In recent years, various methods and techniques have emerged for mapping the contexts of people's interaction with products. Designers and researchers use these techniques to gain deeper insight into the needs and dreams of prospective users of new products. As most of these techniques are still under development, there is a lack of practical knowledge about how such studies can be conducted. I...

This paper presents an experience report on using software engineering and design recovery tools to gain understanding and insight into the design of a software system without being burdened by a large source code repository. It is often the case that software systems contain incomplete or inaccurate documentation, or that the software designers did not follow software engineering best practice...

System designers find it difficult to obtain insight into the potential performance, and performance problems, of enterprise applications based on component technologies like Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) or .NET. One problem is the presence of layered resources, which have complicated effects on bottlenecks. Layered queueing network (LQN) performance models are able to capture these effects, an...

This paper introduces a parameterisation of learning algorithms for distributed constraint optimisation problems (DCOPs). This parameterisation encompasses many algorithms developed in both the computer science and game theory literatures. It is built on our insight that when formulated as noncooperative games, DCOPs form a subset of the class of potential games. This result allows us to prove ...

Expect is a tool for automating interactive applications. Expect was constructed using Tcl, a language library designed to be embedded into applications. This paper describes experiences with Expect and Tcl over a seven year period. These experiences may help other extension designers as well as the Tcl developers or developers of any other extension language see some of the challenges that a s...

Congestion is a problem in order-picking-systems. We developed CTMC models to represent picker blocking in cases including pickers with different exponentially distributed picking times and k pickers, for narrow and wide aisle systems. The focus was not to produce an all-inclusive model, but to generate models that give designers insight of the system, allowing them to reduce the number of vari...

A traditional formal veri cation method becomes an e ective weapon in the arsenal of a designer only after su cient insight into a design problem has been developed for a draft solution to be formalized. In the initial phases of a design the designers can therefore perceive formal methods to be more of a hindrance than an assistance. Since formal methods are meant to be problem solving tools, w...

Online learning communities are being touted as meeting the needs of distance learners and providing flexibility for on-campus students. Currently expectations are not being realized partly owing to a lack of experience and understanding of how such communities evolve, and the constraints and problems experienced by the learners. In this paper some strategies are identified that will inform des...

Thus we have the conundrum of all schools from the most ancient times to the modern day: how to devise a uniform curriculum and teaching methodology that properly educates a diverse group of students? As class sizes grow, the problem becomes worse, a phenomenon that Quintilian himself recognized. (Quintilian, 1922b) He argues that schools have certain advantages over one-to-one learning with a ...

Usability expresses how well a computerised system supports human activity. The humancomputer interaction occurs via the user interface, which is constituted by a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to a great extent. The issue is to integrate GUI design and usability engineering with traditional system development in order to slide on the man-machine scale. The purpose of writing this thesis was to...