Supporting Multiple Stakeholders in Agile Development

Agile software development practices require several stakeholders with different kinds of expertise to collaborate while specifying requirements, designing and modeling software, and verifying whether developers have implemented requirements correctly. We studied 112 requirements engineering (RE) tools from academia and the features of 13 actively maintained behavior-driven development (BDD) tools, which support various stakeholders in specifying and verifying the application behavior. Overall, we found that there is a growing tool specialization targeted towards a specific type of stakeholders. Particularly with BDD tools, we found no adequate support for non-technical stakeholders —- they are required to use an integrated development environment (IDE) —- which is not adapted to suit their expertise. We argue that employing separate tools for requirements specification, modeling, implementation, and verification is counter-productive for agile development. Such an approach makes it difficult to manage associated artifacts and support rapid implementation and feedback loops. To avoid dispersion of requirements and other software-related artifacts among separate tools, establish traceability between requirements and the application source code, and streamline a collaborative software development workflow, we propose to adapt an IDE as an agile development platform. With our approach, we provide in-IDE graphical interfaces to support non-technical stakeholders in creating and maintaining requirements concurrently with the implementation. With such graphical interfaces, we also guide non-technical stakeholders through the object-oriented design process and support them in verifying the modeled behavior. This approach has two advantages: (i) compared with employing separate tools, creating and maintaining requirements directly within a development platform eliminates the necessity to recover trace links, and (ii) various natively created artifacts can be composed into stakeholder-specific interactive live in-IDE documentation. These advantages have a direct impact on how various stakeholders collaborate with each other, and allow for rapid feedback, which is much desired in agile practices. We exemplify our approach using the Glamorous Toolkit IDE. Moreover, the discussed building blocks can be implemented in any IDE with a rich-enough graphical engine and reflective capabilities

Supporting multiple stakeholders in agile development

Agile software development practices require several stakeholders with different kinds of expertise to collaborate while specifying requirements, designing, and modelling software, and verifying whether developers have implemented requirements correctly. We studied 112 requirements engineering (RE) tools from academia and the features of 13 actively maintained behavior-driven development (BDD) tools, which support various stakeholders in specifying and verifying the application behavior. Overall, we found that there is a growing tool specialization targeted towards a specific type of stakeholders. Particularly with BDD tools, we found no adequate support for non-technical stakeholders-- they are required to use an integrated development environment (IDE)-- which is not adapted to suit their expertise. We argue that employing separate tools for requirements specification, modelling, implementation, and verification is counterproductive for agile development. Such an approach makes it difficult to manage associated artifacts and support rapid implementation and feedback loops. To avoid dispersion of requirements and other software-related artifacts among separate tools, establish traceability between requirements and the application source code, and streamline a collaborative software development workflow, we propose to adapt an IDE as an agile development platform. With our approach, we provide in-IDE graphical interfaces to support non-technical stakeholders in creating and maintaining requirements concurrently with the implementation. With such graphical interfaces, we also guide non-technical stakeholders through the object-oriented design process and support them in verifying the modelled behavior. This approach has two advantages: (i) compared with employing separate tools, creating, and maintaining requirements directly within a development platform eliminates the necessity to recover trace links, and (ii) various natively created artifacts can be composed into stakeholder-specific interactive live in-IDE documentation. These advantages have a direct impact on how various stakeholders collaborate with each other, and allow for rapid feedback, which is much desired in agile practices. We exemplify our approach using the Glamorous Toolkit IDE. Moreover, the discussed building blocks can be implemented in any IDE with a rich-enough graphical engine and reflective capabilities

Strengthening nursing, midwifery and allied health professional leadership in the UK - a realist evaluation

