Development of a human information processing model for cognitive task analysis and design

This paper reviews and reappraises the current research on the cognitive task analysis methodology for job or task design and analysis. Specifically, it classifies the current cognitive task analysis methods for job or task design and analysis, sorts out commonalities and differences among all these cognitive task analysis methodology for job and task design and analysis by conducting pros and cons comparisons, and provides guidelines in selecting cognitive task analysis methods for job and task design and analysis. Moreover, based on the current literature review, a validated human-centered information-processing model for cognitive task performance was developed based on human information processing theory. This new model focuses on identifying all cognitive aspects of human performance in technical work, with the goal of assisting job (re)design to increase human job performance.

Computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) has not yet provided the expected benefits for small-to-medium volume discrete parts manufacturing operations. Typically, these systems come in over budget and yet do not provide the promised flexibility. This can be directly attributed to the high cost of control software development for integrated systems. Reusable software has been proposed as a solution to the high software development and maintenance costs. One paradigm for reusable software, object-oriented modeling and programming, has emerged as an important method for specifying, creating, and reusing software modules. This paper describes an object-oriented approach to specifying and developing shop floor controllers for automated manufacturing environments. Specifically, a shop floor controller class hierarchy has been developed based on the behaviour of specific shop floor equipment and is described in this paper. User experience has shown that software development time can be significantly reduced through the use of this controller class.

Over the past decade, problems in software development and maintenance have increased rapidly. The size of software has grown explosively, complexity of software applications has increased, the nature of software applications has become more critical, and large quantities of software to be maintained have accumulated. During the same time, the productivity of individual software engineers has not improved proportionally. Software reusability is widely believed to be a key to help overcome the ongoing software crisis by improving software productivity and quality. However, the promise of software reusability has not yet been fulfilled. We present a multi-faceted software reusability model, a Quintet Web, that enables designers to reuse software artifacts from all phases. The Quintet Web consists of links of five types of reuse support information among existing document blocks: semantic, horizontal, hierarchical, syntactic, and alternative relationships. The five types of reuse support information are named the Semantic Web, the Horizontal Web, the Vertical Web, the Syntactic Web, and the Alternative Web. The Semantic Web defines the operational functionality of each software block. The Horizontal Web links functionally identical blocks of all phases. The Vertical Web identifies hierarchical relationships of software blocks. The Syntactic Web forms a chain from the declaration of each variable to its uses for all variables. The Alternative Web enables software developers to select an alternative algorithm for an identical functionality. The Quintet Web supports both software development and maintenance. When the Quintet Web is applied to development process, it provides software developers a means to check the consistency of the software being developed. The Quintet Web model is independent of a specific software development method.

The Unified Modelling Language (UML) is a language for specifying, visualising, constructing and documenting software systems. The UML proved to be extremely successful and it has achieved tremendous popularity making it the de facto industry standard for object oriented system development. As such, many researchers presented empirical studies on the practical usage of UML but as well criticisms for UML complexity, difficulty to be learnt, etc. Even though a large number of articles and books are devoted to various aspects of UML language, there is little evidence on how UML is used. This study attempts to identify the profile of persons using UML, to pinpoint UML diagrams that are being used and their effectiveness, to discover whether CASE tools are being used and to record the perceived usefulness of UML language. For conducting the study a survey was developed and it was distributed to mailing lists of Greek IT professionals and to university students. The findings indicate that UML is used successfully in the majority of software development projects and that most users perceive UML positively since it supports faster system building, development of higher quality software systems, and for specific cases, it leads to software development cost‐decrease.

With an increasing frequency of data breaches suffered by organizations, computer network defense (CND) is becoming an increasingly important concern. With understanding of how cybersecurity professionals engage in the cognitive aspects of their work, human factors researchers and practitioners can improve tools and training. By optimizing the tools and training network defenders rely on to detect and respond to novel network threats, the cybersecurity workforce will be strengthened. While cognitive task analysis (CTA) is well-positioned to represent the cognitive work of CND, we identify challenges practitioners are likely to encounter in the field. Through a review of published CTAs in CND and other domains, we provide guidance for future CTA efforts in CND. Finally, we present an argument for the use of Elicitation by Critiquing (EBC) and demonstrate its efficacy in mitigating the challenges of applying CTA in CND.

