| 1. |
- Alenljung, Beatrice
(author)
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Decision-making in the Requirements Engineering Process : A Human-centred Approach
- 2005
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Complex decision-making is a prominent aspect of requirements engineering and the need for improved decision support for requirements engineers has been identified by a number of authors. A first step toward better decision support in requirements engineering is to understand decision-makers’ complex decision situations. To gain a holistic perspective of the decision situation from a decision-makers perspective, a decision situation framework has been created. The framework evolved through a literature analysis of decision support systems and decision-making theories. The decision situation of requirements engineers has been studied at Ericsson Microwave Systems and is described in this thesis. Aspects of decision situations are decision matters, decision-making activities, and decision processes. Another aspect of decision situations is the factors that affect the decision-maker. A number of interrelated factors have been identified. Each factor consists of problems and these are related to decision-making theories. The consequences of this for requirements engineering decision support, represented as a list that consists of desirable high-level characteristics, are also discussed.
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| 2. |
- Alenljung, Beatrice
(author)
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Envisioning a Future Decision Support System for Requirements Engineering : A Holistic and Human-centred Perspective
- 2008
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Complex decision-making is a prominent aspect of requirements engineering (RE) and the need for improved decision support for RE decision-makers has been identified by a number of authors in the research literature. The fundamental viewpoint that permeates this thesis is that RE decision-making can be substantially improved by RE decision support systems (REDSS) based on the actual needs of RE decision-makers as well as the actual generic human decision-making activities that take place in the RE decision processes. Thus, a first step toward better decision support in requirements engineering is to understand complex decision situations of decision-makers. In order to gain a holistic view of the decision situation from a decision-maker’s perspective, a decision situation framework has been created. The framework evolved through an analysis of decision support systems literature and decision-making theories. The decision situation of RE decision-makers has been studied at a systems engineering company and is depicted in this thesis. These situations are described in terms of, for example, RE decision matters, RE decision-making activities, and RE decision processes. Factors that affect RE decision-makers are also identified. Each factor consists of problems and difficulties. Based on the empirical findings, a number of desirable characteristics of a visionary REDSS are suggested. Examples of characteristics are to reduce the cognitive load, to support creativity and idea generation, and to support decision communication. One or more guiding principles are proposed for each characteristic and available techniques are described. The purpose of the principles and techniques is to direct further efforts concerning how to find a solution that can fulfil the characteristic. Our contributions are intended to serve as a road map that can direct the efforts of researchers addressing RE decision-making and RE decision support problems. Our intention is to widen the scope and provide new lines of thought about how decision-making in RE can be supported and improved.
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| 3. |
- Cäker, Mikael, 1972-
(author)
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Management accounting as constructing and opposing customer focus : three case studies on management accounting and customer relations
- 2005
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis is on the relation between management accounting and customer focus and relates to discussions about how internal managing processes in organizations are interrelated with interorganizational relations, specifically constructions of customers. Both a normative and a descriptive perspective on the relation are taken within the different parts of the thesis, which consists of a licentiate thesis, three articles and a synthesizing text. The purpose is to understand the interaction between management accounting and customer focus on operative levels in industrial organizations, where focus on customer has a central place. The results are also discussed with respect to its possible importance in the development of managing processes of organizations. The thesis is based on three cases, which have been studied with mainly a qualitative approach.In the licentiate thesis, traditional accounting models, originally developed to provide information for analyzing products, are revisited under the assumption that customers and products are equally interesting to analyze. The three articles explore the role of management accounting in interpreting customers and the interface to customers. In the first article, strong customer accountability is found to override the intentions from managers, as communicated through the accounting system. Arguments of how management accounting can be perceived as inaccurate then have a central place in motivating how customers are prioritized in a way not favored by managers. Furthermore, in the second article, customers are experienced as both catalysts and frustrators to change processes and changes in management accounting are found in eo-development with the different customer relations and how different customers prefer to communicate. The third article explores how coordination mechanisms operate in relation to each other in coordination of customer-supplier relationships. A strong market mechanism creates space for bureaucratic control and use of management accounting. However, the use of bureaucratic control in turn relies on social coordination between actors in order to function.These four parts are revisited and related to each other in a synthesizing part of the thesis. The relation between management accounting and customer focus is approached in two ways. Management accounting may construct customer focus, making it impossible to distinguish between the two. However, another interpretation of the relation is management accounting and customer focus as opposing logics, where management accounting represents hierarchical influence, homogeneous control processes and cost efficient operations, and customer focus represents customer influence, control processes adapted to the customer and customized operations.
