Impact of physical ambiance on communication,collaboration and coordination in agile software development: An empirical evaluation

ContextCommunication, collaboration and coordination are key enablers of software development and even more so in agile methods. The physical environment of the workspace plays a significant role in effective communication, collaboration, and coordination among people while developing software.ObjectiveIn this paper, we have studied and further evaluated empirically the effect of different constituents of physical environment on communication, coordination, and collaboration, respectively. The study aims to provide a guideline for prospective agile software developers.MethodA survey was conducted among software developers at a software development organization. To collect data, a survey was carried out along with observations, and interviews.ResultsIt has been found that half cubicles are ‘very effective’ for the frequency of communication. Further, half cubicles were discovered ‘effective’ but not ‘very effective’ for the quality/effectiveness of communication. It is found that half-height cubicles and status boards are ‘very effective’ for the coordination among team members according to the survey. Communal/discussion space is found to be ‘effective’ but not ‘very effective’ for coordination among team members. Our analysis also reveals that half-height glass barriers are ‘very effective’ during the individuals problem-solving activities while working together as a team. Infact, such a physically open environment appears to improve communication, coordination, and collaboration.ConclusionAccording to this study, an open working environment with only half-height glass barriers and communal space plays a major role in communication among team members. The presence of status boards significantly help in reducing unnecessary communication by providing the required information to individuals and therefore, in turn reduce distractions a team member may confront in their absence. As communication plays a significant role in improving coordination and collaboration, it is not surprising to find the effect of open working environment and status boards in improving coordination and collaboration. An open working environment increases the awareness among software developers e.g. who is doing what, what is on the agenda, what is taking place, etc. That in turn, improves coordination among them. A communal/discussion space helps in collaboration immensely.     

Effects of task complexity on individual creativity through knowledge interaction: A comparison of temporary and permanent teams

Using the interactionist’s perspective of creativity, this paper proposes a new research model of creativity manifestation to explore how factors affecting individual creativity depend on team characteristics. We investigated the antecedents of creativity in the literature—task complexity, team member exchange, and knowledge sharing—and then examined the relationships and differences between temporary and permanent teams. To maximize practical implications, we studied two team types like project task force (PTF) and research and development (R&D) teams in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry in Korea, where strong creativity is required for team performance. PTF teams operate with a clear mission to be completed on a deadline, while R&D teams create scientific enhancements for existing products. The proposed structural model was tested empirically with cross-sectional data from 289 professionals from the two team types. Results indicated that, in the case of PTF teams, task complexity had an indirect relationship with individual complexity through knowledge interaction among team members, while for R&D teams, task complexity was directly associated with individual creativity, and indirectly associated with the creativity through team member exchange. Thus, team characteristics must be considered together with task complexity and knowledge interactions in order to achieve team goals more effectively by maximizing each member’s creativity.     

A case study of factor influencing role improvisation in crisis response teams

Common characteristics of crisis situations are ambiguous and unplanned for events. The need for improvised roles can therefore be an imperative factor for the success of an operation. The aim of this study is to deepen the understanding of the processes taking place during improvised work “as it happens”. A case study of a crisis management team at work is presented and provides an in-depth analysis of the information and communication flow of persons acting in improvised roles, including contextual factors influencing the task at hand. The analysis suggests that three main factors lay behind decreased performance by the team when some of its members were forced to take on roles for which they lacked professional training; lack of language skills, lack of domain knowledge and insufficient organizational structure of the tasks. Based on the observations from this case study, we suggest three ways of improving a team’s performance and hence resilience when forced to improvise due to lack of personnel in one or more required competence areas. These are training to take on the responsibility for tasks or roles outside ones professional area of specialization, developing formal routines for changes in roles and tasks and developing and using tools and routines for information sharing.     

Process-context aware matchmaking for web service composition

Web service composition can help software developer design more powerful and flexible applications according to requirements of enterprise. But during compositing, how to discover suitable web services is a critical problem in design and implementing application-oriented web service technologies. The traditional keyword-based matchmaking approach is difficult to help developer to find suitable service. Current researches find that to attaching semantics to each registered service can help improve the precision of matchmaking. The improvement can help developer find more suitable service for business process. This paper proposes a novel approach of semantics-based matchmaking, which is named process-context aware matchmaking. The process-context aware matchmaking discovers the suitable service during web service composite modeling. During matchmaking, the approach utilizes not only semantics of technical process but also that of business process of a registered service, thus further improving the precision of matchmaking. We integrate the process-context aware matchmaking with business-process-driven web service composition in an integrated development environment based on Eclipse. The performance evaluation shows that performance overhead of this novel approach is acceptable.     

