Scrum master activities : process tailoring in large enterprise projects

This paper explores practitioner descriptions of agile method tailoring in large-scale offshore or outsourced enterprise projects. Specifically, tailoring of the scrum master role is investigated. The scrum master acts as a facilitator for software development teams, nurturing adherence to agile practices and removing impediments for team members. But in large projects, scrum masters often work together in geographically distributed teams. Scrum masters use sprint planning to avoid development tasks that overlap team boundaries, coordinate status and effort across teams, and integrate code bases. The study comprises 8 international companies in London, Bangalore and Delhi. Interviews with 46 practitioners were conducted between February 2010 and May 2012. A grounded theory research method was used to identify that the scrum master role comprises six activities: process anchor, stand-up facilitator, impediment remover, sprint planner, scrum of scrums facilitator, and integration anchor. This systematic description of activities in scrum master teams extends our understanding of practitioner perspectives on agile process tailoring in large enterprises. Understanding these activities will help coaches guide large scale agile teams

Agile methods in Ethiopia : an empirical study

This paper provides empirical evidence of agile method adoption in smaller companies in Ethiopia. Agile methods are emerging as best practice for software development in the global north. So, is there evidence that agile methods are being used in Ethiopia? A Grounded Theory approach was adopted using face-to-face interviews with 17 software professionals from 7 software companies, which were selected by using a snowball sampling technique. The interviews were semi-structured and open-ended and have been audio-recorded and transcribed. Participants in the study identified the importance of agile principles, values and practices. Agile practices are used to address issues with requirements and to encourage user participation. However, it was discovered that the companies in the study were conducting software projects for government clients that mandate substantial documentation with elaborate staged approval procedures, using fixed price contracts with predefined delivery schedules

Virtual teams and employability in global software engineering education

Universities face many challenges when creating opportunities for student experiences of global software engineering. We provide a model for introducing global software engineering into the computing curriculum. Our model is based on a three year collaboration between Robert Gordon University, UK and the International Institute for IT Bangalore, India. We provide evidence based on student feedback from three cohorts of virtual team who never met face to face. We found potential employers were supportive of global software engineering in university curricula. We identify four key principles for global software engineering student projects: reconcile contrasting assessment demands between institutions, create a detailed joint timetable to reconcile teaching calendars, provide a project management framework to support phased delivery and carefully manage project scope

Influential factors of aligning Spotify squads in mission-critical and offshore projects – a longitudinal embedded case study

Changing the development process of an organization is one of the toughest and riskiest decisions. This is particularly true if the known experiences and practices of the new considered ways of working are relative and subject to contextual assumptions. Spotify engineering culture is deemed as a new agile software development method which increasingly attracts large-scale organizations. The method relies on several small cross-functional self-organized teams (i.e., squads). The squad autonomy is a key driver in Spotify method, where a squad decides what to do and how to do it. To enable effective squad autonomy, each squad shall be aligned with a mission, strategy, short-term goals and other squads. Since a little known about Spotify method, there is a need to answer the question of: How can organizations work out and maintain the alignment to enable loosely coupled and tightly aligned squads? In this paper, we identify factors to support the alignment that is actually performed in practice but have never been discussed before in terms of Spotify method. We also present Spotify Tailoring by highlighting the modified and newly introduced processes to the method. Our work is based on a longitudinal embedded case study which was conducted in a real-world large-scale offshore software intensive organization that maintains mission-critical systems. According to the confidentiality agreement by the organization in question, we are not allowed to reveal a detailed description of the features of the explored project

Insecticide resistance and the future of malaria control in Zambia.

BACKGROUND: In line with the Global trend to improve malaria control efforts a major campaign of insecticide treated net distribution was initiated in 1999 and indoor residual spraying with DDT or pyrethroids was reintroduced in 2000 in Zambia. In 2006, these efforts were strengthened by the President's Malaria Initiative. This manuscript reports on the monitoring and evaluation of these activities and the potential impact of emerging insecticide resistance on disease transmission. METHODS: Mosquitoes were captured daily through a series of 108 window exit traps located at 18 sentinel sites. Specimens were identified to species and analyzed for sporozoites. Adult Anopheles mosquitoes were collected resting indoors and larva collected in breeding sites were reared to F1 and F0 generations in the lab and tested for insecticide resistance following the standard WHO susceptibility assay protocol. Annual cross sectional household parasite surveys were carried out to monitor the impact of the control programme on prevalence of Plasmodium falciparum in children aged 1 to 14 years. RESULTS: A total of 619 Anopheles gambiae s.l. and 228 Anopheles funestus s.l. were captured from window exit traps throughout the period, of which 203 were An. gambiae malaria vectors and 14 An. funestus s.s.. In 2010 resistance to DDT and the pyrethroids deltamethrin, lambda-cyhalothrin and permethrin was detected in both An. gambiae s.s. and An. funestus s.s.. No sporozoites were detected in either species. Prevalence of P. falciparum in the sentinel sites remained below 10% throughout the study period. CONCLUSION: Both An. gambiae s.s. and An. funestus s.s. were controlled effectively with the ITN and IRS programme in Zambia, maintaining a reduced disease transmission and burden. However, the discovery of DDT and pyrethroid resistance in the country threatens the sustainability of the vector control programme

