211,540 research outputs found
Project Quality of Offshore Virtual Teams Engaged in Software Requirements Analysis: An Exploratory Comparative Study
The off-shore software development companies in countries such as India use a global delivery model in which initial requirement analysis phase of software projects get executed at client locations to leverage frequent and deep interaction between user and developer teams. Subsequent phases such as design, coding and testing are completed at off-shore locations. Emerging trends indicate an increasing interest in off-shoring even requirements analysis phase using computer mediated communication. We conducted an exploratory research study involving students from Management Development Institute (MDI), India and Marquette University (MU), USA to determine quality of such off-shored requirements analysis projects. Our findings suggest that project quality of teams engaged in pure off-shore mode is comparable to that of teams engaged in collocated mode. However, the effect of controls such as user project monitoring on the quality of off-shored projects needs to be studied further
Trustworthy Experimentation Under Telemetry Loss
Failure to accurately measure the outcomes of an experiment can lead to bias
and incorrect conclusions. Online controlled experiments (aka AB tests) are
increasingly being used to make decisions to improve websites as well as mobile
and desktop applications. We argue that loss of telemetry data (during upload
or post-processing) can skew the results of experiments, leading to loss of
statistical power and inaccurate or erroneous conclusions. By systematically
investigating the causes of telemetry loss, we argue that it is not practical
to entirely eliminate it. Consequently, experimentation systems need to be
robust to its effects. Furthermore, we note that it is nontrivial to measure
the absolute level of telemetry loss in an experimentation system. In this
paper, we take a top-down approach towards solving this problem. We motivate
the impact of loss qualitatively using experiments in real applications
deployed at scale, and formalize the problem by presenting a theoretical
breakdown of the bias introduced by loss. Based on this foundation, we present
a general framework for quantitatively evaluating the impact of telemetry loss,
and present two solutions to measure the absolute levels of loss. This
framework is used by well-known applications at Microsoft, with millions of
users and billions of sessions. These general principles can be adopted by any
application to improve the overall trustworthiness of experimentation and
data-driven decision making.Comment: Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Information
and Knowledge Management, October 201
Software development: A paradigm for the future
A new paradigm for software development that treats software development as an experimental activity is presented. It provides built-in mechanisms for learning how to develop software better and reusing previous experience in the forms of knowledge, processes, and products. It uses models and measures to aid in the tasks of characterization, evaluation and motivation. An organization scheme is proposed for separating the project-specific focus from the organization's learning and reuse focuses of software development. The implications of this approach for corporations, research and education are discussed and some research activities currently underway at the University of Maryland that support this approach are presented
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