Posted on September 14th, 2006 by gernot.
Categories: Publications, Studies.
Tags: Empirical, Pair_Programming, Quality_Assurance
Defects in software design can have major impacts on product quality, project duration and budget. Analytical quality assurance tasks, like software inspection and testing, help detect deviations.
Recently, Pair Programming has been introduced as constructive approach for agile code construction that includes implicit quality assurance approaches, e.g., continuous defect detection, but without active guidance. Several empirical studies recommend active guidance for more efficient and effective defect detection.
In this paper we propose an extension of pair programming that integrates best-practice inspection and test case generation
approaches in order to improve defect detection in software products. We discuss the concept of a controlled experiment to empirically evaluate the proposed pair programming approach.
Posted on December 21st, 2005 by gernot.
Categories: Publications, Studies.
Tags: Empirical, Project_Planning
ISESE 2005
The success of software projects depends on the ability of a human planner to understand the relationships of tasks and their temporal uncertainty and hence the visualization thereof. In this paper we report on an empirical study that compares the performance of two techniques to visualize task relationships and temporal uncertainties: traditional “best-practice” PERT charts and recently introduced PlanningLines. Main results of the study are: (a) while PERT charts are well suited for reading single attributes, PlanningLines better support users in judging temporal task uncertainty; (b) both experiment rounds shows consistent results regarding the strengths and limitations of the techniques. Overall, these results suggest that a combination of PERT charts and PlanningLines has the potential to significantly improve the planning support of project managers and software engineers.
Posted on February 16th, 2005 by gernot.
Categories: Studies.
Tags: Empirical, Project_Planning
Goal of the study was to compare the performance of ‘Planning Line’ glyphs (PL) with PERT charts.
The reason for the decision to compare PL with PERT lies in the ability of PERT to display uncertainties, related to the ending, beginning and duration of a certain project task. Exactly this ability is one of the main advantages, the ‘Planning Lines’ graph provides. The reason for not using similar graphs, like the GANT graph, is that they are not able to display uncertainties in time. Following this the comparison with PL would not be very expressive.
The subjects are graduate students of informatics and business informatics in a usability engineering workshop.
The Austrian university system allows students to organize their studies in a very individual way. This enables them to determine their own schedule and to work part-time during their studies. Therefore the subjects participating in this workshop exhibit rather heterogeneous knowledge and experience levels.
We provided a tutorial, that briefly repeated how to use PERT, a method known by most participants, and introduced the new method ‘Planning Lines’, to guarantee the minimal common level of knowledge for the experiment.
In December 2004, 48 students of the workshop ‘Usability Engineering’ participated in the experiment.
From the experiment preparation team four members supervised the experiment and answered questions concerning the experiment or questionnaire.
This section provides a short overview of the experiment objects, which were used in our study.
The experiment participants received the following experiment materials
Finally subjects had the possibility to give feedback to the PL graph in a one-sided questionnaire.
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