Unified Modeling Language (UML) plays an important role in the modern software development process by offering standardized methods for visual modeling, analysis, and design of complex systems. This paper discusses the main aspects of storing, editing, and integrating UML documents with integrated development environments (IDEs). The main focus is on comparing the two main formats for storing UML models – XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). XMI, being an official standard developed by Object Management Group, provides a high degree of detail and compatibility with various UML tools, making it preferable for large and complex projects that require support for the full UML specification. At the same time, JSON is simple and flexible, which makes it suitable for projects where speed of development and ease of integration are important, although it is inferior to XMI in describing complex aspects of UML models. The paper analyzes in detail the methods of editing UML documents, including manual editing and automated approaches, using APIs and scripts. Manual editing is useful when you need to make small changes to the structure of a UML document, but it can be time-consuming and error-prone when working with large projects. Automation, on the other hand, provides effective tools for mass editing and generating UML elements, which significantly speeds up development and minimizes the likelihood of errors, especially since modern tools such as StarUML offer the necessary tools for programmatically modifying UML documents by integrating them into development processes. Combining of UML documents with integrated development environments also plays a key role in increasing development efficiency, as this allows automating code generation based on UML models, maintaining synchronization between code and diagrams, and facilitating visualization and documentation of architectural solutions. Despite the significant advantages, there are challenges associated with limited support for all UML features and potential conflicts between models and code. This only emphasizes the need for further research in this area. Prospects for further research include the development of new methods and tools for working with UML documents, improving their integration with development environments, and using artificial intelligence to automate the analysis and design of UML models. Attention should also be paid to the using of UML with continuous integration processes, which can significantly increase the flexibility and adaptability of software development. Thus, the study of the structure of storing, editing, and integrating UML documents is an important area for optimizing the design and development of modern software systems.

Scientific missions in the Earth sciences frequently require cost-effective, highly reliable, and easy-to-use software, which can be a challenge for software developers to provide. The NASA Earth Science Enterprise (ESE) spends a significant amount of resources developing software components and other software development artifacts that may also be of value if reused in other projects requiring similar functionality. In general, software reuse is often defined as utilizing existing software artifacts. Software reuse can improve productivity and quality while decreasing the cost of software development, as documented by case studies in the literature. Since large software systems are often the results of the integration of many smaller and sometimes reusable components, ensuring reusability of such software components becomes a necessity. Indeed, designing software components with reusability as a requirement can increase the software reuse potential within a community such as the NASA ESE community. The NASA Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) Software Reuse Working Group is chartered to oversee the development of a process that will maximize the reuse potential of existing software components while recommending strategies for maximizing the reusability potential of yet-to-be-designed components. As part of this work, two surveys of the Earth science community were conducted. The first was performed in 2004 and distributed among government employees and contractors. A follow-up survey was performed in 2005 and distributed among a wider community, to include members of industry and academia. The surveys were designed to collect information on subjects such as the current software reuse practices of Earth science software developers, why they choose to reuse software, and what perceived barriers prevent them from reusing software. In this paper, we compare the results of these surveys, summarize the observed trends, and discuss the findings. The results are very similar, with the second, larger survey confirming the basic results of the first, smaller survey. The results suggest that reuse of ESE software can drive down the cost and time of system development, increase flexibility and responsiveness of these systems to new technologies and requirements, and increase effective and accountable community participation.

Informal and graphical modeling techniques enable developers to construct abstract representations of systems. Object-oriented modeling techniques further facilitate the development process. The Unified Modeling Language (UML), an object-oriented modeling approach, could be broad enough in scope to represent a variety of domains and gain widespread use. Currently, UML comprises several different notations with no formal semantics attached to the individual diagrams. Therefore, it is not possible to apply rigorous automated analysis or to execute a UML model in order to test its behavior, short of writing code and performing exhaustive testing. We introduce a general framework for formalizing a subset of UML diagrams in terms of different formal languages based on a homomorphic mapping between metamodels describing UML and the formal language. This framework enables the construction of a consistent set of rules for transforming UML models into specifications in the formal language. The resulting specifications derived from UML diagrams enable either execution through simulation or analysis through model checking, using existing tools. This paper describes the use of this framework for formalizing UML to model and analyze embedded systems. A prototype system for generating the formal specifications and results from an industrial case study are also described.

