Design patterns are quickly being adopted by the object-oriented community. The application of design patterns to object-oriented software development has already brought positive results in practice. Reported benefits include significant increases in quality and productivity. There are however no tools yet to support the process of pattern-based design. An important reason for this lack of com...

2010 I dedicate this thesis to my family, especially to my mother, who supports me and encourages me throughout my whole life. I would like to thank my supervisor, Ing. Zdeněk Žabokrtský, Ph.D., for his patience and for his valuable expert advices. Moreover, I really appreciate that my supervisor and one of my friends, Mgr. Pavol Rusnák, provided me with a technical support for development and ...

Lab courses are an integral part of higher education in engineering sciences. In this paper, we report about a blended learning approach for such courses in computer science education. We show how the project method for co-located learning can be translated into a blended CSCL setting for a lab course on distributed software development, and how the resulting learning scenario can be supported ...

Much has been written on the macroeconomic aspects of the economic reform process in Latin America, but much less has been published on its microeconomic results, especially at the company level. This paper explores how Embraer, a Brazilian aircraft manufacturer, transformed itself after privatization to become a world market leader in a high-tech industry traditionally dominated by companies b...

Following traditional product development approaches, many engineers involved at the early stages of innovative product development are charged with the demonstration of “technical feasibility” of the product of interest. Doing so ostensibly provides the justification that the product is ready to be approved for commercialization. However, engineers working towards demonstrating technical feasi...

Reorganizing its assistance services, Georgia Tech aims to boost competitiveness and economic growth by fostering innovation throughout the state. Research at Georgia Tech is profi ling the retirement and elder-care sectors to help facilitate public and private investment in those rapidly growing economic areas. IEDC President Jeffrey Finkle relates how his organization supports the economic de...

The paper presents an empirical study of user involvement in developing a technical standard for a scientific community’s information system project. The case illustrates how multiple perspectives are involved when considering the user role in practice. The case presents a situation where both developers and users were pre-defined in the design and development phases of the standard as homogene...

Scalability is an important issue for Distributed Interactive Application (DIA) designers. In order to achieve this, it is important to minimise the network traffic required to maintain the DIA. A commonly used technique to reduce network traffic is through short-term entity dynamics extrapolation. However, this technique makes no use of a priori information regarding entity dynamics. We have b...

Code refactoring’s primary impetus is to control technical debt, a metaphor for the cost in software development due to the extraneous human effort needed to resolve confusing, obfuscatory, or hastily-crafted program code. While these issues are often described as causing “bad smells,” not all bad smells emanate from the code itself. Some (often the most pungent and costly) originate in the for...

Implementing a CRM Analytics solution for a business involves many steps including data extraction, populating the extracted data into a warehouse, and running an appropriate mining algorithm. We propose a CRM Analytics Framework that provides an end-to-end framework for developing and deploying pre-packaged predictive modeling business solutions, intended to help in reducing the time and effor...