While previously available methodologies for software – like those published in the early days of object technology – claimed to be appropriate for every conceivable project, situational method engineering (SME) acknowledges that most projects typically have individual characteristics and situations. Thus, finding the most effective methodology for a particular project needs specific tailoring to that situation. Such a tailored software development methodology needs to take into account all the bits and pieces needed for an organization to develop software, including the software process, the input and output work products, the people involved, the languages used to describe requirements, design, code, and eventually also measures of success or failure. The authors have structured the book into three parts. Part I deals with all the basic concepts, terminology and overall ideas underpinning situational method engineering. As a summary of this part, they present a formal meta-model that enables readers to create their own quality methods and supporting tools. In Part II, they explain how to implement SME in practice, i.e., how to find method components and put them together and how to evaluate the resulting method. For illustration, they also include several industry case studies of customized or constructed processes, highlighting the impact that high-quality engineered methods can have on the success of an industrial software development. Finally, Part III summarizes some of the more recent and forward-looking ideas. This book presents the first summary of the state of the art for SME. For academics, it provides a comprehensive conceptual framework and discusses new research areas. For lecturers, thanks to its step-by-step explanations from basics to the customization and quality assessment of constructed methods, it serves as a solid basis for comprehensive courses on the topic. For industry methodologists, it offers a reference guide on features and technologies to consider when developing in-house software development methods or customising and adopting off-the-shelf ones.

Over the last decade, Method Engineering, defined as the engineering discipline to design, construct and adapt methods, including supportive tools, has emerged as the research and application area for using methods for systems development. This book contains the papers from the IFIP Working Group 8.1 conference on Situational Method Engineering.

Method Engineering focuses on the design, construction and evaluation of methods, techniques and support tools for information systems development It addresses a number of important topics, including: method representation formalisms; meta-modelling; situational methods; contingency approaches; system development practices of method engineering; terminology and reference models; ontologies; usability and experience reports; and organisational support and impact.

Enhancing Situation Awareness (SA) is a major design goal for projects in many fields, including aviation, ground transportation, air traffic control, nuclear power, and medicine, but little information exists in an integral format to support this goal. Designing for Situation Awareness helps designers understand how people acquire and interpret information in complex settings and recognize the factors that undermine this process. Designing to support operator SA reduces the incidence of human error, which has been found to occur largely due to failures in SA. Whereas many previous human factors efforts have focused on design at the perceptual and surface feature level, SA-oriented design focuses on the operator's information needs and cognitive processes as they juggle to integrate information from many sources and achieve multiple competing goals. Thus it addresses design from a system's perspective. By applying theoretical and empirical information on SA to the system design process, human factors practitioners can create designs to support SA across a wide variety of domains and design issues. This book serves as a helpful reference to that end.

Providing an introduction to situational analysis, Adele E. Clarke outlines how this method differs from and is superior to grounded theory and to qualitative data analysis.

"This book provides a compendium of terms, definitions, and explanations of concepts in various areas of systems and design, as well as a vast collection of cutting-edge research articles from the field's leading experts"--Provided by publisher.

The Second Edition offers an innovative extension of grounded theory useful in qualitative research projects that draws on interviews, observations, and visual, narrative, and historical discourse materials. To engage the dense complexities of real world situations, Situational Analysis (SA) braids together Strauss's ecological social worlds/arenas theory, Foucault’s discourse analysis, and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomes and assemblages. The book will serve as an invaluable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate-level students, as well as professional researchers and consultants from diverse backgrounds pursuing qualitative projects.

“Don’s book is a very good addition both to the testing literature and to the literature on quality assurance and software engineering... . [It] is likely to become a standard for test training as well as a good reference for professional testers and developers. I would also recommend this book as background material for negotiating outsourced software contracts. I often work as an expert witness in litigation for software with very poor quality, and this book might well reduce or eliminate these lawsuits....” –Capers Jones, VP and CTO, Namcook Analytics LLC Software and system testers repeatedly fall victim to the same pitfalls. Think of them as “anti-patterns”: mistakes that make testing far less effective and efficient than it ought to be. In Common System and Software Testing Pitfalls, Donald G. Firesmith catalogs 92 of these pitfalls. Drawing on his 35 years of software and system engineering experience, Firesmith shows testers and technical managers and other stakeholders how to avoid falling into these pitfalls, recognize when they have already fallen in, and escape while minimizing their negative consequences. Firesmith writes for testing professionals and other stakeholders involved in large or medium-sized projects. His anti-patterns and solutions address both “pure software” applications and “software-reliant systems,” encompassing heterogeneous subsystems, hardware, software, data, facilities, material, and personnel. For each pitfall, he identifies its applicability, characteristic symptoms, potential negative consequences and causes, and offers specific actionable recommendations for avoiding it or limiting its consequences. This guide will help you Pinpoint testing processes that need improvement–before, during, and after the project Improve shared understanding and collaboration among all project participants Develop, review, and optimize future project testing programs Make your test documentation far more useful Identify testing risks and appropriate risk-mitigation strategies Categorize testing problems for metrics collection, analysis, and reporting Train new testers, QA specialists, and other project stakeholders With 92 common testing pitfalls organized into 14 categories, this taxonomy of testing pitfalls should be relatively complete. However, in spite of its comprehensiveness, it is also quite likely that additional pitfalls and even missing categories of pitfalls will be identified over time as testers read this book and compare it to their personal experiences. As an enhancement to the print edition, the author has provided the following location on the web where readers can find major additions and modifications to this taxonomy of pitfalls: http://donald.firesmith.net/home/common-testing-pitfalls Please send any recommended changes and additions to dgf (at) sei (dot) cmu (dot) edu, and the author will consider them for publication both on the website and in future editions of this book.

The essential introduction to the principles and applications of feedback systems—now fully revised and expanded This textbook covers the mathematics needed to model, analyze, and design feedback systems. Now more user-friendly than ever, this revised and expanded edition of Feedback Systems is a one-volume resource for students and researchers in mathematics and engineering. It has applications across a range of disciplines that utilize feedback in physical, biological, information, and economic systems. Karl Åström and Richard Murray use techniques from physics, computer science, and operations research to introduce control-oriented modeling. They begin with state space tools for analysis and design, including stability of solutions, Lyapunov functions, reachability, state feedback observability, and estimators. The matrix exponential plays a central role in the analysis of linear control systems, allowing a concise development of many of the key concepts for this class of models. Åström and Murray then develop and explain tools in the frequency domain, including transfer functions, Nyquist analysis, PID control, frequency domain design, and robustness. Features a new chapter on design principles and tools, illustrating the types of problems that can be solved using feedback Includes a new chapter on fundamental limits and new material on the Routh-Hurwitz criterion and root locus plots Provides exercises at the end of every chapter Comes with an electronic solutions manual An ideal textbook for undergraduate and graduate students Indispensable for researchers seeking a self-contained resource on control theory