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| 4. |
- Ericsson, AnnMarie, 1972-
(author)
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Enabling Tool Support for Formal Analysis of ECA Rules
- 2009
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Rule-based systems implemented as event-condition-action (ECA) rules utilize a powerful and flexible paradigm when it comes to specifying systems that need to react to complex situation in their environment. Rules can be specified to react to combinations of events occurring at any time in any order. However, the behavior of a rule based system is notoriously hard to analyze due to the rules ability to interact with each other.Formal methods are not utilized in their full potential for enhancing software quality in practice. We argue that seamless support in a high-level paradigm specific tool is a viable way to provide industrial system designers with powerful verification techniques. This thesis targets the issue of formally verifying that a set of specified rules behaves as indented.The prototype tool REX (Rule and Event eXplorer) is developed as a proof of concept of the results of this thesis. Rules and events are specified in REX which is acting as a rule-based front-end to the existing timed automata CASE tool UPPAAL. The rules, events and requirements of application design are specified in REX. To support formal verification, REX automatically transforms the specified rules to timed automata, queries the requirement properties in the model-checker provided by UPPAAL and returns results to the user of REX in terms of rules and events.The results of this thesis consist of guidelines for modeling and verifying rules in a timed automata model-checker and experiences from using and building a tool implementing the proposed guidelines. Moreover, the result of an industrial case study is presented, validating the ability to model and verify a system of industrial complexity using the proposed approach.
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| 5. |
- Friberg, Anneli
(author)
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Continuous Usability Testing : The importance of Being Iterative When it Comes to Assessment and Development of the Library’s Digital Services
- 2017
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In: Proceeding so fthe 2016 Library assessment conference buiLding effective, sustainabLe, PracticaL assessment, october 31–november 2, 2016 Arlington, USA. - Washington, DC : Association of Research Libraries. - 1594079870 - 9781594079870 ; , s. 188-194
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The interest for user experience (UX) and usability in libraries has grown rapidly over the past years and has now become an essential tool for developing and assessing a library’s digital services and physical spaces. It is necessary, though, to recognize that UX incorporates much more than just usability. Norman and Nielsen summarize user experience as something that “encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products” and continues:“The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company’s offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.Furthermore, they state that it is important to separate the overall user experience from usability, since the latter “is a quality attribute of the UI [user interface], covering whether the system is easy to learn, efficient to use, pleasant, and so forth.”At Linköping University Library (LiUB) we are slowly moving towards a “culture of usability” where users are being observed interacting with both physical and virtual spaces, the way Godfrey advocates, but this paper will only focus on the library’s online presence. The main objective with this paper is to argue for continuous usability testing, as a part of regular library activity.Usability testing within the library sector is nothing new per se, but it is usually done in the process of launching a new or redesigned website/UI or implementing a new library system. Most often it has a distinct focus on web development, and is not so much used to develop other services or physical spaces. This is confirmed in numerous articles and UX-blog posts and articles by e.g. Gasparini, Godfrey, Broadwater, and Dominguez, Hamill and Brillat. Sometimes the tests are not conducted by library staff, but by external consultants. Our approach, however, is to use an in-house, continuous process which is applied not only to the library’s website structure, but also to other digital services such as the search box on the library start page and link resolver user interface and the link resolver icon in the discovery tool.Rettig asks whether such a thing as “grassroots UX” exists in libraries. She wonders if “the UX hopeful, [who] do not have the mandate or team or job title”, can find “ways to apply UX methods to smaller-scale, day-to-day work in the library?” I am inclined to say that it is possible. A UX perspective can and should be integrated in any development project, big or small. The UX philosophy does not have to be initiated as a top-down initiative, and in a sense LiUB’s systematic way of doing usability testing started out as a grassroots initiative.
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| 6. |
- Friberg, Anneli
(author)
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Why continuous usability testing can and should be part of regular library activity - from a UX librarian’s point of view
- 2017
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In: REVY. - Aarhus N, Denmark : Danish Research Library Association. - 1904-1969. ; 40:1
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The interest for user experience (UX) and usability in libraries has grown rapidly over the past years and has now become an essential tool for developing and assessing a library’s digital services and physical spaces. At Linköping University Library (LiUB) we are slowly moving towards a user-centered culture, where users are being observed interacting with both physical and virtual spaces, but this article will only focus on the library’s online presence. The main objective is to argue for continuous usability testing as a part of regular library activity.
