events page index

forthcoming

15 November 2005 3:00 pm room 10.2.330

Julia Prior
Software Design Practice: So What Do Software Designers Do All Day?
This research aims to make sense of software design practice: how do people actually design software? What is this design activity in practice? The research uses a longitudinal study in a software development company to develop an understanding of software design work as it is done in situ i.e. in the workplace by professional software designers. The intention is to establish a broad understanding of issues relevant to software design practice. Conclusions made from the study will be emergent, giving a better understanding of software designers' work practices, and a grounded basis for developing theories and models for software design practice. The presentation of this work-in-progress will be given in 3 main parts: a discussion of ethnography as a research methodology, the pragmatics of ethnographical fieldwork, and a look at one of the main issues emerging from the analysis of the fieldwork data collected to date.

Julia Prior is a lecturer in the Department of Software Engineering at UTS. She has worked as a software developer in the mining and car manufacturing industries, and on scientific applications interfacing with bio-mechanical measuring equipment. She continued to do some software quality assurance and other development work after becoming a full-time academic, lecturing in software analysis, design and development. For several years before moving to Australia, she was manager of a technological university's satellite campus with exceptionally close ties to, and highly regarded by, the South African Information Technology industry. She is currently doing her PhD with the Faculty of IT at UTS in software design practice.

29 November 2005 3:00 pm room 10.2.330

Aditya Ghose
(TBA)

past

25 October 2005 6:00 pm room 10.2.410

Cesar Gonzalez-Perez
Discussion on "Extreme Programming Considered Harmful for Reliable Software Development" by Gerold Keefer

10 October 2005 3:00 pm room 10.2.330

Robert Rist
Modelling Object-Oriented Design
There is no mystery to teaching good OO design. The problem is not the programming language. The problem is the distance between input and output, the large amount of thought that occurs between the English specification and the final OO code. The solution is to provide cognitive scaffolding by showing how OO design is actually done. Four main tools are described: plan structure, design rules, design notations, and design stories. These tools can transform a rank beginner into a good OO designer in a one semester subject.
The talk is a 20 minute practice presentation for OOPSLA, followed by analysis and discussion of the talk and the tools.

6 September 2005 3:00 pm room 10.2.330

Kuldar Taveter
The RAP/AOR Methodology for Agent-Oriented IS Engineering and its Mapping to OPEN
We propose a new agent-oriented software engineering process called RAP, which follows the Rational Unified Process (RUP) in many ways, but is based on Agent-Object-Relationship (AOR) modelling instead of object-oriented modelling. The methodology is geared towards development of distributed information systems which involve recurring business and manufacturing processes. In such processes, actors typically have a complicated structure of beliefs and commitments and a reactive behaviour based on them. In my presentation, I will first introduce the RAP/AOR viewpoint modelling framework. After that, I will describe the modelling from the interaction, information and behaviour aspects of the framework by using a case study of business-to-business electronic commerce. I will then provide an overview of an implementation approach based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Extended Markup Language (XML). Finally, I will present a preliminary proposal on mapping of the notions of the methodology to those of the OPEN metamodel.

Kuldar Taveter obtained his PhD (Eng) from Tallinn University of Technology (Estonia, EU) in June 2004. He also holds the degrees of DipEng and MSc (Eng) from the same university. Kuldar's research interests are agent-oriented domain analysis and software engineering, software agents and ontologies. Prior to joining the University of Melbourne as a postdoctoral research fellow, he was working as a research scientist for VTT Information Technology (Technical Research Centre of Finland) which acts as a mediator between academy and industry. At the University of Melbourne, Kuldar is working in the areas of ontology reconciliation and agent-oriented software engineering.

23 August 2005 3:00 pm room 10.2.330

Cesar Gonzalez-Perez and Tom McBride
Transitioning from Development in the Small to Development in the Large

9 August 2005 3:00 pm room 10.2.330

Gerald Khoury
The Lightweight Enterprise Architecture Notation (LEAN): A Unified Language for EA Modelling
While enterprise architectures have found widespread popularity within large-scale IT endeavours, there is no widely accepted modelling language that can be used to create unified enterprise architecture models. The unified languages that exist are either restricted to a small set of domains, within specialised industries, or they are too complex to be commercially relevant. As a result, enterprise architects either create EA models using a number of different modelling approaches (resulting in fragmented models and cognitive overload) or, more commonly, they 'make up' their own informal notation.

