December 1989 - Vol. 32 No. 12
Features
Design complexity measurement and testing
System designers can quantify the complexity of a software design by using a trio of finely tuned design metrics.
Lessons learned from modeling the dynamics of software development
Software systems development has been plagued by cost overruns, late deliveries, poor reliability, and user dissatisfaction. This article presents a paradigm for the study of software project management that is grounded in the feedback systems principles of system dynamics.
Episodic skeletal-plan refinement based on temporal data
ONCOCIN is a medical expert system that extends the skeletal-planning technique to an applciation area where the history of past events and the duration of actions are important. The system's knowledge base is designed to reflect a hierarchical model of the domain, and its control and inference mechanisms encourage a mixed-initiative style of interaction between the computer and the user.
Grand challenges to computation science
The Grand Challenges to Computational Science conference held last January attracted over 100 scientists from major universities, national laboratories, and industrial research centers. The author reports some of the highlights of the conference.
Entity-life modeling and structured analysis in real-time software design—a comparison
While structure analysis is sometimes used as a first step towards a real-time software design with concurrent tasks, a more appropriate task structure can often be based directly on concurrent patterns in the problem environment.
A technique for associating rewrite rules with productions so that many high-level transformations of a source file can be generated easily is described. While eclipsed in power by other editing and compiler generation systems supporting management of both synthesized and inherited attributes, this approach is especially simple to employ and is sufficient in power to deal with a wide class of problems arising from practical applications.