Purpose: This paper aims to share the findings of a realist evaluation study that set out to identify how to strengthen nursing, midwifery and allied health professions (NMAHP) leadership across all health-care contexts in the UK conducted between 2018 and 2019. The collaborative research team were from the Universities of Bangor, Ulster, the University of the West of Scotland and Canterbury Christ Church University. Design/methodology/approach: Realist evaluation and appreciative inquiry were used across three phases of the study. Phase 1 analysed the literature to generate tentative programme theories about what works, tested out in Phase 2 through a national social media Twitter chat and sense-making workshops to help refine the theories in Phase 3. Cross-cutting themes were synthesised into a leadership framework identifying the strategies that work for practitioners in a range of settings and professions based on the context, mechanism and output configuration of realist evaluation. Stakeholders contributed to the ongoing interrogation, analysis and synthesis of project outcomes. Findings: Five guiding lights of leadership, a metaphor for principles, were generated that enable and strengthen leadership across a range of contexts. – “The Light Between Us as interactions in our relationships”, “Seeing People’s Inner Light”, “Kindling the Spark of light and keeping it glowing”, “Lighting up the known and the yet to be known” and “Constellations of connected stars”. Research limitations/implications: This study has illuminated the a-theoretical nature of the relationships between contexts, mechanisms and outcomes in the existing leadership literature. There is more scope to develop the tentative programme theories developed in this study with NMAHP leaders in a variety of different contexts. The outcomes of leadership research mostly focussed on staff outcomes and intermediate outcomes that are then linked to ultimate outcomes in both staff and patients (supplemental). More consideration needs to be given to the impact of leadership on patients, carers and their families. Practical implications: The study has developed additional important resources to enable NMAHP leaders to demonstrate their leadership impact in a range of contexts through the leadership impact self-assessment framework which can be used for 360 feedback in the workplace using the appreciative assessment and reflection tool. Social implications: Whilst policymakers note the increasing importance of leadership in facilitating the culture change needed to support health and care systems to adopt sustainable change at pace, there is still a prevailing focus on traditional approaches to individual leadership development as opposed to collective leadership across teams, services and systems. If this paper fails to understand how to transform leadership policy and education, then it will be impossible to support the workforce to adapt and flex to the increasingly complex contexts they are working in. This will serve to undermine system integration for health and social care if the capacity and capability for transformation are not attended to. Whilst there are ambitious global plans (WHO, 2015) to enable integrated services to be driven by citizen needs, there is still a considerable void in understanding how to authentically engage with people to ensure the transformation is driven by their needs as opposed to what the authors think they need. There is, therefore, a need for systems leaders with the full skillset required to enable integrated services across place-based systems, particularly clinicians who are able to break down barriers and silo working across boundaries through the credibility, leadership and facilitation expertise they provide. Originality/value: The realist evaluation with additional synthesis from key stakeholders has provided new knowledge about the principles of effective NMAHP leadership in health and social care, presented in such a way that facilitates the use of the five guiding lights to inform further practice, education, research and policy development

Maps of Lessons Learnt in Requirements Engineering

Both researchers and practitioners have emphasized the importance of learning from past experiences and its consequential impact on project time, cost, and quality. However, from the survey we conducted of requirements engineering (RE) practitioners, over 70\% of the respondents stated that they seldom use RE lessons in the RE process, though 85\% of these would use such lessons if readily available. Our observation, however, is that RE lessons are scattered, mainly implicitly, in the literature and practice, which obviously, does not help the situation. We, therefore, present ``maps” of RE lessons which would highlight weak (dark) and strong (bright) areas of RE (and hence RE theories). Such maps would thus be: (a) a driver for research to ``light up” the darker areas of RE and (b) a guide for practice to benefit from the brighter areas. To achieve this goal, we populated the maps with over 200 RE lessons elicited from literature and practice using a systematic literature review and survey. The results show that approximately 80\% of the elicited lessons are implicit and that approximately 70\% of the lessons deal with the elicitation, analysis, and specification RE phases only. The RE Lesson Maps, elicited lessons, and the results from populating the maps provide novel scientific groundings for lessons learnt in RE as this topic has not yet been systematically studied in the field

Architectural Design Decision Documentation through Reuse of Design Patterns

The ADMD3 approach presented in this book enchances the architectural design documentation of decision via reuse of design patterns. It combines the support for evaluation of pattern application, semi-automated documentation of decision rationale and trace links. The approach is based on a new kind of design pattern catalogue, whereby usual pattern descriptions are captured together with question annotations to the patterns and information on architectural structure of patterns

