A social scientific framework for social systems in online video games: Building a better looking for raid loot system in World of Warcraft

This paper examines social behavior in the online video game World of Warcraft. Specifically focusing on one element of social design: the behavior of players in the first release of Looking-for-Raid (LFR) loot system of World of Warcraft. It uses lens of economic game theory, combined with Williams (2010) mapping principle and a modern theoretical account of human decision-making, to explore how theory about individual interactions in well-defined contexts (games) can explain collective behavior. It provides some support for this theoretical approach with an examination of data collected as part of an ethnographic study, through focus groups, and a survey distributed to 333 World of Warcraft players. It concludes with a discussion of the results and some guidelines for predicting collective outcomes in certain types of online games using the introduced framework.     

Antecedents and consequences of team potency in software development projects

Developing new software quickly, successfully, and at low cost is critical in organizations. Ways of assessing the effectiveness of development teams has highlighted measures of factors, such as teamwork, group cohesiveness, and team integration, but the use of group potency theory (the collective belief of a group that it can be effective) is rare. In our study, we investigated antecedents of and consequences to group potency in software development project teams. By examining 53 software development project teams collected from small and medium-sized software firms in Turkey, we found, that team potency positively affected speed-to-market, development cost, and market success of the product. We also found that trust among project team members, past experiences of the members, and team empowerment had a positive impact on the team potency during the project. Managerial and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Network-based innovation systems: A capital base for the Monterrey city-region,Mexico

This paper advances notions of interactive learning as one of the key drivers of the knowledge based-development perspective. The paper explores the strategic role and close relationship between social and institutional learning as critical processes in order to generate knowledge and innovation in an urban context—i.e., knowledge city. The research reported in this paper makes an account of: (i) considering a capitals system perspective for knowledge flows to add value for the development of knowledge cities and communities; (ii) learning interactive processes among actors that leverage institutional capacity within regional innovation systems, and; (iii) adopting a knowledge-based development framework for investigating the capital basis of the City of Monterrey, Mexico. This research sheds light on how knowledge-intensive elements—such as higher education institutions, research centers, firms and other local actors—are contributing community building in a knowledge-based urban context—i.e., knowledge city.     

A conceptual framework to study the role of communication through social software for coordination in globally-distributed software teams

BackgroundIn Global Software Development (GSD) the lack of face-to-face communication is a major challenge and effective computer-mediated practices are necessary to mitigate the effect of physical distance. Communication through Social Software (SoSo) supports team coordination, helping to deal with geographical distance; however, in Software Engineering literature, there is a lack of suitable theoretical concepts to analyze and describe everyday practices of globally-distributed software development teams and to study the role of communication through SoSo.ObjectiveThe paper proposes a theoretical framework for analyzing how communicative and coordinative practices are constituted and maintained in globally-distributed teams.MethodThe framework is based on the concepts of communicative genres and coordination mechanisms; it is motivated and explicated through examples from two qualitative empirical cases.ResultsCoordination mechanisms and communicative genres mutually support each other. In particular, communication through SoSo supports team members in establishing, developing and maintaining social protocols within the distributed team. Software Engineering tools and methods provide templates for coordination mechanism that need to be adapted and adopted in order to support the project at hand. SoSo serves as a medium for the necessary metawork. The theoretical framework proposed is used to describe both the practices in an established industrial project and the establishing of practices in three student teams. The framework allows explaining the heterogeneity of practices observed.ConclusionsThis paper presents a conceptual framework to study the role of communication through SoSo for coordination in GSD. The usefulness of the framework is supported by empirical findings on the role of SoSo. The theoretical framework can be beneficial for future research that aims to analyze and describe not only the role of SoSo, but also how communicative and coordinative practices can be established and maintained in GSD teams.     

