Computers — Utensils or epaulets? The application perspective revisited

Information system development projects engage organizational members in a process with potential for conflict. Managing such conflicts in project groups is an important but often neglected aspect of systems development. This research assesses group process during the development of an information system in an insurance company, using questionnaires, recorded transcripts of group meetings, interviews, and archival data. We describe the relationships among four variables in a model of conflict—participation, influence, conflict, and conflict resolution—at five different periods over a 22-month period. Our results show that in every time period participation positively affected influence and that influence positively affected both conflict and conflict resolution. These findings are supported by an analysis of communication patterns within four project meetings and by qualitative data collected during the project. The practical implications of conflict and group processes in system development are discussed.

While small computer systems have provided us with a wide array of development and operational environments, implementation methods, and domains of the software to be developed, it has also made the software development more risky. This paper proposes a new framework for improving the software development process on small computer systems to reduce software development risks. The key idea of the proposed framework is that the solutions to the software development problems can be extracted by the project manager, with relatively low overload, from the development processes that were actually executed in order to reduce the development risks, and then be formalized and stored in a database. The formalized solutions can be used not only for process improvement, but also for devising new solutions if new problems should occur in the future. We believe that the proposed framework is capable of making up for the difficulties in implementing CMM on small computer systems, and it encourages us to apply CMM to such risky software development.

The use of minicomputers in structural analysis

Since the late 1990s, agile or lightweight software development methodologies have experienced a meteoric rise of interest among systems developers who consider traditional systems development methodologies (such as Structured Systems Development, Information Engineering, and Rational Unified Process) too inflexible for building systems having unpredictable and changing requirements. Agile methodologies try to adapt to rapid requirement changes by having short, iterative development cycles and by encouraging frequent, open communication with customers. However, agile methodologies are still in the process of devising systematic approaches on how to be adaptive to unpredictable and changing requirements and how to incorporate customers into the systems development process. In this study, we show how an ethnographic research process called Strip Resolution can be applied as a systematic complement to projects applying agile development principles. We illustrate, in detail, how the Strip Resolution Process (SRP) enabled us, in the role of systems developers, to adapt to changing and unpredictable user requirements and to incorporate customers into the systems development process.

This paper presents a new approach, model theory approach, to small and medium scale transaction processing system (TPS) development. A TPS of this paper is an information system designed to process day-to-day business event data at operational level of an organization. The paper is not concerned with data base construction but with transaction processing. The model theory approach is not a software engineering approach but a systems theory approach. In the approach a model of the target system, which is called a user model, is constructed in set theory using a formal system structure of a TPS. The user model is, then, compiled into an extended Prolog (extProlog) model. The extProlog is an extension of Prolog to meet requirements for management information system development. On compilation a standardized user interface (UI) called internal UI is attached. The extProlog model with the internal UI is, then, executed under control of another standardized UI called an external UI. Implementation is an integral part of the approach. Because the UIs are designed for the formalized (abstract) structure of a TPS, they can be standardized and are provided as black box components to system development. Because a systems developer is required to only build a user model in set theory based on a model theoretic structure in the approach, it is called a model theory approach. Advantages of this approach are that it provides a theoretical structure to information systems development so that systems development can be made an engineering discipline, and facilitates rapid systems development.

During the New Product Development (NPD) cycle, it is important to focus and integrate relevant information into the stages of product conceptualisation, design and development so that they can be used for product and process design effectively. In this paper, a Generic Product and Process Development System (GPDS), which integrates knowledge-based technologies of Rule-Based Expert System (RBES) and Case-Based Reasoning (CBR), is proposed to facilitate product and process development. Although RBES is adopted for sorting product design criteria, relevant past cases are retrieved by the CBR system during product and process design stages. In doing so, previous knowledge in terms of rules and past practices will be made use of during the product and process design stages, resulting in an enhancement of the efficiency of design and operations. By applying GPDS in Hasbro Fast East Limited, the new product design life cycle is greatly shortened with significant reduction in the total development cost.