Architectural Design Decision Documentation through Reuse of Design Patterns

While design decisions on the application of architectural design patterns involve complex trade-offs between functionality and quality properties, such decisions are often spontaneous, and documentation of decisions and trace links to related artefacts is usually insufficient. The approach proposed in this thesis provides a support to overcome these problems. It combines support for evaluation of design pattern application, and semi-automated documentation of decisions and trace links

A Narrative Sentence Planner and Structurer for Domain Independent, Parameterizable Storytelling

Storytelling is an integral part of daily life and a key part of how we share information and connect with others. The ability to use Natural Language Generation (NLG) to produce stories that are tailored and adapted to the individual reader could have large impact in many different applications. However, one reason that this has not become a reality to date is the NLG story gap, a disconnect between the plan-type representations that story generation engines produce, and the linguistic representations needed by NLG engines. Here we describe Fabula Tales, a storytelling system supporting both story generation and NLG. With manual annotation of texts from existing stories using an intuitive user interface, Fabula Tales automatically extracts the underlying story representation and its accompanying syntactically grounded representation. Narratological and sentence planning parameters are applied to these structures to generate different versions of the story. We show how our storytelling system can alter the story at the sentence level, as well as the discourse level. We also show that our approach can be applied to different kinds of stories by testing our approach on both Aesop’s Fables and first-person blogs posted on social media. The content and genre of such stories varies widely, supporting our claim that our approach is general and domain independent. We then conduct several user studies to evaluate the generated story variations and show that Fabula Tales’ automatically produced variations are perceived as more immediate, interesting, and correct, and are preferred to a baseline generation system that does not use narrative parameters

Identification and Characterization of Stress Responsive Genes in Soybean and Sunflower

