The XP customer team: A grounded theory

The initial definition of XP resulted in many people interpreting the on-site customer to be a single person. We have conducted extensive qualitative research studying XP teams, and one of our research questions was “who is the customer”? We found that, rather than a single person, a customer team always exists. In this paper we outline the different roles that were typically on the team, which range from the recognized “Acceptance Tester” role to the less recognized roles of “Political Advisor” and “Super-Secretary”

XP customer practices: A grounded theory

The Customer is a critical role in XP, but almost all XP practices are presented for developers by developers. While XP calls for Real Customer Involvement, it does not explain what XP Customers should do, nor how they should do it. Using Grounded Theory, we discovered eight customer practices used by successful XP teams: Customer Boot Camp, Customer’s Apprentice, Customer Pairing, and Programmer’s Holiday support the well-being and effectiveness of customers; Programmer On-site and Road shows support team and organization interactions; and Big Picture Up Front and Re-calibration support Customers steering the whole project. By adopting these processes, XP Customers and teams can work faster and more sustainably

An Ethnographic Study of Collaboration in a Game Development Team

This paper presents an ethnographically-informed study of the practices at a game company that develops serious games for business training. Games research focuses mainly on the game product, paying little attention to the design and development process. This study attempts to address this gap. We examined the day-to-day activity of a team responsible for designing and developing game content. Our data collection methods were informed by ethnography; they include field observations, contextual interviews and audio recordings. A thematic analysis was performed on transcripts of naturally occurring conversation within the team. The results were triangulated with field notes and interview data. The result is a description of collaborative activity within a game development team, and an interpretation of how the socio-technical environment supported the game development process. This study suggests innovative game design can be supported by creating a culture of collaboration, but innovation from teams is largely dependent on the quality of the interpersonal relationships

Mapping Indigenous education participation

Schwab and Sutherland (forthcoming) present a spatial analysis of the distribution of Indigenous education participation across Australia. Amongst their main findings is the marked effect of geographic isolation on participation. We extend this analysis by relating other Indigenous and non-Indigenous outcomes to the educational participation of 15–19 year olds via a regression framework, estimated at the geographic level. We find that access to schools and other institutions is indeed associated with educational participation. However, other factors are also important; these are variables that act as a proxy for disruption within Indigenous households, access to electronic resources that support educational participation in the home, and the presence of the CDEP scheme. In the paper we also compare the remoteness category of a student’s usual residence on census night with their remoteness category of five years beforehand. We find that, amongst other things, although Indigenous students who lived in remote or very remote areas five years beforehand are more likely to have moved than the general population (especially university students), a substantial number still remain in these areas. This has important implications for the provision of distance and online learning

Measuring and analysing success for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians

The Closing the Gap targets feature heavily in the current policy measurement framework for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians at both the national and state/territory levels. The targets provide concrete measures against which trends in changes in outcomes for the Indigenous population relative to those for the non-Indigenous population can be assessed. Although relative outcomes for the Indigenous population have improved for some of the targets, overall there has been a failure to achieve virtually all of the targets. There are also concerns that the Closing the Gap measures are resulting in an overly negative assessment of progress in improving outcomes for Indigenous Australians, and that they entrench a ‘deficits’ view of the Indigenous population. The aim of this paper is to provide helpful information to consider when assessing alternative frameworks for measuring and targeting success. We consider how to define success for Indigenous individuals, families and communities; what are the key determinants of success for Indigenous Australians; what are some of the areas of success within the seven target areas and more broadly; and what are the implications for frameworks for measuring success

Role-play and Use Case Cards for Requirements Review

This paper presents a technique that uses role-play and index cards to review use cases and to assist in making use case development more accessible and better guided. The technique is based on the established CRC card technique used for object-oriented design. In our technique, essential use cases are recorded on index cards, and role-play is used for development and review. The paper presents the technique, and outlines our experience in applying it

Featherweight Generic Confinement

Existing approaches to object encapsulation either rely on ad hoc syntactic restrictions or require the use of specialised type systems. Syntactic restrictions are difficult to scale and to prove correct, while specialised type systems require extensive changes to programming languages. We demonstrate that confinement can be enforced cheaply in Featherweight Generic Java, with no essential change to the underlying language or type system. This result demonstrates that polymorphic type parameters can simultaneously act as ownership parameters and should facilitate the adoption of confinement and ownership type systems in general-purpose programming languages

Human, rat, and mouse kidney cells express functional erythropoietin receptors

Cells of human, rat, and mouse kidney express functional erythropoietin receptors.BackgroundErythropoietin (EPO), secreted by fibroblast-like cells in the renal interstitium, controls erythropoiesis by regulating the survival, proliferation, and differentiation of erythroid progenitor cells. We examined whether renal cells that are exposed to EPO express EPO receptors (EPO-R) through which analogous cytokine responses might be elicited.MethodsNormal human and rat kidney tissue and defined cell lines of human, rat, and mouse kidney were screened, using reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction, nucleotide sequencing, ligand binding, and Western blotting, for the expression of EPO-R. EPO's effects on DNA synthesis and cell proliferation were also examined.ResultsEPO-R transcripts were readily detected in cortex, medulla, and papilla of human and rat kidney, in mesangial (human, rat), proximal tubular (human, mouse), and medullary collecting duct cells (human). Nucleotide sequences of EPO-R cDNAs from renal cells were identical to those of erythroid precursor cells. Specific 125I-EPO binding revealed a single class of high- to intermediate-affinity EPO-Rs in each tested cell line (kD 96 pM to 1.4 nM; Bmax 0.3 to 7.0 fmol/mg protein). Western blots of murine proximal tubular cell membranes revealed an EPO-R protein of approximately 68 kDa. EPO stimulated DNA synthesis and cell proliferation dose dependently.ConclusionThis is the first direct demonstration, to our knowledge, that renal cells possess EPO-Rs through which EPO stimulates mitogenesis. This suggests currently unrecognized cytokine functions for EPO in the kidney, which may prove beneficial in the repair of an injured kidney while being potentially detrimental in renal malignancies