9,449 research outputs found

    A Multivocal Literature Review on Non-Technical Debt in Software Development: An Insight into Process, Social, People, Organizational, and Culture Debt

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    Software development encompasses various factors beyond technical considerations. Neglecting non-technical elements like individuals, processes, culture, and social and organizational aspects can lead to debt-like characteristics that demand attention. Therefore, we introduce the non-technical debt (NTD) concept to encompass and explore these aspects. This indicates the applicability of the debt analogy to non-technical facets of software development. Technical debt (TD) and NTD share similarities and often arise from risky decision-making processes, impacting both software development professionals and software quality. Overlooking either type of debt can lead to significant implications for software development success. The current study conducts a comprehensive multivocal literature review (MLR) to explore the most recent research on NTD, its causes, and potential mitigation strategies. For analysis, we carefully selected 40 primary studies among 110 records published until October 1, 2022. The study investigates the factors contributing to the accumulation of NTD in software development and proposes strategies to alleviate the adverse effects associated with it. This MLR offers a contemporary overview and identifies prospects for further investigation, making a valuable contribution to the field. The findings of this research highlight that NTD's impacts extend beyond monetary aspects, setting it apart from TD. Furthermore, the findings reveal that rectifying NTD is more challenging than addressing TD, and its consequences contribute to the accumulation of TD. To avert software project failures, a comprehensive approach that addresses NTD and TD concurrently is crucial. Effective communication and coordination play a vital role in mitigating NTD, and the study proposes utilizing the 3C model as a recommended framework to tackle NTD concerns

    Supporting fluid teams: a research agenda

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    Fluid teams are teams that are rapidly assembled from across disciplines or areas of expertise to address a near-term problem. They are typically composed of individuals who have no prior familiarity with one another, who as a team must begin work immediately, and who disband at the completion of the task. Prior research has noted the challenges posed by this unique type of team context. To date, fluid teams have been understudied, yet their relevance and application in the modern workplace is expanding. This Perspective article presents a concise overview of critical research gaps and opportunities to support selection, training, and workplace design for fluid teams

    Genomic architecture of selection for adaptation to challenging environments in aquaculture

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    Aquaculture, including freshwater and marine farming, has been important for global fish production during the past few decades. However, climate change presents a major risk threatening both quality and quantity of aquaculture production. The environmental stressors in aquaculture resulting from climate change, are temperature rise, salinity changes, sea level rise, acidification and changes of other chemical properties and changes of oxygen levels. Although a reasonable genetic gain can be achieved by selective breeding, this genetic response may not be enough to adapt fish species to the effects of climate change. Marker assisted selection focusing on specific genes or alleles that allow fish to cope with these changes would allow more rapid adaptation of fish to these new environments. In this thesis, I focused on three essential environmental stressors - dissolved oxygen, salinity and temperature as primarily determined in aquaculture production. The main objective is to provide insight in the genomic architecture underlying the mechanism of adaptation to challenging environments of aquaculture species under farming conditions. First, I determined candidate QTL associated with phenotypic variation during adaptation to hypoxia or normoxia. I identified overrepresented pathways that could explain the genetic regulation of hypoxia on growth. To identify fish with better hypoxia tolerance and growth under a hypoxic environment, I quantified the genetic correlations between an indicator trait for hypoxia tolerance (critical swimming performance) and growth. Moreover, the genomic architecture associated with swimming performance was demonstrated, while the effect of significant QTLs on growth was estimated. Beyond applying genome-wide association studies, I used selection signatures to identify QTLs and genes contributing to salinity tolerance. In addition, I also compared the genome of the saline-tolerant and highly productive tilapia “Sukamandi”, that was developed by the aquaculture research institute in Indonesia, to that of blue tilapia and Nile tilapia, to identify the QTLs contributing to salinity tolerance. Finally, I investigated QTLs associated with growth-related traits and organ weights at two distinct commercial Mediterranean product sites differing in temperature (farms in Spain and Greece). Overall, this thesis considerably adds to insight into how fish adapt to challenging environments, which will aid marker-assisted selection for improved resilience of aquaculture species under climate change

