The output of 18 software architecture evaluations are analyzed to find patterns in the risk themes identified in the evaluations. The major results are: i) A categorization of risk themes ii) The observation that twice as many risk themes are risks of "omission " as are risks of "commission ". iii) A failure to find a relationship between the business and mission goals of a system and the risk themes from an evaluation of that system. iv) A failure to find a relationship between the domain of a system being evaluated and the risk themes associated with the development of that system. The results of this investigation have application to practitioners by suggesting activities on which developers should put greater focus. They also have application to researchers by suggesting further areas of investigation.

This paper examines the current stage of adoption of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) Product Suite. It is based on appraisal reports submitted to and processed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI/sup SM/) as of July 10, 2003. Relevant appraisal data-including organization type, geographic distribution, and appraisal history-are used to describe CMMI adoption and use patterns. This paper also explains some characteristics of the appraisal process and obtained results.

In 1986, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) was tasked to design, develop, deploy, and maintain a health care system.Over the last ten years, extensive measurement data has been collected and analyzed.By setting goals in terms of a few key indicators, establishing baselines for those indicators, and measuring success in terms of the baseline, management easily monitors development trends and the impacts of process improvement activities.This paper describes the measurement program implemented within SAIC's health care software development organization, illustrates how the measurements are used to influence process improvement, and concludes with general observations and lessons learned.

With the spread of computer networks, communication via computer conferences, electronic mail, and computer bulletin boards will become more common in society, but little is known about the social psychological implications of these technologies. One possibility is a change in physiological arousal, feelings, and expressive behavior-that is, affect. These computer-mediated communication technologies focus attention on the message, transmit social information poorly, and do not have a well-developed social etiquette. Therefore, these technologies might be associated with less attention to others, less social feedback, and depersonalization of the communication setting. In the present study we examined what would happen to feelings and interpersonal behavior in an experiment in which two people met for the first time and discussed a series of questions in order to get to know one another. We measured physiological arousal (pulse and palmar sweat), subjective affect (emotional state and evaluations), and expressive behavior (self-disclosure and uninhibited behavior) in both synchronous computer-mediated and face-to-face discussions. (For comparison purposes, we also examined these effects under high- and low-evaluation anxiety). Communicating by computer did not influence physiological arousal, and it did not change emotions or self-evaluations. However, people who communicated by computer evaluated each other less favorably than did people who communicated face-to-face, they felt and acted as though the setting was more impersonal, and their behavior was more uninhibited. These findings suggest that computer-mediated communication, rather than provoking emotionality per se, elicits asocial or unregulated behavior. Of course, our data are based on a laboratory experiment using just one type of computer-mediated communication, but the results are generally consistent with anecdotal evidence and new field research on how people use computers to communicate in organizations.