An agile enterprise architecture driven approach to enhance communication in geographically distributed agile development

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Agile development is a highly collaborative environment, which requires active communication among stakeholders. This active communication helps in producing high quality working software systems in short releases and iterations. Due to the ever-increasing competition, there is an increasing interest among practitioners and researchers in contemporary geographically distributed agile development (GDAD). GDAD claims to offer several benefits over co-located agile development such as lower production cost, around the clock development, faster time to market, and the liberty of involving the most talented developers across the globe. However, in the GDAD environment, active communication is difficult to achieve due to many challenges such as differences in geographical locations and time. Literature has reported that agile enterprise architecture (EA) could help enhancing GDAD communication and performance. However, little empirical evidence is known to support this claim. Furthermore, it is not clear how to effectively achieve and study active communication construct in GDAD in terms of its dimensions, determinants and effects on performance? As a result, there is a lack of understanding about how GDAD organisations can establish and maintain active communication among distributed teams. This dissertation contributes to this research gap, first, by developing a research model based on an extensive systematic literature review on the GDAD communication challenges, techniques and strategies to mitigate these challenges, and the impact of communication on GDAD software performance. This study provides important insights about GDAD communication by identifying and empirically examining the relationships among the two dimensions of active communication (communication efficiency and communication effectiveness), one antecedent that can be controlled (agile enterprise architecture (EA)), and four aspects of GDAD performance (on-time completion, on-budget completion, software functionality, and software quality). The study then validates the research model using an integrated research approach that combines quantitative and qualitative data analyses. The quantitative data are collected using a survey technique from 160 responses and analysed using Partial Least Squares (PLS) analyses. The qualitative data are collected using interview techniques through 10 post hoc case studies and analysed using content analysis technique. This study reports that agile EA has positive impacts on communication efficiency and communication effectiveness, and on GDAD performance. It has also been found that communication efficiency and communication effectiveness have significant differential impacts on GDAD performance aspects. While communication efficiency is, generally, related to on-time and on-budget completions, communication effectiveness is, generally, related to functionality and quality aspects. While the prior GDAD literature offers little guidance for GDAD communication issue, this research contributes to both theory and practice, and offers a number of useful insights and agile EA driven GDAD model. From theory perspective, insights and model are theoretically based on and empirically tested about the value and positive impact of agile EA on active communication dimensions and GDAD performance, and the impact of communication efficiency and communication effectiveness on GDAD performance in the GDAD environment. Moreover, from practice perspective, this study indicates that agile EA, communication efficiency, and communication effectiveness together increase the GDAD performance and thus, facilitate a better GDAD performance than in GDAD that does not employ agile EA. Despite the above-mentioned contributions, like any other studies, this study has also some limitations such as sample size, time and potential analysis bias of applied qualitative and quantitative research methods. A number of steps were taken to mitigate or minimise the effects of these limitations. Thus, findings of this work should be considered with its limitations when interpreting it in the relevant theoretical and practical context

A Probabilistic Data Fusion Modeling Approach for Extracting True Values from Uncertain and Conflicting Attributes

Real-world data obtained from integrating heterogeneous data sources are often multi-valued, uncertain, imprecise, error-prone, outdated, and have different degrees of accuracy and correctness. It is critical to resolve data uncertainty and conflicts to present quality data that reflect actual world values. This task is called data fusion. In this paper, we deal with the problem of data fusion based on probabilistic entity linkage and uncertainty management in conflict data. Data fusion has been widely explored in the research community. However, concerns such as explicit uncertainty management and on-demand data fusion, which can cope with dynamic data sources, have not been studied well. This paper proposes a new probabilistic data fusion modeling approach that attempts to find true data values under conditions of uncertain or conflicted multi-valued attributes. These attributes are generated from the probabilistic linkage and merging alternatives of multi-corresponding entities. Consequently, the paper identifies and formulates several data fusion cases and sample spaces that require further conditional computation using our computational fusion method. The identification is established to fit with a real-world data fusion problem. In the real world, there is always the possibility of heterogeneous data sources, the integration of probabilistic entities, single or multiple truth values for certain attributes, and different combinations of attribute values as alternatives for each generated entity. We validate our probabilistic data fusion approach through mathematical representation based on three data sources with different reliability scores. The validity of the approach was assessed via implementation into our probabilistic integration system to show how it can manage and resolve different cases of data conflicts and inconsistencies. The outcome showed improved accuracy in identifying true values due to the association of constructive evidence

Pancreatic surgery outcomes: multicentre prospective snapshot study in 67 countries

Background: Pancreatic surgery remains associated with high morbidity rates. Although postoperative mortality appears to have improved with specialization, the outcomes reported in the literature reflect the activity of highly specialized centres. The aim of this study was to evaluate the outcomes following pancreatic surgery worldwide.Methods: This was an international, prospective, multicentre, cross-sectional snapshot study of consecutive patients undergoing pancreatic operations worldwide in a 3-month interval in 2021. The primary outcome was postoperative mortality within 90 days of surgery. Multivariable logistic regression was used to explore relationships with Human Development Index (HDI) and other parameters.Results: A total of 4223 patients from 67 countries were analysed. A complication of any severity was detected in 68.7 percent of patients (2901 of 4223). Major complication rates (Clavien-Dindo grade at least IIIa) were 24, 18, and 27 percent, and mortality rates were 10, 5, and 5 per cent in low-to-middle-, high-, and very high-HDI countries respectively. The 90-day postoperative mortality rate was 5.4 per cent (229 of 4223) overall, but was significantly higher in the low-to-middle-HDI group (adjusted OR 2.88, 95 per cent c.i. 1.80 to 4.48). The overall failure-to-rescue rate was 21 percent; however, it was 41 per cent in low-to-middle-compared with 19 per cent in very high-HDI countries.Conclusion: Excess mortality in low-to-middle-HDI countries could be attributable to failure to rescue of patients from severe complications. The authors call for a collaborative response from international and regional associations of pancreatic surgeons to address management related to death from postoperative complications to tackle the global disparities in the outcomes of pancreatic surgery (NCT04652271; ISRCTN95140761)