Communications of the ACM articles from June 1995

Communications of the ACM archives from June 1995

Site-based management: saving our schools.
June 1, 1995... Many schools at the K-12 level in the U.S. have developed site-based management teams. Typically these teams consist of teachers, school administrators, parents, and other volunteers. Secondary school teams actually include students. The level...

Process cost and value analysis.
June 1, 1995... After years of pursuing fragments of a solution to the challenges of software engineering, including the development of methods, tools, and the like, the software engineering community has come to realize that overemphasizing any one of these...

In school or out: technology, equity, and the future of our kids.
June 1, 1995... In January, Newt Gingrich proposed a tax credit for the poorest Americans to purchase laptop computers, forgetting for the moment that the poorest Americans do not pay taxes and thus a credit does them no good. In this case, his heart may be in...

Why looking isn't always seeing: readership skills and graphical programming.
June 1, 1995... Many believe that visual programming techniques are quite close to developers. This article reports on some fascinating research focusing on understanding how textual and visual representations for software differ in effectiveness. Among other...

Discovering the way programmers think about new programming environments.
June 1, 1995... An interesting usability study of a prototype development environment for the Dylan programming language is presented here. This study's purpose is to determine just how close the prototype is to developers. New approaches to source code...

Cognitive bias in software engineering.
June 1, 1995... Developers' thought processes are a fundamental area of concern. Cognitive scientists have discovered that people's intuitive inferences and probability judgments do not strictly conform to the laws of logic or mathematics, and that people are...

From programming environments to environments for designing.
June 1, 1995... Though there have been advances in end-user programming, complex applications still need professional developers. This inspired look at the future of creating complex software explores the shift from programming environments to design...

Sixteen questions about software reuse.
June 1, 1995... Software reuse is the rise of existing software knowledge or artifacts to build new software artifacts. Reuse is sometimes confused with porting. The two are distinguished as follows: Reuse is using an asset in different systems; porting is...

Auction allocation of computing resources.
June 1, 1995... Standard methods for allocating computing resources normally employ schedulers and either queue or priority schemes. Alternative methods utilizing marketlike processes are being investigated, with direct applicability to evolving distributed...

Comparing data modeling formalisms.
June 1, 1995... Accurate specification and validation of information requirements is critical to the development of organizational information systems. Semantic data models were developed to provide a precise and unambiguous representation of organizational...