SCRUM RETROSPECTIVES: MEASURING AND IMPROVING EFFECTIVENESS

Within Scrum, the retrospective is the principal means through which a team focuses on continuous process improvement. As such, retrospectives provide Scrum teams a method which will allow them to identify and resolve issues that impact team performance. However, it is hard to measure increased performance based on process improvements resulting from retrospectives. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with team members, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and organizational leadership, the research will identify quantitative measures which can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of retrospectives. Subsequently, a new game-based retrospective will be developed incorporating game elements to help improve the effectiveness of retrospectives. Finally, an empirical experiment will be conducted to evaluate the quantitative measures as well as the effectiveness of the game-based retrospective

Understanding IS Education Quality in Developing Countries: Role of Acculturation

Many developing countries (DCs) have limited IS human resources. Hence, their university-level IS classes are often taught by foreign faculty. Despite this arrangement, poor quality of IS education in DCs is a continuing problem. Research indicates cultural differences as an important reason for this problem. Foreign faculty imposing western-curriculum and teaching practices without adapting to the requirements of native students and native students inability/unwillingness to make the necessary adjustments leads to poor course quality. Therefore, we argue that cultural adaptation of foreign faculty and native students will improve IS course quality. Drawing from the acculturation literature that deals with cultural adaptations we develop a model of acculturation specific to teaching of IS courses by foreign faculty in DCs. In doing so, relevant factors from the IS education literature that influence faculty and students’ adaptation are synthesized. This paper extends acculturation theory and discusses relevant implications for IS education in DCs

REPATRIATION OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS STUDENT SOJOURNERS FROM DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: ROLE OF ACCULTURATION

When students return from studying abroad they often find that it is more difficult than they anticipated weaving themselves back into their native culture. With the emphasis on implementing Information Systems in developing countries it is imperative that the knowledge learned abroad is used within the home country. For this research-in-progress, we propose that the psychological theory of acculturation can be used to explain IS-specific difficulties experienced by IS student sojourners as they repatriate to the home countries after studying abroad

Dont Break the Build: Developing a Scrum Retrospective Game

This study discusses the design and observed play of a game-based Scrum retrospective. The game builds on the existing wealth of retrospective activities but adds in actual game play. The game is created in such a way as to satisfy the definition of a game and includes a win/loss state uncommon within typical retrospective activities. Leveraging existing design paradigms, the game looks to capitalize on the reported benefits of using games in team building and learning environments. The game fulfills the goals of a Scrum retrospective for the team to inspect and adapt processes by guiding the team in focused discussion regarding their performance and observations during the proceeding Sprint. The study provides an overview of the game design and mechanics and provides observations and results from post-game questionnaires. Finally, the study proposes changes to the game based on results of the observations and discusses future research possibilities

Scaling Agile: Approach for Defining Key Aspects of Multiteam Agile Software Delivery Systems (Research in Progress)

The need to scale agile approaches for software delivery within larger organizations and larger projects has led to a proliferation of agile scaling frameworks. Anecdotal evidence of the resultant implementation of these scaling frameworks shows varying degrees of success. Missing from this discourse is a holistic, framework-independent understanding of scaling agility. This research proposes an approach for defining key aspects of agile scaling. Using a Delphi method, we will work with an international panel of agilists representing the major scaling frameworks to determine challenges for scaling agile. These results will then be compared to the existing agile scaling research to determine convergence and identify gaps within the existing research. We will also compare the results to the emerging research that uses multiteam systems to help explain the agile scaling phenomenon. These comparisons will provide a means to gauge the relevance of existing literature to practitioner identified needs. The results of the study will provide practitioners a framework-independent understanding of agile scaling for large organizations and projects and provide scholars a clear direction to support future research

IMPROVING KNOWLEDGE COORDINATION IN EARLY STAGES OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT USING GAMIFICATION

Research on software development teams, both co-located and virtual, reveals that additional focus is necessary to improve coordination. This research-in-progress explores one element of gamification for improvingthe initial stages of software team coordination. We develop a model to empirically test the effects of gamification during software requirements elicitation on both co-located and virtual teams based on a controlled 2 x 3 experiment

Mining for Process Improvements: Analyzing Software Repositories in Agile Retrospectives

Software Repositories contain knowledge on how software engineering teams work, communicate, and collaborate. It can be used to develop a data-informed view of a team's development process, which in turn can be employed for process improvement initiatives. In modern, Agile development methods, process improvement takes place in Retrospective meetings, in which the last development iteration is discussed. However, previously proposed activities that take place in these meetings often do not rely on project data, instead depending solely on the perceptions of team members. We propose new Retrospective activities, based on mining the software repositories of individual teams, to complement existing approaches with more objective, data-informed process views.Comment: In IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops (ICSEW'20

Stepping into the Third Dimension

Recent advances in optical-sectioning microscopy, along with novel fluorescent proteins and probes, give us the tools to image molecules and their interactions in space and time. Investigators using these tools routinely collect multichannel three-dimensional (3D) images and time series, but analyzing such complex datasets requires sophisticated visualization techniques. We here provide an overview of the principles and practices of 3D visualization of multichannel microscopic data. We also describe ImageSurfer, a new software package for volume visualization and data analysis. ImageSurfer is freely available (www.imagesurfer.org) and provides powerful interactive tools to explore and analyze complex multichannel 3D datasets. Although ImageSurfer is designed with fluorescent microscopy in mind, it is also effective for other types of data, including 3D datasets acquired by functional magnetic resonance imaging and EM tomography

Alternative splicing and the progesterone receptor in breast cancer

Progesterone receptor status is a marker for hormone responsiveness and disease prognosis in breast cancer. Progesterone receptor negative tumours have generally been shown to have a poorer prognosis than progesterone receptor positive tumours. The observed loss of progesterone receptor could be through a range of mechanisms, including the generation of alternatively spliced progesterone receptor variants that are not detectable by current screening methods. Many progesterone receptor mRNA variants have been described with deletions of various whole, multiple or partial exons that encode differing protein functional domains. These variants may alter the progestin responsiveness of a tissue and contribute to the abnormal growth associated with breast cancer. Absence of specific functional domains from these spliced variants may also make them undetectable or indistinguishable from full length progesterone receptor by conventional antibodies. A comprehensive investigation into the expression profile and activity of progesterone receptor spliced variants in breast cancer is required to advance our understanding of tumour hormone receptor status. This, in turn, may aid the development of new biomarkers of disease prognosis and improve adjuvant treatment decisions