Article

Measuring the conceptual fitness of an application in a computing ecosystem

Author:

Idris HsiAuthors Info & Claims

WISER '04: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM workshop on Interdisciplinary software engineering research

Pages 27 - 36

https://doi.org/10.1145/1029997.1030004

Published: 05 November 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Developing computing applications that can match a set of evolving requirements requires an understanding of the conceptual fitness of these applications relative to the domains they purport to serve. We present the computing ecosystem framework with its associated concepts, use niches, use potential, and activation potential. We show how the ecosystem framework allows us to characterize the usefulness of an application through the concept of fitness. We propose a method for measuring the fitness of an application using a metric called ontological coverage.

We first use a technique called ontological excavation that identifies the user-visible concepts from applications and models them in an ontology. We then use a set of use cases to develop a use case silhouette on the ontology that allows us to measure the ontological coverage of an application as an initial approximation of fitness to a use niche. We present some examples from case studies showing how use case silhouettes can be used to measure the fitness of an application and conclude with some proposals for future work.

References

[1]

Arango, G. and Prieto-Diaz, R. Domain Analysis Concepts and Research directions. in Prieto-Diaz, R. and Arango, G. eds. Domain Analysis and Software Systems Modeling, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 1991, 9--26.

[2]

Beyer, H. and Holtzblatt, K. Apprenticing with the Customer. Communications of the ACM, 38 (5). 45--52.

Digital Library

[3]

Beyer, H. and Holtzblatt, K. Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. Morgan-Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, 1998.

Digital Library

[4]

Booch, G. Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, Inc., Reading, MA, 1994.

Digital Library

[5]

Booch, G., Rumbaugh, J. and Jacobson, I. The Unified Modeling Language User Guide. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1999.

Digital Library

[6]

Borgatti, S.P., Everett, M.G. and Freeman, L.C. UCINET 5.0 Version 1.00. Analytic Technologies, 1999.

[7]

Brachman, R.J., McGuinness, D.L., Patel-Schneider, P.F. and Resnick, L.A. Living with CLASSIC: When and How to Use a KL-ONE-Like Language. in Sowa, J. ed. Principles of Semantic Networks, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1990.

[8]

Brooks, F. The Mythical Man-Month. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1995.

Digital Library

[9]

Card, S.K., Moran, T.P. and Newell, A. The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1983.

Digital Library

[10]

Chen, P.P. The Entity-Relationship Model - Toward a Unified View of Data. ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 1 (1). 9--36.

Digital Library

[11]

Curtis, B., Krasner, H. and Iscoe, N. A Field Study of the Software Design Process for Large Systems. Communications of the ACM, 31 (11). 1268--1287.

Digital Library

[12]

Davis, A.M. Software Requirements Analysis and Specification. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1991.

Digital Library

[13]

Dawkins, R. The Blind Watchmaker. W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1987.

[14]

Dawkins, R. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, New York, 1989.

[15]

Dix, A., Finlay, J., Abowd, G. and Beale, R. Human-Computer Interaction. Prentice-Hall, New York, NY, 1993.

Digital Library

[16]

Elmasri, R. and Navathe, S.B. Fundamentals of Database Systems. Addison-Wesley, New York, NY, 1994.

Digital Library

[17]

El-Ramly, M., Stroulia, E. and Sorenson, P., From Run-time Behavior to Usage Scenarios: An Interaction-Pattern Mining Approach. in 8th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 2002), ACM Press, 315--324.

Digital Library

[18]

El-Ramly, M., Stroulia, E. and Sorenson, P., Recovering Software Requirements from System-User Interaction Traces. in 14th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, (Ischia, Italy, 2002), ACM Press, 447--454.

Digital Library

[19]

Eysenck, M.W. and Keane, M.T. Cognitive Psychology: A Student's Handbook. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Ltd., East Sussex, UK, 1992.

[20]

Falbo, R.d.A., Guizzardi, G. and Duarte, K.C., An Ontological Approach to Domain Engineering. in International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE'02), (Ischia, Italy, 2002), ACM Press, 351--358.

Digital Library

[21]

Flach, J.M. The Ecology of Human-Machine Systems I: Introduction. Ecological Psychology, 2 (3). 191-205.

[22]

Freeman, W.J. The Physiology of Perception. Scientific American, 264 (2). 78--85.

[23]

Greenspan, S.J., Mylopoulos, J. and Borgida, A. Capturing More World Knowledge in the Requirements Specification. in Prieto-Diaz, R. and Arango, G. eds. Domain Analysis and Software Systems Modeling, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 1991, 530--62.

