Understanding the Structure of Agile Software Development Using Text Analytics: A Preliminary Analysis

The tenets of agile software development (ASD) were formulated over fifteen years ago. Since then, a number of methods and best practices have emerged, which, in turn, have spawned many research ideas. This study attempts to chronicle the evolution of thought in agile software development by using text analytics, an approach that is becoming invaluable in our efforts to understand unstructured text. Specifically, we use text analytics to unravel latent semantic relationships within the agile domain in order to get a sense of where we started, where we are today, and what to anticipate in the future

Exploring the Structure of Software Development Research: A Preliminary Text Analysis

Software development projects are critical to organizations when seeking operational efficiencies, competitive advantage, or both. In this research we use text analytics and bibliometrics to identify the key topics of software development that were studied in IS research published in four top IS journals. We also discuss the distribution of various topics across years and the underlying cluster groupings

Mob Programming – A Promising Innovation in the Agile Toolkit

Mob programming is a new agile practice that is attracting the attention of software community. This paper presents an overview of mob programming, its benefits and risks identified by its proponents and early adopters and suggests areas for future academic research that could help establish its efficacy and theoretical rationale. The paper also presents the results of text analysis done on the extant literature on the subject

Assessing Personality Profiles of Software Developers in Agile Development Teams

Agile methodologies are changing the way we develop software. Their emphasis on team-oriented development, joint code ownership, and reliance on people rather than predefined processes to guide activities, is transforming software development into a socio-technical process. As methodologies become increasingly more people and team-oriented, there is an urgent need to investigate the personality profiles of software developers and their likely impact on the productivity of the development team. A review of the IS research literature on personality studies found Jungian typology operationalized as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to be the most popular approach for assessing personality profiles. We compared the Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality, which is currently gaining popularity among personality psychologists, with MBTI. Our analysis, based on extant research literature in personality psychology and group behavior, suggests that FFM not only provides better measures for all factors that are measured by MBTI, but it also allows us to assess Neuroticism, an important personality trait that is of interest to researchers studying work groups, such as the agile development team. Our finding has important implications for researchers studying the agile development process. It is also highly relevant to studies investigating the personality profiles of IS professionals. Thus, our study attempts to bring in fresh insights from Personality Psychology, our reference discipline, to enrich IS research

Electrospun plant-derived natural biomaterials for Tissue engineering

Plant-derived natural products are being used in medicine, and they are easily available for the production and use in tissue engineering based biological applications. Utilization of plant materials to treat human diseases is a common practice followed over many decades. In fact plant and its derivatives have been actively included in health management over thousands of years. The advent of phytochemical and phytopharmacological sciences has opened an arena to elucidate the structural and biological composition of several medicinal plant products. Their pharmacological effects depend on the supply of highly active water soluble compounds; however, due to their large molecular size most compounds are unable to cross the lipid membranes of the cells and therefore result in poor absorption resulting in loss of bioavailability and efficacy. Electrospinning makes it possible to combine the advantages of utilizing these plant materials in the form of nanofibrous scaffolds for delivering the active constituent at a sufficient concentration during the entire treatment period to the host site. The aim of this review is to highlight the potential applications of electrospun nanofibrous scaffolds based systems and herbal medicines in tissue engineering

Artificial neural network modeling of the tensile properties of indigeneously developed 15Cr-15Ni-2.2Mo-Ti modified austenitic stainless steel

The severe and hostile operating conditions of fast breeder reactors demand the development of new austenitic stainless steels that possess higher resistance to void swelling and irradiation embrittlement. This paper discusses the efforts made in the laboratory and industrial scale development of a 15Cr-15Ni-2.2Mo-Ti modified austenitic stainless steel and the evaluation of tensile properties. Melting and casting were carried out in a vacuum induction furnace and the data on recovery of various alloying elements was obtained for charge calculations. Based on the recovery data and decarburisation behavicur under different vacuum levels, a series of alloys with close chemistry variations were prepared. Heat treatment was optimised for these special steels to control the grain size at required level. The ingots were thermo-mechanically processed and tensile properties were evaluated. This experimental data has been used to train and test an artificial neural network. The input parameters of the neural network are chemical compositions and test temperature while the yield strength, ultimate tensile strength and uniform elongation were obtained as output. A multilayer perceptron (MLP) based feed-forward network with back-propagation learning algorithm has been employed. A very good performance of the developed network is obtained. The model can be used as a guideline for new alloy development

Fibers for hearts: A critical review on electrospinning for cardiac tissue engineering

Cardiac cell therapy holds a real promise for improving heart function and especially of the chronically failing myocardium. Embedding cells into 3D biodegradable scaffolds may better preserve cell survival and enhance cell engraftment after transplantation, consequently improving cardiac cell therapy compared with direct intramyocardial injection of isolated cells. The primary objective of a scaffold used in tissue engineering is the recreation of the natural 3D environment most suitable for an adequate tissue growth. An important aspect of this commitment is to mimic the fibrillar structure of the extracellular matrix, which provides essential guidance for cell organization, survival, and function. Recent advances in nanotechnology have significantly improved our capacities to mimic the extracellular matrix. Among them, electrospinning is well known for being easy to process and cost effective. Consequently, it is becoming increasingly popular for biomedical applications and it is most definitely the cutting edge technique to make scaffolds that mimic the extracellular matrix for industrial applications. Here, the desirable physico-chemical properties of the electrospun scaffolds for cardiac therapy are described, and polymers are categorized to natural and synthetic.Moreover, the methods used for improving functionalities by providing cells with the necessary chemical cues and a more in vivo- like environment are reported