6,310 research outputs found
Migrating agile methods to standardized development practice
Situated process and quality frame-works offer a way to resolve the tensions that arise when introducing agile methods into standardized software development engineering. For these to be successful, however, organizations must grasp the opportunity to reintegrate software development management, theory, and practice
Role clarity deficiencies can wreck agile teams
Background
One of the twelve agile principles is to build projects around motivated individuals and trust them to get the job done. Such agile teams must self-organize, but this involves conflict, making self-organization difficult. One area of difficulty is agreeing on everybody’s role.
Background
What dynamics arise in a self-organizing team from the negotiation of everybody’s role?
Method
We conceptualize observations from five agile teams (work observations, interviews) by Charmazian Grounded Theory Methodology.
Results
We define role as something transient and implicit, not fixed and named. The roles are characterized by the responsibilities and expectations of each team member. Every team member must understand and accept their own roles (Local role clarity) and everbody else’s roles (Team-wide role clarity). Role clarity allows a team to work smoothly and effectively and to develop its members’ skills fast. Lack of role clarity creates friction that not only hampers the day-to-day work, but also appears to lead to high employee turnover. Agile coaches are critical to create and maintain role clarity.
Conclusions
Agile teams should pay close attention to the levels of Local role clarity of each member and Team-wide role clarity overall, because role clarity deficits are highly detrimental
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Ritual performances and collective intelligence: theoretical frameworks for analyising activity patterns in Cloudworks
This paper provides an overview of emerging activity patterns on Cloudworks, a specialised site for sharing and debating ideas as well as resources on teaching, learning and scholarship in education. It provides an overview of activities such as 'flash debates', 'blended workshops' and 'open reviews' and seeks to situate dialogic interchanges and structures of involvement within the following theoretical frameworks: a) Goffman's notions of 'face-work' and 'ritual performance�; and b) and secondly, notions of collective intelligence. The paper argues that these perspectives can offer a unique contribution to the study and analysis of sociality (Bouman et al, 2007) bounded in the context of technologically mediated networked learning, with wider implications for understanding matters of participation, self-representation, reflection and expansion in education
AM-OER: An Agile Method for the Development of Open Educational Resources
Open Educational Resources have emerged as important elements of education in the contemporary society, promoting life-long and personalized learning that transcends social, eco- nomic and geographical barriers. To achieve the potential of OERs and bring impact on education, it is necessary to increase their development and supply. However, one of the current challenges is how to produce quality and relevant OERs to be reused and adapted to different contexts and learning situations. In this paper we proposed an agile method for the development of OERs – AM-OER, grounded on agile practices from Software Engineering. Learning Design practices from the OULDI project (UK Open University) are also embedded into the AM-OER aiming at improving quality and facilitating reuse and adaptation of OERs. In order to validate AM-OER, an experiment was conducted by applying it in the development of an OER on software testing. The results showed preliminary evidences on the applicability, effectiveness and ef ciency of the method in the development of OERs
Developing Responsible Research and Innovation for Robots
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This paper develops a framework for responsible
research and innovation (RRI) in robot design for roboticists
from a study of the processes involved in the design and
engineering of a range of robots including standard
manufacturing robots, humanoid robots, environmental scanning
robots and robot swarms. The importance of an iterative
approach to design, the nature of transitions between design
phases, and issues of uncertainty and complexity are examined
for their ethical content. A cycle of RRI thinking based on
reconnoitre, realisation, reflection, response and review is
described which aligns with the general characterisation of robot
engineering processes. Additionally the importance of supporting
communities, knowledge bases and tools for assessment and
analysis is noted
TRUST IN CO-SOURCED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Software development projects are increasingly geographical distributed with offshoring. Co-sourcing is a highly integrative and cohesive approach, seen successful, to software development offshoring. However, research of how dynamic aspects of trust are shaped in co-sourcing activities is limited. We present a case study of how the co-sourcing relationship between a certified CMMI-level 5 Danish software company and an offshoring supplier can be conceptualized as an Abstract System. An Abstract System is a dis-embedded social system (such as banking) that is trusted despite lack of detailed understanding or personal trust relations. The paper suggest how certain work practices among developers and managers can be explained using a dynamic trust lens based on Abstract Systems, especially dis- and re-embedding mechanisms
The Empire Strikes Back: The end of Agile as we know it?
Agile methods have co-evolved with the onset of rapid change in software and systems development and the methodologies and process models designed to guide them. Conceived from the lessons of practice, Agile methods brought a balanced perspective between the intentions of the stakeholder, the management function, and developers. As an evolutionary progression, trends towards rapid continuous delivery have witnessed the advent of DevOps where advances in tooling, technologies, and the environment of both development and consumption exert a new dynamic into the Agile oeuvre. We investigate the progression from Agile to DevOps from a Critical Social Theoretic perspective to examine a paradox in agility – does an always-on conceptualization of production forestall and impinge upon the processes of reflection and renewal that are also endemic to Agile methods? This paper is offered as a catalyst for critical examination of and as a call to action to advocate for sustaining and nurturing reflective practice in Agile and post-Agile methods, such as DevOps. Under threat of disenfranchisement and relegation to automation, we question how evolution towards DevOps may alter key elements in the tenets and principles of the Agile methods phenomenon
Using developmental evaluation methods with communities of practice
Purpose
This research explored the use of developmental evaluation methods with community of
practice programmes experiencing change or transition to better understand how to target
support resources.
Design / methodology / approach
The practical use of a number of developmental evaluation methods was explored in three
organisations over a nine month period using an action research design. The research was a
collaborative process involving all the company participants and the academic (the author)
with the intention of developing the practices of the participants as well as contributing to
scholarship.
Findings
The developmental evaluation activities achieved the objectives of the knowledge managers
concerned: they developed a better understanding of the contribution and performance of
their communities of practice, allowing support resources to be better targeted. Three
methods (fundamental evaluative thinking, actual-ideal comparative method and focus on
strengths and assets) were found to be useful. Cross-case analysis led to the proposition that
developmental evaluation methods act as a structural mechanism that develops the discourse
of the organisation in ways that enhance the climate for learning, potentially helping develop
a learning organization.
Practical implications
Developmental evaluation methods add to the options available to evaluate community of
practice programmes. These supplement the commonly used activity indicators and impact
story methods.
2
Originality / value
Developmental evaluation methods are often used in social change initiatives, informing
public policy and funding decisions. The contribution here is to extend their use to
organisational community of practice programmes
Learning in the Large - An Exploratory Study of Retrospectives in Large-Scale Agile Development
Many see retrospectives as the most important practice of agile software development. Previous studies of retrospectives have focused on pro- cess and outcome at team level. In this article, we study how a large-scale agile development project uses retrospectives through an analysis of retrospective reports identifying a total of 109 issues and 36 action items as a part of a longitudinal case study. We find that most of the issues identified relate to team-level learning and improvement, and discuss these findings in relation to current advice to improve learning outcome in large-scale agile development.Learning in the Large - An Exploratory Study of Retrospectives in Large-Scale Agile DevelopmentpublishedVersio
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