The paper refers to the discussion of measuring and assessing knowledge capital. In particular, the interconnectedness of the intangible resources in organizations is not well represented in the methodical approaches. Moreover, the identification of driver resources which is strongly connected with this question is far from being solved in a satisfactory manner. Therefore, this article reviews existing methods of the scenario analysis in view of the performance measurement discussion and contributes towards an advanced analysis of resources in organizations.

An enhanced approach for the impact analysis is presented. Impact analyses play an important role in future research analysis as part of the scenario techniques in the strategic management field. Nowadays, they are also applied for the description of mutual relationships of tangible and intangible resources in organisations. The new method is based on currently existing methods using a cross impact matrix and overcomes some of their drawbacks. Indirect impacts are considered together with their impact strengths. A modification of the impact matrix is not necessary. Simple examples show that the new method leads to more reasonable and stable results than the existing methods. The new method shall help analysing the complexity of social systems in a more reliable way.

Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 2001. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 95 p. : ill., maps (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-95).

Thesis (M.L. Arch.)--University of Pretoria, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-105).

published_or_final_version / Environmental Management / Master / Master of Science in Environmental Management

Understanding the impact of changes made daily by development teams working on large-scale software products is a challenge faced by many organizations nowadays. Development efficiency can be severely affected by the increase in fragility that can creep in as products evolve and become more complex. Processes, such as gated check-in mechanisms, can be put in place to detect problematic changes before submission, but are usually limited in effectiveness due to their reliance on statically-defined sets of tests. Traditional change-impact analysis techniques can be combined with information gathered at run-time in order to create a system that can select tests for change verification. This report provides the high-level architecture of a system, named Ratchet, that combines static analysis of C++ programs, enabled by the reuse of the Clang compiler frontend, and code-coverage information gathered from automated test runs, in order to automatically select and schedule tests that exercise functions and methods possibly affected by the change. Prototype implementations of the static-analysis components of the system are provided, along with a basic evaluation of their capabilities through synthetic examples. / text

published_or_final_version / Transport Policy and Planning / Master / Master of Arts in Transport Policy and Planning

The main objective of this dissertation is to assist in reducing the chaotic state of the software engineering discipline by providing insights into both the effectiveness of software defect reduction methods and ways these methods can be improved. The dissertation is divided into two main parts. The first is a quasi-experiment comparing the software defect rates and initial development costs of two methods of software defect reduction: software inspection and test-driven development (TDD). Participants, consisting of computer science students at the University of Arizona, were divided into four treatment groups and were asked to complete the same programming assignment using either TDD, software inspection, both, or neither. Resulting defect counts and initial development costs were compared across groups. The study found that software inspection is more effective than TDD at reducing defects, but that it also has a higher initial cost of development. The study establishes the existence of a defect-reduction gap between software inspection and TDD and highlights the need to improve TDD because of its other benefits.The second part of the dissertation explores a method of applying mutation analysis to TDD to reduce the defect reduction gap between the two methods and to make TDD more reliable and predictable. A new change impact analysis algorithm (CHA-AS) based on CHA is presented and evaluated for applications of software change impact analysis where a predetermined set of program entry points is not available or is not known. An estimated average case complexity analysis indicates that the algorithm's time and space complexity is linear in the size of the program under analysis, and a simulation experiment indicates that the algorithm can capitalize on the iterative nature of TDD to produce a cost savings in mutation analysis applied to TDD projects. The algorithm should also be useful for other change impact analysis situations with undefined program entry points such as code library and framework development.An enhanced TDD method is proposed that incorporates mutation analysis, and a set of future research directions are proposed for developing tools to support mutation analysis enhanced TDD and to continue to improve the TDD method.

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