Software Design – Cognitive Aspect

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. Historical Background

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   Pages 1-11

3. What Is a Computer Program?

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   Pages 13-20

4. Software Design: Theoretical Approaches

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   Pages 21-41

5. Software Reuse

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   Pages 43-55

6. Design and Reuse of Object-Oriented Software: the Effect of a Programming Paradigm

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   Pages 57-73

7. Understanding Software

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   Pages 75-103

8. Understanding Software: Effects of the Task and the Textual Structure

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   Pages 105-116

9. The Future for Programming Psychology

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   Pages 117-121

10. Back Matter

    Pages 123-146

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Software Design - Cognitive Aspects covers a variety of areas including software analysis, design, coding and maintenance. It details the history of the research that has been conducted since the 1970s in this fast-developing field before defining a computer program from a computing and cognitive psychology viewpoint. Detailed treatment is given to the two essential sides of programming; software production and software understanding and throughout the book parallels are drawn between studies on processing texts written in natural language and processing computer programs.
This book will be of particular interest to researchers, practitioners and graduate students in Computer Science, Cognitive Psychology, and Cognitive Ergonomics.

• Cognitive Ergonomics
• Cognitive Psychologyt
• Software Comprehension
• Software Design
• Software Reuse
• classification
• cognitive psychology
• design
• modeling
• programming
• programming language

From the reviews:

"This book explains the current state of knowledge in the field of programming psychology and the psychology of software design, reuse, and maintenance. Although largely concerned with academic research, the material presented may be of interested for both the accomplished and novice software practitioner. The research results given should … have some impact on ergonomic specifications of programming tools, in order to ameliorate the compatibility between tools and user. … The book is a lucid account of the cognitive problems in everyday software design … ." (R. Horsch, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 987 (12), 2002)

"The book is especially dedicated to two different groups of readers – computer professionals on the one hand and psychologists on the other hand. … fortunately the author knows well both disciplines and the result is compact and not schizophrenic. Computer professionals can find in this book a lot of interesting ideas and confirmation of the sensed but in computer literature concealed coherence. … The book can be useful also for a third yet unnamed group of readers – researchers in the area of design theory." (Tomas Brandejsky, Neural Network World, Vol. 12 (2), 2002)

• Department of Computer Science, UWA, Penglais, Aberystwyth, UK

  Frank Bott

• Unité de recherche INRIA Rocquencourt, Domaine de Voluceau, Rocquencourt, Le Chesnay Cedex, France

  Françoise Détienne

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