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Potts, Colin

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Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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Improving requirements completeness through inquiry-based goal refinement

1999 , Potts, Colin

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Systematic design of Intranet services

1998 , Potts, Colin

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Inquiry-Based Scenario Analysis of System Requirements

1994 , Potts, Colin , Takahashi, Kenji , Antón, Annie

The Inquiry Cycle is a formal structure for describing and supporting discussions about system requirements. It divides requirements analysis into three intertwined processes: proposing or writing requirements, challenging or discussing them, and refining or improving them. In this paper, we present an extended example (a meeting scheduler) of the Inquiry Cycle in operation, categorize the types of requirements discussion that occur in practice, and suggest some heuristics for analyzing requirements. We also explain how concrete scenarios improve analysis.

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Observer Mercury Project

1998 , Potts, Colin

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Distributed Laboratories: A Research Proposal

1996 , Schwan, Karsten , Ahamad, Mustaque , Hudson, Scott E. , Limb, J. O. (John O.) , Ammar, Mostafa H. , Ezquerra, Norberto F. , Mukherjee, Amarnath , Potts, Colin , Ramachandran, Umakishore , Zegura, Ellen W. , Fujimoto, Richard M.

The continuing merger of computer and communication technologies is leading to a new computing/communications infrastructure of unprecedented magnitude, enabling new applications with broad economic and social impact. Yet, such applications pose major challenges to researchers in Computer Science and in application domains. The topic of the proposed research program is the realization of Distributed Laboratories, where individuals can interact with each other, and more importantly, with powerful, distributed computational tools as readily as if all were located in a single site. Our intent is to permit scientists, engineers, and managers at geographically distinct locations (including individuals 'tele-commuting' from home) to combine their expertise in solving shared problems, by allowing them to simultaneously view, interact with, and steer sophisticated computations executing on high performance distributed computing platforms.

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Towards a Framework for Hypermedia Scenarios

1998 , Hobbs, Reginald L. (Reginald Lionel) , Potts, Colin

Scenarios have been used in many disciplines, such as software engineering, cognitive science, and HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) to aid in decision making, comprehension, design, and training. Scenarios are instances of behavior of the systems, or "stories" about how the system will or should look. These scenarios are used largely as points of discussion in each of these cases. Building new scenarios or analyzing existing scenarios orient the discussion in collaborative activities and increase understanding in single user tasks. How can a scenario structure be defined that will support the widest range of discussion/comprehension activities and remain content- and access-independent? Scenarios can be structured as a document. In some ways, it is similar to a screenplay document from the film industry. The use of a markup language will allow scenario documents to take advantage of hypermedia representations of the components. Building appropriate tools to interpret the Scenario Markup Language (SCML) will support the creation of different representations of scenarios (such as storyboards, audiovisual segments, narratives, etc.) from the same data. Interactions between SCML and tool functionality will also support scenario authoring, dependency analysis, and structured walkthroughs.

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Collaboration during Conceptual Design

1995 , Catledge, Lara D. , Potts, Colin

Conceptual design involves requirements analysis, functional specification, and architectural design. It remains informal and poorly understood. We studied the conceptual design activities of a representative industrial software project, Centauri, for three months with follow-up observations and discussions over the following six months. Our goal was to understand how patterns of collaboration and communication in project teams affect the convergence of the project on a common vision and a documented specification. In this paper, we present our research methodology, our findings, and their implications for process and tool support. The following observations stand out. First, convergence on a common system vision was painfully slow. The major impediment to faster progress was the difficulty that the project team had in making critical allocation and interface design decisions. Second, Centauri project members repeatedly raised certain issues and failed to reach closure on key problems. Finally, we observed a persistent tension between the desire on behalf of nearly all project members to follow a proceduralized development process and the urgency of delivering a working product.