Ethnography

Ethnography is the study of people and cultures, analysing the latter from the former's viewpoint, documenting the cultural development of a group.

Originally an area of anthropologist interests, it has also become popular in the social sciences, communication studies and history. Ethnography is relevant for the understanding of ethnic differences, compositions and materialism/spirituality among the observed populations. A holistic study, it usually includes history and terrain and climate features. Its purpose is to provide a basic understanding of the varied styles in human social life.

The field of anthropology originated from Europe in late 19th century, arriving in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. The founders of ethnography are considered to be EB Tylor (1832-1917) from Britain and Lewis H Morgan (1818-1881), from the us. Franz Boas (1858-1942), Bronislaw Malinowski (1858—1942), Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead (1901-1978), were researchers who contributed the idea of cultural relativism to the literature, focusing on the use of documents and informants, including experiencing life as one of them.

Function Point

A function point measures how business-worthy an information system component is to the end user. As a single unit, the cost of a function point is based on previous projects. Although there is no widely recognised method in the sizing result, there have been many approaches to bring it closer to a standardising convention

As of 2013, these are −

ISO Standards
COSMIC − ISO/IEC 19761:2011 Software engineering. A functional size measurement method.

FiSMA − ISO/IEC 29881:2008 Information technology - Software and systems engineering - FiSMA 1.1 functional size measurement method.

IFPUG − ISO/IEC 20926:2009 Software and systems engineering - Software measurement - IFPUG functional size measurement method.

Mark-II − ISO/IEC 20968:2002 Software engineering - Ml II Function Point Analysis - Counting Practices Manual.

NESMA − ISO/IEC 24570:2005 Software engineering - NESMA function size measurement method version 2.1 - Definitions and counting guidelines for the application of Function Point Analysis.


Object Management Group (OMG), an open membership and not-for-profit computer industry standards consortium, has adopted the Automated Function Point (AFP) specification led by the Consortium for IT Software Quality.

Function Point Analysis (FPA) technique quantifies the functions within software that are meaningful to the users. The functions are based on the requirements specification.

TCL commands

Transaction Control Language(TCL) commands manage transactions in database, usually the changes rbought about by DML statements (update, delete, insert).

Commit - used to permanently save any transaction into the database.

Rollback - undoes all changes, returning to the last committed stage. It can also be used in conjunction with the savepoint command when regression to an earlier state is desirable if savepoints were used rather than commit.

Savepoint - temporarily saves a transaction, thus allowing for a rollback operation to reverse back to this saved state. Savepoint is the only TCL command that needs to be named in order to be identified by a rollback operation.

The Weasel War Dance

In colloquial language, the weasel war dance is a set of moves done by a ferret to indicate playful behaviour. It consists of a frenzied series of hops sideways and backwards, often accompanied by an arched back, and a frizzed-out tail. Ferrets exhibit a pointed lack of spatial awareness when in this state,  often bumping into or falling over objects and furniture.  The dance includes a clucking vocalization, known as "dooking". 

Database Tuning

Database tuning is the process of fine tuning either the parameters of a database installation or the influencing properties of a db application in order to improve performance. It's often recommended with huge database systems due to the  complexity and amount of data to be handled.

Tuning is best done by highly specialised professionals even though it's a costly process with hardly noticeable results. A more cost-effective solution with similar effects can be achieved by hardware implementation. This restricts the need for tuning to a few areas, e.g.: high-end applications. Another option includes the optimisation of the data model by normalising its tables e.g.: using atomic fields and eliminating transitive dependencies.

critical path method (CPM)

The critical path method (CPM) is a progressive project management technique to separate critical and non-critical tasks in order to avoid bottlenecks and missed deadlines due to lack of priorisation. It's best suited for projects with a diverse range of activities in a way that enables their solving in an ordered manner. ideally, a flowchart is used for displaying how the tasks relate to each other (e.g.: how the output of an activity is the input of a subsequent process). It's also tops to determine beforehand the expected completion time for each task.

An activities model designed for project management, common elements of this model include time for the completion of each activity, the dependencies therein, milestones and deliverables. It makes use of the presentation capabilities of an operation flowchart, the outcomes pictured as knots while the accompanying relationships are represented by arrows. For this model to make sense, all individual project operations should be plotted with their respective durations.
Using the dynamics of the operation-duration relationships, CPM calculates the longest path of planned activities to logical end points or to the end of the project, and the earliest and latest that each activity can start and finish without delaying the whole project, as a means of providing a safe margin for work within a given deadline. This procedure distinguishes activities between "critical" and which have "total float", meaning, allowed some delay without compromising the project overall. This network of activities and their matching duration defines the shortest possible time to carry a project through to completion, with total float being unused time within the critical path.

Object-oriented analysis

Object–Oriented Analysis means gathering software requirements according and identifying the elements of the problem domain. The requirements and domain problem are created with an object model in mind, which ultimately guides the whole process through to completion.

Although the object-oriented approach started as a programming methodology since 1960 with Simula, it wasn't until later that this became a major software design paradigm with Xerox Park and an published article by Grady Booch in 1980 that emphasised the features of an object-oriented mindset for software developers.
Codd eventually expanded upon this study to create what is known today as object-oriented methods.


In object-oriented approach, requirements are based on objects that the system interacts with. Grady Booch has defined OOA as a method for identifying requirements from the perspective of the classes and objects found in the vocabulary of the problem domain.

The primary tasks in object-oriented analysis are:

-Identifying objects;
-Organising them through some standard model diagram;
-Defining their attributes and methods;
-describing they interact with user, external agents and each other

In OOD, concepts in the analysis model are technology−independent so they can modelled into classes, constraints and interfaces to provide a suitable solution to the domain problem. The implementation includes restructuring of the class its associations.
Grady Booch has defined object-oriented design as "a method of design encompassing the process of object-oriented decomposition and a notation for depicting both logical and physical as well as static and dynamic models of the system under design".
Object-oriented programming uses these advantages to achieve great gains suc has modularity and reusability.

According to Grady Booch "object–oriented programming is a method of implementation in which programs are organized as cooperative collections of objects, each of which represents an instance of some class, and whose classes are all members of a hierarchy of classes united via inheritance relationships".