Spreadsheet engineering adapts the lessons of software engineering to spreadsheets, providing eight principles as a framework for organizing spreadsheet programming recommendations. Spreadsheets raise issues inadequately addressed by software engineering. Spreadsheets are a powerful modeling language, allowing strategic rapid model change, and enabling exploratory modeling. Spreadsheets users learn slowly with experience because they focus on the problem domain not programming. The heterogeneity of spreadsheet users requires a taxonomy to guide recommendations. Deployment of best practices is difficult and merits research.

This paper describes ten common traps that can undermine a software process improvement program. Learning about these process improvement killers---and their symptoms and solutions---will help you prevent them from bringing your initiative to its knees. However, it is important to realize that none of the solutions presented here are likely to be helpful if you are dealing with unreasonable people.

r boss or your customer talk you into doing a bad job. Integrity and Intelligence: With Customers Perhaps it sounds like heresy, but the customer is not always right; however, the customer always has a point. Too often, software developers incorporate every feature requested by a customer into a requirements specification without regard to how much effort it will take to implement, or whether it is truly necessary to achieve the customer's objectives. While you must respect the attitudes and requests made by every customer, don't be blinded by the notion that you are hearing the "voice of the customer" and therefore must do whatever that voice says. Much of the value that a systems analyst adds to the application development process comes from looking for solutions that address the true user needs with creativity, efficiency, and thoughtfulness. Some years ago, our software group at Kodak developed a PC-based system for controlling some lab equipment. The customers a

Morning commuters adjust their departure times in response to day-to-day changes in congestion. Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS) may enable motorists to employ fundamentally new strategies when adapting their departure times to fluctuations in congestion. At the same time, new driver strategies will likely give rise to different road network behaviors. This paper explores the mutual feedback between driver strategy and traffic system performance through a simulation model of rush hour commuting. Motorists in this model choose departure times according to three adaptive strategies. When commuters apply adaptive strategies that require ATIS in the present model, outcomes for both individual motorists and the system as a whole are by several measures worse than when drivers use a simple strategy that does not require ATIS. These results largely agree with an earlier study of a nearly identical model of rush-hour commuting. This document is available in HTML on the ...

Geoffrey Moore's books Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado have had a tremendous impact on how high technology companies think about the market. Both of these books focus on the use of the technology adoption life cycle model as a basis for strategic decision making. Moore introduced the life cycle model, shown in figure 1, as a framework for helping high technology executives understand the markets product requirements at each stage in the life cycle. Many high tech marketers and managers have turned these books into their new mantra for dong business. Innovators Early Adopters Laggards Population Chasm Early Majority Late Majority Figure 1: Technology Adoption Life Cycle Model Software Quality Assurance (QA) and Test managers can use this framework to understand how the customers perception of quality changes at each stage in the life cycle. Changing quality expectations necessitate different testing strategies and different release criteria. The QA manager can therefore use Moores framework to plan the test effort and QA activities that will help the company transition from the current phase to the next phase. Furthermore, by applying Moores framework to quality assurance activities, we see an explanation for a phenomenon that many QA managers have noticed: startup companies lack formal processes. Some software development process aficionados espouse formal processes for all companies at all phases. These folks succeed at making testers and QA professionals feel that their company is somehow morally inferior for not following formal software development processes. They hold up a variety of standards to show how immature the organization is. However, it is more likely that the technology, rather than the company, is immature. The company needs to ensure that ...

Abstract. The paper shows trends in the dispersion of earnings within 300 separate occupation categories for which consistent information is available from the Current Population Survey and the decennial U.S. Census for various periods since 1960. The paper examines the evidence for two effects. The first is that because improving media technologies and wider audiences around the world, “superstars ” arise to various degrees in various occupations, especially athletes but also others whose performance can be amplified by media technologies photographers, inequality has been rising. This “superstars ” effect (described by Rosen, 1981, and Frank and Cook, 1995) appears to be a long term development which is likely to continue. The second effect is that in occupations which required close work with new semiconductor and information technologies, such as electrical engineers, computer programmers, systems analysts, and data processing equipment repair persons, inequality rose. In other engineering job categories, inequality did not rise. It is argued here that this third effect is a result of technological uncertainty and complexity, which has been described by a diffuse literature including Greenwood and Yorukoglu (1997) and also historical comparisons which are reviewed here in light of this evidence.