Rapid and precise effort estimation of software development projects is crucial in IT industry. In a case study, the Use Case Point (UCP) method was applied to 15 commercial software development projects. The estimated efforts were compared with the incurred project efforts. We measured a standard deviation of 42 %. This is not acceptable for industrial usage. Therefore, we propose appropriate ...

This paper describes a pattern language that is used to define a multimedia authoring environment capable of producing and utilising multimedia components. We believe that the effective construction of multimedia material should refrain from the common practice of building new documents and presentations entirely from scratch. Hence, the proposed pattern language emphasises the process of makin...

The Blackblot Product Manager’s Toolkit ® (PMTK) is a comprehensive set of models and professional templates which constitute a complete product management methodology that illustrates notable best practices and processes to help create successful market-driven products. At the very core of the Blackblot PMTK Methodology are two foundation rules which govern the entire methodology. This chapter...

Phytochromes (phys) encompass a diverse collection of biliproteins that enable cellular light perception by photoconverting between a red-light-absorbing ground state (Pr) and a far-red light-absorbing active state (Pfr). Based on the central role of plant phys in controlling numerous agriculturally important processes, their rational redesign offers great promise toward accelerating crop impro...

Project productivity is a key factor for producing effort estimates from Use Case Points (UCP), especially when the historical dataset is absent. The first versions of UCP effort estimation models used a fixed number or very limited numbers of productivity ratios for all new projects. These approaches have not been well examined over a large number of projects so the validity of these studies w...

While there have been many advances with respect to reusability and scalability of product architectures over the past several decades, little progress has been made in applying the same concepts to underlying design processes. It is on this aspect of design process design that we focus in this paper. Design processes play a key role in product design and their configuration has a significant e...

BACKGROUND Youth substance use programming and educational strategies are frequently informed by prevention approaches that emphasize abstinence goals, which often do not resonate with youth in their lack of acknowledgment of young people's social context and how young people perceive positive effects of substance use. Further, approaches to drug prevention have been critiqued as adopting a one...

Mitigating and preventing substance use among adolescents requires approaches that address the multitude of factors that influence this behavior. Such approaches must be tested, not only for evidence of empirical effectiveness, but also to determine the mechanisms by which they are successful. The aims of the present study were twofold: 1) To determine the effectiveness of a school-based social...

A primary vehicle for understanding the user in the context of the requirements for a system has been the role. For example, the role is captured through the use of actors in the use case diagram and use case descriptions. Recently, personas have been used in conjunction with scenarios in participatory design to go deeper into examining the different types of people who could play a role. A per...