    TeamSTEPPS and Organizational Culture

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    Patient safety issues remain despite several strategies developed for their deterrence. While many safety initiatives bring about improvement, they are repeatedly unsustainable and short-lived. The index hospital’s goal was to build an organizational culture within a groundwork that improves teamwork and continuing healthcare team engagement. Teamwork influences the efficiency of patient care, patient safety, and clinical outcomes, as it has been identified as an approach for enhancing collaboration, decreasing medical errors, and building a culture of safety in healthcare. The facility implemented Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS), an evidence-based framework which was used for team training to produce valuable and needed changes, facilitating modification of organizational culture, increasing patient safety compliance, or solving particular issues. This study aimed to identify the correlation between TeamSTEPPS enactment and improved organizational culture in the ambulatory care nursing department of a New York City public hospital

    Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with Prompts

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    This paper examines the transformative role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in education and their potential as learning tools, despite their inherent risks and limitations. The authors propose seven approaches for utilizing AI in classrooms: AI-tutor, AI-coach, AI-mentor, AI-teammate, AI-tool, AI-simulator, and AI-student, each with distinct pedagogical benefits and risks. The aim is to help students learn with and about AI, with practical strategies designed to mitigate risks such as complacency about the AI's output, errors, and biases. These strategies promote active oversight, critical assessment of AI outputs, and complementarity of AI's capabilities with the students' unique insights. By challenging students to remain the "human in the loop," the authors aim to enhance learning outcomes while ensuring that AI serves as a supportive tool rather than a replacement. The proposed framework offers a guide for educators navigating the integration of AI-assisted learning in classroomsComment: 46 page

    Raising Critical Consciousness in Engineering Education: A Critical Exploration of Transformative Possibilities in Engineering Education and Research

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    This thesis represents a critical exploration of the opportunities, challenges, and barriers to enacting social justice via the engineering curriculum. Through an ethnographic case study of a British engineering for sustainable development course, I illuminate tensions and contradictions of attempts to “do good” while “doing engineering” in a higher education setting. This work is couched within critical and anti-colonial theoretical frames. Through critical and reflexive analysis, I illustrate attempts of participants to innovate in engineering education toward a counter-hegemonic engineering practice, and highlight transformative possibilities, as well as barriers. This case illustrates how the structures that formed modern engineering continue to shape engineering higher education, restraining attempts to transform engineering training for social good.A central question that has driven this work has been: Is it possible to cultivate a more socially just form of engineering practice through engineering higher education? The function of asking this question has been to interrogate a core assumption in engineering education research – that with the right blend of educational interventions, we can make strides towards social justice. My intent in interrogating this assumption is not to be nihilistic per se. I believe it is entirely possible that engineering could potentially be wielded for just cause and consequence. However, if we do not critically examine our core assumptions around this issue, we may also miss out on the possibility that socially just engineering is not achievable, at least in the way we are currently approaching it or in the current context within which it exists.An examination of this topic is already underway in the US context. However, it is under-explored in a British context. Given the different historical trajectories of engineering and engineering in higher education between these two contexts, a closer look at the British context is warranted

    Reinforcement learning in large state action spaces

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    Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising framework for training intelligent agents which learn to optimize long term utility by directly interacting with the environment. Creating RL methods which scale to large state-action spaces is a critical problem towards ensuring real world deployment of RL systems. However, several challenges limit the applicability of RL to large scale settings. These include difficulties with exploration, low sample efficiency, computational intractability, task constraints like decentralization and lack of guarantees about important properties like performance, generalization and robustness in potentially unseen scenarios. This thesis is motivated towards bridging the aforementioned gap. We propose several principled algorithms and frameworks for studying and addressing the above challenges RL. The proposed methods cover a wide range of RL settings (single and multi-agent systems (MAS) with all the variations in the latter, prediction and control, model-based and model-free methods, value-based and policy-based methods). In this work we propose the first results on several different problems: e.g. tensorization of the Bellman equation which allows exponential sample efficiency gains (Chapter 4), provable suboptimality arising from structural constraints in MAS(Chapter 3), combinatorial generalization results in cooperative MAS(Chapter 5), generalization results on observation shifts(Chapter 7), learning deterministic policies in a probabilistic RL framework(Chapter 6). Our algorithms exhibit provably enhanced performance and sample efficiency along with better scalability. Additionally, we also shed light on generalization aspects of the agents under different frameworks. These properties have been been driven by the use of several advanced tools (e.g. statistical machine learning, state abstraction, variational inference, tensor theory). In summary, the contributions in this thesis significantly advance progress towards making RL agents ready for large scale, real world applications