The impact of institutional forces on software metrics programs

Software metrics programs are an important part of a software organization's productivity and quality initiatives as precursors to process-based improvement programs. Like other innovative practices, the implementation of metrics programs is prone to influences from the greater institutional environment the organization exists in. In this paper, we study the influence of both external and internal institutional forces on the assimilation of metrics programs in software organizations. We use previous case-based research in software metrics programs as well as prior work in institutional theory in proposing a model of metrics implementation. The theoretical model is tested on data collected through a survey from 214 metrics managers in defense-related and commercial software organizations. Our results show that external institutions, such as customers and competitors, and internal institutions, such as managers, directly influence the extent to which organizations change their internal work-processes around metrics programs. Additionally, the adaptation of work-processes leads to increased use of metrics programs in decision-making within the organization. Our research informs managers about the importance of management support and institutions in metrics programs adaptation. In addition, managers may note that the continued use of metrics information in decision-making is contingent on adapting the organization's work-processes around the metrics program. Without these investments in metrics program adaptation, the true business value in implementing metrics and software process improvement is not realized.     

Role of collective ownership and coding standards in coordinating expertise in software project teams

Software development is a complex undertaking that continues to present software project teams with numerous challenges. Software project teams are adopting extreme programming (XP) practices in order to overcome the challenges of software development in an increasingly dynamic environment. The ability to coordinate software developers' efforts is critical in such conditions. Expertise coordination has been identified as an important emergent process through which software project teams manage non-routine challenges in software development. However, the extent to which XP enables software project teams to coordinate expertise is unknown. Drawing on the agile development and expertise coordination literatures, we examine the role of collective ownership and coding standards as processes and practices that govern coordination in software project teams. We examine the relationship between collective ownership, coding standards, expertise coordination, and software project technical quality in a field study of 56 software project teams comprising 509 software developers. We found that collective ownership and coding standards play a role in improving software project technical quality. We also found that collective ownership and coding standards moderated the relationship between expertise coordination and software project technical quality, with collective ownership attenuating the relationship and coding standards strengthening the relationship. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Blended learning in higher education: Institutional adoption and implementation

Relatively little of the current research on blended learning (BL) addresses institutional adoption issues. Additional research is needed to guide institutions of higher education in strategically adopting and implementing blended learning on campus. The authors conducted a prior study in which they proposed a framework for institutional BL adoption (Graham, Woodfield, & Harrison, 2012), identifying three stages: (1) awareness/exploration, (2) adoption/early implementation, and (3) mature implementation/growth. The framework also identified key strategy, structure, and support issues universities may address at each stage. The current study applies this adoption framework to 11 U. S. institutions participating in a Next Generation Learning Challenge (NGLC) grant and attempting to transition from an awareness/exploration of BL to the adoption/early implementation phase. The study also compares U.S. institutional strategy, structure, and support approaches to BL adoption and identifies patterns and distinctions.     

Design of web-based collaborative learning environments. Translating the pedagogical learning principles to human computer interface

Seven pedagogical principles guided the development of a collaborative virtual environment, within an international project called ITCOLE. The progressive inquiry model as a theoretical framework had a large impact on describing these principles. Furthermore, this article describes the two web-based software systems – Synergeia and FLE3 – that were developed in the project. Teachers evaluated this software in the light of two perspectives: user friendliness (ease of use) and user satisfaction (especially the pedagogical usability). It is concluded that the participants find the software easy to use. The user satisfaction ranges between good and average. Details about the different types of evaluation are reported in the paper.     

Evolving team behaviors with specialization

This article evaluates Collective Neuro-Evolution (CONE), a cooperative co-evolutionary method for solving collective behavior tasks and increasing task performance via facilitating behavioral specialization in agent teams. Specialization is used as a problem solving mechanism, and its emergence is guided and regulated by CONE. CONE is comparatively evaluated with related methods in a simulated evolutionary robotics pursuit-evasion task. This task required multiple pursuer robots to cooperatively capture evader robots. Results indicate that CONE is appropriate for evolving specialized behaviors. The interaction of specialized behaviors produces behavioral heterogeneity in teams and collective prey capture behaviors that yield significantly higher performances compared to related methods.     