Analysis of software development cost is an important issue for both the academic and the commercial circles. There have been many methods proposed to analyze benefits and costs of software development. However, in practical applications, these methods are usually not applicable owing to various unpredictable factors, such as depression, which may affect the budget of software development, the changes of computer techniques, which may affect the cost of software development, and the adoption of different management concept, which may affect the enterprise's willingness of investing in software development. On the other hand, it is hoped that software development cost could be controlled appropriately while considering multiple requirements. In this paper, we proposed a Multi-Stage Fuzzy-Grey (MSFG) method to cope with these problems. A case study for the development of an e-training system is also given to demonstrate the benefits of our approach.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been conducting an investigation of human interaction with critical elements of NASA’s Launch Termination System (LTS). This safety-critical system requires quick decision making on the part of highly trained users in order to maintain safe launch operations. A team of NASA evaluators has completed a detailed assessment aimed at improving the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of NASA’s Range Data Display System (RDDS), a key component of the LTS. The RDDS forms the vital man-machine link which ingests high volumes of system data in real-time and displays this data to NASA’s Range Safety personnel to enable them to assess launch vehicle trajectory and performance status. The RDDS displays the real-time state of the launch vehicle and its complex subsystems to users in order to support arm/destruct decisions (made by NASA’s Range Safety personnel) to facilitate safe launch operations. These decisions are highly time-sensitive, and users must act quickly in order to prevent serious injury or death and extensive damage to equipment or property. The NASA assessment team performed a Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) to derive the user informational requirements needed to develop data driven, user information software requirements in support of a new RDDS software upgrade. The CTA was designed to address the unique aspects of this particular system, while focusing on the operational context within which the system is used by highly specialized personnel. This analysis and the resulting requirements form the first step in providing human factors guidance to software developers throughout the design, development, and fielding of the new RDDS software GUI. This paper will focus on the applied human factors methods and techniques employed, how these methods and techniques were used to derive user information design requirements, the lessons learned from this activity, and areas for future work. The authors intend to provide human factors practitioners with an example of how CTA methods and techniques may be adapted to meet the particular needs of a project, with special consideration given to the design of safety-critical systems.

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is an industrial standard for object-oriented software specification, which offers notational conventions for system modeling at the initial stage of software development. An actual problem is to develop a tool available for automatic generation of UML diagram from some form of the problem domain description. Authors have been introduced such a tool, called BrainTool and developed by a research group in Riga Technical University. BrainTool supports transformation of the problem domain presented as two-hemisphere model into several kinds of UML diagrams and give an ability to export these diagrams for further software development into UML compatible modeling tools and IDEs. Present paper demonstrates the comparison results of the manual UML class diagram creation for an abstract example of the football game simulation to the UML class diagram received by application of BrainTool for the same game basic scenario. These comparison results give a basis for discussion about possible improvements of the transformations offered by two-hemisphere model and potentially “richer” usage of the model for generation of the UML diagrams suitable for further software development.

