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Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a novel approach of designing, specifying, and describing the behavior of software systems in a way that helps to predict their reliability from the reliability of the components and their interactions.

Design imperatives and relevant mathematical documentation techniques for improved reliability predictability of software systems are identified.

The design approach, which is named design for reliability predictability (DRP), integrates design for change, precise behavioral documentation and structure based reliability prediction to achieve improved reliability predictability of software systems. The specification and documentation approach builds upon precise behavioral specification of interfaces using the trace function method (TFM) and introduces a number of structure functions or connection documents. These functions capture both the static and dynamic behavior of component‐based software systems and are used as a basis for a novel document driven structure based reliability predication model.

Decades of research effort have been spent in software design, mathematical/formal specification and description and reliability prediction of software systems. However, there has been little convergence among these three areas. This paper brings a new direction where the three research areas are unified to create a new design paradigm.

The purpose of this exploratory paper is to analyze how complexity of an artifact affects designing processes of its mechanical, electric, and software sub‐systems.

Based on existing empirical research and frameworks of axiomatic design, product architecture, and product development process, the paper proposes a simple model of functional and structural design to examine how engineers' ways of thinking differ among mechanical, electric and software engineers.

This paper argues that products and artifacts tend to become complex (often with integral architecture) when customers' functional requirements become more demanding and societal/technological constraints become stricter, and that complex mechanical products are often accompanied by electronic control units with complex functions. This implies that designing complex mechanical products often requires intensive coordination among mechanical, electric and software engineers. This, however, is not easy, as engineers' way of thinking is often different among the three areas: mechanical engineers want to complete structural design information first to build prototypes; electrical and software engineers (the latter in particular) request complete functional information first.

In order to solve the above‐mentioned mechanical‐electrical‐software coordination problem, engineers need to share basic design concept of the product in question. Heavy‐weight product managers who infuse the product concept to the project members might be the key to this coordination. Companies may need to make sure that their product development processes are friendly to all of the three groups of engineers.

Although designing complex artifacts has been a popular research theme since H. Simon's seminal work, issues of organizational coordination for developing complex products, with increasing managerial importance, need further research. With an empirical case of the automobile and electronic products, the present paper is unique in that it combines frameworks of product development processes, product architectures, and organizational capabilities.

This article presents practical guidelines for the design of interactive software for children with autism. Many existing software design techniques rely on social interaction and so are not appropriate for this group, and little practical guidance is available. The guidelines presented are based on research experiences during the development of an interactive software game called TouchStory, which was designed to promote an understanding of narrative structure while adapting to the learning needs of individual children with autism. Our results indicate that some children with autism were actively engaged in self‐directed, curiosity‐driven learning, and found TouchStory enjoyable, even after repeated exposures on as many as 20 occasions. The guidelines are not limited to the appearance and behaviour of the software system, and may be fundamental to the research questions asked and the approach adopted. They provide a useful basis for furthering our understanding of the provision of assistive technology for children with autism.

ISO 90003 provides guidelines for applying ISO 9001 to software development processes. The purpose of this paper is to present how the software development process in large, virtual teams (LVTs) can be managed, so that they are in compliance with ISO 9001.

The firm's actions are described in a case example format that illustrates how fit between theory and practice is achieved; and forms a precursor to the derivation of appropriate research arguments.

The steps presented show the application of ISO 90003 guidelines to software development planning activities in LVTs, to meet the requirements of ISO 9000 certification.

The scope of this paper is limited to the application of Section 7.3 (Design and development) of ISO 90003:2004 to the software development process. The paper presents the discussion in a “generalized” fashion so that the steps described can be implemented by any software development company.

The implications for managers in this study lie in the presentation of a set of steps to manage software development processes in LVTs, so that they are in compliance with ISO 9001.

There is a dearth of studies on the application of process‐based approaches in virtual organizations. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by examining how software development processes in virtual organizations (specifically, LVTs) may be formally managed, so that they are in compliance with ISO 9001.

