What causes positive customer satisfaction in an ineffectual software development project? A mechanism from a process tracing case study

The customer role is crucial in agile information systems development (ISD). There is, however, a scarceness in research on how this role is enacted, and how its practice influences project outcome. In this longitudinal case study, an agile ISD project is followed with a particular focus on the customer organization’s participation, aiming to contribute to the understanding of how customers influence agile ISD projects. The data analysis follows a process tracing approach, a case study method where one aims to identify the causes and outcomes of any kind of process through the rigorous analysis of qualitative data. The analysis of the case shows that the low completion of the initial project requirements was caused by over-scoping and by an immature customer. Further, the customer’s acceptance of the outcome was caused by the agile practices introduced in the project. These helped to create a high customer’s sense of responsibility for the outcome, which worked as a mediator towards a positive acceptance of the delivery. The study contributes a mechanism for why agile projects may still be successful in light of low delivery. It is also a first case study in the information systems field explicitly using a process tracing approach

Patent Misuse and Antitrust: Rebirth or False Dawn?

This Article examines how two recent cases, F.T.C. v. Actavis and Kimble v. Marvel Enterprises Inc. could affect both the equitable defense of patent misuse and the patent-antitrust interface more generally. It begins by tracing the history of patent misuse and its reformulation into an “antitrust-lite” doctrine by the Federal Circuit. This Article presents new empirical data confirming this reformulation, and unveils the surprising influence of the Seventh Circuit and the Chicago School on that reformulation. The Article then explores Actavis and Kimble. It explains why Actavis will catalyze more antitrust challenges when patent rights are exercised, and why it also challenges the Federal Circuit’s formulation of patent misuse. The Article proceeds to observe Kimble’s misunderstanding of the patent policy underpinning the Supreme Court’s prohibition against post-expiration royalties. This Article confronts three key objections to a revival of misuse—its vagueness, lax standing requirements and punitive effects on patentees—and explains why these objections are misplaced. The Article concludes by recommending that judges and attorneys use the opportunity provided by Actavis to develop a more thoughtful framework for patent misuse that draws upon the strengths of its roots in patent policy and its interface with antitrust policy

The Place of the Trace: Negligence and Responsibility

One popular theory of moral responsibility locates responsible agency in exercises of control. These control-based theories often appeal to tracing to explain responsibility in cases where some agent is intuitively responsible for bringing about some outcome despite lacking direct control over that outcome’s obtaining. Some question whether control-based theories are committed to utilizing tracing to explain responsibility in certain cases. I argue that reflecting on certain kinds of negligence shows that tracing plays an ineliminable role in any adequate control-based theory of responsibility

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research