Browsing by Author "Smith, Eric C."

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    Design Metrics Which Predict Source Code Quality
    Hartson, H. Rex; Smith, Eric C.; Henry, Sallie M.; Selig, Calvin (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1987)
    Since the inception of software engineering, the major goal has been to control the development and maintenance of reliable software. To this end, many different design methodologies have been presented as a means to improve software quality through semantic clarity and syntactic accuracy during the specification and design phases of the software life cycle. On the other end of the life cycle, software quality metrics have been proposed to supply quantitative measures of the resultant software. This study is an attempt to unify the concepts of design methodologies and software quantity metrics by providing a means to determine the quality of a design before its implementation. By knowing (quantitatively) the quality of the design, a considerable amount of time and money can be saved by realizing design problems and being able to correct these problems at design time. All of this can be accomplished before any effort has been expended on the implementation of the software. This paper provides a means of allowing a software designer to predict the quality of the source code at design time. Actual equations for predicting source code quality from design metric values are given.
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    Rapid Prototyping in Human-Computer Interface Development
    Hartson, H. Rex; Smith, Eric C. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1989)
    Some conventional approaches to interactive system development tend to force commitment to design detail without a means for visualizing the result until it is too late to make significant changes. Rapid prototyping and interactive system refinement, especially for the human interface, allow early observation of system behavior and opportunities for refinement in response to user feedback. The role of rapid prototyping for evaluation of interface designs is set in the system development life cycle. Advantages and pitfalls are weighed, and detailed examples are used to show the application of rapid prototyping in a real development project. Kinds of prototypes are classified according to how they can be used in the development process, and system development issues are presented. The future of rapid prototyping depends on solutions to technical problems that presently limit effectiveness of the techniques in the context of present day software development environments.
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    Rapid Prototyping in Human-Computer Interface Development
    Hartson, H. Rex; Smith, Eric C. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1989)
    Some conventional approaches to interactive system development tend to force commitment to design detail without a means for visualizing the result until it is too late to make significant changes. Rapid prototyping and iterative system refinement, especially for the human interface, allow early observation of system behavior and opportunities for refinement in response to user feedback. The role of rapid prototyping for evaluation of interface designs is set in the system development life cycle. Advantages and pitfalls are weighed, and detailed examples are used to show the application of rapid prototyping in a real development project. Kinds of prototypes are classified according to how they can be used in the development process, and system development issues are presented. The future of rapid prototyping depends on solutions to technical problems that presently limit effectiveness of the technique in the context of present day software development environments.
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    System support for design and development environments
    Smith, Eric C. (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1986)
    Most, if not all, currently popular operating systems are designed to be general purpose environments for the development, maintenance, documentation and execution of systems of all types. Thus, the designers of the operating system must try to make the system a compromise between efficiency and power in all of these areas. This paper suggests that a class of operating systems and tools be designed to deal specifically with the problems of software design and development only. The fact that only the development tools themselves, and not the systems under development, are required to run fast and efficiently in the development environment is stressed as providing significantly different weight to the various considerations of operating system design. Since many of the problems of run time efficiency are no longer quite so pressing, additional power can be given to the operating system so that it may better support the software design and development process.