February 1990 - Vol. 33 No. 2

February 1990 issue cover image

Features

Research and Advances

Smart game board and go explorer: a study in software and knowledge engineering

Software engineering is an established discipline that has accumulated and codified more than two decades worth of know-how. Knowledge engineering, on the other hand, is an emerging discipline with lots of issues but, at least so far, little structure. Despite its lack of maturity the practice of knowledge engineering promises to have a noticeable impact on software engineering doctrine. The experimental nature of knowledge engineering goes hand-in-hand with a style of software development best characterized as ‘exploratory,’ which has not been much studied in traditional software engineering.
Research and Advances

Dynamic file migration in distributed computer systems

The importance of file migration is increasing because of its potential to improve the performance of distributed office, manufacturing and hospital information systems. To encourage research in the file migration problem, the authors summarize accomplishments of researchers of the problem, provide a detailed comparison of file migration and dynamic file allocation problems, and identify important areas of research to support the development of effective file migration policies.
Practice

N-Fold inspection: a requirements analysis technique

N-fold inspection uses traditional inspections of the user requirements document (URD) but replicates the inspection activities using N independent teams. A pilot study was conducted to explore the usefulness of N-fold inspection during requirements analysis. A comparison of N-fold inspection with other development techniques reveals that N-fold inspection is a cost-effective method for finding faults in the URD and may be a valid technique in the development of mission-critical software systems.

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