Domain-oriented design environments are cooperative problem-solving systems that support designers in complex design tasks. In this paper we present the facilities and architecture of Argo, a domain-oriented design environment for software architecture. Argo’s architecture is motivated by the desire to achieve reuse and extensibility of the design environment. It separates domain-neutral code from domain-oriented code, which is distributed among intelligent design materials as opposed to being centralized in the design environment. Argo’s facilities are motivated by the observed cognitive needs of designers. These facilities extend previous work in design environments to support reflection-in-action, opportunistic design, and comprehension and problem-solving. Keywords: Domain-oriented design environments, critics, software architectures, architectural styles, humancomputer interaction, human cognitive skills.

Design critiquing systems are a type of intelligent user interface used to support human designers in decision making. This paper places design critics in the larger context of intelligent user interface approaches and surveys several critiquing systems. Each approach and system is evaluated with respect to a five-phase design improvement process. This paper concludes with a summary of the state of the art in critiquing systems and recommendations for future research directions. 1.

Software design is a cognitively challenging task. Most software design tools provide support for editing, viewing, storing, and transforming designs, but lack support for the essential and difficult cognitive tasks facing designers. These cognitive tasks include decision-making, decision ordering, and task-specific design understanding. This paper describes Argo/UML, an object-oriented design tool using the Unified Modeling Language design notation. Argo/UML supports several identified cognitive needs of software designers. This support is provided in the form of design tool features. We describe each feature in the context of Argo/UML and provide enough detail to enable other tool builders to provide similar support in their own tools. We also discuss our implementation of the UML and XMI standards, and our development approach. Keywords: UML, XMI, Cognitive support, Open-source software. 1.

In research on concurrent engineering and engineering design, the increasing use of design for manufacturability (DFM) is expanding the scope of traditional design activities in order to identify and eliminate manufacturing problems during the design stage. However, manufacturing a product generally involves many different kinds of manufacturing activities, each having different characteristics. A design that is good for one kind of activity may not be good for another; for example, a design that is easy to assemble may not be easy to machine. One obstacle to DFM is the difficulty involved in building a single system that can handle the various manufacturing domains relevant to a design. In this paper, we propose an architecture for integrating CAD with DFM. In the proposed framework, as the designer creates a design, a number of critiquing systems analyze its manufacturability with respect to different manufacturing domains (machining, fixturing, assembly, inspection, and so ...

Assessment activities play a key role when an enterprise wants to evolve its business processes for adopting innovative information and communication technologies. The assessment regards business processes and supporting software systems and, to be effective, it requires the support of adequate software environments that facilitate the collaboration among the involved assessors. The definition and implementation of such a kind of environment implies the previous definition of a measurement framework that may guide the specification and design of the environment. This paper presents the collaborative software environment WebEv to support any kind of assessment framework whose definition is based on the Goal Question Metric paradigm. The environment is flexible and easily customizable to any context and arising needs. It can represent a practical mean for the collection of the available quantitative information regarding the processes and/or software systems of an enterprise.

Automating redesign of electro-mechanical artifacts presents many difficult problems to the developers of intelligent CAD systems. To address this need requires we identify new AI technologies for representation and planning and effectively apply them to the manufacturing problem. In this paper, we present the redesign problem and outline some of the critical points; presenting how to bring existing AI research to bear in creating more effective CAD tools. 1

Abstract—Critics have emerged over the last several years as a specific tool feature to support users in computer-mediated tasks. These computer-supported critics provide proactive guidelines or suggestions for improvement to designs, code and other digital artifacts. The concept of a critic has been adopted in various domains, including: medical (ATTENDING, ONCONCIN), programming (Lisp-Critic, RevJava), software engineering (Argo/UML, ABCDE-Critic), design sketching (Design Evaluator) and others. Critics have proven to be an effective mechanism in providing feedback to users. In this paper we propose an initial critic taxonomy based on our review of the critic literature. We present the groups and elements of the critic taxonomy and explain the groups and critic elements together some examples. We believe our taxonomy will assist others in identifying, categorizing, developing and deploying computersupported critics in a range of domains. Keywords-critic; critic taxonomy; critiquing system;critic tool. I.