arXiv subjects

Françoise Détienne

Publications and source records attributed to Françoise Détienne.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2007

Cross-Participants : fostering design-use mediation in an Open Source Software community

Motivation - This research aims at investigating emerging roles and forms of participation fostering design-use mediation during the Open Source Software design process Research approach - We compare online interactions for a successful "pushed-by-users" design process with unsuccessful previous proposals. The methodology developed, articulate structural analyses of the discussions (organization of discussions, participation) to actions to the code and documentation made by participants to the project. We focus on the useroriented and the developer-oriented mailing-lists of the Python project. Findings/Design - We find that key-participants, the cross-participants, foster the design process and act as boundary spanners between the users and the developers' communities. Research limitations/Implications - These findings can be reinforced developing software to automate the structural analysis of discussions and actions to the code and documentation. Further analyses, supported by these tools, will be necessary to generalise our results. Originality/Value - The analysis of participation among the three interaction spaces of OSS design (discussion, documentation and implementation) is the main originality of this work compared to other OSS research that mainly analyse one or two spaces. Take away message - Beside the idealistic picture that users may intervene freely in the process, OSS design is boost and framed by some key-participants and specific rules and there can be barriers to users' participation

cs.CY↗

arXiv2007

Multimodality and parallelism in design interaction: co-designers' alignment and coalitions

This paper presents an analysis of various forms of articulation between graphico-gestural and verbal modalities in parallel interactions between designers in a collaborative design situation. Based on our methodological framework, we illustrate several forms of multimodal articulations, that is, integrated and non-integrated, through extracts from a corpus on an architectural design meeting. These modes reveal alignment or disalignment between designers, with respect to the focus of their activities. They also show different forms of coalition.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

Assessing the cognitive consequences of the object-oriented approach: a survey of empirical research on object-oriented design by individuals and teams

This paper presents a state-of-art review of empirical research on object-oriented (OO) design. Many claims about the cognitive benefits of the OO paradigm have been made by its advocates. These claims concern the ease of designing and reusing software at the individual level as well as the benefits of this paradigm at the team level. Since these claims are cognitive in nature, its seems important to assess them empirically. After a brief presentation of the main concepts of the OO paradigm, the claims about the superiority of OO design are outlined. The core of this paper consists of a review of empirical studies of OOD. We first discuss results concerning OOD by individuals. On the basis of empirical work, we (1) analyse the design activity of novice OO designers, (2) compare OO design with procedural design and, (3) discuss a typology of problems relevant for the OO approach. Then we assess the claims about naturalness and ease of OO design. The next part discusses results on OO software reuse. On the basis of empirical work, we (1) compare reuse in the OO versus procedural paradigm, (2) discuss the potential for OO software reuse and (3) analyse reuse activity in the OO paradigm. Then we assess claims on reusability. The final part reviews empirical work on OO design by teams. We present results on communication, coordination, knowledge dissemination and interactions with clients. Then we assess claims about OOD at the software design team level. In a general conclusion, we discuss the limitations of these studies and give some directions for future research.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

Object-Oriented Program Comprehension: Effect of Expertise, Task and Phase

The goal of our study is to evaluate the effect on program comprehension of three factors that have not previously been studied in a single experiment. These factors are programmer expertise (expert vs. novice), programming task (documentation vs. reuse), and the development of understanding over time (phase 1 vs. phase 2). This study is carried out in the context of the mental model approach to comprehension based on van Dijk and Kintsch's model (1983). One key aspect of this model is the distinction between two kinds of representation the reader might construct from a text: 1) the textbase, which refers to what is said in the text and how it is said, and 2) the situation model, which represents the situation referred to by the text. We have evaluated the effect of the three factors mentioned above on the development of both the textbase (or program model) and the situation model in object-oriented program comprehension. We found a four-way interaction of expertise, phase, task and type of model. For the documentation group we found that experts and novices differ in the elaboration of their situation model but not their program model. There was no interaction of expertise with phase and type of model in the documentation group. For the reuse group, there was a three-way interaction between phase, expertise and type of model. For the novice reuse group, the effect of the phase was to increase the construction of the situation model but not the program model. With respect to the task, our results show that novices do not spontaneously construct a strong situation model but are able to do so if the task demands it.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

Quantitative Measurements of the Influence of Participant Roles during Peer Review Meetings