The use of prototypes to bridge knowledge boundaries in agile software development

Bridging knowledge boundaries among project team members is essential to prevent delays or complete failure of software development projects. Prior researchers have reported that software prototypes can be used to help bridge knowledge boundaries between team members in traditional software development settings, yet their use in an agile development setting remains unexplored. Agile development centers the interactions between team members on emerging representations of the prototype whose properties are prone to change over time. Therefore, we conducted an in‐depth study of an agile development project to enhance our understanding on how software prototypes are used as boundary objects in a distributed team setting. Our analyses of team member interactions during 46 virtual meetings that took place over a period of 6 months revealed four different prototype use practices (exemplifying, contrasting, relating, framing) that were effective in bridging syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic knowledge boundaries. We also provide empirically grounded evidence of how variations in object properties can afford different use practices, how the use practices take advantage of these properties, and how object properties are reshaped through these use practices as different types of knowledge boundaries are bridged. These findings bear important implications for research on prototypes as boundary objects in software development in particular and boundary object use in general.     

Direct mail promotion mechanisms and their application in supermarkets

In this study, we consider the problem of selecting supermarket loyalty program members to receive physical direct mail and promotional electronic direct mail (i.e., direct email). To help marketers choose the target members for physical direct mails, we modify the customer’s preference index of our original model to predict members’ repurchase rates for a physical supermarket’s members. Based on members’ predicted repurchase rates, marketers can design proper marketing strategies for different types of supermarket member to improve marketing effectiveness. In addition, because members can only spend a short amount of time reading direct emails before choosing the products that they like, a recommender system based on a simple combination method is introduced. The system determines the most suitable combination of commodity types under the condition that a customized direct email can include only a small, fixed number of such types. In this study, member transaction records from a well-known Taiwanese supermarket were used as the test data. This supermarket’s marketing department reviewed all the experimental results and confirmed that our approach is not only superior to the current approach employed by the supermarket but also useful in designing appropriate direct-mail marketing strategies for selected supermarket members. Our approach is also suitable for direct email sent by the supermarket.

     

User-defined information sharing for team situation awareness and teamwork

Abstract

Team members have different roles in various scenarios to maintain situation awareness. A collaborative system should therefore provide appropriate information to the appropriate person at an appropriate time. Considering the mismatch between the designed and actually used information, this paper proposed that users should define what information to share with their team-mates. Thirty-six participants, who formed eighteen teams, used both the traditional and user-defined shared displays to perform failure diagnosis on the context of nuclear power plants. The user-defined shared display exhibited shorter diagnosis time without significant difference in correctness. Information quality, instead of quantity, was positively correlated with team mutual awareness. This study provides empirical evidence that user-defined information sharing is effective at improving operator’s diagnosis performance, so the users should be able to tailor the information based on requirements.Practitioner Summary: To support team situation awareness and teamwork, the present study proposed that users should define what information to share with their team-mates. The laboratory experiment shows that user-defined information sharing shortens operator diagnosis time without degrading correctness. Information quality appears more important than information quantity in enhancing team mutual awareness.     

An inference method of team situation awareness based on mutual awareness

Team situation awareness (TSA) is a critical contributing factor in establishing collaborative relations among team members involved in cooperative activity. Currently, however, there is still a lack of a clearly understandable and commonly agreeable model of TSA. To resolve misunderstanding or conflict among team members or between a team and machines, our research aim is to find out the underlying mechanism of TSA that reflects team cognitive process in a way consistent with team cooperative activity, and to focus on how to achieve mutual understanding, and how to effectively incorporate human teams into a socio-technological system. In this paper, we argue that earlier models of TSA, where TSA was discussed as the intersection of situation awareness (SA) owned by individual team members, are inadequate for study of a sophisticated team reciprocal process. We suggest that it is necessary for the definition of TSA to integrate the notion of individual SA (ISA) into cooperative team activity. In particular, understanding of mutual awareness is an essential element in cooperative activity. We propose a new notion of TSA, which is reducible to mutual beliefs as well as ISA at three levels. Further, we develop an operational TSA inference method and discuss human competence and system-related factors that are required to build TSA. We then try to demonstrate how TSA is actively constructed via inferencing practices. We also develop criteria to assess appropriateness of TSA from two aspects: soundness and completeness of mutual beliefs. Comparison of evaluation results indicates that the notion of TSA proposed in this work is more suitable to depict team cooperative activity than conventional ones.     