    Building Learning Communities Utilizing Team-Based Learning in an On-line Environment

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    Colleges and universities today are finding themselves under increasing pressure to change the practices of teaching. Rapid advancements in technology and demands of a knowledge-based society quickly change expectations and standards in higher education. Technology brings alternative ways to organizing and conveying information. The paradigm of predominantly linear process of learning is shifting to set new trends in online education with applications of differing teaching and learning styles. One of the challenges is to create dynamic learning communities that are learner-centered rather than teaching-centered. This paper discusses the importance of rubrics and components of team-based learning in online education utilizing results of a survey that was administered in an undergraduate Marketing class conducted at a Midwest University’s Business Administration Program. The paper proposes strategies for building effective learning communities in online environments by utilizing rubrics and other team-based learning strategies that can improve the online experience. Our contribution is to evaluate the effectiveness of various tools and components of team-based learning to assist faculty creating student-centered learning goals and outcomes to build dynamic online learning communities. Our findings confirm that rubrics and survey results support current literature on the effectiveness of team-based and small-group learning and the importance of rubrics in online education

    An Overview of Patient Safety Culture with the AHRQ

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    Safety has become a global issue, especially for hospitals. Patient safety culture is a product of values, attitudes, competencies, and behavioral patterns of individuals and groups that determine the commitment, style, and ability of health care organizations to patient safety. The purpose of this study was to determine the description of patient safety culture with the AHRQ model. Quantitative research method with cross sectional. The population of all officers in the inpatient installation of RSUD Dr. R. M Djoelham 156 samples found 61 respondents with simple random sampling technique. The results of the study describe the expectations and actions of managers promoting patient safety by 77.04%, organizational learning by 91.8%, cooperation in units of 93.85% (good or strong culture), open communication by 71.04%, feedback on errors 77.05% (good or strong culture), non-punitive response dimension to errors is 61.20% staffing is 59.01% management support for patient safety efforts is 85.8% cooperation between units is 71.32%, Handsoff work and patient transitions are 59.02% (good enough or moderately cultured), the overall perception of hospital staff about patient safety is 68.86% (good enough or moderately cultured), reporting frequency is 73.22% (good enough or moderately cultured). moderate culture). With the results of this study, it is hoped that RSUD Dr. R.M. Djoelham Kota Binjai is expected to continue, maintain, and develop ongoing patient safety programs and maintain the existing patient safety culture

    Assessing the Lack of Project Management Soft Skills Toward Project Completion Rates

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    Project managers have a challenging yet rewarding occupation that directly affects everyone within the community. To overcome their challenges, project managers rely on their training, experience, and the skills they develop throughout their careers. This research aimed to determine if there is a correlation between applying interpersonal skills as a project manager and higher completion rates within the construction industry. Additionally, this research aimed to assess the relationship between interpersonal skills and quality completion rates in the construction industry. The study was conducted within the construction industry, specifically focusing on road and building construction, surveying project managers working for private companies and governmental agencies in Texas. The researcher collected data by interviewing 12 project managers and observing their work environments. There was a significant difference between project managers who understood and effectively applied interpersonal skills in their work environments versus those who did not effectively apply interpersonal skills. Project managers revealed the importance of developing interpersonal skills to manage projects effectively and efficiently. These findings indicate the need for interpersonal skills development, mentorship, and coaching programs
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