Communications of the ACM articles from September 1995

Communications of the ACM archives from September 1995

Computing in Chile: the jaguar of the Pacific Rim? (Chilean software industry)
September 1, 1995... In less-developed countries (LDCs) looking to expand and modernize their economies, there is a growing perception that one of the most desirable means to this end is to export products with substantial added value. The development of software...

Obituary for an agency. (Office of Technology Assessment closure)
September 1, 1995... These days, it is not considered particularly seemly to feel friendly toward government of any kind or level. An attitude ranging somewhere between contempt and downright hatred seems to prevail. Nevertheless, I have great affection and respect...

Transforming work: collaboration, learning and design. (includes related articles)
September 1, 1995... A major challenge for most corporations is the process of restructuring the work environment to meet and beat the competition. One design approach incorporates an activity-oriented view of the situation, and it all starts by taking a clear look...

Making representations work. (includes related articles)
September 1, 1995... Artifacts, when used in the process of cooperative design, allow end users to simulate future work by creating hands-on exploration of emerging designs. They act as open-ended representations that call for the user's active cooperation to...

Making work visible. (includes related articles)
September 1, 1995... The way in which people work is not always apparent. Too often, assumptions are made as to how tasks are performed rather than unearthing the underlying work practices. By making the work visible, designers create a more intimate view of the...

Ethnocritical questions for working with translations, interpretation and their stakeholders.
September 1, 1995... Translation and Interpretation are at the core of software professionals' analyses of the work of end users [11]. (Throughout this article, I will use the word "users" to mean "end users.") Analysis of users' work is major activity for...

The politics of design: representing work.
September 1, 1995... The three feature articles in this section provide an opening into an important and increasingly contentious area in computer systems development, namely, the methods used in understanding, representing and modeling work processes and practices....

Third and fourth generation language productivity differences.
September 1, 1995... This article reports the results of an empirical study of the impact of fourth generation languages (4GLs) on system development productivity relative to third generation languages (3GLs). Improving software development productivity has long been...

Unraveling the semantics of conceptual schemas.
September 1, 1995... Since the development of early relational database management systems, the database community has focused its research activities on issues like developing more expressive data representation facilities, accelerating the performance of access...

Deriving functional dependencies from the entity-relationship model.
September 1, 1995... The process of database design can be divided into several stages. This four-stage process comprises: * Requirements collection: In this stage, users are interviewed to obtain descriptions of their information needs. This results in a...