Econometric models of the U.S. computer market have been developed to study the relationships between system price and hardware performance. Single measures of price/performance such as “Grosch's Law” are shown to be so oversimplified as to be meaningless. Multiple-regression models predicting system cost as a function of several hardware characteristics do, however, reveal a market dichotomy. On one hand there exists a stable, price predictable market for larger, general purpose computer systems. The other market is the developing one for small business computer systems, a market which is relatively unstable with low price predictability.

Barki and Hartwick (1989) developed an instrument to assess user participation, defined as the extent to which users or their representatives carry out assignments and perform various activities and behaviors during the system development process. The study reported was designed to replicate and extend this work. Consistent with expectations, four separate facets of user participation were found: responsibility; evaluation and review of IS work; communication (users with IS staff, users among themselves and users with senior management); and hands-on activity (system design and training). Relationships of these facets to the users' role on the project team, to their influence and satisfaction with the process of system development, and to their influence and satisfaction with the system were examined. The results provide a clear and complete picture of user participation in systems development.

Welcome to the International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) held in Zurich, Switzerland, on June 2nd and 3rd, 2012. Having grown from a Software Process Workshop in 2005 to the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) in 2007, and finally to the International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) in 2011, this conference series has established its place in the software engineering community as a respected conference focusing on research and practice related to software and systems development process. Software and software systems development use processes as one major means for achieving and ensuring the quality of the final product. This leads to specific challenges regarding software processes such as simplicity, adaptability, standard conformance, the coordination of multiple domains and lifecycles, etc. Processes from other domains (e.g., health care, manufacturing, business, aerospace, automotive systems, and others) face similar challenges. Yet, they share interesting similarities with and differences to software processes. The question is: How can we in the software domain learn from other domains to meet our software process engineering challenges? The ICSSP conferences hence connect the traditional software and systems process community with outside views and insights, broadening its scope of software development processes to system development and explicitly including processes of other domains such as health care, business, and manufacturing. By sharing process development theories and practices from such domains, ICSSP 2012 is investigating novel solutions to today's process challenges. Correspondingly, the main theme of ICSSP 2012 is Beyond Software and Software Systems Processes, signaling our goal of learning from domains other than the traditional software process community.

This article describes the concept of human roles as an organizing principle for defining human interaction with a system. It also describes the six different roles humans can perform in terms of the Systems Engineering (SE) aspects of Human/System Integration (HSI). Four of these roles are associated with system performance and two roles are related to the development process. These two roles suggest that SE principles and practices be applied to the SE and system development processes as well as the system being developed. This paper provides a set of definitions for basic HSI concepts and for the six roles. It also discusses how people in these roles interact with the system and system environment and some of the HSI problems commonly encountered. The paper explains how use of roles as an organizing principal can aid in resolving these issues. These roles and interactions are relevant to large and small systems and all system environments. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Syst Eng 3: 143–155, 1999

The development process of free information systems has been explored in several studies, pointing out problems about the low usability of these systems. However, there is little knowledge about the insertion of usability issues into the development process of these systems when it comes to Assistive Technology resources. Those systems have particularities regarding the way users are involved, since they serve specific users (e.g., visually disabled users). This paper presents an investigation about the development process of a free information system, the NVDA (NonVisual Desktop) screen reade. The study analyzed the inclusion of of usability and accessibility practices in activities of the process applied in its development. Thus, observed practices were grouped according to ISO/IEC 12207 standards. The study demonstrated that several principles of User Centered Design could be indirectly detected in the process, considering the particularities of a free software project.

