acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

Table of Contents


News track


President's letter


Viewpoint


Legally specking


ACM forum


A debate on teaching computing science


Design complexity measurement and testing

System designers can quantify the complexity of a software design by using a trio of finely tuned design metrics.

Lessons learned from modeling the dynamics of software development

Software systems development has been plagued by cost overruns, late deliveries, poor reliability, and user dissatisfaction. This article presents a paradigm for the study of software project management that is grounded in the …

Episodic skeletal-plan refinement based on temporal data

ONCOCIN is a medical expert system that extends the skeletal-planning technique to an applciation area where the history of past events and the duration of actions are important. The system's knowledge base is designed to reflect …

Grand challenges to computation science

The Grand Challenges to Computational Science conference held last January attracted over 100 scientists from major universities, national laboratories, and industrial research centers. The author reports some of the highlights …

Parse tree annotations

A technique for associating rewrite rules with productions so that many high-level transformations of a source file can be generated easily is described. While eclipsed in power by other editing and compiler generation systems …

Entity-life modeling and structured analysis in real-time software design—a comparison

While structure analysis is sometimes used as a first step towards a real-time software design with concurrent tasks, a more appropriate task structure can often be based directly on concurrent patterns in the problem environment …