Stress responsive genes encode proteins involved in plants’ response to abiotic and biotic stresses. Among such stress responsive proteins, proteins encoded by resistance genes (R genes) or nucleotide binding site-leucine-rich repeats (NBS-LRRs) and mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) are the major groups of proteins regulating biotic and abiotic stresses, respectively. Previous studies in Nepal’s lab at SDSU identified and characterized coiled coil (CC)-NBS-LRRs (CNLs), resistance to powdery mildew8 (RPW8)-NBS-LRRs (RNLs), NBS-LRR (NLs), and MAPK proteins in soybean. This study focuses on R and MAPK genes in the recently sequenced genome of sunflower as well as the toll-interleukin-1 receptor-like nucleotide-binding site leucine-rich repeat (TNL) R genes of soybean. This study also uses greenhouse experiments and RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data to characterize stress responsive genes involved in interaction effects of soybean aphid (SBA) and soybean cyst nematode (SCN) interactions on soybean. Thus the major objectives of this dissertation work were to 1) explore the TNL genes in soybean and R (CNL, TNL, RNL) genes in sunflower genomes to assess how they may have evolved and their possible role in resistance against pathogens using available transcriptomic data, 2) identify and characterize MAPK genes in sunflower, and 3) characterize induced susceptibility effects of soybean-soybean aphid and interaction effects of soybean soybean aphid-soybean cyst nematode on soybean. In this dissertation, we used in silico approaches to report genome-wide identification and characterization of soybean TNL proteins as well as sunflower R and MAPK proteins. In order to achieve these objectives, numerous bioinformatics tools were utilized: hidden markov model (HMM) profilings were performed, and annotation of protein domains were conducted. Maximum Likelihood phylogenetic trees were constructed, and nonsynonymous substitutions per nonsynonymous site to synonymous substitutions per synonymous site ratios (Ka/Ks) as a proxy for selection pressure of R genes were calculated. In addition, chromosomal distribution, intron-exon architecture; synteny as well as gene expression patterns were assessed. In order to characterize stress responsive genes involved in defense responses, we used soybean aphid (Aphis glycines; SBA) and soybean cyst nematode (Heterodera glycines; SCN) to infest soybean cultivars. We conducted greenhouse experiments to characterize induced susceptibility effects of soybean-SBA interaction, and three-way interactions among soybean, SBA, and SCN. We utilized both demographic and genetic (RNA-seq) datasets to characterize the genes involved in such interactions using biotype 1, biotype 2 soybean aphids and HG type 0 SCN on soybean. FastQC, Btrim, Trimmomatic, Salmon, iDEP, MapMan tools were used to assess the quality, trim, map, assemble, visualize, pathway analysis and biological significance of RNA sequencing data to host genome. We identified an inventory of 117 of 153 regular TNL genes in soybean, and 352 NBS-encoding genes (100 CNLs, 77 TNLs, 13 RNLs, and 162 NLs), 28 MPKs and eight MKKs in sunflower through in silico analyses. R genes in soybean and sunflower formed several gene clusters suggesting their origin by tandem duplications. The selection pressure analysis revealed R genes experiencing purifying selection (Ka/Ks \u3c 1) in both soybean and sunflower. Sunflower MAP Kinases revealed within and between clade functional divergence, and MKK3 orthologues were highly conserved across the species representing diverse taxonomic groups of the plant kingdom. Demographic data obtained from greenhouse experiments showed that induced susceptibility as initial feeding with virulent SBA (biotype 2) increased the population of subsequent avirulent SBA (biotype 1) in both susceptible and resistant cultivars. In the three-way interaction among soybean, SBA, and SCN, the number of SCN eggs was significantly greater on the susceptible cultivar and there was no effect in the resistant cultivar in the presence of SBA. The SBA population density was negatively affected by SCN populations. RNA-seq analysis in both studies have revealed differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and transcription factor (TF) binding motifs, which were enriched for various biological processes and pathways at different time points. The DEGs were common and unique in susceptible and resistant cultivars and treatments that were enriched for various biological processes and pathways. These DEGs were also functionally related to known defense mechanisms previously reported in various hostaphid and host-nematode systems. The responses to aphid biotype 1 infestation in the presence or absence of inducer population (biotype 2) at two time points (day1 and 11 post inducer infestation) revealed significant differences on the gene enrichment and regulation in SBA resistant and susceptible cultivars. For instance, enrichment analysis showed ‘response to chitin’, ‘lignin catabolic and metabolic process’, ‘asparagine metabolic process’, ‘response to chemical’ unique to treatment with no inducer population, whereas, ‘response to reactive oxygen species’, ‘photosynthesis’, ‘regulation of endopeptidase activity’ unique to treatment with inducer population. Likewise, Soybean-SBA-SCN interaction study showed enrichment of genes in ‘Plant Pathogen Interaction’ and ‘cutin, suberine, and wax biosynthesis’ pathways at 5 (days post SBA infestation) dpi; ‘isoflavonoid biosynthesis’ and ‘one carbon pool by folate’ pathways enriched at 30 dpi in SCN resistant and susceptible cultivars. Overall, the results from this study have improved the current understanding of diversity and evolution of MAPK and R genes in sunflower and soybean, as well as have first time reported a molecular characterization of induced susceptibility effects due to SBA on soybean, and soybean- SBA-SCN interactions, which has a direct implication in disease and pest management

Ca2+ signals in plant immunity

Calcium ions function as a key second messenger ion in eukaryotes. Spatially and temporally defined cytoplasmic Ca2+ signals are shaped through the concerted activity of ion channels, exchangers, and pumps in response to diverse stimuli; these signals are then decoded through the activity of Ca2+-binding sensor proteins. In plants, Ca2+ signaling is central to both pattern- and effector-triggered immunity, with the generation of characteristic cytoplasmic Ca2+ elevations in response to potential pathogens being common to both. However, despite their importance, and a long history of scientific interest, the transport proteins that shape Ca2+ signals and their integration remain poorly characterized. Here, we discuss recent work that has both shed light on and deepened the mysteries of Ca2+ signaling in plant immunity