According to Pedraz-Delhaes, users evaluate both the product and the vendor on the basis of provided documentation. Thus, a question arises as to what quality characteristics should be taken into account when making a decision about accepting a given user manual. There are some proposals (e.g., ISO Std. 26513 and 26514), but they contain too many quality characteristics and lack orthogonality. The goal of this paper is to propose a simple quality model for user documentation, along with acceptance methods based on it. The model is to be orthogonal and complete. As a result, the COCA quality model is presented, which comprises four orthogonal quality characteristics: Completeness, Operability, Correctness, and Appearance. To check completeness, the proposed quality model has been compared with many other quality models that are directly or indirectly concerned with user documentation. Moreover, two acceptance methods are described in the paper: pure review based on ISO Std. 1028:2008, and documentation evaluation test (a type of browser evaluation test), which is aimed at assessing the operability of user documentation. Initial quality profiles have been empirically collected for both methods—they can be used when interpreting evaluation results obtained for a given user manual.

Abstract Completeness is one of the main quality attributes of requirements specifications. If functional requirements are expressed as use cases, one can be interested in event completeness. A use case is event complete if it contains description of all the events that can happen when executing the use case. Missing events in any use case can lead to higher project costs. Thus, the question arises of what is a good method of identification of events in use cases and what accuracy and review speed one can expect from it. The goal of this study was to check if (1) HAZOP-based event identification is more effective than ad hoc review and (2) what is the review speed of these two approaches. Two controlled experiments were conducted in order to evaluate ad hoc approach and H4U method to event identification. The first experiment included 18 students, while the second experiment was conducted with the help of 82 professionals. In both cases, accuracy and review speed of the investigated methods were measured and analyzed. Moreover, the usage of HAZOP keywords was analyzed. In both experiments, a benchmark specification based on use cases was used. The first experiment with students showed that a HAZOP-based review is more effective in event identification than ad hoc review and this result is statistically significant. However, the reviewing speed of HAZOP-based reviews is lower. The second experiment with professionals confirmed these results. These experiments showed also that event completeness is hard to achieve. It on average ranged from 0.15 to 0.26. HAZOP-based identification of events in use cases is an useful alternative to ad hoc reviews. It can achieve higher event completeness at the cost of an increase in effort.

Software Engineering is developing very fast. To keep up with the changes, software companies need effective methods of knowledge transfer. In the paper a 3-step approach to knowledge transfer, called Technical Drama, is presented. The paper is focused on transferring knowledge concerning architecture evaluation, but the approach could also be applied to transferring knowledge concerning inspections, testing etc. It is claimed in the paper that the Technical Drama can be useful in the industrial context (two case studies are described) as well as at university (then a kind of software studio is required).

Extreme programming (XP) is an agile (lightweight) software development methodology and it becomes more and more popular. XP proposes many interesting practices, but it also has some weaknesses. From the software engineering point of view the most important issues are: maintenance problems resulting from very limited documentation (XP relies on code and test cases only), and lack of wider perspective of a system to be built. Moreover, XP assumes that there is only one customer representative. In many cases there are several representatives (each one with his own view of the system and different priorities) and then some XP practices should be modified. In the paper we assess XP from two points of view: the capability maturity model and the Sommerville-Sawyer model (1997). We also propose how to introduce documented requirements to XP, how to modify the planning game to allow many customer representatives and how to get a wider perspective of a system to be built at the beginning of the project lifecycle.

There were two actions which resulted in the project named TETE - An Intelligent Knowledge Testing Engine". The first one was launched by Polish Ministry of Education which aimed at starting "teleteaching" (a kind of Open University) in Poland. Poznan University of Technology was proposed to start distant courses in the field of Informatics (see [3]). The other stimulant for the project was the ECDL project. In 1996 CEPIS (Council of European Professional Informatics Societies) has decided to promote a Finnish idea of Computer Driving Licence and named it "European Computer Driving Licence" (ECDL). ECDL is a set of examinations - the same across Europe - which defines a certain standard of knowledge and skills necessary for effective usage of computers. In 1997 the authors started work on a computer system which would be used in distant education courses on ECDL. We focused our work on intelligent kernel for computer-aided learning system. Important feature of the system is the ability to work on-line as well as a standalone system for knowledge presentation and self-assessment. Structure of the TETE kernel allows to use it with wide variety of courses. TETE uses a web browser (e.g. Netscape) as a presentation tool and it consists of the following modules:• a progress database keeping track of the student's behaviour (e.g. student's answers, time between subsequent lessons and test sessions, forgetting curve etc.) which defines student's perception profile• an intelligent question selection and scheduling engine making decision on the basis of the progress data and description of available knowledge units and test questions;• student's time manager• progress reporter• smart pre-loader of web pages