Frame: the problem and its names
Step 1 of the review on the method of a project, read on 2026-11-02. It states the problem, gives the field's names beside the repository's, and turns the front page's four questions into sub-questions.
Shape: frame
The problem in one sentence
How one person goes from a stated problem to a checked result with the fewest wasted round trips, and leaves a trail another person can resume.
Names
One row per term. Every file of this folder uses these names.
| Term | What the field means by it | Where met |
|---|---|---|
| design science research (DSR) | research that builds an artifact to solve a stated problem and evaluates it | Hevner 2004; Peffers 2006 |
| DSR process | six activities: problem identification, objectives, design and development, demonstration, evaluation, communication | Peffers 2006 |
| objectives of a solution | what a good solution would do better than the current ones, quantitative or qualitative | Peffers 2006, activity 2 |
| entry point | the activity a project starts from; the model is nominally sequential, not required to be | Peffers 2006 |
| literature review (research methods) | a written search and synthesis of prior work, done before the work it informs | Webster 2002; Booth 2016 |
| evidence-based research | the call that no new study begins without a systematic review of the existing ones | Lund 2016 |
| research waste | effort lost to avoidable flaws in questions, design, conduct and reporting | Chalmers 2009; Macleod 2014 |
| rework | effort spent redoing work; avoidable rework could have been found earlier or avoided | Boehm 2001; Fairley 2005 |
| delayed-issue effect | the claim that a defect costs more the later it is found | Boehm 2001; Menzies 2017 |
| heuristic | a rule of thumb for solving a problem, such as drawing a figure or working backwards | Polya 1945; Schoenfeld 1985 |
| personal software process (PSP) | a method of planning, logging and reviewing one's own work as an engineer | Prechelt 2001b; Hayes 1997 |
| reproducible research | a project kept so that someone else can redo and follow it from its files | Noble 2009; Sandve 2013 |
| project organization | the folders, README, notebook and change log of one project | Noble 2009; Wilson 2017 |
| resumption | going back to a task after an interruption; its cost is the time to rebuild the goal | Altmann 2002; Parnin 2010 |
| definition of done | a stated quality standard that work must meet to count | Schwaber 2020 |
| shaping | making an idea concrete enough to bet on before building | Singer 2019 |
| business success criteria | the measure, set in the first phase, by which the result is judged | Chapman 2000 |
The field's name against the repository's
- No single field owns the problem. Each part has its own name.
- The steps from problem to evaluated result are the DSR process in research, and the project phases in practice (CRISP-DM, Scrum).
- The review before building is evidence-based research and research waste in medicine; the repository calls it the literature review.
- The trail is project organization and reproducible research.
- The repository's word project matches Noble 2009 and Wilson 2017, who write "project" for one person's work. It differs from project management, whose frameworks address teams and organizations.
- Decision: the name stays. Record 0002 gives the reason. The review does not rename the repository.
- One word needs care. In this family, baseline is the method a result is compared with. In project management practice it often means an approved plan. This pass did not check that in a source.
Sub-questions
| Front-page question | Sub-questions of this review |
|---|---|
| Round trips | Q1a: which steps written first are measured to cut rework? Q1b: what causes rework? Q1c: what do the process models and frameworks prescribe before building? |
| Topics | Q2: does writing a plan or scope as a structured text change the outcome? |
| The trail | Q3: what do practice guides leave behind, and what is measured about resuming? |
| The boundary | Q4: where do the process models stop and the document genres begin? |
Not held here
- The outline and the shallow hierarchy are reviewed in reader-ergonomics, as overview first and shallow outline. This review links them.
- The decision record belongs to reader-ergonomics-software-design.