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An Empirical Investigation of the Impact of Cognitive Complexity and Experience of Programmers, and Program Complexity on Program Comprehension and Modification
The psychological characteristics of programmers are believed to be important determinants of programming productivity. However, little evidence is available to support this contention. This investigation, motivated by the lack of such evidence, was concerned with determining the influence of the programmer's cognitive complexity (differentiation and integration) and experience on comprehending and modifying programs of different levels of complexity. Data were collected from ninty-three graduate and undergraduate students in a classroom experimental setting. In the first phase of the experiment, a background questionnaire was administered in order to collect experience and other demographic information. Also, a domain-specific Role Construct Repertory (REP) Test was administered to collect cognitive complexity information. In the second phase, the subjects were randomly assigned to either the program comprehension group or to the program modification group. Both groups used two COBOL programs of differing levels of complexity to do comprehension and modification exercises. Three sets of hypotheses were tested. The first set of hypotheses was designed to evaluate the direction and strength of the relationship between cognitive complexity and program comprehension and modification. The second set of hypotheses was designed to evaluate the combined influence of cognitive complexity and program complexity on the comprehension and modification of the programs. The third set of hypotheses was designed to evaluate the moderating effect of experience on the relationship of cognitive complexity to program comprehension and modification. Cognitive integration was found to have a significant and positive nonlinear relationship only with the relatively complex program modification scores. The subjects who were ranked high in cognitive integration performed better than those ranked low in modifying the relatively complex program; but they performed the same in modifying the relatively simple program. Cognitive differentiation was found to have no significant relationship with either comprehension scores or modification scores. Experience of the subjects did …
Accident versus Essence: Investigating the Relationship Among Information Systems Development and Requirements Capabilities and Perceptions of Enterprise Architecture
Information systems (IS) are indelibly linked to the global economy and are indispensable to society and organizations. Despite the decisive function of IS in organizations today, IS development problems continue to plague organizations. The failure to get the system requirements right is considered to be one of the primary, if not the most significant, reasons for this high IS failure rate. Getting requirements right is most notably identified with Frederick Brooks' contention that requirements are the essence of what IT professionals do, all the rest being accidents or risk management. However, enterprise architecture (EA) may also provide the discipline to bridge the gap between effective requirements, organizational objectives, and the actual IS implementations. The intent of this research is to examine the relationship between IS development capabilities and requirements analysis and design capabilities within the context of enterprise architecture. To accomplish this, a survey of IT professionals within the Society for Information Management (SIM) was conducted. Results indicate support for the hypothesized relationship between IS development and requirements capabilities. The hypothesized relationships with the organizational demographics were not supported nor was the hypothesized positive relationship between requirements capabilities and EA perceptions. However, the nature of the relationship of requirements and EA provided important insight into the relationship leading to several explanations as to its meaning and contributions to research and practice. This research contributes to IS development knowledge by providing evidence of the essential role of requirements in IS development capabilities and in IS development maturity. Furthermore, contributions to the nascent field of EA research and practice include key insight into EA maturity, EA implementation success, and the role of IT professionals in EA teams. Moreover, these results provide a template and research plan of action to pursue further EA research in exploring EA maturity models and critical success factors, …
A Text Analysis of Data Science Career Opportunities and U.S. iSchool Curriculum
Data science employment opportunities of varied complexity and environment are in growing demand across the globe. Data science as a discipline potentially offers a wealth of jobs to prospective employees, while traditional information science-based roles continue to decrease as budgets get cut across the U.S. Since data is related closely to information historically, this research will explore the education of U.S. iSchool professionals and compare it to traditional data science roles being advertised within the job market. Through a combination of latent semantic analysis of over 1600 job postings and iSchool course documentation, it is our aim to explore the intersection of library and information science and data science. Hopefully these research findings will guide future directions for library and information science professionals into data science driven roles, while also examining and highlighting the data science techniques currently driven by the education of iSchool professionals. In addition, it is our aim to understand how data science could benefit from a mutually symbiotic relationship with the field of information science as statistically data scientists spend far too much time working on data preparation and not nearly enough time conducting scientific inquiry. The results of this examination will potentially guide future directions of iSchool students and professionals towards more cooperative data science roles and guide future research into the intersection between iSchools and data science and possibilities for partnership.
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