Formerly one of the Yugoslav republics, Slovenia declared its independence in June 1991. Together with Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, Slovenia belongs to the group of leading IS technology ...markets among the new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe. The Delphi technique was used by the authors to compile a list of the key issues in information systems (IS) management in Slovenia, to quantify them, and, through iterations, to strengthen consensus about their importance. The results are presented and compared with those obtained in similar studies in the USA. The findings indicate profound differences in IS management issues between Slovenia and the USA and these differences are believed to be largely applicable to other new Central and Eastern European democracies.
This is an exploratory field study that examines the influence of selected system development methodologies on maintenance time. A number of factors related to the early stages of information systems ...development and to information systems maintenance were investigated: development methodology, maintenance time and its allocation, number of users, their understanding and involvement, system documentation, software quality, system characteristics, project controllability, system size and age, organization of the maintenance function, use of tools, ability of personnel, stability of organization, and others. The survey findings do not support the proposition that the application of modern information systems development methodology decreases maintenance time. However, some benefits are identified. Time spent on emergency error correction, as well as the number of system failures, decreased significantly with the application of modern methodology. Systems developed with modern methodologies seem to facilitate making greater changes in functionality as the systems age.
This paper describes how software development process naturally evolves. Items taken from an early version of the SEI's CMM questionnaire are shown to make up a linear scale that describes how ...software development and management practices are introduced in a software production organization. Analysis of this scale shows that when software practices are inadequately or incompletely implemented, they are refined in several iterations. This observation implies that such repetitive refinements of software practices can be estimated and that it may be possible to correct inadequate or incomplete initial implementations and shorten the cycle between refinement steps and thus accelerate the software process evolution.
Is natural language querying practical? Dekleva, Sasa M.
ACM SIGMIS Database: the DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems,
05/1994, Letnik:
25, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The study reported here involved the use of the natural language query system INTELLECT. It evaluated the level of correct interpretation to investigate whether the use of such a system is practical. ...Two sets of queries generated by two groups of senior-level business students were used. Questions from the first set were generated by "naïve" students who were untrained, and not aware that they were providing queries which were to be executed by a computer. Students from the second group attended a short lecture and understood that they were to generate natural language queries to be executed by a computer. INTELLECT's lexicon was augmented in stages. The level of correct interpretation achieved in this study is far above any previously reported and suggests that existing natural language query systems may be practical. key features in the accuracy of interpretation were user training and iterative lexicon enhancement.
This investigation provides an empirical scaling of software engineering practices derived from the software process maturity model developed by the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon ...University (Humphrey et al. Humphrey, W. S., D. H. Kitson, T. C. Kasse. 1989. The state of software engineering practice: A preliminary report. Technical Report CMU/SEI-89-TR-1 ESD-TR-89-01, Carnegie-Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, PA.). An analysis of data collected in an extended software maintenance study has shown that the responses to Humphrey's key software practice items fit the Rasch psychometric model providing an alternative framework in which to understand the software development practices. The Rasch model analysis describes the likelihood of a practice deployment for any level of evolution and provides precise and meaningful measures.
In recent, separate surveys of CFOs and CIOs, only 7.2% of CIOs and 10.9% of CFOs responding said they outsourced their computer operations. The most common fully outsourced services included ...disaster recovery, application development, user training, software maintenance, and hot line assistance. Cost reduction and cash infusion were not primary reasons for outsourcing.
First normal form reconsidered Dekleva, Sasa; Martens, Stanley
Communications of the ACM,
10/1993, Letnik:
36, Številka:
10
Magazine Article
A new, nontrivial definition of first normal form (1NF) is suggested, in response to Codd's (1970) article on relational databases. The insight is that nonsimplicity is multivalued dependence without ...functional dependence. Under the new definition, it can be shown that a relation is in 4th normal form if it is in 1NF and Boyce-Codd normal form. Codd focuses on the notion of simple domains. A domain of a relation is simple when its elements are atomic (nondecomposable) values, as opposed to relations. Codd offers a method of decomposing a relation which has nonsimple domains into a collection of relations each of which has simple domains, which he calls normalization. A new look at normalizing into 1NF is presented because, although a relation can be defined to have simple domains, relations so defined can still be represented in a way in which their domains are nonsimple. In the process of normalization proposed by Cobb, he is revealing a deeper point than one which can be dismissed through use of a simple formal device.