The purpose of this study is to identify a typology of procurement contracts in the context of software development projects that allows firms to align design flexibility with design uncertainty at the project level. The theoretical lenses of contract theory and software engineering are used to explain why the five archetypes in the proposed typology provide gradually increasing levels of design flexibility and to develop hypotheses about the associations between design flexibility and a set of project cost dimensions.

The hypotheses are tested with objective contractual data from 270 software development contracts entered into by a leading international bank over a period of three years.

Data analysis confirms the existence of the proposed typology and shows that design flexibility is negatively associated with control and positively associated with coordination, trust, duration and price.

Although the findings are based on the contracting practices of a single, albeit sophisticated, organization, they shed light on the ability of firms to align flexibility with uncertainty at the onset of new projects by taking advantage of nuanced contractual mechanisms to produce a broader set of contractual archetypes.

This paper is the first in the outsourcing literature to analyze a nuanced contractual typology in software development projects through the perspectives of both contract theory and software engineering.

This paper aims to propose a conceptual model of policy components for software that supports modularizing and tailoring of information security policies (ISPs).

This study used a design science research approach, drawing on design knowledge from the field of situational method engineering. The conceptual model was developed as a unified modeling language class diagram using existing ISPs from public agencies in Sweden.

This study’s demonstration as proof of concept indicates that the conceptual model can be used to create free-standing modules that provide guidance about information security in relation to a specific work task and that these modules can be used across multiple tailored ISPs. Thus, the model can be considered as a step toward developing software to tailor ISPs.

The proposed conceptual model bears several short- and long-term implications for research. In the short term, the model can act as a foundation for developing software to design tailored ISPs. In the long term, having software that enables tailorable ISPs will allow researchers to do new types of studies, such as evaluating the software's effectiveness in the ISP development process.

Practitioners can use the model to develop software that assist information security managers in designing tailored ISPs. Such a tool can offer the opportunity for information security managers to design more purposeful ISPs.

The proposed model offers a detailed and well-elaborated starting point for developing software that supports modularizing and tailoring of ISPs.

Concurrent engineering can help manufacturing enterprises to achieve shorter time to market, reduced development costs, and high‐quality products. In order to realize the concurrent engineering, a lot of integrations are required according to parallel development technique, such as the integration of the people with different disciplines, the integration of the software of design methods and design data, and so on. This paper discusses the integration of the software of existing design methods for concurrent engineering by using axiomatic design. The results show that a very complicated software system for concurrent engineering becomes simple and consists of 26 modules corresponding to 26 design methods and one main module which contains all the junctional properties at each level. The task of the programmer for the integration becomes clear and is mainly programming for the main module.

This project developed and implemented a prototype WWW‐based instructional learning system modeled around a metacognitive research and development framework which mapped cognitive variables, to metacognitive learning strategies for those variables, to metadata for the instructional design of the media. The framework helped delineate learning strategies and related metacognitive attributes of young students acquiring knowledge in advanced science concepts in an Internet/browser‐based environment. The framework also provided a basis for learner‐specific Internet content personalization.

The purpose of this study is to provide a method for designing the software for a process control system that avoids difficulties that lead to safety problems.

Design of real-time software for safety critical programmable equipment systems (PES) such as process control or shutdown systems needs to be approached quite differently compared to any other software. It must be designed by those who understand the equipment system not by software engineers who do not. Following the ‘Piper Alpha’ disaster in the North Sea in the late 1980s, it was realised that the software of safety critical PES, such as the shut-down system on an oil rig, was proving very unreliable. Earlier hardwired relay-based shut-down systems were designed by process control engineers who understood the functions the equipment was required to perform; however, by the 1980s, such systems had been replaced by PES designed by system analysts who did not understand the technologies involved. The safety critical real-time software for a programmable equipment system will only be reliable when it is designed by control engineers who understand the functions it has to perform.

Bottom-up design of software is necessary to avoid safety issues and this can only be achieved using object-oriented methods.

This paper describes an entirely original idea of the author based on experience of managing the design and construction of the process control, emergency shut-down and fire and gas and communication systems for a major oil and gas platform in the North Sea around the time of the Piper Alpha disaster.