Process Models

Although user participation in systems development is widely believed to have positive impacts on user acceptance, it does not guarantee success and there is still much that we do not know about how and why user participation sometimes delivers positive benefits, but not always. Much of the prior research on user participation assumes that user–developer communication will ensure that the resulting system will be designed to meet users’ needs and will be accepted by them. The nature and quality of the communication between users and developers, however, remains an understudied aspect of user participation. In this paper, we focus on the user–developer communication process. We propose a process model that delineates four stages of communication between users and software developers, and we argue that these stages must occur for user participation to lead to effective outcomes. To illustrate our model, we apply it to analyse a ‘critical case study’ of a software project that failed despite high levels of user involvement. We show that when ‘communication lapses’ occurred in several of the user–developer communication stages, developers failed to be informed regarding the underlying reasons that users avoided the system. Based on the insights from this case study, we advise researchers and practitioners how to leverage the potential benefits of user participation, rather than take them for granted.

Many models of the design and development process have been published over the years, representing it for different purposes and from different points of view. This article contributes an organising framework that clarifies the topology of the literature on these models and thereby relates the main perspectives that have been developed. The main categories of model are introduced. Their contexts, advantages, and limitations are considered through discussion of selected examples. It is demonstrated that the framework integrates coverage of earlier reviews and as such provides a new perspective on the literature. Finally, key characteristics of design and development process models are discussed considering their applications in practice, and opportunities for further research are suggested. Overall, the article should aid researchers in positioning new models and new modelling approaches in relation to state-of-the-art. It may also be of interest to practitioners and educators seeking an overview of developments in this area.

Building owners, designers and constructors are seeing a rapid increase in the number of sustainably designed high performance buildings. These buildings provide numerous benefits to the owners and occupants to include improved indoor air quality, energy efficiency, and environmental site standards; and ultimately enhance productivity for the building occupants. As the demand increases for higher building energy efficiency and environmental standards, application of a set of process models will support consistency and optimization during the design process. Systems engineering process models have proven effective in taking an integrated and comprehensive view of a system while allowing for clear stakeholder engagement, requirements definition, life cycle analysis, technology insertion, validation and verification. This paper overlays systems engineering on the sustainable design process by providing a framework for application of the Waterfall, Vee, and Spiral process models to high...

Software Engineering is a branch of Computer Science that evolved as a result of urgent need to deal with decades of software crisis, characterized by low theoretical knowledge and practice of the construction of error-free and efficient software. The introduction of well-organized scientific, engineering and management strategies in the process of software development no doubt led to major breakthroughs, and solutions to software failures. One of the obvious game-changer in this regard is the evolution of Software Development Life Cycle, also known as Software Process Model for driving the different phases of software construction. A sound understanding of the process model is therefore inevitable, not just for software developers, but also to users and researchers. Such a theoretical cum practical understanding will enhance decisions on which process model is best for a particular job or perspective. This invariably, contributes immensely to the probability of success or failure of the project in question. Thus, the necessity for this research. This work presents an unambiguous expository of selected software development model variants. A total of four process model variants were studied, in a theoretical, visual and analytical manner. The variants were analyzed using strength versus weakness (SVW) tabular scenario. This work was concluded by presenting guides towards choice of these models. This research is expected to be a useful reference to software practitioners and researchers.

Abstract: How do changes in the spatial organization of entrepreneurial firms come about? This paper provides a conceptualisation of the process of locational change. A process model of locational change is constructed on the basis of an empirical study of 109 locational events during the life course of 25 young firms in knowledge intensive sectors (knowledge services and biomedicals). This process model of locational change maps both internal and external variation and selection processes. This model contributes to the ...

In the food industry, automatic control of quality parameters is limited by the availability of sensors for such parameters. For fresh cheese production the in- stallation of NIR (near infrared) sensors opens the path for the design of automatic control schemes for dry matter and protein content. This paper describes a design procedure for such control schemes, including design and

Building owners, designers and constructors are seeing a rapid increase in the number of sustainably designed high performance buildings. These buildings provide numerous benefits to the owners and occupants to include improved indoor air quality, energy efficiency, and environmental site standards; and ultimately enhance productivity for the building occupants. As the demand increases for higher building energy efficiency and environmental standards, application of a set of process models will support consistency and optimization during the design process. Systems engineering process models have proven effective in taking an integrated and comprehensive view of a system while allowing for clear stakeholder engagement, requirements definition, life cycle analysis, technology insertion, validation and verification. This paper overlays systems engineering on the sustainable design process by providing a framework for application of the Waterfall, Vee, and Spiral process models to high...

Websites like all web applications evolved very quickly, E-Companies are in highly competitive environment, they have to follow the customer needs and their competitors’ performance. To survive in this highly competitive environment; companies can adopt many alternatives; amongst them is the continues corrections and enhancements for the company’s website to meet the customer requirements. These corrections and enhancements occur much more frequent than those in traditional software, this mean that the need for reengineering will occur in shorter period of time compared to traditional software. Reengineering takes time, resources, and money ,so we want to make sure that we will do it in a way that will help us to reduce the need for website reengineering in the future, this can be accomplished if we use suitable software reengineering process model, that will address the needs of the website as a part of the software reengineering process, such model is not there yet ,so in this paper we will propose new cyclic process model that is suitable for reengineering websites, there are two main benefits for the proposed cyclic model; first: for each of the activities presented within the model it can be revisited, and for any particular cycle during the reengineering process, the process can be terminated after any one of these activities. Second: based on its cyclic nature; the model is suitable to be used with any approach to software re-engineering such as the Big Bang approach, incremental approach, and evolutionary approach.

Abstract. In the medical environment, clinical research has been predomi-nantly paper-based. The Case Report Form (CRF) is an example of paper-based tools used in documenting clinical trials. A clinical trial can be understood to be a business process. This also means that automating the clinical trial can be re-ferred to as a workflow process. In this research, we seek to automate the clini-cal trial in order to support the medical practitioners to ably translate their natu-ral language format including CRFs using a workflow system. However we al-so address the need for flexibility in workflow models in the clinical trials that operate under specific guidelines in form of protocols. To attain the required level of flexibility in clinical trial workflow models, we use the constraint-based modeling language. The results from the validation indicate that the designed workflow modeling framework meets the required level of flexibility with re-spect to its usefulness and usability.