Adapting funding processes for agile IT projects: an empirical investigation

Agile software development that provides software development organizations, the ability to respond to changes in turbulent business environments, has been gaining wide adoption. Agile software development projects are characterized by ‘just enough’ planning and lack of upfront commitment to scope, cost, and schedule. These characteristics pose conflicting demands on managers responsible for making funding decisions, because traditional approaches to funding IT projects are often based on well-defined scope, cost, and schedule. These conflicts demand the adaptation of traditional funding processes to suit to agile projects. We draw from Adaptive Structuration Theory to understand the nature of conflicts between traditional IT project funding processes and the dynamic nature of agile projects, and how these conflicts are addressed by practices that are appropriated in the process of social interaction between funding decision makers and development teams. On the basis of a multisite case study, we present a framework that explains how organizations adapt traditional IT funding approaches to accommodate the unique characteristics of agile IT projects.     

A graph theoretic approach to authorization delegation and conflict resolution in decentralised systems

The problem of resolving conflicts in delegated authorizations has not been systematically addressed by researchers. In (Ruan and Varadharajan in Proceedings of the 7th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy, pp. 271–285, 2002) we proposed a graph based framework that supports authorization delegation and conflict resolution. In this paper, we have extended the model to allow grantors of delegations to express degrees of certainties about their delegations and grants of authorizations. This expression of certainty gives the subjects (e.g. users) more flexibility to control their delegations of access rights. We propose a new conflict resolution policy based on weighted lengths of authorization paths. This policy provides a greater degree of flexibility in that it enables to specify and analyse the effect of predecessor-successor relationship as well as the weights of authorizations on the conflicts. We present a detailed algorithm to evaluate authorization delegations and conflict resolutions. The correctness proof and time complexity of the algorithm are also provided. Since in a dynamic environment, the authorization state is not static, we have considered how authorization state changes occur and have developed an algorithm to analyse authorization state transformations and given correctness proofs. Finally, we discuss how to achieve a global decision policy from local authorization policies in a distributed environment. Three integration models based on the degrees of node autonomy are proposed, and different strategies of integrating the local policies into the global policies in each model are systematically discussed.     

Supporting collaborative software development over GitHub

GitHub is a web‐based, distributed Software Configuration Management (SCM) system build over Git, which enables developers to host shared repositories over the Internet and access them from any location, at any time. It helps developers to effectively orchestrate their activities over shared codebases by capturing direct conflicts arising because of concurrent editing on the same shared artifact. However, SCM systems have limited support for capturing inconsistencies arising because of indirect conflicts which arise because of software dependency relationships that exist between related artifacts, and lead to the introduction of syntactic and semantic inconsistencies in codebases. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative software development (CSD) tool named, Collaboration Over GitHub (COG), that provides real‐time information about arising direct and indirect conflicts among collaborative developers, working over GitHub, through a collection of workspace awareness widgets. These widgets provide people‐centric information about direct and indirect collaborators over GitHub. Resource‐centric information about current and conflicting activities of real‐time collaborators is captured and propagated to others, based on the dependency relationships between software artifacts being manipulated by them. COG uses dependency graphs to store and process dependency relationship information which is required to ascertain information about indirect conflicts. Notably, the most important novel contribution of COG is that it not only captures indirect conflicts that lead to the introduction of syntactic inconsistencies but also changes that lead to semantic inconsistencies in the codebase. It also does so at finer levels of granularity, with changes to individual method's body being traced, thereby capturing statement‐level conflicts as well. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adapting integrity enforcement techniques for data reconciliation

Integration of data sources opens up possibilities for new and valuable applications of data that cannot be supported by the individual sources alone. Unfortunately, many data integration projects are hindered by the inherent heterogeneities in the sources to be integrated. In particular, differences in the way that real world data is encoded within sources can cause a range of difficulties, not least of which is that the conflicting semantics may not be recognised until the integration project is well under way. Once identified, semantic conflicts of this kind are typically dealt with by configuring a data transformation engine, that can convert incoming data into the form required by the integrated system. However, determination of a complete and consistent set of data transformations for any given integration task is far from trivial. In this paper, we explore the potential application of techniques for integrity enforcement in supporting this process. We describe the design of a data reconciliation tool (LITCHI) based on these techniques that aims to assist taxonomists in the integration of biodiversity data sets. Our experiences have highlighted several limitations of integrity enforcement when applied to this real world problem, and we describe how we have overcome these in the design of our system.     

