Roles and responsibilities in agile ICT for development

This paper examines the different roles in designing interactive software in a ICT for development context. Using experiences from a participatory action research project, in which we used agile methods to design and deploy an system to support ‘agricultural information flow’ for a co-operative of small farmers in rural India, we identify points of difference between the roles in standard descriptions of agile software methods and the roles as they emerged in our project. A key finding is the critical role played by a ‘Development Project Manager’ in facilitating dialogue, orchestrating the activities of other actors and in building the capabilities and confidence of all the participants in joint action

Automated user documentation generation based on the Eclipse application model

An application's user documentation, also referred to as the user manual, is one of the core elements required in application distribution. While there exist many tools to aid an application's developer in creating and maintaining documentation on and for the code itself, there are no tools that complement code development with user documentation for modern graphical applications. Approaches like literate programming are not applicable to this scenario, as not a library, but a full application is to be documented to an end-user. Documentation generation on applications up to now was only partially feasible due to the gap between the code and its semantics. The new generation of Eclipse rich client platform developed applications is based on an application model, closing a broad semantic gap between code and visible interface. We use this application model to provide a semantic description for the contained elements. Combined with the internal relationships of the application model, these semantic descriptions are aggregated to well-structured user documentations that comply to the ISO/IEC 26514. This paper delivers a report on the Ecrit research project, where the potentials and limitations of user documentation generation based on the Eclipse application model were investigated.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

OntoMaven: Maven-based Ontology Development and Management of Distributed Ontology Repositories

In collaborative agile ontology development projects support for modular reuse of ontologies from large existing remote repositories, ontology project life cycle management, and transitive dependency management are important needs. The Apache Maven approach has proven its success in distributed collaborative Software Engineering by its widespread adoption. The contribution of this paper is a new design artifact called OntoMaven. OntoMaven adopts the Maven-based development methodology and adapts its concepts to knowledge engineering for Maven-based ontology development and management of ontology artifacts in distributed ontology repositories.Comment: Pre-print submission to 9th International Workshop on Semantic Web Enabled Software Engineering (SWESE2013). Berlin, Germany, December 2-5, 201

Software for physics of tau lepton decay in LHC experiments

Software development in high energy physics experiments offers unique experience with rapidly changing environment and variety of different standards and frameworks that software must be adapted to. As such, regular methods of software development are hard to use as they do not take into account how greatly some of these changes influence the whole structure. The following thesis summarizes development of TAUOLA C++ Interface introducing tau decays to new event record standard. Documentation of the program is already published. That is why it is not recalled here again. We focus on the development cycle and methodology used in the project, starting from the definition of the expectations through planning and designing the abstract model and concluding with the implementation. In the last part of the paper we present installation of the software within different experiments surrounding Large Hadron Collider and the problems that emerged during this process.Comment: Thesis submitted to Applied Computer Science Department in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MSc degree. This work is partially supported by EU Marie Curie Research Training Network grant under the contract No. MRTN-CT-2006-0355505, Polish Government grant N202 06434 (2008-2011) and EU-RTN Programme: Contract No. MRTN-CT-2006-035482 'Flavianet

Use of an agile bridge in the development of assistive technology

Engaging with end users in the development of assistive technologies remains one of the major challenges for researchers and developers in the field of accessibility and HCI. Developing usable software systems for people with complex disabilities is problematic, software developers are wary of using user-centred design, one of the main methods by which usability can be improved, due to concerns about how best to work with adults with complex disabilities, in particular Severe Speech and Physical Impairments (SSPI) and how to involve them in research. This paper reports on how the adoption of an adapted agile approach involving the incorporation of a user advocate on the research team helped in meeting this challenge in one software project and offers suggestions for how this could be used by other development teams

Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice: The Agile Research Network

We report an action research-oriented approach to investigating agile project management methods which aims to bridge the gap between academic research and agile practice. We have set up a research network of academics from two universities, through which we run focussed project-based research into agile methods. Organisations are invited to suggest an ‘agile challenge’ and we work closely with them to investigate how challenge affects them. Our approach is both academic and practical. We use appropriate research methods such as interviews, observation and discussion to clarify and explore the nature of the challenge. We then undertake a detailed literature review to identify practical approaches that may be appropriate for adoption, and report our findings. If the organisation introduces new practices or approaches as a result of our work, we conduct an academic evaluation. Alternatively, if we uncover an under-researched area, we propose undertaking some basic research. As befits the topic, we work iteratively and incrementally and produce regular outputs. In this paper we introduce our approach, overview research methods used in the agile research literature, describe our research model, outline a case study, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of our approach. We discuss the importance of producing outputs that are accessible to practitioners as well as researchers. Findings suggest that by investigating the challenges that organisations propose, we uncover problems that are of real relevance to the agile community and obtain rich insights into the facilitators and barriers that organisations face when using agile methods. Additionally, we find that practitioners are interested in research results as long as publications are relevant to their needs and are written accessibly. We are satisfied with the basic structure of our approach, but we anticipate that the method will evolve as we continue to work with collaborators