Size Matters: Microservices Research and Applications

In this chapter we offer an overview of microservices providing the introductory information that a reader should know before continuing reading this book. We introduce the idea of microservices and we discuss some of the current research challenges and real-life software applications where the microservice paradigm play a key role. We have identified a set of areas where both researcher and developer can propose new ideas and technical solutions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1706.0735

Expert Premier League soccer managers’ use of transformational leadership behaviours and attitude towards sport integrity: An intrinsic case study

The present study is the first to examine transformational leadership behaviours and integrity attitudes of expert, Premier League and International level football managers. To provide a rich, detailed exploration of the expert managers’ experiences, a qualitative approach was adopted utilising holistic content analysis. Constructed narratives revealed that the key behaviours demonstrated were inspirational messages or team talks (i.e. inspirational motivation), empathy (i.e. individualised consideration), introducing new training methods (i.e. intellectual stimulation), using exemplar players (i.e. appropriate role modelling), and goal setting (i.e. high performance expectations). However, the use and effect of such behaviours varied greatly between managers. Each of the managers also claimed to have been willing to “bend the rules” as a player and frequently used euphemistic labels to describe such behaviour. However, upon entering management, all three managers claimed to have adjusted such attitudes without providing an explanation for this

Deriving a mutation index of carcinogenicity using protein structure and protein interfaces

With the advent of Next Generation Sequencing the identification of mutations in the genomes of healthy and diseased tissues has become commonplace. While much progress has been made to elucidate the aetiology of disease processes in cancer, the contributions to disease that many individual mutations make remain to be characterised and their downstream consequences on cancer phenotypes remain to be understood. Missense mutations commonly occur in cancers and their consequences remain challenging to predict. However, this knowledge is becoming more vital, for both assessing disease progression and for stratifying drug treatment regimes. Coupled with structural data, comprehensive genomic databases of mutations such as the 1000 Genomes project and COSMIC give an opportunity to investigate general principles of how cancer mutations disrupt proteins and their interactions at the molecular and network level. We describe a comprehensive comparison of cancer and neutral missense mutations; by combining features derived from structural and interface properties we have developed a carcinogenicity predictor, InCa (Index of Carcinogenicity). Upon comparison with other methods, we observe that InCa can predict mutations that might not be detected by other methods. We also discuss general limitations shared by all predictors that attempt to predict driver mutations and discuss how this could impact high-throughput predictions. A web interface to a server implementation is publicly available at http://inca.icr.ac.uk/

RNA editing signature during myeloid leukemia cell differentiation

Adenosine deaminases acting on RNA (ADARs) are key proteins for hematopoietic stem cell self-renewal and for survival of differentiating progenitor cells. However, their specific role in myeloid cell maturation has been poorly investigated. Here we show that ADAR1 is present at basal level in the primary myeloid leukemia cells obtained from patients at diagnosis as well as in myeloid U-937 and THP1 cell lines and its expression correlates with the editing levels. Upon phorbol-myristate acetate or Vitamin D3/granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF)-driven differentiation, both ADAR1 and ADAR2 enzymes are upregulated, with a concomitant global increase of A-to-I RNA editing. ADAR1 silencing caused an editing decrease at specific ADAR1 target genes, without, however, interfering with cell differentiation or with ADAR2 activity. Remarkably, ADAR2 is absent in the undifferentiated cell stage, due to its elimination through the ubiquitin–proteasome pathway, being strongly upregulated at the end of the differentiation process. Of note, peripheral blood monocytes display editing events at the selected targets similar to those found in differentiated cell lines. Taken together, the data indicate that ADAR enzymes play important and distinct roles in myeloid cells