Customer-centered design for mobile applications

Designing applications for mobile platforms presents unique and harder challenges than traditional software design. Users of such devices expect to be able to run such applications with no training, no traditional packaging elements such as quick start cards, and no help system. Customer-centered design is probably the only way such applications can be designed successfully. This paper presents our experience using customer-centered design to create a sophisticated mobile application—mSports Baseball. We describe the application and detail how we modified contextual Design (CD), our customer-centered design process, to produce an application users could enjoy with no training and no help.

Calling down the lightning [software design]

The bolt of lightning that sparks a new product idea is totally unpredictable. The authors consider the crucial question for a product-development organization: what context allows creativity to happen and how does an organization call down the lightning? They consider the example of spreadsheet design     

Temporal methods: Multi-dimensional modeling of sequential circuits

This paper discusses a mechanism for modeling the state-changing behavior of sequential devices.Temporal methods encode the temporal relationship between device variables and allow us to generalize temporal behaviors by extending Hamscher's notion of temporal abstraction. In this paper we formally define temporal methods, and describe our use of them in modeling sequential circuits. We also describe tarms, our temporal reason maintenance system which supports diagnostic reasoning about sequential circuits within the generic model-based diagnostic system (gmods).     

Design recovery for distributed systems

Two factors limit the utility of reverse engineering technology for many distributed software systems. First, with the exception of tools that support Ada and its explicit tasking constructs, reverse engineering tools fail to capture information concerning the flow of information between tasks. Second, relatively few reverse engineering tools are available for programming languages in which many older legacy applications were written (e.g., Jovial, CMS-2, and various assembly languages). We describe approaches that were developed for overcoming these limitations. In particular, we have implemented an approach for automatically extracting task flow information from a command and control system written in CMS-2. Our approach takes advantage of a small amount of externally provided design knowledge in order to recover design information relevant to the distributed nature of the target system