FAST NUCES, LAHORE

Assignment#2

Department:
Computer Science

TOPIC:
Problem-Solving

SUBMITTED BY:
Ali Idrees
19L-1141

SUBMITTED TO: Ms. Raheela Tariq

(Psychology-6A)
Problem solving is the way of attaining a goal when the goal is not
readily available. There are multiple methodologies for problem solving:
“IDEAL” is one of them which was provided by Barry Stern and John
Bransford. Which involves:
I = Identify the problem
D = Define the problem
E = Explore multiple options to the solution
A = Act on your decided pathway
L = Look-back on your results and see what could have been done
better

On the other side, there are multiple reasons for failing in problem
solving, one of the prominent reasons are:
1. Functional Fixedness
2. Using Previous Strategies
This case study is all related to the above-mentioned topics:

Case-Study:

Nano-Tech is a Game-Development company. They get hired by

American companies and they receive multiple projects in terms of
building up new ideas and projects. Recently they have been provided
with a new project that involves innovative ideas moreover a lot of
problem solving and new bug errors. This Project was only for 2 months
but it's been four months since they have been on this specific project
Sean being the head of this company has tried multiple phases of
solving these errors and problems. The head of quality assurance
Nadine is under a huge stress as he has tried all the previous algorithms
and has tried multiple new heuristic approaches to solving this project
but they have never been on this specific problem.
One of their own employees named Amna comes in and tries to
volunteer to solve this problem using his new ideas and new
terminologies. She first of all identifies the problems, that the bug errors
are due to the logical problems and there are multiple logical problems
that are being considered in this very specific program that they have
been building for a very long time She then opens up a board meeting
and invites all the developers to her meeting in this board board meeting
She tells her colleagues and asked all the developers to convey what
the problems they have been facing, and they develop one specific draft
that includes all the problems that they have gone through in the
previous four months and now one step has been done by Amna that
she has analysed all the problems.
Once the problems being done Amna thinks that she can't even solve all
the problems altogether because there is more chance of having future
problems in the code so she gives the freedom to the developers to have
solutions by their side .Now in the second round of board meetings he
listens to every solution by his developers and allows them to have the
freedom to solve the problems by their sides and explore every single
option.
After the second board meeting Amna had concluded his decisions and
explored everything that she could have done by his side so after this
she decided to have a third board meeting. In which she included every
management and every development staff. And out of every effective
procedure they have been through. Amna decided to take up with the
most appropriate solution to the problems and the team agreed upon the
most effective solution and they all went through they all applied that
specific algorithm to the problems they had and it took a few weeks to
conclude these all board meetings and it took only one week to include
all these bug errors and logical errors altogether.
After that specific last week of solving the problems they concluded
everything up submitted project and had a very good meeting and after
that specific meeting Amna decides to throw up her last board meeting
even though the team was surprised to have this last specific board
meeting but Amna surprised her team by saying that the ideas in the
problem solving is not yet done until the analysis is done on the
results/process. So in her last board meeting she asked everyone to
throw out what specifically could have done more better in terms of
achieving the goal better so they documented this last board meeting in
terms of a specific conclusion of their 4 to 6 month project.
Questions:

Q1. Which employee has used the IDEAL method of problem-solving?

Q2. When do you think the team is Identifying and defining their
problems?

Q3. Did Amna and her team members explore all possible solutions,
explain your answer?

Q4. Why did the company have a board meeting after project
submission?

Q5. Why do you think Nadine and his ideas failed to solve the problems?
Give proper supporting details.
Ans#1: Amna has used the IDEAL method to reach towards her goals
and solve-the problems. As she first analyses the root cause towards the
bug errors, asks the team to define all problems, then lets every-one
explore their solutions. Hits the best solution and then looks back at the
results.

Ans#2: In their first phase of board meetings every team member

analysed the problems and defined their perspective in the meeting to
Amna.

Ans#3: Amna gave the freedom to explore every possible solution and
encouraged individual involvement. Which helped explore every path
possible to the goal. Every Developer had its own method to solve the
bug-error. The best possible was then chosen, that had the higher
percentage of success.

Ans#4: The last meeting was conducted in-order to analyse previous

mistakes and learn from them in order to avoid such in future and grow
more in terms of solving problems.

Ans#5: Nadine’s approach included functional fixedness as he

considered every bug-error into the same category, moreover he used
previous algorithms(which were successful) to solve the problem. Using
a Heuristic approach which does not guarantee a solution towards the
problem was also a factor.