Master Tjaard
Finally, I’m done with all the studying kerfuffle!
Had my colloquium a couple of days ago, got a nice grade… (9/10) and today I had my thesis printed and I applied for getting my diploma. Which I will receive in June… Apart from perhaps helping another master student with some stuff I made I’m done. Here is the abstact of my thesis:
When one designs an architecture, this involves a lot of knowledge about this architecture. Such archictectural knowledge (AK) often remains tacit, but it has been shown that making it explicit and explicitly using it can greatly help a qualitative architecting process. The nature of AK in quantitative architectural analysis is still largely unknown. This master thesis investigates this matter in an industrial case study at Astron. Astron is an institute that develops radio telescopes. Modern radio telescopes are very large and complex embedded systems. Their development involves a lot of quantitative analysis, of which the results are used to make design decisions. The various parts and aspects of the developed systems are analyzed by domain experts. Astron currently experiences problems in their analysis and decision making process. A lot of AK remains tacit, which makes it hard to share analysis between domain experts and other stakeholders. It also makes it hard to trace back the reasons for design decisions. This master thesis presents an analysis of the analysis and decision making in Astron’s development process. The types of AK involved in the various activities within the process, as well as their relations, are condensed in a domain model, which provides a common ground for capturing and sharing all relevant AK. To facilitate the capturing and sharing of this AK, The Knowledge Architect tool suite is proposed, which implements the domain model. Part of this tool suite is implemented in The Knowledge Architect Excel plug-in, which provides a means to make AK explicit in Excel-based quantitative analysis models. One asset this plug-in has is a visualization of the contents of an analysis model which should provide analysts with extra and quicker insight into one another’s analysis models. To which extent the plug-in manages to do this is validated in a controlled experiment.
If any of you people would perchance care to read the whole: my master thesis! Yes, I know that there is a grammar error in the abstract in the pdf… but hey, I had to make the thing final sometime and it was too late when I noticed…
As you already might have read, I wrote a bit about all this a while ago, so you’ll be able to read more when you follow the link. And to be complete I perhaps should mention the group’s home page again as well as a direct link to the tool I made.
Have fun! I’ll have… finding a job ;) ! PhD, no PhD… choices…