“One, none, and a hundred thousand” recipes for a robust response to turbulence

Turbulence appears to be a “new normal” in current societies, and public organizations need to learn how to react and adapt to it. Scholars agree on the need for robust actions to respond to turbulence. Through a qualitative comparative analysis performed on the vaccination campaigns of all 20 Italian regions, our paper explores whether different and alternative models of robustness may exist to cope with turbulence. Results shed light on three alternative models featuring static, hybrid, and dynamic robustness. They also highlight that robust governance appears to involve a capacity to learn, and to employ this learning as circumstances demand

Walking Through the Method Zoo: Does Higher Education Really Meet Software Industry Demands?

Software engineering educators are continually challenged by rapidly evolving concepts, technologies, and industry demands. Due to the omnipresence of software in a digitalized society, higher education institutions (HEIs) have to educate the students such that they learn how to learn, and that they are equipped with a profound basic knowledge and with latest knowledge about modern software and system development. Since industry demands change constantly, HEIs are challenged in meeting such current and future demands in a timely manner. This paper analyzes the current state of practice in software engineering education. Specifically, we want to compare contemporary education with industrial practice to understand if frameworks, methods and practices for software and system development taught at HEIs reflect industrial practice. For this, we conducted an online survey and collected information about 67 software engineering courses. Our findings show that development approaches taught at HEIs quite closely reflect industrial practice. We also found that the choice of what process to teach is sometimes driven by the wish to make a course successful. Especially when this happens for project courses, it could be beneficial to put more emphasis on building learning sequences with other courses

Symbolic interactionism and the cell information board: challenging the wisdom of systems

Claudio Ciborra in “The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems” argues that the position of information and communications technology (ICT) in organizations requires a shift from the present focus on the “scientific paradigm” to an “alternative centre of gravity: human existence in everyday life”. This paper takes up Ciborra’s challenge by examining the focal point of social interaction during a longitudinal study of engaged scholarship in an Irish multinational subsidiary. During this study there was a gradual realization that the main locus of interaction was the cell information board. It was here that people gathered to assimilate digital information sources and transform these into “acts” including workpractice improvements. The paper seeks to answer the following question: how does symbolic interactionism enable the conceptualization of an information system as a sign-action system? The work makes a contribution by examining a supply chain information system as a form of symbolic action. The study challenges us to view information systems as not primarily being the IT artifact but pertaining first and foremost to human activity as its very core

Recovering Grammar Relationships for the Java Language Specification

Grammar convergence is a method that helps discovering relationships between different grammars of the same language or different language versions. The key element of the method is the operational, transformation-based representation of those relationships. Given input grammars for convergence, they are transformed until they are structurally equal. The transformations are composed from primitive operators; properties of these operators and the composed chains provide quantitative and qualitative insight into the relationships between the grammars at hand. We describe a refined method for grammar convergence, and we use it in a major study, where we recover the relationships between all the grammars that occur in the different versions of the Java Language Specification (JLS). The relationships are represented as grammar transformation chains that capture all accidental or intended differences between the JLS grammars. This method is mechanized and driven by nominal and structural differences between pairs of grammars that are subject to asymmetric, binary convergence steps. We present the underlying operator suite for grammar transformation in detail, and we illustrate the suite with many examples of transformations on the JLS grammars. We also describe the extraction effort, which was needed to make the JLS grammars amenable to automated processing. We include substantial metadata about the convergence process for the JLS so that the effort becomes reproducible and transparent

Conceptualizing the Effect of Cultural Distance on IT Outsourcing Success

The relationship quality between client and vendor organizations is one of the most significant influence factors for IT outsourcing success. In this context, the degree of dissimilarity between cultural values of two or more organizations (“cultural distance”) can represent a considerable challenge for establishing and maintaining good-quality relationships. Still, research on cultural distance and its effects is scarce. This paper seeks to address this gap. Building on extant theory on culture and IT outsourcing, we develop a research model which we are currently evaluating. This is done by means of an exploratory, qualitative research design based on an in-depth single case study that analyzes three outsourcing configurations of a leading European media company. Their diversity allows for a detailed examination of cultural distance on the national, organizational, and team level. Given its highly relevant characteristics, we expect our research to yield valuable contributions for both theory and practice

Architecture evaluation in continuous development

Context: In automotive, stage-gate processes have previously been the norm, with architecture created mainly during an early phase and then used to guide subsequent development phases. Current iterative and Agile development methods, where the implementation evolves continuously, changes the role of architecture. Objective: We investigate how architecture evaluation can provide useful feedback during development of continuously evolving systems. Method: Starting from the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM), we performed architecture evaluation, both in a national research project led by an automotive Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), and at the OEM, in the context of continuous development. This allows us to include the experience of several architects from different organizations over several years. Using data produced during the evaluations we perform a post-hoc analysis to derive initial findings. We then validate and refine these findings through a series of focus groups with architects and industry experts. Findings: We propose principles of continuous evaluation and evolution of architecture, and based on these discuss a roadmap for future research. Conclusion: In iterative development settings, the needs are different from what typical architecture evaluation methods provide. Our principles show the importance of dedicated feedback-loops for continuous evolution of systems and their architecture

An Agile V-Model for Medical Device Software Development to Overcome the Challenges with Plan Driven SDLCs

Through the use of semi structured interviews with medical device software organizations it emerged that medical device software organizations are experiencing difficulties when following plan driven Software Development Life Cycles (SDLC), particularly in the area of requirements management. To attempt to resolve these issues an examination of the non-regulated industry was performed to determine if lessons learned there could be applied to the development of medical device software. This examination revealed that agile methods are being widely adopted in the non-regulated software industry. To learn if agile methods could be adopted when developing medical device software a mapping study was performed which looked for instances of where agile methods have been used in regulated industries and where they have been adopted, to what success. This mapping study revealed that incorporating agile practices with the existing plan driven SDLC is the most favourable choice for medical device software organizations. This research aims to develop a SDLC which has a foundation of a plan driven SDLC which incorporates agile practices which can be followed when developing regulatory compliant software

Assessing the Impact of Empirical Process Control Metrics in Agile Software Development - A Framework based on Improvement Capability

Empirical process control is an integral part of agile software development. A multitude of development metrics has been proposed to implement it. However, the efficacy of control metrics has remained unclear and empirical evidence of their impact is scarce. Methods for assessing whether and how a proposed metric stimulates the improvement of a development process are not yet available. We conduct a design science approach to develop an artifact that assesses the impact of development metrics and we identify their contribution for process improvement at a global software vendor. We draw on the theoretical construct of improvement capability to outline design principles of a measurement framework. Our evaluation of five large-scale agile development projects demonstrates that our framework facilitates to implement development metrics more effectively. The framework has the potential to improve large-scale agile software development and it serves as a useful basis for future empirical research on development metrics