An automated software team formation based Belbin team role using fuzzy technique

In software engineering (SE), team plays an important role in determining the project success. To ensure the optimal outcome of the project the team is working on, it is essential to ensure that the team comprises of the members with right characteristics. In a team assigning the right role to each team member in order to make certain that the most appropriate individuals are chosen for specific tasks and their efforts contribute maximum to the overall team performance. One of the prevalent team roles is Belbin team role. Belbin developed this theory for formation a successful team. This theory is centered on the team roles and how they should be matched in order to avoid conflicts and build sound teams that are optimally managed. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to develop an automated software team formation method based on Belbin Team Role by using a Fuzzy technique. Fuzzy technique was chosen because it allows analyzing of imprecise data and classifying selected criteria. In this study, two roles in Belbin Team role, which are Shaper (Sh) and Plant (Pl) were chosen to assign the specific role in software team – team leader and programmer, respectively. These roles were chosen because the combination of these roles is able to determine effective team members in SE team. The proposed automated software team formation was then evaluated using an expert review. The participants consist of 12 software developers from Asiacell Telecommunication Company in Kurdistan Region Government of Iraq (KRG). The results demonstrate that the method is useful to be used for forming SE team in industrial setting. The proposed automated software team formation can serve as a useful tool for managers when assigning new team members to a software project. In addition, by using the proposed method, it can help decision makers specifically managers to form effective and equal teams. Effective and equal teams can have an equal chance to experience good team work and thus, to be a successful team

Team formation model of selecting team leader: An analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach

Teamwork is important element to enhance learning experiences.In order to build effective teamwork, team formation is a critical process to ensure that team consists of effective team members. In a team, leadership is the most significant role which contributes to the success of a software project.However, extant literature demonstrated that criteria which suits into team members specifically for leadership role is inconclusive. Therefore, this study aims to construct a software team formation model for selecting team leader by using AHP approach. AHP is chosen because it is able to achieve high accuracy and robustness in dealing with selection process.To evaluate the model, experimental research design was employed and the sample comprised of 24 students enrolled in Information Technology (IT) course from Universiti Utara Malaysia.The initial results showed that the team using AHP to select team leader experienced significantly higher level of satisfaction compared to team with self-selection team leader.The proposed model provides a mechanism for decision maker to form and select team leader in a group work project, and thus can enhance team performance

Hard-Real-Time Computing Performance in a Cloud Environment

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) is rapidly working with DoD Services to move from multi-year (e.g., 7-10) traditional acquisition programs to a commercial industrybased approach for software development. While commercial technologies and approaches provide an opportunity for rapid fielding of mission capabilities to pace threats, the suitability of commercial technologies to meet hard-real-time requirements within a surface combat system is unclear. This research establishes technical data to validate the effectiveness and suitability of current commercial technologies to meet the hard-real-time demands of a DoD combat management system. (Moreland Jr., 2013) conducted similar research; however, microservices, containers, and container orchestration technologies were not on the DoD radar at the time. Updated knowledge in this area will inform future DoD roadmaps and investments. A mission-based approach using Mission Engineering will be used to set the context for applied research. A hypothetical yet operationally relevant Strait Transit scenario has been established to provide context for definition of experimental parameters to be set while assessing the hypothesis. System models federated to form a system-of-systems architecture and data from a cloud computing environment are used to collect data for quantitative analysis

Use of Technological Tools for Supporting Interpersonal Trust: From Modelling to Fostering Trust Through Design

