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 number of recent developments in software engineering -- from agile methods to aspect-oriented programming to design patterns to good enough software -- share a number of common attributes. These developments avoid a unifying theme or plan, focus on negotiation between different concerns, and exhibit a high level of context sensitivity. We argue that these developments are evidence of a postmodern turn in software engineering. In this paper, we survey a number of these developments and describe their potential implications for the practice of conceptual modelling.

Postmodern prospects for conceptual modelling

This paper presents a technique that uses role-play and index cards to review use cases and to assist in making use case development more accessible and better guided. The technique is based on the established CRC card technique used for object-oriented design. In our technique, essential use cases are recorded on index cards, and role-play is used for development and review. The paper presents the technique, and outlines our experience in applying it.

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Role-play and Use Case Cards for Requirements Review

Since its inception, a large amount of software has been written in Java and surprisingly little is known about the structure of Java programs in the wild. There are very few software visualization tools for analytical reasoning of Java software. We are creating a visual software analytics tool that will help to characterize a corpus of Java software. Our tool will help to provide insight into a collection of Java programs, confirm the expected, and expose the unexpected.

Towards Visual Software Analytics

A key feature of agile software development is its prioritisation of responding to changing requirements over planning ahead. If an agile development team spends too much time planning and designing architecture then responding to change will be extremely costly, while not doing enough architectural design puts the project at risk of failure. Striking the balance depends heavily on the context of the system being built, the environment and the development teams. This Grounded Theory research into how much architecture agile teams design up-front has identified system complexity as an important factor in determining how much planning a team does up-front, while system size, although related to complexity, has a much less direct impact. Furthermore, when determining how much design to do up-front, value to the customer can be a more important factor than overall development cost. Understanding these factors can help agile teams to determine how much up-front planning is appropriate for the systems they develop.

The Effect of Complexity and Value on Architecture Planning in Agile Software Development

The Nord Modular music synthesiser system comprises a stand-alone array of digital signal processors programmed by a dataflow visual langauage and supported by a visual programming environment that runs on commodity hardware. We have investigated applying program visualisation techniques to over 400 Nord Modular programs. Our visualisations make explicit module types and signal flows that are only implicit in the metaphorical graphical syntax adopted by the Nord Modular visual programming language. We have also analysed the programming style used in Nord Modular programs, in particular, the direction of program layouts. While we found that programs tended to arrange signal flow top down and left to right, we found much more variation than we expected, both within individual programs and across the Nord factory program corpus.

James Noble

Papers

Postmodern prospects for conceptual modelling

Role-play and Use Case Cards for Requirements Review

Towards Visual Software Analytics

The Effect of Complexity and Value on Architecture Planning in Agile Software Development

Program visualisation for visual programs