I am not sure if planning vs. handling resources in software engineering
is essentially different to other design or engineering disciplines.
Descriptive qualitative studies in Design Research suggest afaik that in
actual working practice, no clean top-down or bottom-up processes take
place. For me, the question "partitioning" vs. "(w)holistically" doesn't
make much sense, because nobody actually works like that. Would such
distinction give any (theoretical, explanatory) benefit?
I don't have the empirical references you want, but
[How Designers Work, chapter 2] comes into my mind
http://www.lucs.lu.se/People/Henrik.Gedenryd/HowDesignersWork/
Gerhard
PS: From my understanding, partitioning is often done in terms of the
expert knowledge needed to implement a certain
module/function/subtask/etc and the expert is asked to provide an
reasonable estimate.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
A key aspect of programming in practice is the reliable estimation of
size, time and effort. It seems like most people that are good at
estimating do so by partitioning the problem into smaller pieces that
can be handled more easily. Then, final estimates are accomplished by
combining the pieces. This procedure is certainly what engineering
approaches teach and I think other approaches as well.
But I haven't been able to find much empirical data suggesting that
software estimation done by partitioning is superior to that done more
"wholistically". I assume that I am missing something huge and obvious
since partitioning is such an important cognitive tool (and has been for
such a long time). But, I haven't found empirical references yet
Can anybody direct me to references on this topic.
Thanks very much
Dr. Allen Milewski
Department of Software Engineering
Monmouth University
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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