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12 July 2005 3:00 pm room 10.4.460

Asif Qumer
Defining Agility and Agile Methods
There are number of agile and traditional methodologies for software development. However, the problem is that there is no clear and complete definition of agility and agile methods; subsequently it is not feasible to draw a clear distinction between traditional and agile software development methods in practice. The purpose of this study is to suggest a definition of agility and agile methods that would facilitate the differentiation of agile methods from other available methods.

28 June 2005 3:00 pm room 10.4.460

Brian Henderson-Sellers
Identification of Reusable Method Fragments from the PASSI Agent-Oriented Methodology
Theoretical proposals for the development of reusable method fragments are applied to the identification of method fragments in the agent-oriented methodology, PASSI. The format of these fragments is ensured as compatible with the structure and format already established for the OPEN Process Framework’s (OPF) repository, which uses a method engineering (ME) approach. Since the OPF repository has already been enhanced by fragments from several other AO methodologies, we expect a “convergence to completion” (or near-completion) such that most of the PASSI fragments are likely to map to existing OPF fragments. Indeed, only seven new fragments (six of which are novel diagram types) are identified in this study.

14 June 2005 3:00 pm room 10.4.460

Asif Qumer
Discussion on "The New Methodology" by Martin Fowler (2003)

31 May 2005 3:00 pm room 10.2.320

Brian Henderson-Sellers
Standard Metamodel for Development Methodologies: Progress towards a New ISO Standard
Brian will summarise the latest results in the standardisation process and will describe how this UTS-led new standard will make modelling development methodologies easier and better.

17 May 2005 3:00 pm room 10.2.320

Ghassan Beydoun
Towards Method Engineering for Multi-Agent Systems: A Generic MAS Metamodel
New Multi-Agent System (MAS) software development methodologies are published at an increasing pace. This is in part due to the accepted premise that no single methodology can be suitable for all MAS software projects. Method engineering, which focuses on project-specific methodology construction from existing method fragments, is an appealing approach to organize, appropriately access and effectively harness the software engineering knowledge of methodologies. Towards this, in this paper we present and validate a generic product-focussed metamodel to serve as a representational infrastructure to unify existing methodologies into a single specification. Our metamodel does not focus on any class of MAS, nor does it impose any restrictions on the format of system requirements; rather, our metamodel is an abstraction of how any MAS is structured and behaves both at design time and run-time. We analyze two well-known existing MAS metamodels. We sketch how they can be seen as subtypes of our generic metamodel. This constitutes early evidence to support the use of our metamodel towards the construction of situated MAS methodologies.

3 May 2005 3:00 pm room 10.2.320

Norazlin Yusop and Cesar Gonzalez-Perez
Answering Reviewers' Comments to a Paper Submission

19 April 2005 3:00 pm room 10.2.320

Brian Henderson-Sellers and Cesar Gonzalez-Perez
Issues in Preparing a Research Paper for Journal Publication

5 April 2005 3:00 pm room 10.2.320

Joao Araujo
Scenario Modeling with Aspects
There has been significant recent interest, within the Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) community, in representing crosscutting concerns at various stages of the software lifecycle. However, most of these efforts have concentrated on the design and implementation phases. We focus in this paper on representing aspects during requirements modeling. In particular, we focus on scenario-based requirements and show how to compose aspectual and non-aspectual scenarios so that they can be simulated as a whole. Non-aspectual scenarios are modeled as UML sequence diagrams. Aspectual scenarios are modeled as Interaction Pattern Specifications (IPSs). In order to simulate them, the scenarios are transformed into a set of executable state machines using an existing state machine synthesis algorithm. The composition can be done at the state machine level or at the sequence diagram level. In this presentation, we will discuss composition at these two different levels of abstraction.