Auditable versioned data storage outsourcing

Auditability is crucial for data outsourcing, facilitating accountability and identifying data loss or corruption incidents in a timely manner, reducing in turn the risks from such losses. In recent years, in synch with the growing trend of outsourcing, a lot of progress has been made in designing probabilistic (for efficiency) provable data possession (PDP) schemes. However, even the recent and advanced PDP solutions that do deal with dynamic data, do so in a limited manner, and for only the latest version of the data. A naive solution treating different versions in isolation would work, but leads to tremendous overheads, and is undesirable. In this paper, we present algorithms to achieve full persistence (all intermediate configurations are preserved and are modifiable) for an optimized skip list (known as FlexList) so that versioned data can be audited. The proposed scheme provides deduplication at the level of logical, variable sized blocks, such that only the altered parts of the different versions are kept, while the persistent data-structure facilitates access (read) of any arbitrary version with the same storage and process efficiency that state-of-the-art dynamic PDP solutions provide for only the current version, while commit (write) operations incur around 5% additional time. Furthermore, the time overhead for auditing arbitrary versions in addition to the latest version is imperceptible even on a low-end server. Additionally, the application of our approach opens up the possibility to naturally support block level deduplication. While a naive solution to audit versions would copy the whole data and the data structure for each version, our solution utilizes storage space amounting very close to the most efficient delta-based solutions. Accordingly, we explore how the proposed data structure benefits the system with block level deduplication besides adding auditability property, and how it can be integrated with a state-of-the-art versioning system (Git), and in the process scale the storage efficiency of Git, and thus help scale the size of data to be stored in Git, without compromising the retrieval efficiency of arbitrary versions.     

Studies of mobile document work and their contributions to the Satchel project

This paper provides a retrospective account of the field studies, questionnaire surveys and user trials we carried out during our Satchel research project. Satchel is a system that supports mobile document work by providing streamlined access to documents and document services. We describe each study and present illustrative results to show how each one contributed to the overall success of the research project. More specifically, we describe how each study affected the design of our Satchel prototypes and the design of the scenarios that were used as communication tools during the course of the project. We analyse the relative value of each of the studies and trials, concentrating on cost factors such as research effort, expenses, and amount of subject time required. Although we acknowledge that not all research projects will be able to include such a wide number or variety of user studies, we hope that our analysis will provide useful information for other research projects.     

Conflict detection during plan integration for multi-agent systems

This paper describes techniques developed for conflict detection during plan integration. Agents' intensions are represented with intended goal structure (IGS) and the E-PERT diagrams. Conflicts are classified as goal, plan, and belief conflicts. Before integrating individual plans and detecting plan conflicts, agents first detect and eliminate their goal conflicts by exchanging their IGS. Plan integration is done through merging individual E-PERT diagrams. Project estimation and review technique (PERT) diagrams have been used extensively in the systems analysis area since the 1980s to provide a global consistent view of parallel activities within a project. We extended the PERT diagrams for use in the plan integration activity within multi-agent systems (MAS). The E-PERT diagram contributes to maintain traceable temporal relations among agents' local scheduled actions. Combined with pattern matching, plan conflicts due to resource sharing, or conflicting conditions (i.e., postconditions of one action disabling preconditions of another action) can be detected. The conflict detection techniques are implemented in a sensible agent testbed to promote deployment and performance analysis.     

Detecting Structural Refactoring Conflicts Using Critical Pair Analysis

Refactorings are program transformations that improve the software structure while preserving the external behaviour. In spite of this very useful property, refactorings can still give rise to structural conflicts when parallel evolutions to the same software are made by different developers. This paper explores this problem of structural evolution conflicts in a formal way by using graph transformation and critical pair analysis. Based on experiments carried out in the graph transformation tool AGG, we show how this formalism can be exploited to detect and resolve refactoring conflicts.     

