This paper reports on a software understanding "eld study of corrective maintenance of large-scale software. Participants were professional software maintenance engineers. The paper reports on the general understanding process, the types of actions programmers preferred during the debugging task, the level of abstraction at which they were working and the role of hypotheses in the debugging str...

We analyze the determinants of HMO information technology outsourcing using two studies. Study 1 examines the effect of asset specificity on outsourcing for development and operation activities, using HMO specific fixed effects to control for differences between HMOs. Study 2 regresses the HMO specific fixed effects from Study 1, which measure an HMO's propensity to outsource, on HMO characteri...

Information Systems (IS) is a complex discipline constantly in need of additional operationalized theories and constructs. The need exists for methodologies that are qualitative and interpretive but result in theories and constructs that can be subjected to empirical testing. This paper proposes that Revealed Causal Mapping (RCM) is a methodology that meets this need. This paper uses the domain...

Although there are many articles in the NIS literature which address small-business computing, in effect the organizations represented in these studies are, in many ways, similar to mediumand large-sized organizations. In this article, we focus on businesses that are truly small: they have very few employees and there is no formal NIS department. In this environment, the small business owner/ma...

In recent years, due to the increasing needs for information related products in daily life, the information and communication industry is in full flourish. In Taiwan, competition on hardware products has shifted from price and quality to after-sale and maintenance services. If the manufacturer could collaborate with commercial links of the purchaser, supplier, logistic partners and financial s...

Maintenance costs of Information Systems (ISs) are high and are growing. Part of the costs come from low software quality. The quality of software can be measured when it is maintained. By improving the quality of maintenance prone modules future maintenance costs may be lowered for those modules. In this article we will discuss how to measure software quality and we will also present a prototy...

The semantic consistency of context-dependent documents is an important problem in the fields of document databases and web information systems. While techniques for adapting documents to different context of use are well investigated, the consistency maintenance of context-dependent documents remains a challenge. Existing methods are specialized on specific document formats or domains, or are ...

This paper exposes the common order-theoretic properties of the structures manipulated by the version space algorithm [Mit78]and the assumption-based truth maintenance systems (ATMS) [dk86a,dk86b] by recasting them in the framework of convex spaces. Our analysis of version spaces in this framework reveals necessary and sufficient conditions for ensuring the preservation of an essential finite r...