Peer review meetings (PRMs) are formal meetings during which peers systematically analyze artifacts to improve their quality and report on non-conformities. This paper presents an approach based on protocol analysis for quantifying the influence of participant roles during PRMs. Three views are used to characterize the seven defined participant roles. The project view defines three roles supervisor, procedure expert and developer. The meeting view defines two roles: author and reviewer, and the task view defines the roles reflecting direct and indirect interest in the artifact under review. The analysis, based on log-linear modeling, shows that review activities have different patterns, depending on their focus: form or content. The influence of each role is analyzed with respect to this focus. Interpretation of the quantitative data leads to the suggestion that PRMs could be improved by creating three different types of reviews, each of which collects together specific roles: form review, cognitive synchronization review and content review.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

Design Strategies and Knowledge in Object-Oriented Programming: Effects of Experience

An empirical study was conducted to analyse design strategies and knowledge used in object-oriented software design. Eight professional programmers experienced with procedural programming languages and either experienced or not experienced in object-oriented design strategies related to two central aspects of the object-oriented paradigm: (1) associating actions, i.e., execution steps, of a complex plan to different objects and revising a complex plan, and (2) defining simple plans at different levels in the class hierarchy. As regards the development of complex plans elements attached to different objects, our results show that, for beginners in OOP, the description of objects and the description of actions are not always integrated in an early design phase, particularly for the declarative problem whereas, for the programmers experienced in OOP, the description of objects and the description of actions tend to be integrated in their first drafts of solutions whichever the problem type. The analysis of design strategies reveal the use of different knowledge according to subjects' language experience: (1) schemas related to procedural languages; actions are organized in an execution order, or (2) schemas related to object-oriented languages; actions and objects are integrated, and actions are organised around objects.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

Memory of past designs: distinctive roles in individual and collective design

Empirical studies on design have emphasised the role of memory of past solutions. Design involves the use of generic knowledge as well as episodic knowledge about past designs for analogous problems : in this way, it involves the reuse of past designs. We analyse this mechanism of reuse from a socio-cognitive viewpoint. According to a purely cognitive approach, reuse involves cognitive mechanisms linked to the problem solving activity itself. Our socio-cognitive approach accounts for these phenomena as well as reuse mechanisms linked to cooperation, in particular coordination, and confrontation/integration of viewpoints.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

Confrontation of viewpoints in a concurrent engineering process

We present an empirical study aimed at analysing the use of viewpoints in an industrial Concurrent Engineering context. Our focus is on the viewpoints expressed in the argumentative process taking place in evaluation meetings. Our results show that arguments enabling a viewpoint or proposal to be defended are often characterized by the use of constraints. One result involved the way in which the proposals for solutions are assessed during these meetings. We have revealed the existence of specific assessment modes in these meetings as well as their combination. Then, we show that, even if some constraints are apparently identically used by the different specialists involved in meetings, various meanings and weightings are associated with these constraints by these different specialists.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

Mental Representations Constructed by Experts and Novices in Object-Oriented Program Comprehension

Previous studies on program comprehension were carried out largely in the context of procedural languages. Our purpose is to develop and evaluate a cognitive model of object-oriented (OO) program understanding. Our model is based on the van Dijk and Kintsch's model of text understanding (1983). One key aspect of this theoretical approach is the distinction between two kinds of representation the reader might construct from a text: the textbase and the situation model. On the basis of results of an experiment we have conducted, we evaluate the cognitive validity of this distinction in OO program understanding. We examine how the construction of these two representations is differentially affected by the programmer's expertise and how they evolve differentially over time.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

Reusing processes and documenting processes: toward an integrated framework

This paper presents a cognitive typology of reuse processes, and a cognitive typology of documenting processes. Empirical studies on design with reuse and on software documenting provide evidence for a generalized cognitive model. First, these studies emphasize the cyclical nature of design: cycles of planning, writing and revising occur. Second, natural language documentation follows the hierarchy of cognitive entities manipulated during design. Similarly software reuse involves exploiting various types of knowledge depending on the phase of design in which reuse is involved. We suggest that these observations can be explained based on cognitive models of text processing: the van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) model of text comprehension, and the Hayes and Flower (1980) model of text production. Based on our generalized cognitive model, we suggest a framework for documenting reusable components.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

Strategies in object-oriented design

This paper presents a study aiming to analyse the design strategies of experts in object-oriented programming. We report an experiment conducted with four experts. Each subject solved three problems. Our results show that three strategies may be used in program design according to the solution structure. An object-centred strategy and a function-centred strategy are used when the solution has a hierarchical structure with vertical communication between objects. In this case, the plan which guides the design activity is declarative. A procedure-centred strategy is used when the solution has a flat structure with horizontal communication between objects. In this case, the plan which guides the design activity is procedural. These results are discussed in relation with results on design strategies in procedural design. Furthermore, our results provide insight into the knowledge structures of experts in object-oriented design. To conclude, we point out limitations of this study and discuss implications of our results for Human-Computer Interaction systems, in particular for systems assisting experts in their design activity.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