Software design is the devising and documenting of the overall architecture for a software system. Design consists of identifying the major components of the system, specifying what they are to accomplish, and establishing the interfaces among the components. Design is the first step of transforming the requirements (a statement of what is to be done) into the functioning software ( how the requirements are accomplished). Design also includes lower level work such as detailed specification of data structures and algorithms within the identified components, but this article primarily deals with overall architecture. The general strategy for this overview of software design is to establish the framework for design in the context of overall system development, discuss how the process of development embodies and influences the design approach, address general approaches to design with some extra detail on the lesser known topic of concurrent and real‐time systems, and finally, emphasize the importance of requirements analysis and specification, and the transition to design. The “transition to design” is logically part of the topic “approaches to design” but is best deferred until after the discussion of requirements. Along the way some design methods that have become sufficiently well known that they have a name will be discussed. The specific topics are Design and the overall system development process. Approaches to process. Approaches to design. Concurrent and real‐time systems. Requirements analysis. Requirements‐to‐design transition. Present and future. Software design is the devising and documenting of the overall architecture for a software system. Design consists of identifying the major components of the system, specifying what they are to accomplish, and establishing the interfaces among the components. Design is the first step of transforming the requirements (a statement of what is to be done) into the functioning software ( how the requirements are accomplished). Design also includes lower level work such as detailed specification of data structures and algorithms within the identified components, but this article primarily deals with overall architecture. The general strategy for this overview of software design is to establish the framework for design in the context of overall system development, discuss how the process of development embodies and influences the design approach, address general approaches to design with some extra detail on the lesser known topic of concurrent and real‐time systems, and finally, emphasize the importance of requirements analysis and specification, and the transition to design. The “transition to design” is logically part of the topic “approaches to design” but is best deferred until after the discussion of requirements. Along the way some design methods that have become sufficiently well known that they have a name will be discussed. The specific topics are Design and the overall system development process. Approaches to process. Approaches to design. Concurrent and real‐time systems. Requirements analysis. Requirements‐to‐design transition. Present and future.

To supply data needed for a rational fatigue design of structures subject to random load there must be some appropriate testing methods which are able to reproduce a specified time history of the random variable such as load, stress, strain and stress intensity factor and also must be inexpensive to be popular ones.With a small micro computer system alone, it is very difficult to perform exact experiments considering the dynamic characters of the test system varying as the fatigue damage accumulates in the specimen. In this report, two Micro Processing Units are used to perform experiments with or without response compensation by FFT. Stationary Gaussian random processes are generated with a large computer and data are packed into special forms to be sent through TSS within a reasonable time.The developed soft and hardware are satisfactory and fatige crack growth tests under a stationary random stress intensity factor showed the effect of the compensation and indicated the possibility of a simplified and less time consuming test method without response compensation.

This paper describes the author's experiences using a low-cost system-on-a-chip (SoC) embedded computer system and a commercial real-time operating system (RTOS) in the laboratory component of an undergraduate embedded system design class. The target hardware is a small low-cost X86 SoC computer system that has a wide range of I/O features. For software development, a popular commercial hard RTOS is used that has been designed for use in embedded devices. This course covers both hardware and software topics in embedded systems, and the course culminates in a final team-based design project. A full set of course materials including a textbook with laboratory tutorials, instructor slides, and code examples has been developed and is available online in electronic form.

This research paper talks about the development of an innovative IoT-based smart door lock that also uses facial recognition, Internet of Things (IoT) integration, and the ESP32-CAM microcontroller to increase home security. As locks continue to evolve with more new features, the use of IoT is increasing and enhancing the security and usability. ESP32-CAM was selected for this project because of its built-in Wi-Fi connectivity and camera, which render it exceptionally suited for creating a smart lock system that is able to not only recognize the saved faces but also alert the user if there is an intruder. When compared to other microcontrollers like Raspberry Pi, the ESP32- CAM offers many more advantages, including enhanced security features, a userfriendly interface, and a lower cost, and much more in initial price. This paper also compares and talks about already existing facial recognition-based door locks, providing a detailed analysis of their plus points and limitations to understand the current state of the technology. The research also provides a detailed breakdown including the system's development process, selection of components for the device, and compilation of hardware components for the implementation of the model, The paper also includes the algorithms and user interface design. In this paper, you’ll see how each component works, its usage, and how each component works together to ensure reliable and accurate facial recognition. Also, model testing was done to get the device's performance in a number of different conditions and usage areas. The results of these tests show that ESP32-CAM based smart door lock is a good and powerful solution and it is also cost-effective, offering good amount of savings compared to other smart lock systems in the market. This paper highlights how the project talks about some of the common security problems associated with the old locking system. By offering a more accessible and reliable alternative, this smart lock system has the potential to revolutionize home security. The integration of advanced facial recognition technology with IoT makes the home door lock system a more secure and user-friendly approach to home access control.