João Araújo is an assistant professor at the New University of Lisbon, Portugal. He holds a PhD in Computer Science, from the University of Lancaster, United Kingdom, in the area of Requirements Engineering. Currently his main research interest is in aspect-oriented requirements engineering, having several papers on this topic in international conferences and workshops. He was an organizer of the early aspects workshop at AOSD 2002, AOSD 2003, AOSD 2004, OOPSLA 2004 and AOSD 2005. He was Also an organizer of two workshops on integration and transformation of UML models (WTUML and WITUML), at ETAPS'01 and ECOOP'02. Additionally, he served on the organization committees of UML'03 as tutorials chair and UML'04 as co-publicity chair. He is also acting as co-publicity chair of MoDELS 2005 and PC co-chair of WER 2005. For more information please visit http://ctp.di.fct.unl.pt/~ja

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22 March 2005 3:00 pm room 10.2.320

Anton Bogdanovych
E-Commerce environments as 3D Electronic Institutions
Many researchers have paid close attention in the recent past to 3D product presentation in E-Commerce systems. Surprisingly, not many practical results have been shown. In this paper we outline the reasons for the lack of success and propose the use of 3D Virtual Worlds that not only offer natural ways of product presentation but also provide means to satisfy the social needs of customers, which are mostly neglected in nowadays E-Commerce solutions. Virtual Worlds are somewhat unregulated environments, which do not have the means to enforce technological norms and rules on their inhabitants. But these norms can be enforced with the help of the Electronic Institution methodology. It is shown how two metaphors, Virtual Worlds and Electronic Institutions are combined into a single metaphor, 3D Electronic Institution, while retaining the features and advantages of both, and how the 3D Electronic Institutions are generated.

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8 March 2005 3:00 pm room 10.2.320

Paolo Giorgini (Trento University)
Goal-Oriented Requirements Analysis and Reasoning in the Tropos Methodology
Tropos is an agent-oriented software methodology founded on the notions of agent and goal, and goal analysis is used extensively to support software development during different phases. In this seminar I will present the semantics and the formalization of goal models and I will show two different forms of reasoning (forward and backward) applied to the requirements analysis phase. I will briefly present also the implemented tool that supports the whole approach.

Paolo Giorgini is researcher in Computer Science at University of Trento. His research interests include agent-oriented software engineering, multi-agent system modeling and design, knowledge representation and conceptual modeling. He has worked on the development of requirements and design languages for agent-based systems, and the application of knowledge representation techniques to software repositories and software development. He is currently working in a number of research projects at University of Trento and ITC-irst. Giorgini received his Ph.D. degree from Computer Science Institute of University of Ancona (Italy) in 1998. Between March and October 1998 he worked at University of Macerata and University of Ancona as research assistant, where he continued to carry out research in agent-based software engineering. In November 1998 he joined the Mechanized Reasoning Group (MRG) at University of Trento as pos-doc researcher. In December 1998 he started a collaboration with the Computer Science Department at University of Toronto (Canada) where he spent several months doing research in agent-based software development methodologies. His publication list includes more than 100 refereed journal and conference proceedings papers and five edited books. He has contributed to the organization of international conferences as chair and program committee member, such as CoopIS, ER, CAiSE, AAMAS, EUMAS, AOSE, AOIS, and ISWC.

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22 February 2005 3:00 pm room 10.4.460

Greg O'Keefe (Australian National University)
An Aspect Oriented Metamodelling Framework with Formal Semantics
I aim to give a metamodel for Executable UML (Mellor and Balcer 2002), and to generate a modelling tool from it. Our approach has two important innovations over existing modelling frameworks. First, the metamodels can be partitioned into "domains" and linked by an implementation of Mellor's notion of a bridge. This allows for simpler, more comprehensible metamodels. Second, we use a form of algebraic signatures as both a formal semantics and a basis for code generation. I will demonstrate a proof-of-concept implementation, and discuss the work required to fulfil this goal.

14 December 2004 3:00 pm room 10.4.460 (NOT the Board room)

Cesar Gonzalez-Perez
Report on OOPSLA 2004 and WG19 Meeting
COTAR run two full-day workshops at OOPSLA 2004, on Agent-Oriented Methodologies and Method Engineering, respectively. Feedback has been excellent. Cesar will report on the major issues discussed and the conclusions of the two workshops. Also, COTAR is leading an ISO new work item hosted by WG19 with the aim to creatre a standard metamodel for software development methodologies based on the existing Australian Standard AS4651. Cesar (with Brian's help) will report on the objectives of the project and the progress made to date. A short presentation about the standard will also be shown.

30 November 2004 3:00 pm room 10.3.290 (Board room)

Igor Hawryszkiewycz and Brian Henderson-Sellers
What is Research?