Acquiring and sharing tacit knowledge in software development teams: An empirical study

ContextSharing expert knowledge is a key process in developing software products. Since expert knowledge is mostly tacit, the acquisition and sharing of tacit knowledge along with the development of a transactive memory system (TMS) are significant factors in effective software teams.ObjectiveWe seek to enhance our understanding human factors in the software development process and provide support for the agile approach, particularly in its advocacy of social interaction, by answering two questions: How do software development teams acquire and share tacit knowledge? What roles do tacit knowledge and transactive memory play in successful team performance?MethodA theoretical model describing the process for acquiring and sharing tacit knowledge and development of a TMS through social interaction is presented and a second predictive model addresses the two research questions above. The elements of the predictive model and other demographic variables were incorporated into a larger online survey for software development teams, completed by 46 software SMEs, consisting of 181 individual team members.ResultsOur results show that team tacit knowledge is acquired and shared directly through good quality social interactions and through the development of a TMS with quality of social interaction playing a greater role than transactive memory. Both TMS and team tacit knowledge predict effectiveness but not efficiency in software teams.ConclusionIt is concluded that TMS and team tacit knowledge can differentiate between low- and high-performing teams in terms of effectiveness, where more effective teams have a competitive advantage in developing new products and bringing them to market. As face-to-face social interaction is key, collocated, functionally rich, domain expert teams are advocated rather than distributed teams, though arguably the team manager may be in a separate geographic location provided that there is frequent communication and effective use of issue tracking tools as in agile teams.     

Linking perceived external prestige and collective identification to collaborative behaviors in R&D teams

Research efforts have long been directed at understanding variations in collaborative behaviors among work teams with burgeoning interest in teams operating in knowledge-intensive settings. One of the largely unexplained issues is how does team image and collective identification facilitate collaborative behaviors. Here, survey data were collected from nineteen highly technical work teams engaging in software development in an R&D division of a multinational NASDAQ firm involved in multimedia communications and information processing technology. The relationships between perceived external prestige, collective team identification and team collaborative behaviors were examined. The results of the team-level analyses suggest that perceived external prestige augments collective team identification (measured at Time 1), which in turn engenders a high degree of collaboration and interaction within the team (measured at Time 2). When past team performance was controlled for, the results consistently supported the hypothesized model.     

Software crowdsourcing for developing Software-as-a-Service

Recently software crowdsourcing has become a viable development paradigm for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ecosystems. TopCoder, one of the largest competitive programming communities, enables enterprises to tap into its global talent pool and crowdsource a variety of SaaS development tasks including requirement analysis, architecture design, code, and testing. Many researchers have proposed auction-based modelling methods to characterize general software crowdsourcing. But there are few papers on the comprehensive analysis of SaaS crowdsourcing process and developer community.This paper introduces a holistic analysis framework to model the SaaS-oriented software crowdsourcing from two dimensions: individual behavior in crowdsourcing contests and collective competition in the community. The framework includes a game-theoretical model to describe the competitive nature of software crowdsourcing process. Moreover, the framework defines a competition network to characterize the topological properties of a crowdsourcing community for SaaS development. The analysis of this model indicates that the success of a competitive software crowdsourcing project essentially depends upon the networks of key participants with sufficient skills and dedication for the project. This is validated by a large historical data collected from the Top-Coder website over a ten-year period.     

From Aristotle to Ringelmann: a large-scale analysis of team productivity and coordination in Open Source Software projects

Complex software development projects rely on the contribution of teams of developers, who are required to collaborate and coordinate their efforts. The productivity of such development teams, i.e., how their size is related to the produced output, is an important consideration for project and schedule management as well as for cost estimation. The majority of studies in empirical software engineering suggest that - due to coordination overhead - teams of collaborating developers become less productive as they grow in size. This phenomenon is commonly paraphrased as Brooks’ law of software project management, which states that “adding manpower to a software project makes it later”. Outside software engineering, the non-additive scaling of productivity in teams is often referred to as the Ringelmann effect, which is studied extensively in social psychology and organizational theory. Conversely, a recent study suggested that in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, the productivity of developers increases as the team grows in size. Attributing it to collective synergetic effects, this surprising finding was linked to the Aristotelian quote that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”. Using a data set of 58 OSS projects with more than 580,000 commits contributed by more than 30,000 developers, in this article we provide a large-scale analysis of the relation between size and productivity of software development teams. Our findings confirm the negative relation between team size and productivity previously suggested by empirical software engineering research, thus providing quantitative evidence for the presence of a strong Ringelmann effect. Using fine-grained data on the association between developers and source code files, we investigate possible explanations for the observed relations between team size and productivity. In particular, we take a network perspective on developer-code associations in software development teams and show that the magnitude of the decrease in productivity is likely to be related to the growth dynamics of co-editing networks which can be interpreted as a first-order approximation of coordination requirements.     