Locating computer clubs in multicultural neighborhoods: How collaborative project work fosters integration processes

Located in socially and culturally diverse neighborhoods, we have built a network of intercultural computer clubs, called come_IN. These clubs offer a place to share practices among children and adults of diverse ethnical backgrounds. We show how this initiative ties into the striving for the integration of migrant communities and host society in Germany. In this paper, we analyze how collaborative project work and the use of mobile media and technologies contribute to integration processes in multicultural neighborhoods. Qualitative data gathered from interviews with club participants, participative observation in the computer clubs, as well as the analysis of artifacts created during project work provides the background needed to match local needs and peculiarities with (mobile) technologies. Based on these findings we present two approaches to add to the technological infrastructure: (1) a mesh-network extending the clubs into the neighborhood and (2) a project management tool, which supports projects and stimulates the sharing of ideas among projects.     

Managing artificial intelligence projects: Key insights from an AI consulting firm

While organisations are increasingly interested in artificial intelligence (AI), many AI projects encounter significant issues or even fail. To gain a deeper understanding of the issues that arise during these projects and the practices that contribute to addressing them, we study the case of Consult, a North American AI consulting firm that helps organisations leverage the power of AI by providing custom solutions. The management of AI projects at Consult is a multi-method approach that draws on elements from traditional project management, agile practices, and AI workflow practices. While the combination of these elements enables Consult to be effective in delivering AI projects to their customers, our analysis reveals that managing AI projects in this way draw upon three core logics, that is, commonly shared norms, values, and prescribed behaviours which influence actors' understanding of how work should be done. We identify that the simultaneous presence of these three logics—a traditional project management logic, an agile logic, and an AI workflow logic—gives rise to conflicts and issues in managing AI projects at Consult, and successfully managing these AI projects involves resolving conflicts that arise between them. From our case findings, we derive four strategies to help organisations better manage their AI projects.     

Metagit: Decentralised metadata management with Git

Version control systems are used widely for tracking edits to data files, especially when working in teams with simultaneous editors. They track who made edits and when, and provide tools for comparing changes made and for resolving conflicts when the same file is edited by two people. Attaching metadata to files which stays with the data and tracking changes can be difficult if the file format does not support it. In this paper we present a new and innovative architecture for recording key-value metadata for objects in a revision control system, specifically Git. The utility and maturity of version control system tools make them a good candidate for a metadata store. We take advantage of Git's data store to permit the values to be blobs, opening up other possibilities such as defining thumbnails for files and folders. Propagation rules are presented, detailing when metadata follows a file after modifications to the repository. A prototype version of a tool is presented and the usefulness of the architecture is demonstrated with a number of examples. Adapting the approach to other systems such as Mercurial and Subversion is also discussed.     

一种分布式可持续集成自动化测试平台

软件开发过程中,随着逻辑复杂度的不断增加,专门的测试可以有效地减少软件的bug,提高软件的质量,然而传统的人工测试已经不能满足当前软件开发的需求。为此,提出一种分布式可持续集成的自动化测试平台,基于Jenkins平台实现分布式可持续集成,选用Git作为版本管理工具,使用Katalon作为自动化测试工具。平台实现对Web软件每日自动更新并持续集成自动化测试,该平台在Web软件测试中大大地减少了测试人员重复回归测试的工作量。     

An integration centric approach for the coordination of distributed software development projects

This paper presents an approach for Distributed Software Development (DSD) that is based on two foundations. The first one is an integration centric engineering process, which aims at managing crucial dependencies in DSD projects. The second foundation is a strategy for operationalizing the coordination of the engineering process. The purpose of this strategy is to simultaneously provide global information system support for coordination and achieve common understanding about what should be coordinated and how. The approach has been successfully used at Ericsson, a major supplier of telecommunication systems worldwide, for coordinating extraordinary complex projects developing nodes in the third generation of mobile systems. Although many obstacles have to be addressed, the results indicate that the approach is a viable way to manage DSD during very demanding circumstances.     

Impacts of new technologies on media usage and social behaviour in domestic environments

Technological infrastructure at home is changing continuously and is becoming increasingly interconnected. Media devices, including the TV set, provide access to the Internet and offer manifold opportunities to consume media on demand. Additionally, personal devices, such as smartphones, also enable flexible consumption and sharing of media. Questions about how these technologies change the user's media usage and how these changes affect the social structure of a household, however, remain largely unanswered. In order to gain insight into the adoption of new technologies into daily routines, we explored these changes in respect of people's media usage in a qualitative long-term Living Lab study. We will present findings regarding personal routines, flexible integration of new devices into existing practices, influences on households as social systems and related issues in device access and collective use. We will highlight potentials and conflicts regarding device shifts and roles; restrictions in device access; social influences in the living room; and individual changes in media consumption.     

