The monograph presents the proceedings of the Third Symposium on Empir ical Foundations of Information and Software Sciences (EFISS) held at the Riso National Laboratory in Roskilde, Denmark, 23-25 October 1985. The EFISS series of meetings was initiated with the express purpose of explor ing subjects and methods of scientific inquiry of empirical nature which are of common interest to information and software sciences. Furthermore, these meetings were expected to provide a cross-disciplinary forum for discussion of problems and exchange of research results of importance for the design and application of advanced information systems. The previous two EFISS symposia took place at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The first meeting in 1982 focused on methods of experimental design and measurement techniques in information and software sciences. The second meeting was held in 1984 and its main theme was the value of information in prescriptive contexts, such as value of information for understanding and implementation of these messages, instructions, and commands. Specific examples of problems of this kind are the value of comments for the enhancement of understanding of computer programs, the value of information in assisting and guiding users of on line interactive systems, and the value of lexical aids in information retrieval. In both symposia, contributed papers were considered on any other valid subject of empirical foundations of the said two sciences.

This is the proceedings of the Sixth Symposium on Empirical Foundations of Information and Software Sciences (EFISS), which was held in Atlanta, Georgia, on October 19-21, 1988. The purpose of the symposia is to explore subjects and methods of scientific inquiry which are of common interest to information and software sciences, and to identify directions of research that would benefit from the mutual interaction of these two disciplines. The main theme of the sixth symposium was modeling in information and software engineering, with emphasis on methods and tools of modeling. The symposium covered topics such as models of individual and organizational users of information systems, methods of selecting appropriate types of models for a given type of users and a given type of tasks, deriving models from records of system usage, modeling system evolution, constructing user and task models for adaptive systems, and models of system architectures. This symposium was sponsored by the School of Information and Computer Science of the Georgia Institute of Technology and by the U.S. Army Institute for Research in Management Information, Communications, and Computer Sciences (AIRMICS). 17le Editors vii CONTENTS 1 I. KEYNOTE ADDRESS ............................................. .

This is the proceedings of the Sixth Symposium on Empirical Foundations of Information and Software Sciences (EFISS), which was held in Atlanta, Georgia, on October 19-21, 1988. The purpose of the symposia is to explore subjects and methods of scientific inquiry which are of common interest to information and software sciences, and to identify directions of research that would benefit from the mutual interaction of these two disciplines. The main theme of the sixth symposium was modeling in information and software engineering, with emphasis on methods and tools of modeling. The symposium covered topics such as models of individual and organizational users of information systems, methods of selecting appropriate types of models for a given type of users and a given type of tasks, deriving models from records of system usage, modeling system evolution, constructing user and task models for adaptive systems, and models of system architectures. This symposium was sponsored by the School of Information and Computer Science of the Georgia Institute of Technology and by the U.S. Army Institute for Research in Management Information, Communications, and Computer Sciences (AIRMICS).17le Editors vii CONTENTS 1 I. KEYNOTE ADDRESS ...

Content Description #Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Software developers are faced with the challenge of making software systems and products of ever greater quality and safety, while at the same time being faced with the growing pressure of costs reduction in order to gain and maintain competitive advantages. As in any scientific and engineering discipline, reliable measurement is essential for talking on such a challenge. "Software measurement is an excellent abstraction mechanism for learning what works and what doesn't" (Victor Basili). Measurement of both software process and products provides a large amount of basic information for the evaluation of the software development processes or the software products themselves. Examples of recent successes in software measurement span multiple areas, such as evaluation of new development methods and paradigms, quality and management improvement programs, tool-supporting initiatives and company wide measurement programs. The German Computer Science Interest (GI) Group of Software Metrics and the Canadian Interest Group in Software Metrics (CIM) have attended to these concerns in the recent years. Research initiatives were directed initially to the definition of software metrics and then to validation of the software metrics themselves. This was followed by more and more investigation into practical applications of software metrics and by critical analysis of the benefits and weaknesses of software measurement programs. Key findings in this area of software engineering have been published in some important books, such as Dumke and Zuse's Theory and Practice of Software Measurement, Ebert and Dumke's Software Metrics in Practice and Lehner, Dumke and Abran's Software Metrics.

The purpose of the Second Symposium on Empirical Foundations of Informa tion and Software Science (EFISS) was, in essence, the same as that of the First Symposium in this series, i. e. to explore subjects and methods of sci entific inquiry which are of fundamental and common interest to information and software sciences, and to map directions of research that will benefit from the mutual interaction of these two fields. In fact, one of the most important results of the First EFISS Symposium was the conclusion that the commonality of these two sciences is much more than just the commonality of their objects of study, namely, the study of informative and prescriptive properties of texts in all kinds of sign sys tems (such as natural or artificial languages). Rather, the most challeng ing problems appear to be in the areas in which both these sciences overlap, such as, for instance, the problem of trade-offs between informative and prescriptive uses of texts. This problem can be formulated in generic terms as follows: given a certain kind of action or activity which has been pre scribed to some agent, i. e. which is required to be implemented or carried out, what kind of information should be provided to the agent, in what form, and how should it be distributed over the contextual structure of the pre scriptive text to enable the agent to carry out the action or activity most effectively and efficiently.

No detailed description available for "Software Complexity".