CMSC 735
Assignment 3
October 24, 2002
(Due: November 5, 2002)
The goal of this assignment is to make you a more informed/critical reviewer of papers in the literature,
and to give you some experience applying GQM.
This is a follow-up to the annotated bibliography project. Each of you will re-read your three papers
from assignment 1 and write a set of GQM goals that represent the basic study of the work reported in
the paper, list the set of models used with definition of terms, and give the metrics or data collected and
analyzed. You will state as many context variables as you can.
Then you should evaluate the study based upon its consistency in making clear its goals, providing
sufficient information to do the analysis, and interpreting the results that they provided in the paper. If the
paper is an empirical study of some kind, you might consider some of the criteria on context guidelines
from Kitchenham, et.al., “Preliminary Guidelines for Empirical Research in Software Engineering, IEEE
TSE August 2002 (guidelines attached)
Based upon this analysis, you should generate a new abstract.
For each abstract you write you should fill in a set of goal templates (Analyze O for the purpose of X
with respect to M from the point of view of P in the context of C), if possible, and assure the conforms
to the requirement, i.e., the abstract should make clear the entity being studied, (i.e., the process,
product, model, metric,...), the attributes of the entities that are of interest, the purpose of the study,
(i.e., whether the study is aimed at characterizing, understanding, evaluating, predicting, or improving),
and for who the study should be of value, (i.e., a researcher, project manager, corporation,...). The
context should also be clear, i.e., a company, the relevant characteristics of the company, if it is a class
project the assumed background of the participants.
Note whatever information is important to understand the model or metric, e.g., certain definitions,
environmental characteristics, information about process conformance, underlying models, etc., should
be in the abstract. Each abstract should be between 250 and 300 words.
As a separate activity, write a critique of the paper from the point of view of its success in expressing
sufficient information for you to understand the results in context and/or replicate the experiment,
selecting several items from the attached guidelines.
Send your paper to Cathy Sinex ([email protected]).
