A Case Study on Effectively Identifying Technical Debt

Context: The technical debt (TD) concept describes a tradeoff between short-term and long-term goals in software development. While it is highly useful as a metaphor, it has utility beyond the facilitation of discussion, to inspire a useful set of methods and tools that support the identification, measurement, monitoring, management, and payment of TD. Objective: This study focuses on the identification of TD. We evaluate human elicitation of TD and compare it to automated identification. Method: We asked a development team to identify TD items in artifacts from a software project on which they were working. We provided the participants with a TD template and a short questionnaire. In addition, we also collected the output of three tools to automatically identify TD and compared it to the results of human elicitation. Results: There is little overlap between the TD reported by different developers, so aggregation, rather than consensus, is an appropriate way to combine TD reported by multiple developers. The tools used are especially useful for identifying defect debt but cannot help in identifying many other types of debt, so involving humans in the identification process is necessary. Conclusion: We have conducted a case study that focuses on the practical identification of TD, one area that could be facilitated by tools and techniques. It contributes to the TD landscape, which depicts an understanding of relationships between different types of debt and how they are best discovered

Building Community Assets: Growing Lower-Income Credit Union Membership through Community and Credit Union Partnerships

This report details the partnership process and lessons learned from a two-year technical assistance program designed to help community organizations partner with mainstream credit unions with the goal of enrolling new lower-income members or expanding an existing partnership. The case studies describing these partnerships identify four strategic areas through which partnerships can be strengthened and the common barriers to developing a successful partnership can be overcome

A Marxian Model of Market for Money Capital: Profit Rate, Interest Rate, and Leverage Ratio

In this paper, I develop a Marxian model of market for money capital populated by capitalists equipped with equal money capital endowment but with heterogeneous linear production technology. Due to a maximization of return on equity, capitalists with relatively weak technology, yielding profit rate lower than interest rate, become a money capitalist (lender) and capitalists with relatively strong technology, yielding profit rate greater than interest rate, become an industrial capitalist (borrower). The equilibrium interest rate is derived by the associated demand and supply relation. In this context, Marx’s notion of the role of credit system in an expanded reproduction of capital is understood in terms of an efficient reallocation of funds through credit market. From this setup of the model follow two essential relationships Marx establishes between the average profit rate and the interest rate: (i) that the profit (rate) sets a maximum limit of interest (rate), and (ii) that the two rates are correlated. Lastly, depending on the financial sector’s leverage ratio, which is supported by its intermediation technology, the financial sector may be more or less profitable than the industrial sector. This result suggests that one aspect of the industrial-banking capitalists antagonism surrounding the division of profit into interest and profit of enterprise lies in the banking capitalists’ strenuous efforts towards continuous innovations in financial intermediation technology

A Global Alliance Against Forced Labour: Report I (B)

Explains how the concept of forced labor is defined in international law and discusses some parameters for identifying contemporary forced labor situations in practice. Provides the first minimum global estimate of the numbers of people in forced labor by an international organization, broken down by geographical region and by form of forced labor. Gives a global picture of contemporary patterns of forced labor, and of action to eradicate it. Reviews the ILO’s assistance to member States for the eradication of forced labor, in view of the creation of a Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour. Lastly, it makes recommendations for future action

The Knowledge Application and Utilization Framework Applied to Defense COTS: A Research Synthesis for Outsourced Innovation

Purpose -- Militaries of developing nations face increasing budget pressures, high operations tempo, a blitzing pace of technology, and adversaries that often meet or beat government capabilities using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies. The adoption of COTS products into defense acquisitions has been offered to help meet these challenges by essentially outsourcing new product development and innovation. This research summarizes extant research to develop a framework for managing the innovative and knowledge flows. Design/Methodology/Approach – A literature review of 62 sources was conducted with the objectives of identifying antecedents (barriers and facilitators) and consequences of COTS adoption. Findings – The DoD COTS literature predominantly consists of industry case studies, and there’s a strong need for further academically rigorous study. Extant rigorous research implicates the importance of the role of knowledge management to government innovative thinking that relies heavily on commercial suppliers. Research Limitations/Implications – Extant academically rigorous studies tend to depend on measures derived from work in information systems research, relying on user satisfaction as the outcome. Our findings indicate that user satisfaction has no relationship to COTS success; technically complex governmental purchases may be too distant from users or may have socio-economic goals that supersede user satisfaction. The knowledge acquisition and utilization framework worked well to explain the innovative process in COTS. Practical Implications – Where past research in the commercial context found technological knowledge to outweigh market knowledge in terms of importance, our research found the opposite. Managers either in government or marketing to government should be aware of the importance of market knowledge for defense COTS innovation, especially for commercial companies that work as system integrators. Originality/Value – From the literature emerged a framework of COTS product usage and a scale to measure COTS product appropriateness that should help to guide COTS product adoption decisions and to help manage COTS product implementations ex post

Aligning Capital With Mission: Lessons from the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Social Investment Program

The Annie E. Casey Foundation engaged InSight at Pacific Community Ventures to conduct the first comprehensive third-party evaluation of the SI Program, with research support from the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. The evaluation focused on the social impact of the SI Program and its impact measurement practices, and had the following objectives: ? Provide a comprehensive review of the social impact that has been achieved to date through the SI Program. ? Assess the systems and processes used by the SI Program to measure and report on its impact, identifying the SI Program's strengths in impact measurement and areas for improvement. ? Surface evidence-based findings and lessons that can assist the Foundation and other investors in rigorously examining and enhancing the social impact of their investments, in order to support the continued development of the impact investing field