Gaming the system: The effects of social capital as a resource for virtual team members

Increasingly individuals interact with one another through information and communication technologies in virtual teams. Leveraging the resource-based view of the firm and social capital theory, we examine how a team member’s social capital (a resource) affects the team member’s perception of the quality of knowledge shared within the team (a capability) and the benefits to the individual team member (an outcome). Using the context of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, we find that within virtual teams, relational and cognitive social capital contribute to knowledge quality, which in turn positively benefits the outcomes of individual team members.     

User Roles in Online Communities and Their Moderating Effect on Online Community Usage Intention: An Integrated Approach

Recently, it has been evident that the analysis of user data and content in online environments allows practitioners to understand how to motivate online community members and keep them frequently involved in the community, and so to manage these communities successfully. In this sense, practitioners should comprehend community members’ usage intentions to give a better service and to motivate them. However, different user types engage in such communities, so understanding their diverse needs is also essential for practitioners. In parallel, this article addresses the problem of the different user types existing in online communities, and each of them requires different strategies to be motivated and involved in the community. Thus, unlike previous studies, this study firstly identifies user roles in an online community based on the structural role theory, social network analysis, and community members’ contribution behavior. After that, it investigates members’ usage intentions based on the technology acceptance model and examines the moderating effect of identified user roles on their usage intentions. The study also guides practitioners to develop motivational strategies to keep each type of member continually satisfied.     

Task difficulty and team diversity on team creativity: Multi-agent simulation approach

Organizational structures are complex and vary according to sector, field, and type of business or service. In order to be effective, an organization needs to tailor its activities to the environment in which is it located. Based on contingency perspectives, this study is focused on investigating effective ways to design team diversity and maximize team creativity according to task difficulty levels. Considering the organizational team member as an agent, the study employed a multi-agent simulation method to understand the progress of creative manifestation, by observing the exploration and exploitation activity of team members over certain periods of time. The results first reveal that the level of team diversity influences the amount of creativity manifested by team members’ activities, such as exploration and exploitation. Second, managers have to properly facilitate either exploration or exploitation depending on task difficulty by striking a balance between them.     

Formation control for multi-robot systems with collision avoidance

In this paper, distributed formation is studied for a team of mobile robots including leaders and followers. Followers are able to sense the relative displacements to neighbouring followers and all of the leaders, and the leaders can be sensed by the followers. Based on such assumption of sensing, distributed formation control scheme is designed, under which both followers team and leaders team are fully independent. The followers and leaders have exchangeable roles within their own group. The leaders can have an arbitrary formation, and around the leaders, the followers need to reach a regular polygon formation with a suitable orientation. Distributed control laws and localised collision avoidance algorithms are designed for each follower, and they use only local displacements. Speed and acceleration sensors are avoided. As the leaders and the followers are independent and exchangeable, both robot teams are scalable and robust against member failures and system delays.     

Why information security is now multi-disciplinary,multi-departmental,and multi-organizational in nature

Information security has changed a lot over the years, and as a result a team-based approach is now required. This team must now be made up of people from many different departments within an organization, and to some extent people from outside organizations as well. One of the most pressing contemporary management challenges is to organize the work of this team, to clearly specify roles and responsibilities, to train and sensitize team members to the work to be done, and then to make sure that they are in fact doing the work that management has indicated.     

Improving situation awareness in crisis response teams: An experimental analysis of enriched information and centralized coordination

In responding to an emergency, the actions of emergency response teams critically depend upon the situation awareness the team members have acquired. Situation awareness, and the design of systems to support it, has been a focus in recent emergency management research. In this paper, we introduce two interventions to the core processes of information processing and information sharing in emergency response teams to analyze their effect on the teams’ situation awareness: (1) we enrich raw incoming information by adding a summary of the information received, and (2) we channel all incoming information to a central coordinator who then decides upon further distribution within the team. The effect of both interventions is investigated through a controlled experiment with experienced professional responders. Our results show distinctly different effects for information enrichment and centralization, both for the teams and for the coordinators within the team. While the interaction effects of both conditions cannot be discerned, it is apparent that processing non-enriched information and non-centralized information sharing leads to a worse overall team situation awareness. Our work suggests several implications for the design of emergency response management information systems.     

