Extreme programming and its positive affect on software engineering teams

This paper presents an early empirical study on Extreme Programming (XP) practices employing Positive Affect metric.The study was conducted on university students doing development projects to gain an insight understanding of the effect of using agile practices on software engineering (SE) teams.The finding indicates that XP practices do have positive affectivity on the SE teams. This is to be expected because of the existence of the practices such as simple design,pair programming, continuous testing, continuous integration and frequent review (release) that command feedback.This finding helps to provide early empirical evidences on the impact of XP methodology on the positive affectivity of the developers

Agent-based modelling of transactive memory systems and knowledge processes in agile versus traditional software development teams.

The objective of this research is to develop an agent-based model of transactive memory systems (TMS - meta-knowledge of expertise and knowledge in a team) simulating software development teams using two different software development methodologies. Waterfall (a structured methodology with a series of large discrete phases) and the Agile. eXtreme programming (XP - more recent. dynamic, and tuned to change and flexibility). There does exist research relating to TMS; comparisons of software development methodologies; cognitive processes of software development teams; and also agent-based modelling of social and cognitive systems. This is interdisciplinary research spanning psychology and computer science aiming to consolidate these discrete streams of research. The model evaluated the parameters of small/large tasks. and working solo/in pairs to investigate the effect on TMS, knowledge and team output. Over three sirnulaiions. increasing in cognitive realism. the model introduced greater complexity and novelty to the agents work. and various initial conditions of team knowledge and team member familiarity. The results illustrated a number of differences in TMS, knowledge processes and output between XP and Waterfall teams. The main findings indicate that as the novelty and complexity of the task increases the use of some XP techniques can lower the reduction in output. Also the dependence on TMS accuracy for teams using some XP techniques in complex novel environments is high while the team knowledge distribution becomes much more homogenous. This contradicts the literature that asserts a positive relationship between TMS accuracy and knowledge heterogeneity. Results also suggest that XP techniques can compensate for the advantages relating to team members' prior knowledge of each other allowing newly formed X P teams to perform better. The results contribute to understanding how knowledge and memory processes in software development teams affect team output, and how the adoption of XP practices can produce results that, challenge the established TMS literature

Constrained distributed optimization : A population dynamics approach

Large-scale network systems involve a large number of states, which makes the design of real-time controllers a challenging task. A distributed controller design allows to reduce computational requirements since tasks are divided into different systems, allowing real-time processing. This paper proposes a novel methodology for solving constrained optimization problems in a distributed way inspired by population dynamics. This methodology consists of an extension of a population dynamics equation and the introduction of a mass dynamics equation. The proposed methodology divides the problem into smaller sub-problems, whose feasible regions vary over time achieving an agreement to solve the global problem. The methodology also guarantees attraction to the feasible region and allows to have few changes in the decision-making design when a network suffers the addition/removal of nodes/edges. Then, distributed controllers are designed with the proposed methodology and applied to the large-scale Barcelona Drinking Water Network (BDWN). Some simulations are presented and discussed in order to illustrate the control performance.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Predictability of extreme events in social media

It is part of our daily social-media experience that seemingly ordinary items (videos, news, publications, etc.) unexpectedly gain an enormous amount of attention. Here we investigate how unexpected these events are. We propose a method that, given some information on the items, quantifies the predictability of events, i.e., the potential of identifying in advance the most successful items defined as the upper bound for the quality of any prediction based on the same information. Applying this method to different data, ranging from views in YouTube videos to posts in Usenet discussion groups, we invariantly find that the predictability increases for the most extreme events. This indicates that, despite the inherently stochastic collective dynamics of users, efficient prediction is possible for the most extreme events.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure

Influence of the spatial distribution of border traps in the capacitance frequency dispersion of Al2O3/InGaAs

In this paper, the capacitance frequency dispersion in strong accumulation of capacitance voltage curves has been studied for different high-k dielectric layers in MOS stacks. By studying experimental data at low (77 K) and room temperature (300 K), in oxides with different density of defects, it was possible reflect the spatial distribution of the defects in the capacitance frequency dispersion. The experimental data show that while at room temperature, the capacitance dispersion is dominated by the exchange of carriers from the semiconductor into oxide traps far away from the interface, at low temperature the oxide traps near the Al2O3/InGaAs interface are responsible for the frequency dispersion. The results indicate that the capacitance dispersion in strong accumulation reflect the spatial distribution of traps within the oxide, and that dielectric/semiconductor conduction band offset is a critical parameter for determining the capacitance dispersion for Al2O3/InGaAs based gate stacks.Fil: Palumbo, Félix Roberto Mario. Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Tecnológica Nacional; ArgentinaFil: Aguirre, Fernando Leonel. Universidad Tecnológica Nacional; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica; ArgentinaFil: Pazos, Sebastián Matías. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Tecnológica Nacional; Argentina. Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica; ArgentinaFil: Krylov, Igor. Technion - Israel Institute of Technology; IsraelFil: Winter, Roy. Technion - Israel Institute of Technology; IsraelFil: Eizenberg, Moshe. Technion - Israel Institute of Technology; Israe

A determination of the fragmentation functions of pions, kaons, and protons with faithful uncertainties

We present NNFF1.0, a new determination of the fragmentation functions (FFs) of charged pions, charged kaons, and protons/antiprotons from an analysis of single-inclusive hadron production data in electron-positron annihilation. This determination, performed at leading, next-to-leading, and next-to-next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD, is based on the NNPDF methodology, a fitting framework designed to provide a statistically sound representation of FF uncertainties and to minimise any procedural bias. We discuss novel aspects of the methodology used in this analysis, namely an optimised parametrisation of FFs and a more efficient $\chi^2$ minimisation strategy, and validate the FF fitting procedure by means of closure tests. We then present the NNFF1.0 sets, and discuss their fit quality, their perturbative convergence, and their stability upon variations of the kinematic cuts and the fitted dataset. We find that the systematic inclusion of higher-order QCD corrections significantly improves the description of the data, especially in the small-$z$ region. We compare the NNFF1.0 sets to other recent sets of FFs, finding in general a reasonable agreement, but also important differences. Together with existing sets of unpolarised and polarised parton distribution functions (PDFs), FFs and PDFs are now available from a common fitting framework for the first time.Comment: 50 pages, 22 figures, 5 table

Labsware: Implementation of Gamification Approach in Computer Lab Activities

Most of computer sciences students of Universitas Multimedia Nusantara require to take a course that come with lab practicum. Despite the importance of lab practicum activity, there are indication that some student is not motivated enough to complete it. Gamification is a method of implementing game design elements in non-game contexts. This research shows how gamification can be implemented in the classroom, and the survey result of application usage. Despite its successful implementation, increased motivation due to the application of game elements are not perceived significantly