15470855
A field study of developer pairs: productivity impacts and implications
Pair programming purportedly delivers quality code with little productivity loss. The authors' field study, outside the pair programming environment, shows that two-person teams working independently are more productive than those working concurrently; agile methods may overcome inherent productivity losses of concurrent development. This research contrasts starkly with our field study findings. We decided to reexamine our earlier productivity data from teams of two and ask: Would our previous findings of concurrent-work productivity loss be reversed if we look only at programming pairs rather than teams of all sizes? If so, we could conclude that pairs are naturally more productive than larger teams, regardless of the collaborative process. If not, we could conclude that the collaboration mechanisms prescribed in pair programming might overcome a natural loss of productivity from concurrent work. We offer these findings and their implications as a benchmark against which we might measure the potential of pair programming practices.
206448594
Enhancing the Cocomo Estimation Models
In software engineering, team task assignments appear to have a significant potential impact on a project's overall success. The authors propose task assignment effort adjustment factors that can help tune existing estimation models. They show significant improvements in the predictive abilities of both Cocomo I and II by enhancing them with these factors.
6086610
Security for fixed sensor networks
Sensor networks consist of resource-constrained sensors operating in a variety of environments. Given the severe constraints on these sensors, it is a particularly challenging problem to choose and design valid security protocols for such networks. This problem has recently given rise to new research addressing the security issues. This paper presents an overview of the important works, specifically the new mechanisms and protocols, which have been introduced or are still under development in this area.
2351489
An Empirical Study Using Task Assignment Patterns to Improve the Accuracy of Software Effort Estimation
In most software development organizations, there is seldom a one-to-one mapping between software developers and development tasks. It is frequently necessary to concurrently assign individuals to multiple tasks and to assign more than one individual to work cooperatively on a single task. A principal goal in making such assignments should be to minimize the effort required to complete each task. But what impact does the manner in which developers are assigned to tasks have on the effort requirements? This paper identifies four task assignment factors: team size, concurrency, intensity, and fragmentation. These four factors are shown to improve the predictive ability of the well-known intermediate COCOMO cost estimation model. A parsimonious effort estimation model is also derived that utilizes a subset of the task assignment factors and unadjusted function points. For the data examined, this parsimonious model is shown to have goodness of fit and quality of estimation superior to that of the COCOMO model, while utilizing fewer cost factors.
31874341
Cost estimation for component based software development
17812918
Acquiring and delivering lessons learned for NASA scientists and engineers: a dynamic approach
Web forms are a common mechanism for collecting information online. They pose some limitations which negatively affect ease and flexibility of user interaction. These limitations are more pronounced when collecting information that can not be broken down into well defined and agreed upon structures. Lessons Learned or any kind of 'knowledge' is an example of such information. In this paper we introduce a concept of 'Dynamic Forms' which is aimed at enhancing user interaction while collecting unstructured information, 'Lessons Learned' in particular.
209398246
From Kansas to Oz.
14722546
Is Electronic Community an Addictive Substance?
In this study, we examine how online games, like the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) EverQuest, are represented and controlled through media rhetoric. We look at international attempts to regulate their use through policy, and unearth some of the ways in which media reports have constructed public opinion of online games. We then contrast those reports with an ethnographic study of the EverQuest environment. The analysis of game experience and informant testimony shows that regulation and control of games is ultimately not a correct course of action in order to heal social dysfunction, of which excessive participation in electronic communities is only a symptom.
18420869
Simultaneous measurement of steering performance and perceived heading on a curving path
The ability to judge heading (direction of travel) has been the focus of much research, but a role for perceived heading in steering has not been firmly established. Subjects steered down a road consisting of straight and curved segments and made heading judgments along the way. Heading judgments while traversing curved road segments were biased in the direction of the curve by up to 5° and position errors on the same curved roads were highly correlated with heading biases. This correlation was revealed by the simultaneous measurement of steering performance and perceived heading.
1589294
A Conceptual-Modeling Approach to Extracting Data from the Web
Electronically available data on the Web is exploding at an ever increasing pace. Much of this data is unstructured, which makes searching hard and traditional database querying impossible. Many Web documents, however, contain an abundance of recognizable constants that together describe the essence of a document’s content. For these kinds of data-rich documents (e.g., advertisements, movie reviews, weather reports, travel information, sports summaries, financial statements, obituaries, and many others) we can apply a conceptual-modeling approach to extract and structure data. The approach is based on an ontology – a conceptual model instance – that describes the data of interest, including relationships, lexical appearance, and context keywords. By parsing the ontology, we can automatically produce a database scheme and recognizers for constants and keywords, and then invoke routines to recognize and extract data from unstructured documents and structure it according to the generated database scheme. Experiments show that it is possible to achieve good recall and precision ratios for documents that are rich in recognizable constants and narrow in ontological breadth.
6433216
XCS Applied To Mapping FPGA Architectures
This paper considers the application of XCS to the complex, real-world problem of mapping Boolean networks to technology-specific layout of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The mapping is formulated as a temporal task, where the XCS's actions are to create blocks (based on an abstract Boolean network) that can be placed in the FPGA, one-at-a-time. Despite the complexity of this task, we demonstrate that the system is effective. We demonstrate the transfer of knowledge stored in an XCS rule set from a small FPGA mapping problem, to a larger problem. We present a novel technique that utilizes a problem-specific finite state machine and two populations of classifiers to treat the problem hierarchically. Final sections of the paper discuss implications and future directions for this work.