Appendix A (Continued)

1.0 Background and Initiation

Individual characteristics

(demographics, subjective norms, competencies and preferences, styles)

1.1 Your age? ___________________________________________________

1.2 Your educational background? (degrees earned)

1.3 Do you have management responsibilities? (Are there other employees that report

to you/that you supervise?)

1.4 Your place in the organization (IT-department, Line unit)?

1.5 Your present position?

1.6 Your work experience (position, start-end, type of projects)?

2.0 The Last Completed Project Worked on, Being a

User Oriented System Lasting More than Three Months

and Having at Least Three Project Members

2.1 Please briefly describe the intended objectives and deliverables

2.2 Approximately when was it started and completed?

2.3 How would you describe the size or scope of the project (lines of code, # of screens,

# of tables, # of reports, # of servers/clients/networks, etc.)?

2.4 How would you describe the personnel involved in the project (# of IS professionals,

# of client team members, amount of change of personnel during the project)?

2.5 How would you describe the level of difficulty of the project (system characteristics,

management issues, collaboration tasks)?

2.6 To what extent would you characterize the project as developing completely new

application software (in contrast to maintenance and upgrading)? To what extent

did you utilize vendor developed software in the project? (If so, which product did

you use, who was the vendor, how would you describe the documentation, vendor

determined, object-oriented, in compliance with UML, structured design — or any

other? Changes in the vendor software were made by yourself, the vendor, both?)

3.0 Methods and Tools in the Last Project

3.1 As you work on the analysis and design of the new IT application, what sort of

methods do you use for representing requirements and application structures? As

you personally see it, would you say your employed methods belong to types of

methods? If so, what would be the dominating type? The least used or important

one?

3.2 Have you used any of the following analysis and design modeling techniques for

representing requirements and application structures? (For any used, follow up

with how extensively, supported by case tool, used alone or part of project team

usage, thoughts about using the tools, where/when in the project were they be

employed)

• Use-case

• Class or object diagrams

• Sequence charts

• Collaboration charts

• Activity diagrams

• State transition diagrams

• Data Flow diagram

• Entity Relationship diagram

3.3 When it comes to modeling the requirements, design, and code structure for new

system, what methods do you prefer? (May be answered in earlier question —

particularly if using methods not selected themselves)

3.4 In the execution of the last project, to what extent did you use computer tools that

support your standard — that is, how do you actually carry out your descriptions,

manually or automated? (link to CASE tools)

3.5 Do all members of the project team use the same set of representations and CASE

tools or does each member use whatever tools he or she prefers?

3.6 How are descriptions of requirements communicated among project members? Do

you typically use any of the following for communication regarding requirements

among project members?

Mail

• E-mail

• Shared project specification database

• Meetings and walkthroughs

• Other?

3.7 How would you characterize the user — user participation — IT expert interaction

and integration (or lack thereof)?

Do you employ UML or any of its diagrams in these interactions? (As you see it,

what are the benefits and what are the drawbacks? How well do users understand

these diagrams? How does a user exert influence on choice of diagram or diagram

content? Or should the user not have any influence? Why and why not?)

3.8 Did this project include any mechanism for learning or enhancing your abilities

regarding the representations and CASE tools?

In your experience, how are representation and tool competence taken care of?

(follow-up) How much do you have to learn on your own? Did you have ‘methods’

discussion groups? Did you attend methods seminars or courses? Is the focus on

representation something resembling a ‘one shot’ or is it an ongoing activity?

4.0 Outcomes (Use — Amount, Density, Distribution,

Economic Value, "Correctness of Solutions")

4.1 Considering these same projects, to what degree do you consider them successful?

What sort of criteria do you use to judge them?

• Economic?

• Time?

• Quality?

• Amount of completeness?

• Positive feelings among developers?

• Positive feelings among users/sponsors?

• Meeting stated objectives?

4.2 To what extent and in what way did the use of UML, OO analysis and design, and/

or CASE toolaffect the level of success achieved?

5.0 About Project Work in General

UML/OOAD/CASE — the innovation and its nature (Rogers’ aspects, critical mass, OOP

infusion — supporting tech, class libraries, application components)

5.1 Having discussed the use of methods in the last project — thinking about the

projects you have worked on during the last five years, are there some projects for

which you tend to use modeling tools rather than others? What would differentiate

projects where you do use the tools from those where you don’t?

5.2 Thinking back over the last 5 years or so, what are the most drastic changes with

regard to how you work on projects? (organization, people, ITs development,

methods)

5.3 What, if any, changes have you made to the standard UML/OOAD/CASE approach

to make it useful in your environment?

5.4 Professionally, what would you say is most fun to do?

6.0 IT-Environment (org factors, size (6.1), diversity

(6.2), scale (6.3)) — (Following Fichman)

6.1 About how many projects will be active at any one time?

How many employees are there in the IT department who are likely to be engaged

in software development at any one time?

About what size is the annual IT budget?

6.2 (Diversity) About how many different programming languages used by the

development staff account for at least 5% of development projects?

About how many runtime platforms account for at least 5% of new development

projects?

6.3 (Learning related scale) What percentage of application effort goes into new

development, integration of systems, maintenance, non-development related activities?

7.0 IT Strategy

7.1 To what extent is there an IT strategy linked to organizational business strategy?

7.2 To what extent is there an articulated IT strategy?

Do you have a development and maintenance strategy for tools and technical support?

Does this strategy include organization issues

• In-house vs. outsourcing?

• Reward system?

• Productivity guidelines?

• Project principles?

• Hiring guidelines?

7.3 Has the strategy any formulation about learning? Keeping the present staff up-tospeed,

project learning requirements as part of project management, planning, and

control?

7.4 To what extent does your strategy include standardization of hardware, software,

and development approach?

7.5 To what extent does the department use OO analysis, design, programming?

7.6 Does the strategy include changing the amount of OO?

THANK YOU

Do you want to be apprised of results of the study?

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Address___________________________________________________

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