Discontinuities and Best Practices in Virtual Research Collaboration

Research collaboration has become increasingly global, as collaboration technologies continue to advance and as research problems become more interdisciplinary and global. Virtual research teams have processes and challenges that are unique from a typical virtual team, and we need a better understanding of how such teams can utilize virtual research environments to their advantage. We examine this question from a review of the relevant literature and an analysis of experiences and reflections from a doctoral seminar that studied and experienced the process of virtual research collaboration

Integrating Usability Practices into Agile Development : A Case Study

Within agile software development there is a growing concern with how development organizations can integrate usability work into agile practices. The concern occurs as frustration experienced in practice by agile developers and usability designers, and it also occurs as a gap in the research literature. With this paper we report from a case study in a software company that is committed to agile development, to usability work, and to their integration. The theoretical starting point is an initial framework that has been elicited from the research literature; and the paper’s contribution is an extension and modification of the initial framework based on our case study results. The resulting framework points to three enablers (attitudes, compromises, skills), three tasks (upfront design, low-fi prototyping, iterative evaluating), and three alternative modes of collaboration/work organization (parallel, embedded, fully integrated) in agile usability practices. In addition, end-user involvement may vary. The paper contributes by extending existing frameworks on integration and thus providing better explanations for practitioners and researchers of integration of usability.Godkänd; 2014; 20141021 (terpai