3 research outputs found
An exploratory study in communication in Agile Global Software Development
Global software development (GSD) is gaining ever more relevance. Although communication is key in the exchange
of information between team members, multi-site software development has introduced additional obstacles (different
time-zones and cultures, IT infrastructure, etc.) and delays into the act of communication, which is already problematic.
Communication is even more critical in the case of Agile Global Software Development (AGSD) in which communication plays a primary role. This paper reports an exploratory study of the effects of tools supporting communication
in AGSD. More precisely, this paper analyses the perception of team members about communication infrastructures
in AGSD. The research question to which this study responds concerns how development teams perceive the communication infrastructure while developing products using agile methodologies. Most previous studies have dealt with communication support from a highly technological media tool perspective. In this research work, instead, observations were obtained from three perspectives: communication among team members, communication of the status of the development process, and communication of the status of the progress of the product under development.
It has been possible to show that team members perceive advantages to using media tools that make them
feel in practice that teams are co-located, such as smartboards supported by efficient video-tools, and combining media tools with centralized repository tools, with information from the process development and product characteristics,
that allow distributed teams to effectively share information about the status of the project/process/product
during the development process in order to overcome some of the still existing problems in communication in AGSD
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Exploiting a perdurantist foundational ontology and graph database for semantic data integration
This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University London.The view of reality that is inherent to perdurantist philosophical ontologies, often termed four dimensional (4D) ontologies, has not been widely adopted within the mainstream of information system design practice. However, as the closed world of enterprise systems is opened to Internet scale Semantic Web and Open Data information sources, there is a need to better understand the semantics of both internal and external data and how they can be integrated. Philosophical foundational ontologies can help establish this understanding and there is, therefore, an emerging need to research how they can be applied to the problem of semantic data integration. Therefore, a prime objective of this research was to develop a framework through which to apply a 4D foundational ontology and a graph database to the problem of semantic data integration, and to assess the effectiveness of the approach. The research employed design science, a methodology which is applicable to undertaking research within information systems as it encompasses methods through which the research can be undertaken and the resultant artefacts evaluated. This methodology has a number of discrete stages: problem awareness; a core design-build-evaluate iterative cycle through which the research is conducted; and a conclusion stage. The design science research was conducted through the development of a number of artefacts, the prime being the 4D-Semantic Extract Load (4D-SETL) framework. The effectiveness of the framework was assessed by applying it to semantically interpret and integrate a number of large scale datasets and to instantiate a prototype graph database warehouse to persist the resultant ontology. A series of technical experiments confirmed that directly reflecting the model patterns of 4D ontology within a prototype data warehouse proved an effective means of both structuring and semantically integrating complex datasets and that the artefacts produced by 4D-SETL could function at scale. Through illustrative scenario, the effectiveness of the approach is described in relation to the ability of the framework to address a number of weaknesses in current approaches. Furthermore the major advantages of the 4D-SETL are elaborated; which include ability of the framework is to combine foundational, domain and instance level ontological models in a single coherent system that dispensed with much of the translation normally undertaken between conceptual, logical and physical data models. Additionally, adopting a perdurantist realist foundational ontology provided a clear means of establishing and maintaining the identity of physical objects as their constituent temporal and spatial parts unfold over the course of tim