Overcoming relationship-initiation barriers: The impact of a computer-dating system on sex role,shyness, and appearance inhibitions

A survey of the users of an online computer-mediated matchmaking service showed that their communication patterns and objectives varied by their sex, shyness level, and appearance. Men generally contacted women more than vice versa, but a substantial minority of the women contacted a great number of men, suggesting that the safety and anonymity the system offered helped them break free from traditional sex role norms. More than half of the women reported starting a romantic or sexual relationship through the system, as compared to less than a third of the men, reflecting, in part, that men outnumber women on the system nearly three to one. Users who scored higher on a shyness scale were much more likely than less shy users to say they were using the system to find romance or sex, suggesting shier users employ the system as a way to overcome their inhibitions. Women who rated their own appearance as average were less likely to be contacted by men than those who rated their appearance as above average, but there was no significant difference between appearance groups concerning the likelihood of starting a romantic or sexual relationship. Intrinsic aspects of this computer-mediated matchmaking system helped some users overcome relationship-initiation barriers rooted in sex role, shyness, and appearance inhibitions.     

Homeopathic remedies for team toxicity

By creating better goals and results definition, by clarifying and checking on rules, and by ensuring processes are well integrated and documented, you can avoid workplace toxins. But the real secret to long-term project health lies in ensuring that every team member feels it appropriate to their role to expose toxic levels of team activity and to name a solution. You can ensure this by implementing five antitoxins: clear, mutually agreed upon goals and results; clear rules that make sense; well-integrated and visible processes; increased accountability of all team members for uncovering and reporting toxic performance levels; and, most importantly, recognition and a positive approach to answering tough questions about the project's progress. Continuous positive feedback about small successes is still the best medicine for keeping a team healthy and productive. What do healthy team members do when they see a toxin! They add it to the list of other toxins already caught or prevented before they caused bugs in the team's software. Such lists become an important part of the project's lessons learned     

A team formation model based on knowledge and collaboration

Appointing a good leader to the position of team manager and having competent workers collaborate as team members is a key to success in business activities of an enterprising institution. The traditional methodologies of human resource management have defined the required abilities for team managers and team members, and evaluated those abilities of employees. However, it is difficult to consider those abilities systematically in practice. In addition, the current management paradigm undergoes rapid transitions into knowledge management. In step with these trends, this study presents a framework for analyzing the knowledge of the candidates for managers and team members for the new team, and proposes a genetic algorithm and social network measures for choosing a team manager and team members. A prototype was built for testing the feasibility of the model. The testing data are from an R&D institute’s human resource management department. The results show that our proposed approach is a quantitative and systematic method for selecting proper personnel for appropriate teams.     

Kinematic analysis of head and trunk in individual and team one-handed carrying

Designing one-handed carrying tasks based on biomechanical findings has a considerable effect on preventing musculoskeletal injuries. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of height difference of team members on their head and trunk angles in two-person carrying with one hand and compared to individual carrying. In this experimental study, 25 male volunteers performed no-load, 3.5, 7, and 10.5 kg walking trials individually and 7, 14, and 21 kg in teams with one hand in a distance of 30 m. A commercial IMU was used for analyzing the participants' head and trunk angles in frontal, sagittal, and transverse planes. The mean and standard deviation related to the participants' age was 21.24 ± 1.42years. A significant difference was observed in the lateral bending of head and trunk in the frontal plane in taller members of the team compared to individual carrying. In addition, in team carrying, with an increase in weight, extension of the trunk increased significantly. In team carrying, right twisting of the head was reduced significantly. The motion of head and trunk in individual and team carrying, similar to the no-load trial, was reversed in all three planes. In one-handed team carrying, when there is a difference in height between the team members, lateral bending of the head and trunk in the frontal plane will be greater for the taller team member compared to individual carrying. Therefore, in designing these tasks, enough attention needs to be paid to team members’ height differences to prevent the likely injuries.     

Extending the theory of Bounded Generalized Reciprocity: An explanation of the social benefits of cooperative video game play

The theory of Bounded Generalized Reciprocity was examined to help explain why cooperative video game play can increase players’ subsequent pro-social behaviors. Participants played a basketball video game with a helpful or unhelpful teammate against an ostensible opposing team. Participants in the control condition did not play a video game with their teammate. Participants then engaged in a one-shot simultaneous or sequential prisoner’s dilemma game with their teammate and an opposing team member. In line with Bounded Generalized Reciprocity, donations to teammates were influenced by expectations of others to reciprocate pro-social behaviors. Specifically, playing with a helpful teammate confirmed expectations of in-group members to reciprocate pro-social behaviors and led to increases in pro-social behaviors between teammates. Playing with an unhelpful teammate disconfirmed expectations of in-group members to reciprocate pro-social behaviors and led to decreases in pro-social behaviors between teammates. Interestingly, playing with a helpful teammate increased participants’ donation to out-group members even though participants did not expect them to reciprocate. The current study emphasizes the importance of pro-social reciprocity expectations in predicting people’s pro-social behaviors and the impact cooperative video game play can have on such expectations.