, the predefined ownership ordering restricts the permissible inter-object reference structure.

Simple ownership types for object containment

Since the publication of the Design Patterns book (E. Gamma et al., 1994), a large number of object-oriented design patterns have been identified and codified. As part of the pattern form, object-oriented design patterns must indicate their relationships with other patterns, but these relationships are typically described very briefly, and different collections of patterns describe different relationships in different ways. In this paper, we describe and classify the common relationships between object-oriented design patterns. Practitioners can use these relationships to help them identity those patterns which may be applicable to a particular problem, and pattern writers can use these relationships to help them integrate new patterns into the body of the patterns literature.

http://gmm.fsksm.utm.my/~mrazak/articles/IEEE--Noble_1998--Classifying_relationships_between_object-oriented_design_patterns.pdf

Classifying relationships between object-oriented design patterns

Pluggable types have been proposed to support multiple type systems in the same programming language. We have designed and implemented JavaCOP, a program constraint system for implementing practical pluggable type systems for Java. JavaCOP enforces user-defined typing constraints written in a declarative and expressive rule language. We have validated our design by (re)implementing a range of type systems and program checkers. By using a program constraint system to implement pluggable types, programmers are able to check that their programs will operate correctly in restricted environments, adhere to strict programming rules, avoid null pointer errors or scoped memory exceptions, and meet style guidelines, while programming language researchers can easily experiment with novel type systems.

A framework for implementing pluggable type systems

The customer is the only nondeveloper role in extreme programming (XP). The customer's explicit responsibilities are to drive the project, providing project requirements (user stories) and quality control (acceptance testing): unfortunately the customer must also shoulder a number of implicit responsibilities including liaison with external project stakeholders, especially project funders, clients, and end users, while maintaining the trust of both the development team and the wider business. In this paper, we report on a series of case studies of the customer role in XP projects. We have found that customers have a pressured and stressful role, leading to issues of sustainability.

/pdf/the-xp-customer-role-in-practice-three-studies-p0b7mufgic.pdf

James Noble

Papers

Capabilities for Sharing: A Generalisation of Uniqueness and Read-Only

Simple ownership types for object containment

Classifying relationships between object-oriented design patterns

A framework for implementing pluggable type systems

The XP customer role in practice: three studies