November 1988 - Vol. 31 No. 11
Features
Ecological studies of professional programmers
For over two decades, software psychology researchers have been developing insights to software productivity and quality by investigating builders and users of software.…
Designing documentation to compensate for delocalized plans
Conceptual representation methods play a significant role in facilitating the software process. Recent studies explore and clarify the use of these representations and…
A field study of the software design process for large systems
The problems of designing large software systems were studied through interviewing personnel from 17 large projects. A layered behavioral model is used to analyze how…
The designer as user: building requirements for design tools from design practice
Software tools that support the design and development of interactive computing systems are an exciting possibility. The potential pay-off is great: user interface…
Using induction to design algorithms
An analogy between proving mathematical theorems and designing computer algorithms provides an elegant methodology for designing algorithms, explaining their behavior,…
A thinning algorithm by contour generation
A new contour generating serial algorithm is faster and more efficient than conventional contour tracing and parallel algorithms
Efficient table-free sampling methods for the exponential, Cauchy, and normal distributions
Three algorithms for sampling from exponential, Cauchy and normal distributions are developed. They are based on the "exact approximation" method, and their expected…
The number of buffers required for sequential processing of a disk file
The number of buffers required for sequential processing of disk files is investigated with the assumption that there is a single user served by two processors: one reads…
Relaxed heaps: an alternative to Fibonacci heaps with applications to parallel computation
The relaxed heap is a priority queue data structure that achieves the same amortized time bounds as the Fibonacci heap—a sequence of m decrease_key and n delete_min…