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Browsing by Author "Stevens, K. Todd"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Document Quality Indicators: A Framework for Assessing Documentation Adequacy
    Arthur, James D.; Stevens, K. Todd (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1990)
    This paper presents case study results of a research effort funded by the Naval Surface Warfare Systems (NSWC) at Dahlgren, Virginia. The investigation focuses on assessing the adequacy of project documentation based on an identified taxonomic structure relating documentation characteristics. Previous research in this area has been limited to the study of isolated characteristics of documentation and English prose, without considering the collective contributions of such characteristics. The research described in this paper takes those characteristics, adds others, and establishes a well-defined approach to assessing the "adequacy" of software documentation. The identification of Document Quality Idicators (DQIs) provide the basis for the assessment procedure. DQIs are hierarchically defined in terms of document Qualities, Factors that refine Qualities, and Quantifiers that provide for the measurement of Factors.
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    Prospects for Automated Documentation Analysis in Support of Software Quality Assurance
    Arthur, James D.; Nance, Richard E.; Stevens, K. Todd (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1988)
    This report discusses the strengths and weaknesses of ADDS. ADDS is an automated document synthesis system that exploits the benefits of reverse engineering. Its generated documents are primarily used to support the maintenance activity. Based on the content and format of these reports, recommendations are made to improve the overall effectiveness of ADDS. These recommendations include the modifications/additions of reports and corresponding changes to ADDS.
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    A Taxonomy for the Evaluation of Computer Documentation
    Stevens, K. Todd; Arthur, James D.; Nance, Richard E. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1988)
    The evaluation of software documentation is a key issue in the more general framework of evaluating products of a software development process. The research described in this report focuses on (1) a general taxonomy of document characteristics that support an assessment of documentation adequacy, and (2) the refining of the general evaluation taxonomy to a specific application, namely, the Automated Design Description System (ADDS).
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    A taxonomy for the evaluation of computer documentation
    Stevens, K. Todd (Virginia Tech, 1988-08-05)
    Software quality is a highly visible topic in the software engineering community. In response to assessing the quality of the documentation of software, this thesis presents a taxonomy of documentation characteristics which can be used to evaluate the quality of computer documentation. Previous work in the area has been limited to individual characteristics of documentation and English prose in general and not organized in such fashion as to be usable in an evaluation procedure. This thesis takes these characteristics, adds others, and systematically establishes a hierarchical structure of characteristics that allow one to assess the quality of documentation. The tree structure has three distinct levels (viz. Qualities, Factors, and QuarzzuÌ ierr), with a root node (or highest characteristic) of Documentation Adequacy. The Qualities are abstract, non-measurable characteristics. The Factors are characteristics that support the assessment of the Qualities; Qualizier are decomposed into Factors. The Quantyiers, which are measurable document characteristics, support the assessment of the Factors. In the thesis, the levels are described and then the characteristics are each defined in terms of evaluation of documentation quality. Finally, an example application is presented as the evaluation taxonomy is tailored to a specific set of documents, those generated by the Automated Design Description System (ADDS).
  • Using Belbin's Role to Improve Team Effectiveness
    Stevens, K. Todd; Henry, Sallie M. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1997-04-01)
    This paper presents a controlled experiment conducted with software engineering students that demonstrates the utility of forming teams based on R. Meredith Belbin's set of team roles. The overall research effort is a demonstration of the general utility of Belbin's roles in improving the effectiveness of teams, even industry teams. The significance of this work is twofold: performance and team viability. Performance improvements clearly improve a team's productivity; viability issues are important because if employees remain with a team or employer, then employee replacement costs are reduced. To address this problem, as an initial step, controlled experiments have been conducted to demonstrate that teams that contain certain roles perform better than teams that do not. In a laboratory setting, a number of teams were formed that contained a single leader; other teams were formed that had no leader or multiple leaders. The results of this single experiment are positive. They demonstrate that indeed Belbin's roles are useful knowledge in forming teams. The specific conclusion of this first controlled experiment is that a single leader on a team perform better than having multiple leaders or no leader. In other words, as one would expect, the mean time to completion for the leaderless group of teams was significantly larger than the group of teams with leaders. This means that Belbin's roles can be utilized in team formation, making sure that a team has a single leader, and also for evaluation on extant teams. Both of these aspects, formation and evaluation, are extremely useful to managers of software programmers.