[24]

Halpin, T. Conceptual Schema and Relational Database Design. Prentice Hall, Sydney, AUS, 1995.

Digital Library

[25]

Hilbert, D.M. and Redmiles, D.F. Extracting Usability Information from User Interface Events. ACM Computing Surveys, 32 (4). 384--421.

Digital Library

[26]

Holtzblatt, K. and Beyer, H. Making Customer-Centered Design Work For Teams. Communications of the ACM, 36 (10). 92--103.

Digital Library

[27]

Hsi, I. Analyzing the Conceptual Coherence of Computing Applications Through Ontological Excavation College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, 2004.

[28]

Hsi, I. and Potts, C., Studying the Evolution and Enhancement of Software Features. in Intl. Conf. Software Maintenance, (San Jose, CA, 2000), IEEE Computer Society, 143--151.

Digital Library

[29]

Hsi, I., Potts, C. and Moore, M., Ontological Excavation: Unearthing the Core Concepts of the Application. in Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, (Victoria, Canada, 2003), IEEE Computer Society, 354--352.

Digital Library

[30]

Hughes, J., O'Brien, J., Rodden, T., Rouncefield, M. and Sommerfield, I., Presenting Ethnography in the Requirements Process. in 2nd IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering, (1995), 27--34.

Digital Library

[31]

Jacobson, I., Booch, G. and Rumbaugh, J. The Unified Software Development Process. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1999.

Digital Library

[32]

Kaindl, H., An Integration of Scenarios with their Purposes in Task Modeling. in Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques, (Ann Arbor, MI, 1995), ACM Press, 227--235.

Digital Library

[33]

Kirlik, A. Requirements for Psychological Models to Support Design: Towards Ecological Task Analysis. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1995.

[34]

Kohl, H. From Archetype to Zetigeist. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, MA, 1992.

[35]

Laurel, B. (ed.), The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1990.

Digital Library

[36]

Lehman, M., Laws of Software Evolution Revisited. in 5th European Workshop on Software Process Technology, (Nancy, France, 1996), 108--124.

Digital Library

[37]

Lehman, M. and Belady, L. Program Evolution: Processes of Software Change. Academic Press,inc., Orlando, 1985.

Digital Library

[38]

Leveson, N.G. Intent Specifications: An Approach to Building Human-Centered Specifications. IEEE Transcations on Software Engineering, 26 (1). 15--35.

Digital Library

[39]

Mackenzie, A., Ball, A.S. and Virdee, S.R. Instant Notes in Ecology. BIOS Scientific Publishers Ltd, Oxford, UK, 1998.

[40]

Memon, A., Banerjee, I. and Nagarajan, A., GUI Ripping: Reverse Engineering of Graphical User Interfaces for Testing. in Tenth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, (Victoria, BC Canada, 2003), IEEE Computer Society, 260--269.

Digital Library

[41]

Nielsen, J. Usability Engineering. Academic Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993.

Digital Library

[42]

Nijssen, G.M. and Halpin, T.A. Conceptual Schema and Relational Database Design. Prentice Hall, New York, 1989.

Digital Library

[43]

Norman, D. The Invisible Computer. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998.

Digital Library

[44]

Norman, D.A. The Design of Everyday Things. Doubleday, New York, NY, 1988.

[45]

Nuseibeh, B. and Easterbrook, S., Requirements Engineering: A Roadmap. in Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, (Limerick, Ireland, 2000), ACM Press, 35--46.

Digital Library

[46]

Potts, C. Software Engineering Research Revisited. IEEE Software, 10 (5). 19--26.

Digital Library

[47]

Potts, C., Using Schematic Scenarios to Understand User Needs. in Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques, (Ann Arbor, MI, 1995), ACM Press, 247--256.

Digital Library

[48]

Potts, C., Anton, A. and Takahashi, K. Inquiry-Based Requirements Analysis IEEE Software, 1994, 21--32.

Digital Library

[49]

Potts, C. and Hsi, I. Abstraction and context in requirements engineering: Toward a Synthesis. Annals of Software Engineering, 3. 23--61.

Digital Library

[50]

Raichle, M.E. Visualizing the Mind. Scientific American, 270 (4). 58--64.

[51]

Rumbaugh, J., Blaha, M., Premerlani, W., Eddy, F. and Lorensen, W. Object-oriented Modeling and Design. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1991.

Digital Library

[52]

Sommerville, I., Rodden, T., Sawyer, P., Bentley, R. and Twidale, M., Integrating Ethnography Into The Requirements Engineering Process. in IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering, (San Diego, CA, 1992), IEEE Computer Society Press, 165--181.