Gender issues have recently been discussed extensively with respect to the computing fields (Bair & McGrathe-Cohoon, 2005; Camp, 2002; Margolis & Fisher, 2002). One of the discussed issues is the “shrinking pipeline” phenomenon (Camp, 1997). Camp shows how, in addition to the shrinking of the pipeline upon transition from high school to graduate school, the pipeline has been shrinking also at the bachelor-degree level since 1983. She argues that since the number of women at the bachelor’s level affects the number of women at levels higher in the pipeline and in the job market, this phenomenon is of great concern. The shrinking pipeline is explained in various ways. Among other explanations, the image of the field as requiring long hours of programming is a dominant one. Here is an illustrative case. The April 3, 2003, edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Business News addressed the question of why more women are not involved in the tech fields.1 This question was discussed by a panel, assembled by the Pittsburgh Technology Council a week before the article was published, which included some of the region’s most successful women. Among other arguments, Robbin Steif, chief financial officer of Maya Design, said, “It might be an issue of self-selection—women might not be risk takers.” Then she added, “It might also have something to do with the work/family issue, because entrepreneurs work way more than 40 hours per week.” This article focuses on software development teams using one of the agile software development methods. A high quality of working software is the primary measure of progress; however, agile software development processes, in addition, promote a sustainable pace for all the individuals (developers and users) involved in the software development process,2 welcome requirement changes even in late stages of the development, and favor face-to-face communication. Based on our observations of agile software teams both in academia and in industry, we claim that such software development frameworks enable women to gain new and better positions in the hi-tech industry in general and in software development teams in particular. We view this article as an example of how diversity can be achieved in software teams. In our current research, we explore other dimensions by which diversity can be achieved in software teams, such as minorities and nationalities. The perspective and data that are presented in this article are part of our research about human aspects of software engineering, specifically our comprehensive research about cognitive and organizational aspects of agile software development methods both in the industry and academia (Dubinsky & Hazzan, 2004; Dubinsky, Talby, Hazzan, & Keren, in press; Hazzan & Dubinsky, 2003a, 2003b; Tomayko & Hazzan, 2004).q

As a powerful and object-oriented graphical modeling language, Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been introduced into the design and development of safety-critical computer systems. However, UML model is difficult to reflect the concurrency and consistency of constraint rules between objects and impossible to completely demonstrate the dynamic behavior characteristics of a system. Further, it cannot be directly expressed and analyzed by mathematical tools. Petri net modeling technology uses graphical element place and transition to clearly describe the internal interactions of a system. Meanwhile, Petri net has mature mathematical analysis methods. We have proposed to combine these two tools for designing and analyzing a system with a set of transformation rules from UML statecharts to Petri net. In this paper, an automatic conversion tool is introduced. The tool performs the transformation with three steps as follows: (1) Transforming UML model into XML document, which makes information extraction of the UML model become easier. (2) Analyzing semantics of UML model and Petri net model, then designing data structure for transformation, and completing the transformation based on the transformation rules. (3) Analyzing the transformed Petri net model to verify the characteristics of the UML model. The transformation rules and the tools are developed based on a new railway interlocking system.

Software testing is an important process in software quality assurance(SQA). Software testing consumes the majority of the software developers' time and cost of all the phases of system development. An important problem in software testing is to determine whether a program has been tested enough with a testing criterion and when one could stop testing. On the other hand, software measurement is used to estimate the quality of a software. Complexity measures can be used to compare software quality and development cost. This paper proposes a new testing approach which choosing testing path based on path complexity. The process is to use a set of testing paths that satisfying all-uses testing criterion, and then choose the testing path with the most complexity to test. This process is continued until the program can be accepted. The proposed formula is used to determine if it is possible to stop testing before satisfying all-du-paths testing criterion. The main contribution of the paper is that software developers can choose a proper testing action with lower testing effort.

Software systems of today are often complex, making development costs difficult to estimate. This paper uses data from 50 projects performed at one of the largest banks in Sweden to identify factors that have an impact on software development cost. Correlation analysis of the relationship between factor states and project costs was assessed using ANOVA and regression analysis. Ten out of the original 31 factors turned out to have an impact on software development project cost at the Swedish bank including the: number of function points, involved risk, number of budget revisions, primary platform, project priority, commissioning body's unit, commissioning body, number of project participants, project duration, and number of consultants. In order to be able to compare projects of different size and complexity, this study also considers the software development productivity defined as the amount of function points per working hour in a project. The study at the bank indicates that the productivity is affected by factors such as performance of estimation and prognosis efforts, project type, number of budget revisions, existence of testing conductor, presentation interface, and number of project participants. A discussion addressing how the productivity factors relate to cost estimation models and their factors is presented. Some of the factors found to have an impact on cost are already included in estimation models such as COCOMO II, TEAMATe, and SEER-SEM, for instance function points and software platform. Thus, this paper validates these well-known factors for cost estimation. However, several of the factors found in this study are not included in established models for software development cost estimation. Thus, this paper also provides indications for possible extensions of these models.