16 November 2004 3:00 pm room 10.3.290 (Board room)

Tom McBride
(paper for APSEC 2004)
The paper outlines existing maturity models of project management and their underlying constructs. Two alternative constructs, one process based and the other systems theory based, are described and discussed in relation to project management. Organizations involved in software development in Sydney, Australia were interviewed about their project management practices and their responses analysed to determine whether different project managers used different levels of project management practices and whether the practices better fit a process based maturity model or a systems theory based maturity model. The conclusion, that a system theory based maturity model is better correlated with organizational size and software development maturity than a process-based maturity model, is briefly discussed and additional research is suggested that could investigate this conclusion further.

2 November 2004 3:00 pm room 10.3.290 (Board room)

Igor Hawryszkiewycz and Brian Henderson-Sellers
Research Directions

19 October 2004 3:00 pm room 10.3.290 (Board room)

Tom McBride
Introduction to Professional Certification
For some time now there has been an argument that IT professionals should be licensed or certified. While motives vary the general idea is that IT and, in particular, software developers should come under a similar professional scheme as engineers with the same rights to practice their profession and the same responsibilities for the work they produce. There are several current initiatives that have some bearing on this. There is the Certified ICT Professional designed to conform to the requirements of the Professional Standards Council, the ISO project working on international certification of software engineers, and the Chartered Professional Engineer from IEAust. None of these schemes is compulsory. All are intended to certify that a particular level of professional knowledge, skills and competence have been achieved. These different schemes will be described then discussed from the viewpoint of how they are likely to affect ICT in Australia.

5 October 2004 3:00 pm room 10.3.290 (Board room)

Brian Henderson-Sellers
When is a Paper a Different Paper?

21 September 2004 3:00 pm room 10.3.290 (Board room)

Magdy Serour
Introducing Agility: A Case Study of Situational Method Engineering using the OPEN Process Framework

8 September 2004 3:00 pm room 10.2.230

Alistair Cockburn
Question-and-answer session

7 September 2004 3:00 pm room 10.3.290

Brian Henderson-Sellers and Cesar Gonzalez-Perez
Discussion on the paper "Agent Oriented Software Engineering: Does it make sense?"

24 August 2004 3:00 pm room 10.3.290

Brian Henderson-Sellers, Jenny Edwards and Ken Dovey
Research Methods in IT

10 August 2004 3:00 pm room 10.3.290

Alan Davis
The IT Entrepreneurial Challenge: Rise and Fall of a Software Startup
These days it seems that everybody wants to get rich by starting a new company. And because just about anybody can create a “software product” with relatively little training and cost, information technology (IT) companies become the most likely goal. However, the building of the product (whether in software or any other medium) is the most trivial and usually the least expensive and least risky part of any commercial endeavor. This talk removes some of the mystique surrounding the creation of IT companies. It explores some of the key aspects of a startup business, e.g., personnel, finance, productization, marketing, sales, branding, establishment of appropriate boards, facilities, and exit strategies. For each aspect, the speaker will describe the fundamental goals and approaches, and will describe his personal experiences (some successful and some not so successful) on his own three startup companies.

27 July 2004 3:00 pm room 10.4.460

Mahmood Niazi (NICTA)
A Maturity Model for the Implementation of Software Process Improvement: An Empirical Study
Different advances have been made in the development of software process improvement (SPI) standards and models, e.g. Capability Maturity Model (CMM), more recently CMMI, and ISO's SPICE. However, these advances have not been matched by equal advances in the adoption of these standards and models in software development which has resulted in limited success for many SPI efforts. The current problem with SPI is not a lack of standard or model, but rather a lack of an effective strategy to successfully implement these standards or models. The importance of SPI implementation demands that it be recognised as a complex process in its own right and that organizations should determine their SPI implementation maturity through an organized set of activities. In the literature, much attention has been paid to “what activities to implement” instead of “how to implement” these activities. I believe that identification of only “what” activities to implement is not sufficient and that knowledge of “how” to implement is also required for successful implementation of SPI programmes. I have adopted a CMMI approach and developed a maturity model for SPI implementation in order to guide organizations in assessing and improving their SPI implementation maturity. The basis of this model is what I have studied in the SPI literature and an empirical study I have carried out. In the design of this maturity model I have extended the concept of critical success factors (CSFs). I have conducted CSF interviews with 34 Australian practitioners. I have also analysed CSFs and critical barriers using 50 research articles (published experience reports and case studies). This maturity model has three dimensions –Maturity stage dimension, CSF dimension and assessment dimension. It provides a very practical structure with which to assess and improve SPI implementation maturity.