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| 7. |
- Grindal, Mats
(author)
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Handling Combinatorial Explosion in Software Testing
- 2007
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In this thesis, the overall conclusion is that combination strategies, (i.e., test case selection methods that manage the combinatorial explosion of possible things to test), can improve the software testing in most organizations. The research underlying this thesis emphasizes relevance by working in close relationship with industry.Input parameter models of test objects play a crucial role for combination strategies. These models consist of parameters with corresponding parameter values and represent the input space and possibly other properties, such as state, of the test object. Test case selection is then defined as the selection of combinations of parameter values from these models.This research describes a complete test process, adapted to combination strategies. Guidelines and step-by-step descriptions of the activities in process are included in the presentation. In particular, selection of suitable combination strategies, input parameter modeling and handling of conflicts in the input parameter models are addressed. It is also shown that several of the steps in the test process can be automated.The test process is validated through a set of experiments and case studies involving industrial testers as well as actual test problems as they occur in industry. In conjunction with the validation of the test process, aspects of applicability of the combination strategy test process (e.g., usability, scalability and performance) are studied. Identification and discussion of barriers for the introduction of the combination strategy test process in industrial projects are also included.This research also presents a comprehensive survey of existing combination strategies, complete with classifications and descriptions of their different properties. Further, this thesis contains a survey of the testing maturity of twelve software-producing organizations. The data indicate low test maturity in most of the investigated organizations. Test managers are often aware of this but have trouble improving. Combination strategies are suitable improvement enablers, due to their low introduction costs.
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| 8. |
- Håkansson, Nina
(author)
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Network analysis and optimization of animal transports
- 2012
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis is about animal transports and their effect on animal welfare. Transports are needed in today’s system of livestock farming. Long transports are stressful for animals and infectious diseases can spread via animal transports. With optimization methods transport times can be minimized, but there is a trade-off between short distances for the animals and short distances for the trucks. The risk of disease spread in the transport system and disease occurrence at farms can be studied with models and network analysis.The animal transport data and the quality of the data in the Swedish national database of cattle and pig transports are investigated in the thesis. The data is analyzed regarding number of transports, number of farms, seasonality, geographical properties, transport distances, network measures of individual farms and network measures of the system. The data can be used as input parameters in epidemic models.Cattle purchase reports are double reported and we found that there are incorrect and missing reports in the database. The quality is improving over the years i.e. 5% of cattle purchase reports were not correctly double reported in 2006, 3% in 2007 and 1% in 2008. In the reports of births and deaths of cattle we detected date preferences; more cattle births and deaths are reported on the 1st, 10th and 20th each month. This is because when we humans don’t remember the exact number we tend to pick nice numbers (like 1, 10 and 20). This implies that the correct date is not always reported.Network analysis and network measures are suggested as tools to estimate risk for disease spread in transport systems and risk of disease introduction to individual holdings. Network generation algorithms can be used together with epidemic models to test the ability of network measures to predict disease risks. I have developed, and improved, a network generation algorithm that generates a large variety of structures.In my thesis I also suggest a method, the good choice heuristic, for generating non-optimal routes. Today coordination of animal transports is neither optimal nor random. In epidemic simulations we need to model routes as close to the actual driven routes as possible and the good choice heuristic can model that. The heuristic is tuned by two parameters and creates coordination of routes from completely random to almost as good as the Clarke and Wright heuristic. I also used the method to make the rough estimate that transport distances for cattle can be reduced by 2-24% with route-coordination optimization of transports-to-slaughter.Different optimization methods can be used to minimize the transport times for animal-transports in Sweden. For transports-to-slaughter the strategic planning of “which animals to send where” is the first step to optimize. I investigated data from 2008 and found that with strategic planning, given the slaughterhouse capacity, transport distances can be decreased by about 25% for pigs and 40% for cattle. The slaughterhouse capacity and placement are limiting the possibility to minimize transport times for the animals. The transport distances could be decreased by 60% if all animals were sent to the closest slaughterhouse 2008. Small-scale and mobile slaughterhouses have small effect on total transport work (total transport distance for all the animals) but are important for the transport distances of the animals that travel the longest.
