EXPLAINING SOFTWARE PROJECT RISKS IN AGILE TEAMS: AN ACTION CASE USING CAUSAL MAPPING

Agile teams must deal with many risks to their software project’s resources and schedule. This challenge is exacerbated in large-scale agile development by the increasingly specialized team roles with inherently different explanations of the software project’s risks. Against this backdrop, we report an action case study of how an agile team can understand and manage different explanations of their project risks. We used the causal mapping technique to understand how a team’s six different roles explain their software project risks and assessed these maps’ usefulness with the team. From this action case study, we present two findings. First, causal mapping is useful for revealing role-specific explanations of software project risks in agile teams. Second, agile teams can use role-specific causal maps to juxtapose their explanations of software project risks. We discuss how these findings imply a caveat for agile teams seeking to understand and manage team-generalized software project risks and ignoring idiosyncratic explanations of software project risks

From Dataflow Specification to Multiprocessor Partitioned Time-triggered Real-time Implementation *

International audienceOur objective is to facilitate the development of complex time-triggered systems by automating the allocation and scheduling steps. We show that full automation is possible while taking into account the elements of complexity needed by a complex embedded control system. More precisely, we consider deterministic functional specifications provided (as often in an industrial setting) by means of synchronous data-flow models with multiple modes and multiple relative periods. We first extend this functional model with an original real-time characterization that takes advantage of our time-triggered framework to provide a simpler representation of complex end-to-end flow requirements. We also extend our specifications with additional non-functional properties specifying partitioning, allocation , and preemptability constraints. Then, weprovide novel algorithms for the off-line scheduling of these extended specifications onto partitioned time-triggered architectures à la ARINC 653. The main originality of our work is that it takes into account at the same time multiple complexity elements: various types of non-functional properties (real-time, partitioning, allocation, preemptability) and functional specifications with conditional execution and multiple modes. Allocation of time slots/windows to partitions can be fullyor partially provided, or synthesized by our tool. Our algorithms allow the automatic allocation and scheduling onto multi-processor (distributed) sys-tems with a global time base, taking into account communication costs. We demonstrate our technique on a model of space flight software systemwith strong real-time determinism requirements

The application of system thinking in project management

Mestrado em Gestão e Estratégia IndustrialO crescente nível de complexidade nas organizações apresenta desafios significativos para a Gestão de Projetos exigindo metodologias mais sofisticadas e ricas para tratar dos problemas de forma eficiente. A abordagem holística proposta pelo Pensamento Sistémico tem sido identificada como um caminho possível para gestores no contexto de grandes organizações e/ou problemas complexos. Consequentemente, é percetível um aumento no volume de literatura focado na aplicação de Pensamento Sistémico à área de Gestão de Projeto. O presente estudo visa contribuir para o crescimento do volume de literatura académica através da aplicação de metodologias de Pensamento Sistémico a uma situação real do ponto de vista de um gestor de projeto. Este estudo de caso está focado num projeto de desenvolvimento de TI concluído numa organização multinacional, que enfrentou problemas de execução. A aplicação de metodologias de Pensamento Sistémico permitiu uma melhor avaliação de riscos do projeto e uma compreensão concisa da raiz dos problemas que causam problemas de execução.The increasing level of complexity in organisations poses significant challenges for Project Management, demanding more sophisticated and rich methodologies that address issues efficiently. The holistic approach proposed by System Thinking field has been identified as a possible path for managers in the context of large organisations and/or complex problems. Hence, it is noticeable a growing body of literature focused in the application of System Thinking to the field of Project Management. The present study aims to contribute to this growing body of literature through the application of System Thinking methodologies to a real situation from the point of view of the Project Manager. This case study is focused on a completed project related with IT development in a large multinational organisation, that faced execution problems. The application of System Thinking methodologies allowed for better risk assessment in the project and for a concise understanding of the root problems causing execution problems. From the point of view of the Project Manager, this holistic approach enabled a more efficient analysis of the problem and the incentives at stake within the system as well for a better decision making than the traditional methodologies.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Modeling of Reconfigurable Medical Ultrasonic Applications in BIP

Medical ultrasonic imaging applications require high quality of images produced in real-time often with limited resources available. Deadlock-freedom and confluency must be guaranteed to ensure the correctness of the applications, while feasibility and optimality properties are required to provide the best Quality of Service (QoS) within available resources. In this paper we introduce BIP (Behavior-Interaction-Priority) framework components as main building blocks to model such applications in a correct-by-construction manner. Based on those components we model a reconfigurable multi-mode processing pipeline for ultrasonic imaging that supports QoS management by topology reconfiguration. Finally, as a proof of concept, we present a simple quality controller as a well-triggered component, which when combined with the processing pipeline can manipulate the quality of image processing

Service selection with qos correlations in distributed service-based systems

© 2013 IEEE. Service selection is an important research problem in distributed service-based systems, which aims to select proper services to meet user requirements. A number of service selection approaches have been proposed in recent years. Most of them, however, overlook quality-of-service (QoS) correlations, which broadly exist in distributed service-based systems. The concept of QoS correlations involves two aspects: 1) QoS correlations among services and 2) QoS correlations of user requirements. The first aspect means that some QoS attributes of service not only depend on the service itself but also have correlations with other services, e.g., buying service 1 and then getting service 2 with half price. The second aspect means the relationships among QoS attributes of user requirements, e.g., a user can accept a service with fast response time and high service cost or the user can also accept a service with slow response time and low service cost (Fig. 1). These correlations significantly affect user selection of services. Currently, only a few existing approaches have considered QoS correlations among services, i.e., the first aspect, but they still overlook QoS correlations of user requirements, i.e., the second aspect, which are also very important in distributed service-based systems. In this paper, a novel service selection approach is proposed, which not only considers QoS correlations of services but also accounts for QoS correlations of user requirements. This approach, to the best of our knowledge, is the first one which considers QoS correlations of user requirements. Also, this approach is decentralized which can avoid the single point of failure. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach

Iteration management in concurrent development projects

Title from cover. "August 1999."Includes bibliographical references (leaves 25-29).David N. Ford and John D. Sterman