13 July 2004 3:00 pm room 10.4.460

David Avison
The potential of qualitative research: A look at case study and action research in practice

29 June 2004 3:00 pm room 10.4.460

Tom McBride
Monitoring and Controlling Software Development Projects
Software development projects are seldom able to be planned so accurately that the plans predict exactly what will happen during the project. Project managers must monitor the project and make changes either to the project’s activities or to the plan itself. Yet much of the project management literature gives only cursory attention to the problem of monitoring and controlling the project. To investigate how project managers regard software development projects, this paper examines software development from the perspectives of two extremes: software development as a production problem and software development as a design problem. Empirical evidence was analyzed and it was found that software development is viewed as a production problem by most project managers. The research highlighted that a relatively simple test could guide project managers toward tailoring their project monitoring and control activities to better suit the project type.

15 June 2004 3:00 pm room 10.4.460

Julia Prior
Discussion on Principles and Criteria for Paper Reviewing

1 June 2004 3:00 pm room 10.4.470

Igor Hawryszkiewycz
The Evolution of a Metamodel for Collaborative Processes
The presentation will outline a metamodel for describing collaborative processes. The metamodel integrates organizational, social and workflow aspects into the one model to provide ways to model and implement collaborative processes. The presentation will outline the concepts that make up the metamodel, how they evolved and why they are needed. The presentation will then introduce ways of using the metamodel to develop systems, outlining direct implementation of the of the metamodel concepts, as well as their integration with object modeling to construct agent supported systems. The presentation will also discuss the differences between the collaborative metamodel and current process oriented models will also be introduced outlining the differences between them and how they can benefit by using each other's concepts

18 May 2004 3:00 pm room 10.4.470

Brian Henderson-Sellers and Didar Zowghi
Publish or Perish: Journals or Conferences
Brian will defend that publishing in journals is more beneficial for researchers, while Didar will defend that conferences are superior. You can just listen or position yourself beside either of the parties.

4 May 2004 3:00 pm room 10.4.470

Cesar Gonzalez-Perez
Introduction to the Standard Metamodel for Software Development Methodologies
The Standard Metamodel for Software Development Methodologies (SMSDM) is a proposal to Standards Australia from COTAR. It comprises a comprehensive metamodel that covers all the areas currently addressed by SPEM, OPEN, OOSPICE and UML. Its major innovations include the integration of process and product aspects of methodologies, the consideration of capability levels, and the ability to exert control in the endeavour layer from the metamodel layer by using powertypes. This talk will introduce the basic concepts of the SMSDM, with special emphasis in its differences from current metamodels.

20 April 2004 3:00 pm room 10.4.470

Quang Vinh Nguyen
Applying A New Large Hierarchical Visualization Technique (ENCCON) for LiveNet and Online Auctions
This presentation describes a new visualization approach for viewing, navigation and manipulation of large relational hierarchies. We use a new efficient layout technique, called ENCCON, to draw the entire hierarchy as well as a portion of focused sub-hierarchy on the geometric display area. We then use a new semi-transparency viewing technique to help users to navigate and interact through the hierarchical data by shifting and zooming the views. We will show the live demo of two applications of this technique in 1) a visualization of LiveNet for supporting knowledge management and collaboration in e-learning, and 2) a visual browser for navigating product catalog items for online auctions.

6 April 2004 3:00 pm room 10.4.470

Robert Rist
Discussion on 'Use Cases and Aspects - Working Seamlessly Together' by Ivar Jacobson

23 March 2004 3:00 pm room 10.4.470

Larry Constantine
Usage-Centered Design: Lessons Learned in a Decade of Application
Usage-centered design is a systematic approach to user interface design that has been applied with notable success in numerous projects ranging from modest stand-alone applications to massive systems involving over a thousand person-years effort. Based on use cases and solidly anchored in modern software engineering practices, it has been successfully integrated with a variety of software development processes and approaches, ranging from extreme programming to the IBM Rational Unified Process. This presentation will review some of the projects in which it has been used and how the approach has evolved, with particular attention to some of the practical and conceptual lessons learned along the way.

