AT THE FIRST software engineering (SE) conference in 1968, Doug McIlroy introduced the concept of software components during his keynote speech, “Mass-Produced Software Components.”1 That components hold such an esteemed place in SE history should come as no surprise: componentization is a fundamental engineering principle. Top-down approaches decompose large systems into smaller parts—componen...

The increasing prominence of online focus groups in market research and the complexity that the Internet environment adds to the conduct of research with focus groups has led to a certain interest in discovering how this method can be applied effectively and to which situations or purposes it is best suited. Based on an examination of the literature and on an empirical survey of the heads of qu...

The supervision of undergraduate student dissertations is an area in need of research. Although some studies have already addressed this, these are primarily based on academic staff responses. This study contributes to knowledge by gathering the responses of students and focusing on formative electronic assessment. Data was collected using a student focus group and student questionnaire. The fi...

User-based research is strongly recommended in design for older adults. The aim of this paper is to focus the attention on the poorly explored role of medical and para-medical personnel’s perspective on home health care technologies using data that have been gained during the “Active Ageing At Home” (AA@H) project. A focus group was organized at the National Institute of Health & Science on Age...

In the two sections of this article, I examine aspects of the analysis and reporting of interaction in focus groups. In both sections, I argue that the essential importance of interaction for producing the data in focus groups does not correspond to any requirement that the analysis or the reporting of that data should emphasize interaction. With regard to analyzing interaction, the goals of th...

Empirical evidence reveals positive effects of collaborative learning on students’ cognitive and social development. In daily secondary education, however, collaborative learning and CSCL in particular is scarce. This study examines the potential of asynchronous discussion groups in secondary education for two subjects (biology and history). More specifically, the study focuses secondary school...

EVER SINCE THE software in dustry diverged from the computer manufacturing industry, software firms’ business models have been in flux. Over the last decade, the primary software industry has tended to be seen as a combination of a US$200-billion software product industry (with products comprising either enterprise solutions or packaged mass-market software) and a $500-billion professionalservi...

USER INNOVATION AND customercentric development are hot topics in software and almost all service sectors, manifested by growing interest in crowdsourcing and user-contribution systems.1 However, success stories of companies that have switched from a traditional closed-source to an open source software (OSS) business remain scarce. Access to source code will likely increase—especially in commod...