A Methodological Framework for Socio-Cognitive Analyses of Collaborative Design of Open Source Software

Open Source Software (OSS) development challenges traditional software engineering practices. In particular, OSS projects are managed by a large number of volunteers, working freely on the tasks they choose to undertake. OSS projects also rarely rely on explicit system-level design, or on project plans or schedules. Moreover, OSS developers work in arbitrary locations and collaborate almost exclusively over the Internet, using simple tools such as email and software code tracking databases (e.g. CVS). All the characteristics above make OSS development akin to weaving a tapestry of heterogeneous components. The OSS design process relies on various types of actors: people with prescribed roles, but also elements coming from a variety of information spaces (such as email and software code). The objective of our research is to understand the specific hybrid weaving accomplished by the actors of this distributed, collective design process. This, in turn, challenges traditional methodologies used to understand distributed software engineering: OSS development is simply too "fibrous" to lend itself well to analysis under a single methodological lens. In this paper, we describe the methodological framework we articulated to analyze collaborative design in the Open Source world. Our framework focuses on the links between the heterogeneous components of a project's hybrid network. We combine ethnography, text mining, and socio-technical network analysis and visualization to understand OSS development in its totality. This way, we are able to simultaneously consider the social, technical, and cognitive aspects of OSS development. We describe our methodology in detail, and discuss its implications for future research on distributed collective practices.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

Articulation entre élaboration de solutions et argumentation polyphonique

In this paper, we propose an analytical framework that aims to bring out the nature of participants' contributions to co-design meetings, in a way that synthesises content and function dimensions, together with the dimension of dialogicality. We term the resulting global vision of contribution, the "interactive profile".

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

Collaborative design : managing task interdependencies and multiple perspectives

This paper focuses on two characteristics of collaborative design with respect to cooperative work: the importance of work interdependencies linked to the nature of design problems; and the fundamental function of design cooperative work arrangement which is the confrontation and combination of perspectives. These two intrinsic characteristics of the design work stress specific cooperative processes: coordination processes in order to manage task interdependencies, establishment of common ground and negotiation mechanisms in order to manage the integration of multiple perspectives in design.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

Viewpoints in co-design: a field study in concurrent engineering

We present a field study aimed at analysing the use of viewpoints in co-design meetings. A viewpoint is a representation characterised by a certain combination of constraints. Three types of viewpoints are distinguished: prescribed viewpoint, discipline-specific viewpoint and integrated viewpoint. The contribution of our work consists in characterising the viewpoints of various stakeholders involved in co-design ("design office" disciplines, and production and maintenance disciplines), the dynamics of viewpoints confrontation and the cooperative modes that enable these different viewpoints to be integrated.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

Changing our view on design evaluation meetings methodology: a study of software technical review meetings

By contrast to design meetings, design evaluation meetings (DEMs) have generally been considered as situations in which, according to DEMs methodologies, design activities are quite marginal. In a study of DEMs in software development, i.e. in technical review meetings following a particular review methodology, we showed: (i) the occurrence of design activities as part of an argumentation process; (ii) the relative importance of cognitive synchronisation as a prerequisite for evaluation; (iii) the important role played in evaluation by argumentation that makes explicit the underlying design rationale (DR). On the basis of our results, we discuss the potential for using DR methodologies in this kind of meetings.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

Cognitive Effort in Collective Software Design: Methodological Perspectives in Cognitive Ergonomics

Empirical software engineering is concerned with measuring, or estimating, both the effort put into the software process and the quality of its product. We defend the idea that measuring process effort and product quality and establishing a relation between the two cannot be performed without a model of cognitive and collective activities involved in software design, and without measurement of these activities. This is the object of our field, i.e. Cognitive Ergonomics of design. After a brief presentation of its theoretical and methodological foundations, we will discuss a cognitive approach to design activities and its potential to provide new directions in ESE. Then we will present and discuss an illustration of the methodological directions we have proposed for the analysis and measurement of cognitive activities in the context of collective software design. The two situations analysed are technical review meetings, and Request For Comments-like procedures in Open Source Software design.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2007

Articulation entre composantes verbale et graphico-gestuelle de l'interaction dans des réunions de conception architecturale

This study is focused on the role of external representations, e.g., skteches, in collaborative architectural design. In particular, we analyse (1) the use of graphico-gestural modalities and, (2) the articulation modes between graphico-gestural and verbal modalities in design interaction. We have elaborated a first classification which distinguishes between two modes of articulation, articulation in integrated activities versus articulation in parallel activities.

cs.HC↗