A computational framework for institutional agency

This paper provides a computational framework, based on defeasible logic, to capture some aspects of institutional agency. Our background is Kanger-Lindahl-Pörn account of organised interaction, which describes this interaction within a multi-modal logical setting. This work focuses in particular on the notions of counts-as link and on those of attempt and of personal and direct action to realise states of affairs. We show how standard defeasible logic (DL) can be extended to represent these concepts: the resulting system preserves some basic properties commonly attributed to them. In addition, the framework enjoys nice computational properties, as it turns out that the extension of any theory can be computed in time linear to the size of the theory itself.     

Pathways to Institutional Equilibrium after a Campus Disaster

This study applies theories of evolutionary organizational change to disaster‐stricken higher education institutions. A collective case study was used to explore two institutions’ pathways back to operational equilibrium following environmental disasters. The key finding is the identification of seven variables that collectively influenced the institutional pathway to equilibrium. These variables can either shorten or lengthen the achievement of recovery goals that lead to operational equilibrium. The conclusion developed from these findings is that institutional equilibrium is largely dependent on external factors and can be regained while an institution is yet in recovery mode. Findings from this study contribute to the theoretical foundations of organizational development and crisis management, as well as the practice of crisis management in higher education.     

Reflexion in mathematical models of decision-making

Abstract

The paper is devoted to a generalization of static and dynamic mathematical models of behavior with explicitly stated reflexive models of agents’ decision-making. Reflexion is considered as agent’s beliefs about nature, opponents’ beliefs and opponents’ decision-making principles in the framework of game theory, collective behavior theory and learning models.     

Appropriating artifacts as instruments: when design-for-use meets design-in-use

This article discusses the use of artifacts as an instrument-mediated activity based on a field study in a call center specialized in networks and telecommunications. In this work setting, operators have access to a knowledge-sharing database, which is designed to support the collective elaboration of individual knowledge diffused on hot-lines in an instrument as a means for the collective activity. We characterize this situation along two interrelated analytical dimensions:

• the design-in-use process by analyzing operators' activities: hot-line assistance and knowledge base appropriation;
• the design-for-use process by analyzing the design assumptions inscribed in the artifact developed by designers.

Main results showed that the experts' dialogue-conducting strategies are based on the intrinsic complexity of the questions. The problems are co-elaborated in the course of action by the expert and the caller and constituted as a domain of problems organized by one or more specific problems. This progressive elaboration aims at elucidating the problem situation implicitly contained in the initial request. Two individual instruments were developed within the shared database. Both of them showed transformation of the artifact structure. Moreover, a relation between the organized forms of hot-line assistance activity and the forms and functions of the instruments designed is identified: it may be fully or partially reciprocally congruent. These empirical results are discussed while opposing the ‘design-in-use’ criteria developed by operators to the ‘design-for-use’ criteria built up by the actors of institutional design. In conclusion, we emphasize points to consider in order to support further reflection on relations between use and design in an anthropocentric perspective.     

Knowledge spaces with graded knowledge states

Knowledge spaces represent a framework for assessment of knowledge with solid theoretical foundations, methodology, software tools, and practical applications. The underlying assumption in knowledge spaces is that a knowledge state of an individual is represented by a set of items which the individual has mastered. In this paper, we propose an extension of the theory of knowledge spaces which accounts for gradedness of knowledge states. Namely, we assume that a knowledge state is represented by a fuzzy (graded) set with degrees representing levels to which an individual has mastered the items. If 0 and 1 are the only degrees, our approach coincides with that of ordinary knowledge spaces. We develop basic concepts and results in the graded setting including bases of graded knowledge states and their computation and a logic of partial failure with its completeness theorem. We also present an illustrative example. The main aim of this paper is to demonstrate mathematical and computational feasibility of knowledge spaces with graded knowledge states.