This paper presents a study that was designed to examine efforts undertaken by two cities—Atlanta and LaGrange, Georgia—to redress the digital divide. Atlanta’s initiative has taken the form of community technology centers where citizens can come to get exposure to information technology and to learn something about computers and their applications. LaGrange has taken a very different approach, providing free Internet access to the home via a digital cable set-top box. This research is designed to examine the strengths and limitations of the two initiatives, with the goal of understanding why neither effort has had the impact that policy makers had hoped for with respect to solving the digital divide problem. Our findings indicate that the relationship between access and use of IT is not deterministic. Social processes that exist at both the institutional and individual levels of analysis complicate this relationship. From the institutional perspective, a persistent divide exists even when cities are giving away a theoretically “free good ” or service. Free goods often took the form of a training course that delivered little more than basic IT literacy and computer hardware of inferior quality and capabilities. From the individual perspective, we found that economic capital explains

Design patterns are solutions to recurring design problems, conceived to increase benefits in terms of reuse, code quality and, above all, maintainability and resilence to changes. This paper presents results from an empirical study aimed at understanding the evolution of design patterns in three open source systems, namely JHotDraw, ArgoUML, and Eclipse-JDT. Specifically, the study analyzes how frequently patterns are modified, to what changes they undergo and what classes co-change with the patterns. Results show how patterns more suited to support the application purpose tend to change more frequently, and that different kind of changes have a different impact on co-changed classes and a different capability of making the system resilent to changes.

Abstract – This study examines the processes of organizational knowledge creation in two highly virtualized teams, one involved in the design of a small city car and the second in the re-design of a small industrial vehicle. Using Nonaka’s model of organizational knowledge creation, we explore how the virtualization of knowledge based processes, i.e. the intensive exploitation of ICTs in support of knowledge-based activities, has shaped new forms of knowledge creation both at individual and organizational level. In contrast with previous studies [1] that identified knowledge codification as the main contribution of ICTs, this study provides detailed micro-level evidence on the ability of virtual technologies to support the transfer and the creation of new knowledge both at explicit and tacit levels. Several

This paper argues that three main obstacles for wider use of risk management technology are low awareness of the technology, limitations of existing risk management approaches, and lack of empirical evidence of the usefulness of risk management methods. This paper addresses the last two of these issues. First, we present a risk management method that attempts to avoid the limitations we have recognized in many current risk management approaches. The method, called Riskit, allows a thorough documentation of risk scenarios, uses a sound approach for ranking risks, and supports multiple goals and stakeholders. Second, we will discuss the inherent difficulties in evaluating risk management methods empirically and present an example of an empirical study that was carried out to evaluate the feasibility of the method. 1.

Analyzing the change-proneness of design patterns and the kinds of changes occurring to classes playing role(s) in some design pattern(s) during software evolution poses the basis for guidelines to help developers who have to choose, apply or maintain design patterns. Building on previous work, this paper shifts the focus from design patterns as wholes to the finer-grain level of design pattern roles. The paper presents an empirical study to understand whether there are roles that are more change-prone than others and whether there are changes that are more likely to occur to certain roles. The study relies on data extracted from the source code repositories of three different systems (JHotDraw, Xerces, and Eclipse-JDT) and from 12 design patterns. Results obtained confirm the intuitive behavior about changeability of many roles in design motifs, but also warns about properly designing parts of the motif subject to frequent changes. 1

The field of program comprehension is characterized by both the continuing development of new tools and techniques and the adaptation of existing techniques to address program comprehension needs for new software development and maintenance scenarios. The adoption of these techniques and tools in industry requires proper experimentation to assess the advantages and disadvantages of each technique or tool and to let the practitioners choose the most suitable approach for a specific problem. The objective of this working session is to encourage researchers and practitioners working in the area of program comprehension to join forces to design and carry out studies related to program comprehension, including observational studies, controlled experiments, case studies, surveys, and contests, and to develop standards for describing and carrying out such studies in a way that facilitates replication of data and aggregation of the results of related studies.

Traditional governmental structures have organized the capture, use, and management of information along agency lines. These “information silos ” are not very useful in a dynamic environment. Information integration is considered one of the most significant ways to change the structure and function of public organizations. It has the potential to support the transformation of organizational structures and communication channels between and among multiple agencies working in different locations. This article contributes to this knowledge-building effort by examining the factors that influenced the success of selected criminal justice integration initiatives. Useful integration strategies are also identified. 1.

Bug tracking systems are valuable assets for managing maintenance activities. They are widely used in open-source projects as well as in the software industry. They collect many different kinds of issues: requests for defect fixing, enhancements, refactoring/restructuring activities and organizational issues. These different kinds of issues are simply labeled as “bug” for lack of a better classification support or of knowledge about the possible kinds. This paper investigates whether the text of the issues posted in bug tracking systems is enough to classify them into corrective maintenance and other kinds of activities. We show that alternating decision trees, naive Bayes classifiers, and logistic regression can be used to accurately distinguish bugs from other kinds of issues. Results from empirical studies performed on issues for Mozilla, Eclipse, and JBoss indicate that issues can be classified with between 77 % and 82 % of correct decisions.

Software frameworks and libraries are indispensable to today’s software systems. As they evolve, it is often timeconsuming for developers to keep their code up-to-date, so approaches have been proposed to facilitate this. Usually, these approaches cannot automatically identify change rules for one-replaced-by-many and many-replaced-by-one methods, and they trade off recall for higher precision using one or more experimentally-evaluated thresholds. We introduce AURA, a novel hybrid approach that combines call dependency and text similarity analyses to overcome these limitations. We implement it in a Java system and compare it on five frameworks with three previous approaches by Dagenais and Robillard, M. Kim et al., and Schäfer et al. The comparison shows that, on average, the recall of AURA is 53.07% higher while its precision is similar, e.g., 0.10 % lower. 1.

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