Communications of the ACM articles from May 1995

Communications of the ACM archives from May 1995

Turbulent times for information technology.
May 1, 1995... For the past five years, I have been employed by companies, both corporate and nonprofit, to resolve information technology problems as they moved their information from the hardcopy model to the electronic model. Each of the database,...

Death from above. (viewpoint on information policy)
May 1, 1995... Over the last 30 years, the American CEO corps has included an astonishingly large percentage of men who piloted bombers during World War II. For some reason not so difficult to guess, dropping explosives on people from commanding heights...

Little engines that could: computing in small energetic countries.
May 1, 1995... How do very small countries, here defined as having fewer than 10 million people, find places for themselves in the information technologies (IT) arena? Does success require accommodation in the global IT regime that often seems dominated by...

Requirements gathering: the human factor.
May 1, 1995... Requirements definition/requirements gathering/requirements elicitation/requirements engineering - all phrases for "figuring out what to build." If we build a product for sale that meets few customer needs, we will not be competitive in the...

Customer-developer links in software development.
May 1, 1995... Many of the best ideas for new products and product improvements come from the customer or end user of the product [15]. In the software arena, tapping into this source of information requires the establishment of one or more customer-developer...

Apprenticing with the customer.
May 1, 1995... A new computer system changes how its customers work. Designing such a system requires intimate knowledge of customers' work and motives to ensure that the system supports them well. The creation of a new system implicitly means designing the...

Participatory analysis of flexibility.
May 1, 1995... Analysis as part of requirements gathering, conducted according to conventional systems development approaches like structured analysis and object-oriented analysis, focuses on standard data formats and general data flow. The data-dictionaries...

Using video to re-present the user.
May 1, 1995... Advocates of user-centered design and participatory design, also referred to as "work practice practitioners" include computer scientists, systems designers, software engineers, social scientists, industrial and graphic designers, marketing,...

Creating products customers demand.
May 1, 1995... This article presents a re-engineering case study of the product requirements definition process at Digital Equipment Corporation. Based on cross-functional teams working in direct partnership with customers, the re-engineered process was...

Succeeding as a clandestine change agent.
May 1, 1995... Changing the attitudes and work habits of a large organization is daunting at best. The task is more challenging when the organization perceives itself as eminently successful, dominating the market in its category. During the past 5 years I've...

Self-assessment procedure XXIII: programming languages.
May 1, 1995... This is the 23rd Self-Assessment Procedure.(1) The purpose of this procedure is to let its readers test their knowledge of some of the more important features of significant programming languages. The features of imperative languages like...

C in the first course considered harmful. (teaching programming languages)
May 1, 1995... To advise or not to advise, that is the dilemma. To be or not to be, that is the question. To see or not to see, that is the difficulty. To C or not to C in the first course is the question of the hour. There are a number of arguments on both...