9 March 2004 3:00 pm room 10.4.470

Steve Mellor
MDA Distilled
This talk is a presentation of the Model Driven Architecture initiative of the OMG, focussing on its technological aspects. Models and metamodels in MDA are addressed, and then how MDA allows us to transform from one model to another using mappings. "Agile" MDA is described and associated intellectual property and production issues are finally addressed.

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24 February 2004 3:00 pm room 10.4.470

Brian Henderson-Sellers
Trends in Object- and Agent-Oriented Methodologies: Home Thoughts from Abroad
Based on my PEP in the USA for the last six months of 2003, I will share my observations of the object and agent scene there, particularly methodological research trends. This includes agent methods, method engineering, aspect-oriented design and UML2.0. I have also some comments on academic publishing in terms of the quality of conferences and journals and how these are being perceived by promotions and appointments committees.

10 February 2004 3:00 pm room 10.4.470

Robert Rist
A Balanced Model of Software Design
Software design can be seen as the interaction of three processes: schema creation, evaluation, and retrieval. A schema is a stored solution to a common problem, and a large amount of programming expertise is simply the ability to retrieve a solution to a problem. Schema retrieval, where the structure of the solution is known initially, is characterised by top-down design. It is seen when experts work in a familiar domain, or when a use case provides a set structure for the solution. Novices do not use top-down design, because they have not yet developed a set of abstract schemas and thus cannot retrieve and apply schemas. The creation of a solution for a new problem is characterised by backward and bottom-up design from the problem goal. Hundreds if not thousands of decisions are made during the construction process. The initial construction of a solution uses a plan structure to define the essential nodes and links in a solution, and then applies a set of design rules to transform this plan structure into a single solution that can then be stored as a plan schema. A plan schema has both a deep, non-linear plan structure and a surface, linear execution order. A balanced model of design shows how a solution is constructed and evaluated, as well as retrieved and applied.

21 October 2003 3:00 pm room 10.2.230

Barry Jay
A New Technology for Objects?
The standard technology underpinning OO suffers from a number of limitations to do with the sub-typing and (the lack of) type parameters in class definitions. This talk will discuss a new foundation for OO which removes these limitations. The presentation will be fairly informal, through examples and discussion.

7 October 2003 3:00 pm room 10.2.230

Lorraine Dagher
Changing the Working Culture of Software Development Teams to Adopt Reusability
Software development has incurred many changes through its evolution. Some of the changes that have occurred are technological and organisational changes affecting the software development process. The aim of this research is to investigate the technological change of Reusability. Reusability is an old concept that has resurfaced through the introduction of Object Oriented Technology and it goes without saying, 'use what you already have'. Such change needs to be embraced and adopted by the organisation for improved software development. Reusability is a change in which development teams are reluctant to adopt due to a number of issues such as fear, ownership and status. More importantly, how to convince the software development teams to adopt reusability into their practice, through education and training, rewards and recognition and highlighting both organisational and team gain. In particular illustrating the benefits of reduced redundancy and improved quality of software.

23 September 2003 3:00 pm room 10.2.230

Tom McBride
Agile Development Methods
A lot has been said about agile development methods such as Extreme Programming, SCRUM and similar. Such methods challenge some long cherished beliefs about how software development should be organised. But are our beliefs in formal software development methods more about social order, status and hierarchy than about essentials of software development. How do agile methods challenge the structure of what we research and teach? Are we researching a dinosaur? This will be a discussion organised around several topics. What are the essential elements of agile development methods? What aspects of ‘traditional’ software development processes are concerned with social control and can be dispensed with. What conditions are necessary before they can be dispensed. What review and feedback mechanisms are used in place of hierarchical authorisation. Is agile development more suited to development for a market than bespoke development. The discussion will be oriented around initial findings from a visit to a very successful local software development organisation that has implemented a form of agile development and whose software product quality is very high.

9 September 2003 3:00 pm room 10.2.230

Bhuvan Unhelkar
Modeling Web Services with the UML
This talk will introduce web services, discuss the issues faced by web services in terms of modeling, and apply the existing UML diagrams to help create good web service applications.

