Contributions in Merlin

This article uses basic facts from the psychology of attention to show how the limited attention of consumers affects economic competition. The article determines endogenously whether an economy is information rich or information poor. A conventional economic equilibrium results if subjects have spare attention capacity. At the positive level, the respective impacts of advances in information technology, international integration and the media on equilibrium diversity and level of attention-seeking activities are shown. At the normative level, the issues of welfare, efficiency and optimal policy interventions are addressed.

null

The reasons why software is changed are manyfold; new features are added, bugs have to be fixed, or the consistency of coding rules has to be re-established. Since there are many types of of source code changes we want to explore whether they appear frequently together in time and whether they describe specific development activities. We describe a semi-automated approach to discover patterns of such change types using agglomerative hierarchical clustering. We extracted source code changes of one commercial and two open-source software systems and applied the clustering. We found that change type patterns do describe development activities and affect the control flow, the exception flow, or change the API.

Strukturierte Produkte sehen auf den ersten Blick attraktiv aus. Doch lohnt sich eine Investition wirklich?

Product development organizations often distribute the responsibilities for requirements engineering over several roles. The collaboration of product management, concerned with market needs, and product development, concerned with the technological aspects of a product, is well established. Such shared responsibility provides advantages in the utilization of specific knowledge, skills, and resources. However, the collaboration leads to increased demands on coordination. Novel concepts and models need to be investigated to support such collaborative requirements engineering. In this paper we focus on requirements communication from product management to a development team by proposing and evaluating the model of goal-oriented requirements communication. The model explains how efficiency and effectiveness of requirements communication can be increased and allows the utilization of established requirements engineering knowledge in a new way to address the task of requirements communication.

Product derivation from a product line model is a central activity in product line requirements engineering. A product line framework and/or approach should provide sophisticated visualization and product derivation support, otherwise large product lines become very hard to handle. In this paper we first present how we can benefit from existing single-system visualization techniques in product lines. Then we introduce new visualization aids and concepts that support the analysis of variability and the derivation of products in software product line engineering. We expect that these new visual support mechanisms will significantly ease the work of stakeholders and requirements engineers when negotiating a new product based on a software product line.

Ein unternehmensübergreifendes Verständnis von Organisation ist von zentraler Bedeutung. Denn es hat sich gezeigt, dass die Organisation des Unternehmensumfeldes, z. B. Wettbewerbspolitik, und die Organisation an den Grenzen der Unternehmung - z.B. Outsourcing, Kooperationen - erheblichen Einfluss auf den Erfolg und die Gestaltung von Unternehmensstrukturen haben. Das Lehrbuch wurde in der 5. Auflage aktualisiert und ergänzt um die Bereiche `Dienstleistungs-/Service-Organisation` und `Organisation von Wertschöpfung`.

In diesem Beitrag präsentieren wir einen Ansatz zur Unterstützung der kooperativen Reiseberatung basierend auf einem interaktiven Großbildschirmsystem, welches eine gemeinsame Visualisierung der Informations-Ressourcen zur Verbesserung der Interaktion und Kommunikation zwischen Kunden und Berater erlaubt und verschiedene Medienkanäle für den Zugriff auf Internet-Ressourcen und andere Experten integriert. Aufbauend auf einem nutzerzentrierten Szenario stellen wir einen konkreten System-Prototyp vor und diskutieren die ersten Erfahrungen aus einem Feld-Experiment in einer realen Reiseagentur. Der Einsatz des berührungsempfindlichen Großbildschirms und der Multimedia-Ressourcen fördert die emotionale Beteiligung des Benutzers, während die Integration der Community-Informationen die Vertrauenswürdigkeit erhöht. Die Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass solch ein System den Kooperationsprozess bzw. die Kunden- und Beraterzufriedenheit deutlich verbessern kann.