A CAST Analysis of an Accident of Software Project

We report a CAST analysis of a software project by a team across the primary and subcontractor companies focusing on a kind of safety, psychological safety. By using CAST, we can understand the context of the behaviours leading to the unintended event and avoid personal blames to keep psychological safety. The project was a software maintenance project, in which an online trading system went down in the production migration, the final phase before the system release. The end users had no damages in this case, but some members were going to lose respects from other members and stakeholders. The system down was caused by a defect, and the first investigation report simply blamed the subcontractor members related to the defect injection and leakage. The senior manager, who cares to build and maintain psychological safety in the team, wanted to conduct a deeper analysis to avoid personal blames. The CAST helped to uncover that process changes over time from the originally defined one contributed the injection and leakage of the defect. It turned out the process owner and manager at the primary contractor side had a part of the responsibility for the defect leakage. The senior manager made this conclusion shared among team members and succeeded to avoid losing psychological safety. We conclude the CAST based on STAMP is useful in analyzing issues of software project management such as psychological safety.

Functional and Behavioral Representation of Product Information for Collaboration in Product Lifecycle

In this study, a functional and behavioral representation model for collaboration in product development is developed to represent assembly-related product knowledge, including its geometry, spatial relationships, function and behavior, which will be used to create a knowledge representation scheme to capture, store, and retrieve product knowledge. In this model, the function, behavior and artifact information is interrelated based on assembly associations. Functional and behavioral inputs and outputs are defined based on the spatial relationships in the assembly, as well as on the geometry of the product. The functional associations among artifacts define the “Behavior Model” with engineering formulas and physical rules. “Behavior Models” then define the behavior of the artifact. Behavior has four different forms for different phases in life cycle: (1) Intended Behavior in the conceptual design phase, (2) Estimated Behavior in the design phase, (3) Observed Behavior in the operation stage, and (4) Evaluated Behavior in the design and operation phases. When an unintended event (behavior) occurs, an additional function can be added to eliminate that effect. As a result, the functional and behavioral model is updated dynamically.