26 August 2003 3:00 pm room 10.2.230

Magdy Serour
Controlling Action Research Projects
Action Research (AR) as an effective qualitative research method has been widely adopted and used for studies in different disciplines. It has been used in the social sciences since the 1940s to integrate theory with practice through an iterative process of problem diagnosis, action intervention and reflection learning. It has also been accepted as a valid research method in applied fields, such as organisation development, medical and education. The Action Research method focuses on the collaboration and mutual interest between researchers who are aiming to test and prove their theory and practitioners who are aiming to solve their immediate problem(s). Action Research has dual aims of providing a mechanism for practical problem solving (Action) and for generating and testing theory (Research). Therefore, AR aims to achieve action and research continuously. The dual interest of AR provides a win-win scenario for both researcher and participants in an AR intervention. AR plays an effective rôle in solving practical problems by increasing the understanding of a given social situation through the direct involvement of the researcher in an organisational change that can also positively affect future decisions and actions based on better understanding of the problem(s) in hand. It is performed collaboratively in a “real life” situation using feedback in a cyclical process with the intention of improving the understanding of change processes in social systems, and is undertaken within a mutually acceptable ethical framework. AR as a qualitative research approach is becoming more accepted and utilised in Information Systems research. There has been a growing number of IS publications that advocate the use of alternative approaches to understand the organisational, behavioural and social consequences of information systems planning, development, adoption and use. Additionally, AR is regarded as an appropriate research method in IS studies due to the fact that, in AR, the researcher plays an extra rôle as co-practitioner and the practitioner contributes to the research based on collaboration between them. This attribute of the dual rôles promotes Action Research as a method that solves immediate practical problems, while expanding scientific knowledge. For achieving a successful intervention using AR, researchers must understand the various aspects that can enable them to plan, manage and control their AR project and this is the focus of our discussion.

12 August 2003 3:00 pm room 10.2.230

David Avison
Dangers Inherent in the Use of Techniques: Identifying Framing Influences
The literature about the development of information systems tends to concentrate on methodologies, techniques and tools. There is significant published research about the potential negative aspects of using methodologies and tools (along with that discussing their potential benefits). Techniques, on the other hand, are seen largely as benign, very often as simple aids to help carry out a task and are used in many methodologies. They might be seen as supporting the collection, collation, analysis, representation or communication of information about system requirements and attributes (or a combination of these). However, we argue in this paper that techniques also have negative aspects and there are as many dangers in their use as there are in using methodologies and tools. In particular, techniques may restrict understanding by framing the ways of thinking about the problem situation. In other words, peoples’ understanding of a problem can be profoundly influenced by how the problem is presented to them by the technique. Different development techniques can represent the same problem situation differently, and the way in which it is represented has considerable potential for influencing problem understanding and resultant decision-making. Drawing on the cognitive psychology literature enables us to show how specific visual and linguistic characteristics of techniques may influence problem understanding. In addition, examining the taken-for-granted paradigm of a particular technique provides a further dimension influencing problem understanding. We apply this knowledge of visual/language and paradigm attributes to over 100 techniques used to a greater or lesser extent in IS development, indicating how different types of technique are likely to influence problem cognition. This serves two purposes. First, it exposes potential biases of a particular technique and makes users aware of the potential dangers. Second, the overall categorization may provide guidance to users in selecting appropriate techniques and combinations of techniques to help reduce any negative framing influences, provide a more holistic view of a problem situation and support a more appropriate problem-learning environment.

1 July 2003 3:00 pm room 10.2.250

Cesar Gonzalez-Perez
Issues in metamodelling of processes and products
Software development processes and products are often described using semi-formal constructs such as methodological frameworks (OPEN, Catalysis, RUP, etc.) and modelling languages (such as UML). The richness and overall quality of these semi-formal constructs, in turn, strongly influence the quality of the described processes and products. Metamodelling deals with the construction of better ways to specify methodologies and modelling languages, taking care of issues such as expresiveness, change of abstraction levels, tailorability and tool support. This talk will discuss some problems existing in current metamodelling approaches and introduce potential solutions to some of them based on the preliminary results of ongoing research.