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| 9. |
- Lennartsson, Jenny
(author)
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Networks and epidemics - impact of network structure on disease transmission
- 2012
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The spread of infectious diseases, between animals as well as between humans, is a topic often in focus. Outbreaks of diseases like for example foot-and-mouth disease, avian influenza, and swine influenza have in the last decades led to an increasing interest in modelling of infectious diseases since such models can be used to elucidate disease transmission and to evaluate the impact of different control strategies. Different kind of modelling techniques can be used, e.g. individual based disease modelling, Bayesian analysis, Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations, and network analysis. The topic in this thesis is network analysis, since this is a useful method when studying spread of infectious diseases. The usefulness lies in the fact that a network describes potential transmission routes, and to have knowledge about the structure of them is valuable in predicting the spread of diseases. This thesis contains both a method for generating a wide range of different theoretical networks, and also examination and discussion about the usefulness of network analysis as a tool for analysing transmission of infectious animal diseases between farms in a spatial context. In addition to the theoretical networks, Swedish animal transport networks are used as empirical examples.To be able to answer questions about the effect of the proportion of contacts in networks, the effect of missing links and about the usefulness of network measures, there was a need to manage to generate networks with a wide range of different structures. Therefore, it was necessary to develop a network generating algorithm. Papers I and II describes that network generating algorithm, SpecNet, which creates spatial networks. The aim was to develop an algorithm that managed to generate a wide range of network structures. The performance of the algorithm was evaluated by some network measures. In the first study, Paper I, the algorithm succeeded to generate a wide range of most of the investigated network measures. Paper II is an improvement of the algorithm to produce networks with low negative assortativity by adding two classes of nodes instead of one. Except to generate theoretical networks from scratch, it is also relevant that a network generating algorithm has the potential to regenerate a network with given specific structures. Therefore, we tested to regenerate two Swedish animal transport networks according to their structures. SpecNet managed to mimic the two empirical networks well in comparison with a non-spatial network generating algorithm that was not equally successful in regenerating the requested structures.Sampled empirical networks are rarely complete, since contacts are often missing during sampling, e.g. due to difficulties to sample or due to too short time window during sampling. In Paper III, the focus is on the effect on disease transmission, due to number of contacts in the network, as well as on the reliability of making predictions from networks with a small proportion of missing links. In addition, attention is also given to the spatial distribution of animal holdings in the landscape and on what effect this distribution has on the resulting disease transmission between the holdings. Our results indicate that, assuming weighted contacts, it is maybe risky to make predictions about disease transmission from one single network replicate with as low proportion of contacts as in most empirical animal transport networks.In case of a disease outbreak, it would be valuable to use network measures as predictors for the progress and the extent of the disease transmission. Then a reliable network is required, and also that the used network measures has the potential to make reasonable predictions about the epidemic. In Paper IV we investigate if network measures are useful as predictors for eventual disease transmissions. Moreover, we also analyse if there is some measure that correlates better with disease transmission than others. Disease transmission simulations are performed in networks with different structures to mimic diverse spatial conditions, thereafter are the simulation results compared to the values of the network structures.
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| 10. |
- Lindblom, Jessica, 1969-
(author)
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Minding the Body : Interacting socially through embodied action
- 2007
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation clarifies the role and relevance of the body in social interaction and cognition from an embodied cognitive science perspective. Theories of embodied cognition have during the past two decades offered a radical shift in explanations of the human mind, from traditional computationalism which considers cognition in terms of internal symbolic representations and computational processes, to emphasizing the way cognition is shaped by the body and its sensorimotor interaction with the surrounding social and material world. This thesis develops a framework for the embodied nature of social interaction and cognition, which is based on an interdisciplinary approach that ranges historically in time and across different disciplines. The theoretical framework presents a thorough and integrated understanding that supports and explains the embodied nature of social interaction and cognition. It is argued that embodiment is the part and parcel of social interaction and cognition in the most general and specific ways, in which dynamically embodied actions themselves have meaning and agency. The framework is illustrated by empirical work that provides some detailed observational fieldwork on embodied actions captured in three different episodes of spontaneous social interaction in situ. Besides illustrating the theoretical issues discussed in the thesis, the empirical work also reveals some novel characteristics of embodied action in social interaction and cognition. Furthermore, the ontogeny of social interaction and cognition is considered, in which social scaffolding and embodied experience play crucial roles during child development. In addition, the issue what it would take for an artificial system to be (socially) embodied is discussed from the perspectives of cognitive modeling and technology. Finally, the theoretical contributions and implications of the study of embodied actions in social interaction and cognition for cognitive science and related disciplines are summed up. The practical relevance for applications to artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction is also outlined as well as some aspects for future work.
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