Management Challenges for DevOps Adoption within UK SMEs

The DevOps phenomenon is gathering pace as more UK organisations seek to leverage the benefits it can potentially bring to software engineering functions. However substantial organisational change is inherent to adopting DevOps, especially where there are prior and established methods. As part of a wider piece of doctoral research investigating the management challenges of DevOps adoption, we present early findings of a six month qualitative diary study following the adoption of DevOps within a UK based SME with over 200 employees. We find that within our case study organisation, the DevOps approach is being adopted for the development of a new system used both internally and by customers. DevOps, conceptually, appears to be generally well regarded, but in reality is proving difficult to fully adopt. This difficulty is down to a combination of necessity in maintaining a legacy system, lack of senior management buy-in, managerial structure and resistance. Additionally, we are finding evidence of job crafting, especially with the software developers. Taken together, we put forward the argument that DevOps is an interdisciplinary topic which would greatly benefit from further management and potentially psychology oriented research attention

Strategic Shift to a Diagnostic Model of Care in a Multi-Site Group Dental Practice.

BackgroundDocumenting standardized dental diagnostic terms represents an emerging change for how dentistry is practiced. We focused on a mid-sized dental group practice as it shifted to a policy of documenting patients' diagnoses using standardized terms in the electronic health record.MethodsKotter's change framework was translated into interview questions posed to the senior leadership in a mid-size dental group practice. In addition, quantitative content analyses were conducted on the written policies and forms before and after the implementation of standardized diagnosis documentation to assess the extent to which the forms and policies reflected the shift. Three reviewers analyzed the data individually and reached consensuses where needed.ResultsKotter's guiding change framework explained the steps taken to 97 percent utilization rate of the Electronic Health Record and Dental Diagnostic Code. Of the 96 documents included in the forms and policy analysis, 31 documents were officially updated but only two added a diagnostic element.ConclusionChange strategies established in the business literature hold utility for dental practices seeking diagnosis-centered care.Practical implicationsA practice that shifts to a diagnosis-driven care philosophy would be best served by ensuring that the change process follows a leadership framework that is calibrated to the organization's culture

CHANGING LEARNING ENVIRONMENT THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

Evolution of E-learning phenomenon exceeded all expectations in recent years.As a result of development of IT&C technologies and, on the other hand, due to support decision-makers at European level, the assimilation of virtual learning platforms in schools and universities hasbecome a normal phenomenon.The E-learning 2.0 concept seeks to revolutionize traditional learning methods and requires majorchanges in the perception of the educational process of teaching and learning.This article tries to create an overview of the main development directions and emphasizes the impactthat computer-assisted instruction technologies have on teaching and learning methods, with a directconnection to distance learning and blended learning concepts. Also, we have tried to open aperspective on the concept of e-Assessment and related technologiese-learning 2.0, computer based training, e-assessment, blended learning, distance learning

How FAIR can you get? Image Retrieval as a Use Case to calculate FAIR Metrics

A large number of services for research data management strive to adhere to the FAIR guiding principles for scientific data management and stewardship. To evaluate these services and to indicate possible improvements, use-case-centric metrics are needed as an addendum to existing metric frameworks. The retrieval of spatially and temporally annotated images can exemplify such a use case. The prototypical implementation indicates that currently no research data repository achieves the full score. Suggestions on how to increase the score include automatic annotation based on the metadata inside the image file and support for content negotiation to retrieve the images. These and other insights can lead to an improvement of data integration workflows, resulting in a better and more FAIR approach to manage research data.Comment: This is a preprint for a paper accepted for the 2018 IEEE conferenc

Software Reuse in Agile Development Organizations - A Conceptual Management Tool

The reuse of knowledge is considered a major factor for increasing productivity and quality. In the software industry knowledge is embodied in software assets such as code components, functional designs and test cases. This kind of knowledge reuse is also referred to as software reuse. Although the benefits can be substantial, software reuse has never reached its full potential. Organizations are not aware of the different levels of reuse or do not know how to address reuse issues. This paper proposes a conceptual management tool for supporting software reuse. Furthermore the paper presents the findings of the application of the management tool in an agile development organization

A case study of the integration of ICT in teaching and learning in a smart school in Sabah

This research investigates teachers’ views of their use of ICT in teaching and learning (T&LICT). The objective of this research was to study in depth the thoughts, beliefs and opinions of the teachers’ attempt towards pedagogical improvement as part of the Smart School Project. Specifically this research examines and describes the teachers’ implementation of T&LICT in the classroom in terms of the instructional practice, the instructional roles and the instructional environment. A case study research methodology is employed. The case is Sekolah Menengah Bestari (a psuedonym), which is a Smart School in Sabah. Analysis of data from 52 survey questionnaires complemented the qualitative data from the 13 interviews and 3 observations, as well as document analysis. Findings indicated that hardware and software technology infrastructure were available to support the T&LICT implementation. Nevertheless, the teachers felt it was not enough to implement T&LICT effectively. It was estimated that about half of Sekolah Menengah Bestari staff, mainly Bestari and ETeMS teachers, implemented T&LICT. Findings indicated that teacher practices were little changed. IT was used mainly to support the existing teacher-directed and teacher-centered approach. The role of the teacher extended to that of facilitating without releasing control of lesson to the students

Beyond Surveys: Analyzing Software Development Artifacts to Assess Teaching Efforts

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents an approach of using software development artifacts to gauge student behavior and the effectiveness of changes to curriculum design. There is an ongoing need to adapt university courses to changing requirements and shifts in industry. As an educator it is therefore vital to have access to methods, with which to ascertain the effects of curriculum design changes. In this paper, we present our approach of analyzing software repositories in order to gauge student behavior during project work. We evaluate this approach in a case study of a university undergraduate software development course teaching agile development methodologies. Surveys revealed positive attitudes towards the course and the change of employed development methodology from Scrum to Kanban. However, surveys were not usable to ascertain the degree to which students had adapted their workflows and whether they had done so in accordance with course goals. Therefore, we analyzed students' software repository data, which represents information that can be collected by educators to reveal insights into learning successes and detailed student behavior. We analyze the software repositories created during the last five courses, and evaluate differences in workflows between Kanban and Scrum usage