System Integration

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Q-Methodology Survey Home Page

The reason I am doing a Q-Methodology survey is it is part of my dissertation for an MSc with the U.K. Open University (O.U.). 

The O.U. is an institution that allows people to study in their own time.  It is geared towards people who, for whatever reason, did not attend university during their younger years.

In recent years it has expanded its courses to include post-graduate courses that allow people to study whilst working.

I am currently working full time whilst completing my studies, the final year is a dissertation, the Q-Methodology is part of this dissertation.

The reason I chose the Q-Methodology for my survey is that it is suited to analysis of the influences on System Integration (S.I.) and functional partitioning of a system.  My initial survey of the influences found that many were non-technical, for instance lack of communication, unstable requirements and what test equipment was available from previous projects.  The technical factors did influence S.I. and partitioning but they were not dominant.

I also found different people, and different groups of people, had different opinions on the influences.

Q-Methodology is geared towards the subjective, the analysis of peoples personal opinions and to clustering these opinions via factor analysis.

At the moment there is very little public domain research into what affects S.I.  Two institutions that are carrying out research is the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in the USA and the Center for Systems and Software Engineering.

The data from my survey will be placed in the public domain, this will, hopefully, assist, in some small way, future studies.

This link takes you to the survey results page.