[53]

Sutcliffe, A., Maiden, Minocha and Manuel Supporting Scenario-based Requirements Engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 24 (12). 1072--1088.

Digital Library

[54]

Verheijen, G.M.A. and Van Bekkum, J. NIAM: An Information Analysis Method. in Olle, T.W., Sol, H.G. and Verrijn-Stuart, A.A. eds. Information Systems Design Methodologies, North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1982.

[55]

Vicente, K.J. A Few Implications of an Ecological Approach to Human Factors. Human Factors Society Bulletin, 33 (11). 1-4.

[56]

Vicente, K.J. and Rasmussen, J. The Ecology of Human-Machine Systems II: Mediating "Direct Perception" in Complex Work Domains. Ecological Psychology, 2 (3). 207--249.

[57]

Wand, Y., Storey, V.C. and Weber, R. An Ontological Analysis of the Relationship Construct in Conceptual Modeling. ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 24 (4). 494--528.

Digital Library

[58]

Wasserman, S. and Faust, K. Social Network Analysis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994.

Cited By

MacDonald CAtwood MWakkary RHarrison SNeustaedter CBardzell SPaulos E(2014)What does it mean for a system to be useful?Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems10.1145/2598510.2598600(885-894)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2598510.2598600
Sanyal ASoumya Sankar Basu Choudhury S(2010)A requirement framework for enablement of automatic generation of domain model2010 International Conference on Computer Information Systems and Industrial Management Applications (CISIM)10.1109/CISIM.2010.5643633(359-364)Online publication date: Oct-2010
https://doi.org/10.1109/CISIM.2010.5643633
Blandford AGreen TFurniss DMakri S(2008)Evaluating system utility and conceptual fit using CASSMInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2007.11.00566:6(393-409)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2007.11.005
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Fitness diversification in the service of fitness optimization: a comparison study
GECCO '22: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion

Blindly chasing after fitness is not the best strategy for optimization of hard problems, as it usually leads to premature convergence and getting stuck in low-quality local optima. Several techniques such as niching or quality-diversity algorithms have ...
Fitness landscapes and graphs: multimodularity, ruggedness and neutrality
GECCO '09: Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference Companion on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference: Late Breaking Papers

The performances of evolutionary algorithms (genetics algorithms, genetic programming, etc.) or local search algotihms (Simulated annealing, tabu search, etc.) depends on the properties of seach space structure. One concept to analyse the search space ...
Fitness landscapes and graphs: multimodularity, ruggedness and neutrality
GECCO '12: Proceedings of the 14th annual conference companion on Genetic and evolutionary computation

One of the most commonly-used metaphors to describe the process of heuristic search methods in solving combinatorial optimization problems is that of a fitness landscape. The landscape metaphor appears most commonly in work related to evolutionary ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WISER '04: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM workshop on Interdisciplinary software engineering research

November 2004

96 pages

ISBN:1581139888

DOI:10.1145/1029997

Program Chairs:
Nikolay Mehandjiev
University of Manchester
,
Pearl Brereton
Keele University
,
Keith Bennett
University of Durham
,
David Budgen
Keele University
,
Paul Layzell
University of Manchester

Copyright © 2004 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 05 November 2004

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

WISER04

Sponsor:

WISER04: Workshop on Interdisciplinary Software Engineering Research

November 5, 2004

CA, Newport Beach, USA

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

5
Total Citations
View Citations
452
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)0
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 15 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

MacDonald CAtwood MWakkary RHarrison SNeustaedter CBardzell SPaulos E(2014)What does it mean for a system to be useful?Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems10.1145/2598510.2598600(885-894)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2598510.2598600
Sanyal ASoumya Sankar Basu Choudhury S(2010)A requirement framework for enablement of automatic generation of domain model2010 International Conference on Computer Information Systems and Industrial Management Applications (CISIM)10.1109/CISIM.2010.5643633(359-364)Online publication date: Oct-2010
https://doi.org/10.1109/CISIM.2010.5643633
Blandford AGreen TFurniss DMakri S(2008)Evaluating system utility and conceptual fit using CASSMInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2007.11.00566:6(393-409)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2007.11.005
Mehandjiev NBrereton PHosking JMehandjiev NBrereton PHosking J(2006)Second international workshop on interdisciplinary software engineering researchProceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Workshop on interdisciplinary software engineering research10.1145/1137661.1137662(1-3)Online publication date: 20-May-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1137661.1137662
Mehandjiev NBrereton PHosking JOsterweil LRombach DSoffa M(2006)Second international workshop on interdisciplinary software engineering research (WISER)Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering10.1145/1134285.1134477(1009-1010)Online publication date: 28-May-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1134285.1134477

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents