Use of Design Methods,Team Leaders' Goal Orientation,and Team Effectiveness: A Follow-Up Study in Software Development Projects

This article reports an empirical study on effectiveness of software development teams. It was predicted that both the extent to which design methods are used and team leaders' goal orientation is related to team effectiveness. Follow-up data (6-12 months after first assessment) were available from 25 German and Swiss software development projects. Hierarchical regression analysis showed that use of design methods and team leaders' goal orientation predicted team efficiency and changeability of the software product. In addition, goal orientation predicted maintaining schedule and budget. Practical implications of this study refer to the necessity to consider both the use of design methods and leadership issues when aiming at effective software development projects.     

The Decision View's Role in Software Architecture Practice

A decision view provides a useful complement to the traditional sets of architectural views and viewpoints. It gives an explanatory perspective that illuminates the reasoning process itself and not solely its results. The decision view documents aspects of the architecture that are hard to reverse-engineer from the software itself and that are often left tacit. The decision view and the decisions that it captures embody high-level architectural knowledge that can be transferred to other practitioners and merged when systems are merged, and they offer useful support for maintaining large, long-lived software-intensive systems. This article leads readers through a succession of epiphanies: from design to architecture, then architecture representation to architecture design methods, and finally to architectural design decisions.     

It's the Thought that Counts: The Mediating Effects of Information Processing in Virtual Team Decision Making

Previous research shows that although collaboration technology can improve the exchange of information during team decision making, one of the challenges is that this better discussion often does not lead to better decisions. In this paper, we investigate the impact of individual information processing on team decision making. We investigated the effects of two types of collaboration technology when participants were either the member of a team majority or a team minority. There was little impact due to the majority/minority, but the use of collaboration technology that required users to categorize the comments they received from others resulted in increased information processing, which in turn led to better decisions and more satisfied participants.     

Development and Validation of Team Creativity Measures: A Complex Systems Perspective

Without formalizing the team creativity (TC) concept with reliable and valid measurement, it is difficult to conduct rigorous research to help teams generate creative ideas and problem solving at a high level, of good quality and great value. The one‐sidedness and lack of depth of existing research on team creativity leads to the limited reliability and validity of team creativity measurements. In order to solve these problems, we introduce the complex system theory and develop the TC Scale with nine items for team creativity from three dimensions: team creative thinking, team creative action and team creative outcome. The data is collected from three distinct positions of respondents (managers, team leaders and senior staff) in 183 creative teams. The results of reliability measures, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis strongly support our scale. Further, we test the correlation between team trust and team creativity to establish its predictive validity and make a further verification on the scale structure through second‐order confirmatory factor analysis. Finally, we discuss the implications for research and practice.     

Managing Software Development in Microprocessor Projects

Careful management of firmware development effort and selection of appropriate design tools can improve programmer productivity.     

The Climate for Creativity and Change in Teams

This article reports the results of a study conducted to examine the ability of the Situational Outlook Questionnaire (SOQ^TM) to effectively discern climates that either encourage or discourage creativity and the ability to initiate change in a team setting. The purpose of the study is to examine the concurrent criterion–related validity of the SOQ. The article explores the characteristics in an organisational climate that promote teamwork and some of the tripwires one needs to be aware of in the formation and management of teams. Nine dimensions of the climate for creativity and change as measured by the Situational Outlook Questionnaire are put forward and defined in relation to teams. The methodology and results of the study are reported. The results show that when subjects (N7equals;154) complete the SOQ based on their recollection of a best– and worst–case team experience, the measure is able to consistently and significantly discriminate between the two types of experiences. Conclusions, implications, and areas for future research to further examine the validity of the SOQ are explored.     

Distribution Dimensions in Software Development Projects: A Taxonomy

Distribution in software development projects is a complex phenomenon with many dimensions. In addition to the obvious physical dimension entailed by geographically dispersed project personnel and resources, projects must contend with organizational distribution among various company departments, for example, as well as temporal and stakeholder distributions. A review of the literature on globally distributed software development projects produced a preliminary taxonomy based on a dimensional analysis of distribution. Developers can use this taxonomy to identify and visualize their project's distribution dimensions and scopes. A real-world case study of the taxonomy's use illuminates its value, as well as common challenges and possible solutions to distribution problems.This article is part of a special issue on Global Software Development.     

Experiences in Improving Flight Software Development Processes

In 2001, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) initiated a software process improvement effort. In 2004, JPL began the Multimission System Architecture Platform (MSAP) project and designated it as part of this effort. In 2007, JPL's Engineering and Science Directorate, which controls the MSAP project's technical development, achieved CMMI Staged Maturity Level 3.1 This article describes the impacts of the CMMI rating and the JPL process improvement effort on the MSAP project's software engineering and assurance organizations.     

Fostering Creativity in New Product Development through Entrepreneurial Decision Making

Research has emphasized the importance of employees' individual entrepreneurial decision making for innovation. In this context, practised creativity as the ability to perceive and exploit creative opportunities, can be regarded as a crucial requirement for employees in new product development. We discuss the application of decision making logic as an important antecedent of practised creativity in new product development. We survey 219 employees from new product development departments of German product and service firms. Results indicate that the use of entrepreneurial decision making logic positively impacts practised creativity; comparably we find indicators that the use of causal decision making logic negatively influences creativity. The effects significantly depend on the moderating role of uncertainty. The results contribute to the literature of creativity, entrepreneurship and new product development by theoretically and empirically revealing effectuation as antecedent to practised creativity. The results open promising avenues for future research and allow the derivation of valuable guidelines for practitioners. Aligning the new product development process to support employees' entrepreneurial decision making may help generating practised creativity.     

Organizational Slack and Knowledge Creation in Product Development Projects: The Role of Project Deliverables

Our concern is with how changes in organizational slack affect knowledge creation in product development projects. We operationalize a change in organizational slack as changed possibilities to depart from project deliverables in NPD projects. Through case research in high velocity industries we identify the effect a change in organizational slack has on knowledge creation processes inside product development projects. In particular we highlight the effects on tacit and explicit knowledge. More specifically we find that reduced slack creates a focus on explicit knowledge rather than tacit knowledge, which may reduce the ability to create knowledge creation and ultimately to innovate.     

Antecedents of Team Creativity: An Examination of Team Emotional Intelligence,Team Trust and Collaborative Culture

Teams represent a dominant approach to getting work done in a business environment. Creativity enables teams to solve problems and leverage opportunities through the integration of divergent thoughts and perspectives. Prior research indicates that a collaborative culture, which affects how team members interact and work together, is a critical antecedent of team creativity. This study explores other antecedents of team creativity, namely, team emotional intelligence and team trust, and investigates the relationships among these precursors to creative effort. Using a survey of 82 student teams at a large university in the northeast United States, our findings suggest that team emotional intelligence promotes team trust. Trust, in turn, fosters a collaborative culture which enhances the creativity of the team. Cognitive trust also moderates the relationship between collaborative culture and team creativity. Implications of these results for managers and academics are discussed.     

Organizing Individual and Collective Creativity: Flying in the Face of Creativity Clichés

The growing complexity of problems requires collective solutions to produce creative outcomes. Organizational theory on creativity has been extensively developed in recent decades, but two problematic issues remain. First, no current comprehensive model explains the development of collective creativity. Second, no empirical research has been conducted on the process of theory dissemination and its relevance within the managerial community. This paper provides evidence which can inform the design of collective creative projects within organizations, flying in the face of some managerial clichés. We design a research project which enables managerial sensemaking to emerge and which proposes a comprehensive approach to the design of team creativity. From a research design involving 24 managers and 98 eleven‐person groups, results confirm that creativity is not only about creative genius, and design for creativity is not a matter of linear correlation but implies a more sophisticated and integrative approach according to which individual creative skills, team dynamics and organizational solutions interact with each other to produce a collective creative performance.     

小组软件过程简介

TSP技术主要用于指导工程组如何更好地进行软件产品开发，实践表明TSP的使用有助于提高效率，保障产品质量，从而晚好地满足成本和进度要求，TSP可以指导小级和管理人员更好地解决软件产品开发中面临的诸多问题，文章主要描述TSP结构，创建以及TSP与PSP，CMM间的关系。     

Perception of the Climate for Creativity in the Workplace: the Role of the Level in the Organization and Gender

This paper reports a study conducted to examine differences between employees in managerial and non‐managerial positions, as well as between men and women, in their perception of climate for creativity in the workplace. It was hypothesized that, in general, managers would perceive the climate as more favourable than non‐managers, and this discrepancy should be modulated by gender. The questionnaire used in the study, conceptually grounded in Amabile's empirical and theoretical work on creativity and innovation, was administered to 388 respondents: 229 female and 159 male participants drawn from a wide range of Polish work organizations. The results show that managers perceive the climate as significantly more conducive to creativity than non‐managers do. Female employees perceive the climate less favourably than male employees, although these differences appeared smaller and less frequent as compared to the managers/non‐managers comparisons. Moreover, higher positions of female participants in the organization do not improve their perception of the climate to the same extent as it does in the case of male participants. Implications and areas for future research are explored.     

Open Innovation and Firm Performance: The Mediating Role of Social Capital

This article examines the role of social relations and networks in open innovation settings. Building on extant open innovation literature as well as on social capital theory, we develop a model that conceptualizes social capital as a mediator between the implementation of open innovation instruments and firm performance. In doing so, this paper adds to the understanding of the role of structure and content of social relations in open innovation contexts as well as of sustainable side‐effects of open innovation. In particular, we argue that apart from a direct effect of open innovation instruments on firm performance, there is also a mediated relationship between these variables. More precisely, we propose that the implementation of open innovation instruments strengthens an organization's social capital, which is, in turn, positively related to firm performance.     

浅析软件开发项目过程中的风险管理

软件项目开发中存在的各类风险会影响项目计划的实现,如果项目风险变成现实,就有可能影响项目的进度,增加项目的成本,甚至使软件项目不能实现。成功的项目管理一般都对项目风险进行了良好的管理。该文就软件开发项目过程中存在的风险进行分析,并比较了几种主流的风险管理模型,探讨如何对项目进行有效的风险管理,从而最大限度的减少风险的发生。     

Towards a Comprehensive Understanding of Lead Userness: The Search for Individual Creativity

In innovation research the identification of lead users has attracted considerable research effort. While lead user research has made important advances, there is still a significant lack in terms of understanding antecedents to lead userness. Therefore the aim of this paper is to offer a framework which is rooted in creativity psychology in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of who leading‐edge users are. It will allow for a systematic investigation and detection of innovative users. We conducted an empirical study in the field of small kitchen appliances in co‐operation with Philips Consumer Lifestyle, a field which lacks some of the typical characteristics that have been emphasized in markets traditionally studied in lead user research. With our research we show that (1) lead userness is fundamentally linked to individual creativity; (2) particularly creativity‐ and domain‐relevant skills (cognitive style, product knowledge and use experience) are related to lead userness; (3) creativity‐relevant skills can be explained by personal characteristics, such as education, gender and openness to experience.     

智能财务分析与决策支持软件的现状与发展

财务软件在经历多年发展之后,决策支持软件（DSS）的引入使财务软件应用达到了一个新的高度。本文通过分析决策支持软件（DSS）的现状与发展,并以实际的软件对比阐述了智能财务软件的发展方向。