Trust is a core construct of our social lives, influencing how we interact with other individuals that are part of our social circle. Whether at work, in teams, or with friends and family, trust influences how much information we exchange with the other individuals and how we interact as a dyad. Defined as risk acceptance behaviour in situations where there is dependency between the parties, trusting another person means accepting some risks to benefit from the social integration of tasks and knowledge. In an institutional environment, trust is a core component of teamwork dynamics, having a strong influence on team effectiveness and performance. Teams are the backbone of current industry, research, healthcare, and business domains. Teams have the power to increase the momentum of projects and tasks, and may also benefit from the collective body of knowledge brought by experts from different fields. Teamwork also brings new constraints to the interpersonal dynamic; for instance, a lack of interpersonal trust can deeply impact the performance and effectiveness of a team. Without trust, communication and interaction between team members can be significantly impaired, limiting the ability of a team to perform and to become effective. As teams move to non-collocated work, the development of trust is restricted by the limited media richness of communication channels. The perceptual mechanisms that compose the major part of the trust development process become constrained, as behavioural cues are not readily available through Computer Mediated Communication Systems (CMCSs). For this reason, virtual teams can suffer from low, fragile, and delayed trust, impairing team effectiveness and performance. Given the increasing prevalence of non-collocated teams, there is a need for the development of a toolset for understanding, measuring, and fostering trust in distributed teamwork environments. The existing literature provides only a partial understanding of the trust formation process and does not encompass a detailed description of the perceptual mechanisms that would help explain trust formation and allow the design of interventions tailored at targeting trust. I started by developing a model that explains trust formation and the perceptual mechanisms involved in this process, in which I also incorporate the distinction between intuitive trust and calculative confidence. The Human Factors Interpersonal Trust State Formation Model developed in this thesis helps explain the situational variability of interpersonal trust, a very important characteristic to consider when using the knowledge about trust formation to inform design. This model explains how researchers and practitioners can develop designs and interventions to foster trust based on increasing the perception of trust-building cues. Similarly, good trust metrics must capture both a measurement of trust between two people and provide information about how each trust cue influences the formation of the trust state. With the intent of incorporating situational sensitivity to a trust metric, I designed the Quick Trust Assessment Scale (QTAS), based on the NASA-TLX structure, using a combination of direct rating of subjective subscales of trust, with a pairwise comparison of each pair of subscales. I evaluated the QTAS using Crombach’s Alpha and Factor Analysis. The results showed high internal validity and identified one component for extraction from the metric, since this component focused on measuring a construct outside the interest of the QTAS. The QTAS is the first trust metric to be developed that includes a component to measure the situational variability of trust. The next component of this thesis focuses on identifying and testing ways to foster trust in a specific other through electronic communication. To achieve this objective, I initially conducted an ethnographic study to identify how team members foster trust in face-to-face collaborations and which trust cues are most often exchanged. In this study, I identified the effect of a third party on fostering trust (liaison) and five behaviours, or trust building cues, that were most used: recommendation, validation, expertise, social network, and benevolence/willingness to help. These five behaviours were later converted into interface design objects (trust tokens), in the form of badges, to be used in CMCSs and social network environments, acting as surrogates for the missing trust cues. The trust tokens were tested on simulated social network interfaces to identify the effects of multiple latent factors. Results showed that the use of the trust tokens is independent of gender, age, education level, and personality type. However, use was dependent on the type of risk the participants were facing and their cultural background. Although trust tokens are effective in fostering trust behaviour, there was not a unified solution for every type of situation. In order to further validate the situational dependence of trust decisions, I have evaluated two major variables of interest. Through experimental manipulation, I demonstrated the influence of (1) situational risk and (2) cultural background on the use of trust cues. These findings are of relevance for the design of systems that support the development of interpersonal trust as they raise the awareness of the highly variable nature of trust. In order for designers, researchers, and practitioners to successfully influence trust behaviour in teamwork environments, they need to include interpersonal trust as a variable of interest in the design requirements of systems that support teamwork, as well as carefully consider the impact of their interventions, as their interventions will influence variably, depending on the situation and target population. Ultimately, this research program demonstrates the importance of including interpersonal trust as a variable of interest in and as a requirement for the design of systems that support teamwork and collaboration

Partner selection mechanisms for agent cooperation

In a multi-agent system, a single agent may not be capable of completing complex tasks. Therefore agents are required to form a team to fulfill the task requirements. In this paper an agent model is introduced that facilitates cooperation among agents. A multi-threaded multi-agent simulation framework is designed to test the model. The experimental results demonstrate that the model is significantly useful in achieving cooperation under various environmental constraints. It also allows agents to adjust their teammate selection strategies according to environmental constraints.Unpublished[1] Tesser, A. and Shaffer, D., Attitudes and Attitude Change. Annual Review of Psychology, 1990. 41(1): p. 479-523. [2] Airiau, P., Sen, S. and Dasgupta, P., Effect of joining decisions on peer clusters, in Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and Multiagent systems. 2006, ACM: Hakodate, Japan. p. 609-615. [3] Dutta, P.S., Moreau, L. and Jennings, N.R. Finding interaction partners using cognition-based decision strategies. in Proceedings of the IJCAI-2003 workshop on Cognitive Modeling of Agents and Multi-Agent Interactions. 2003. [4] Sen, S., Gursel, A. and Airiau, S. Learning to identify beneficial partners. in the Proceedings of the Workshop on Adaptive and Learning Agents at the 6th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. 2007. USA. [5] Ahn, J., DeAngelis, D. and Barber, S. Attitude Driven Team Formation using Multi-Dimensional Trust. in IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT'07). 2007. [6] Dutta, P.S. and Sen, S., Forming stable partnerships. Cognitive Systems Research, 2003. 4(3): p. 211-221. [7] Banaei-Kashani, F. and Shahabi, C. Criticality-based analysis and design of unstructured peer-to-peer networks as" Complex systems. in Cluster Computing and the Grid, 2003. Proceedings. CCGrid 2003. 3rd IEEE/ACM International Symposium on. 2003