Dr Craig Ramsay
Teaching Assistant
Office: Ewing Building, Rm E2, 1st Floor
Email: cramsay@computing.dundee.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1382 388834
Fax: +44 (0)1382 385509 [FAO: Dr Craig Ramsay]
Write to:
Dr Craig Ramsay
School of Computing
University of Dundee
Dundee DD1 4HN
Scotland
Research Group: Intelligent Systems, Space technology centre
Research Themes: Computer-Based Interviewing
View publications authored/co-authored by Craig
PhD Research Project Summary:
Hi, I'm currently leading delivery of the following software engineering modules within the undergraduate Computing degree and the postgraduate MSc degree: AC31002 Object-oriented analysis and design; AC51003 Software Engineering. I'm also the Level 3 Tutor, one of the Careers Liaisons for the School of Computing and I also help out with one of the Research Frontiers modules in Level 4. If you are a Level 3 student and require support with anything, please let me know. If I can't help you myself I'll try to point you to someone who can.
My research interests are in software engineering, in particular improving the effectiveness of detailed design documentation for software systems which is the focus of my PhD. I'm investigating the design of a software tool which will deliver comprehensive, detailed design documentation for a software system in the form of flowcharts and pseudocode. Further, this documentation must be produced as a natural by-product of the development process, i.e. it requires minimal effort to create and maintain. It brings together some well known ideas in a novel way in order to address common documentation problems, specifically: documentation requires significant effort to create and maintain, it isn't produced in a timely manner, and it gets out of date with the code it corresponds to. I'm hoping that the tool will eliminate these documentation issues and also deliver important cost and quality benefits to software projects such as: improving the visibility of 'business' logic in code; assisting communication amongst team members; assisting review and quality assurance tasks. I'm also interested in the possible educational aspects of the tool, e.g. whether it helps people who are learning programming languages or algorithms.
We have launched a spin-out company from the School of Computing (Rapid Quality Systems Ltd) to commercialise the software tool which I have designed during my PhD. If you visit their website you will be able to download trial versions of the tool. I'd love to hear what you think of it!
For the software engineering modules we use the following Unified Modeling Language (UML) design tool: 'Visual Paradigm for UML'. I would like to acknowledge Visual Paradigm for providing us with an Academic License to use the tool.
Visual Paradigm offers University of Dundee VP-UML, BPVA for educational use through the VP Academic Partner Program.