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17 June 2003 3:00 pm room 10.2.250

Didar Zowghi
The impact of stakeholders' geographical distribution on requirements engineering process
The increasing globalization of software industry demands an investigation of Requirements Engineering (RE) in multi-site software development organizations. Requirements engineering is a task difficult enough when done locally -- but it is even more difficult when cross-functional stakeholder groups specify requirements across cultural, language and time zone boundaries. This talk reports on a field study that investigated RE challenges introduced by stakeholders’ geographical distribution in a multi-site organization. The goal was to examine RE practice in global software development, to formulate recommendations for improvement as well as to provide directions for future research on methods and tools. Findings reveal that aspects such as a lack of a common understanding of requirements, together with reduced awareness of working local context, trust level and ability to share work artefacts significantly challenge the effective collaboration of remote stakeholders in negotiating a set of requirements that satisfies geographically distributed customers.

3 June 2003 2:00 pm room 10.2.250

Ingrid Slembek
An Evaluation Methodology for the Improvement of Knowledge Work Processes
In the move from the industrial to the knowledge economy, organisations have shifted the focus from the improvement of their production processes to the improvement of their collaborative processes in a bid to optimise the effectiveness of their human capital. Our goal is to provide stakeholders of knowledge-intensive business processes with information about the performance of their process that allows them to make practical improvements to the process to gain a competitive edge. In this paper, we present the framework that we have developed to evaluate the tender response process for its organisational knowledge creation capability. We report here on the progress of our research and our interim findings.

19 May 2003 2:00 pm room 10.2.250

Patrick Tooth
Online information from the Library: new resources and old favourites
I'll mainly concentrate on how to find journal articles online (including newspaper articles), going through several newer resources and some older ones as well. I'll also talk about Web of Science, which is the online version of the Science Citation Index.

5 May 2003 2:00 pm room 10.2.250

Alan Lin 
An Agent-based Collaborative Architecture for Personalized Learning Processes
Personalized learning is important because senior students (such as in universities) may demand that courses be customized to their needs and employs (such as in industry) may require just-in-time learning so that they can get specific knowledge related to their current work. A personalized learning process is a set of learning materials and a set of learning activities to achieve a personalized learning goal. The materials contain the knowledge related to the learning goal. The activities support the collaboration between the learner and the instructor to enable the individual learner obtain the knowledge she needs.
For realizing personalized learning, the learner and the instructor interact with each other to achieve the learning goals. To support personalized learning processes, web-based system architectures are employed to facilitate the collaboration between learners and instructors. However, traditional web-based learning systems (e.g. Cisco Global Learning) concentrate on providing the same learning materials and activities to all learners. Therefore, they are inadequate to support personalized learning.
This research proposes an agent-based collaborative architecture for personalized learning processes. This architecture supports two kinds of learning modes --- a learner driven mode and an instructor driven model. The architecture consists of two components --- a virtual learning environment (VLE) and an open multi-agent system (OMAS). The VCE provides the services to represent and manage learning materials and learning activities. The OMAS provides actions that can (1) find the suitable instructor for each learner and (2) dynamically re-configure the learning materials and learning activities to meet the learner’s goal. This presentation will focus on introducing the OMAS in the collaborative architecture.

7 April 2003 2:00 pm room 10.2.250

Tom McBride
Research Support Tools
We all know that we can work much more effectively with the right tools. What tools to we use to support our research work. Some of the problems encountered during PhD research projects seem to have been solved manually while the same problems in the commercial workplace would be quickly supported by tools.
The problem of ensuring consistency between the research question, research methodology and data analysis is one highlighted in the recent doctoral assessments and is not easily dealt with by spreadsheet. There are too many relationships that must be maintained if any of the data changes.
The problem of keeping track of potential or actual research participants, especially when the number of them is more than a handful, can quickly get out of hand with the risk of missed or duplicated phone calls. Few things will discourage potential participants as effectively as the impression of disorganisation. More commercial organizations are using Customer Relationship Management systems to track all dealings between the customer and the company. Large research projects might use a clinical trials system. But there doesn't seem to be a small CRM suitable for small research projects.
Tom will discuss these problems and demonstrate small Access databases created to address them.

24 March 2003 2:00 pm room 10.2.250

Susanna Davis
Ethics committees: help, hurdle or hindrance?
In recent years there has been an explosion in legislation and guidelines relating to the conduct of research.
Researchers can feel pressured at what they may perceive as yet another bureaucratic hurdle to be leapt over. However, the experience of the UTS Human Research Ethics Committee has often been that the ethics application process itself can add considerable value to research. This is particularly the case for higher degree students.

10 March 2003 2:00 pm room 10.2.250

Brian Henderson-Sellers
How to Deal with Review Comments