Engineering topics

Kiper, James D.

Publications and source records attributed to Kiper, James D..

6 records

NASA NTRS2006

Experiences using Visualization Techniques to Present Requirements, Risks to Them, and Options for Risk Mitigation

For several years we have been employing a risk-based decision process to guide development and application of advanced technologies, and for research and technology portfolio planning. The process is supported by custom software, in which visualization plays an important role. During requirements gathering, visualization is used to help scrutinize the status (completeness, extent) of the information. During decision making based on the gathered information, visualization is used to help decisionmakers understand the space of options and their consequences. In this paper we summarize the visualization capabilities that we have employed, indicating when and how they have proven useful.

requirements↗

NASA NTRS2005

Modeling uncertainty in requirements engineering decision support

One inherent characteristic of requrements engineering is a lack of certainty during this early phase of a project. Nevertheless, decisions about requirements must be made in spite of this uncertainty. Here we describe the context in which we are exploring this, and some initial work to support elicitation of uncertain requirements, and to deal with the combination of such information from multiple stakeholders.

risk analysis↗

NASA NTRS2005

Visualization support for risk-informed decision making when planning and managing software developments

Key decisions are made in the early stages of planning and management of software developments. The information basis for these decisions is often a mix of analogy with past developments, and the best judgments of domain experts. Visualization of this information can support to such decision making by clarifying the status of the information and yielding insights into the ramifications of that information vis-a-vis decision alternatives.

technology infusion↗

NASA NTRS2004

Information technology aided exploration of system design spaces

We report on a practical application of information technology techniques to aid system engineers effectively explore large design spaces. We make use of heuristic search, visualization and data mining, the combination of which we have implemented wtihin a risk management tool in use at JPL and NASA.

requirements prioritization↗

NASA NTRS2004

Scalable collaborative risk management technology for complex critical systems

We describe here our project and plans to develop methods, software tools, and infrastructure tools to address challenges relating to geographically distributed software development. Specifically, this work is creating an infrastructure that supports applications working over distributed geographical and organizational domains and is using this infrastructure to develop a tool that supports project development using risk management and analysis techniques where the participants are not collocated.

requirements prioritization↗

NASA NTRS1995

Using program visualization to enhance maintainability and promote reuse

Our intuition is that comprehension of visual representations is often quicker than of equivalent text. In the work described in this paper, we explore the application of this intuition to programming languages. The goal of this project is to create visual representation of segments of computer programs that improve the maintenance and reusability of this code. We describe a software tool, a program browser, that provides a visual representation of the function call graph of any C program. This tool is the first in a series of tools that aids program comprehension, making reuse of existing programs more likely. The development of the program browser is itself an example of code reuse as described in the section on implementation. Although our intuition is that some visual display of programs aid understandability, we are looking for experimental verification. Several human factors experiments in this area have contradicted this intuition. We describe reasons for these contradictions, and potential solutions to overcome them.

Ames, Chuck↗