Toward an ‘IT Conflict-Resistance Theory’: action research during IT pre-implementation

Most empirical research on users’ resistance toward Information Technology (IT) has been conducted after implementation of IT in organisations. Little research has been done on the way individual and group resistance emerges and evolves during prior stages of projects. This focus on pre-implementation phases is important since Information Systems (IS) managers need to anticipate potential conflicts and users’ resistance that can involve project failure. While IS literature has separately developed theories on resistance and conflicts, we conceptualise a whole theoretic-system we call ‘IT Conflict-Resistance Theory’ (IT-CRT). This theory is used as driver for a 2-year action research project conducted at Netia Corporation (a worldwide leader in video and audio broadcasting) during preliminary phases of its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation project. According to our findings, while conflicts toward IT implementation are often considered to have negative effects and require being actively managed by top managers, the case study delivers an alternative observation: a passive-like attitude of managers during the IT pre-implantation phase does not prevent the resolution of a socio-political oriented conflict between two groups of employees. Our observations illustrate how the avoidance management style invites team members to cope with conflict situations and to express tacit causes of resistance. While most Management Information System methods tend naturally to maximise users’ satisfaction and to reduce potential resistance, the IT-CRT theory developed in this article supports an alternative approach: enhancing resistance in order to anticipate and resolve latent conflicts that are directly or indirectly related to the project. The underlying message of this article for researchers and practitioners is to consider users’ resistance toward IT as a key process embedded into IT choices and IS design.     

Management challenges to implementing agile processes in traditional development organizations

Discussions with traditional developers and managers concerning agile software development practices nearly always contain two somewhat contradictory ideas. They find that on small, stand-alone projects, agile practices are less burdensome and more in tune with the software industry's increasing needs for rapid development and coping with continuous change. Managers face several barriers, real and perceived, when they try to bring agile approaches into traditional organizations. They categorized the barriers either as problems only in terms of scope or scale, or as significant general issues needing resolution. From these two categories, we've identified three areas - development process conflicts, business process conflicts, and people conflicts - that we believe are the critical challenges to software managers of large organizations in bringing agile approaches to bear in their projects.     

Factors Supporting Knowledge Integration in Global Innovation Projects: An Exploratory Study

This exploratory study identifies the factors which contribute to effective knowledge integration in global innovation projects through an in‐depth analysis of two case studies. Knowledge integration is analysed in two components: knowledge (individual expertise), and integration (working together). Our analysis highlights three distinct ways that individuals think about individual expertise: individual knowledge and competence; feeling valued; and unfamiliar areas. We also identify four ways in which individuals think about working together: good social relations; cultural distance; negotiation skills; and better results through working with others. Using examples from the case studies, we discuss how these factors enable knowledge integration in globally distributed innovation projects. We also propose a model indicating how these factors impact on knowledge integration and innovation performance. This study contributes towards management guidance, which is currently lacking in the area of knowledge integration.     

Action Planning for New Product Development Projects

Two empirical studies are presented to show how experienced project leaders execute New Product Development (NPD) projects. In the first study we interviewed project leaders from four different design firms. We discovered that inside realistic NPD projects the NPD activities seldom occur in the same order as they are described in the NPD literature. Some activities are omitted, some activities are run in parallel and some even have a seemingly illogical timing. The reasons for these ‘strange’ patterns are usually project‐specific. The NPD project leaders distinguish four types of NPD projects. On the one hand, familiar (client well known and/or standard technology and/or re‐design) or non‐familiar projects (new client and/or new technology and/or innovative design), and on the other hand, the complexity of the product (simple versus complex), and they plan their NPD projects differently according to those four types. For instance, within simple and familiar projects they omit more NPD activities than in projects with a more complex and new nature. In the second empirical study we did a matched pairing study (finding NPD projects which would match each of the four types). This time we interviewed experienced project leaders from different companies, because they are probably more familiar with only one type of NPD project. We found a minimal and a ‘regular’ NPD process. Projects on new products (the non‐familiar type) contain the most activities in the total project. Complex projects execute more activities in the first stages, and also different activities than in non‐complex projects. We also found that NPD project leaders adapt an opportunistic attitude towards carrying out activities in parallel in order to gain time.