Representing Culture via Agile Collaboration

Accounting, Management and Information Technologies, 1999

Postindustrial organizations have come to depend upon the steady production and modification of software products to meet their competitive needs. This study reports insights into software development practices that were revealed through a cultural interpretation of organizational stories told by members of SWC, a company engaged in software development. Through interviews with 38 members of SWC, 83 stories were extracted and analyzed to identify their main themes. By grouping these content themes, we produced nine broader cultural themes that represented the organization's cultural context. Two management practices applied in SWC-development team organization and outsourcing-were subjected to an analysis in which cultural themes were interpreted from each of three perspectives proposed by Martin, J. [(1992) Cultures in Organisations; Three Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press]: integration, differentiation, and fragmentation.

2003

This article describes a non-traditional approach to Participatory Design where distributed users have a serious impact on a software development process. The small software provider makes use of a nontraditional way of Participatory Design combined with an agile development approach. By using for among other things support service, user meetings, courses and news letter they are able to on a daily bases keep in contact with users. Users convey requirements for new functiona lities, give feedback and report errors. Users' feedback and proposals form the base for further development. Frequent releases allow the company to quickly implement improvements and bug-fixes. The article relates the observed practices to other research on Participatory Design in unconventional settings and discusses how to expand the Participatory Design toolbox.

Communications in Computer and Information Science

ISO/IEC29110 is an international standard of software lifecycle for small software companies also known as Very Small Entities (VSEs). While VSEs come from a diversity of cultural backgrounds, the current ISO/IEC29110 for VSEs does not address these cultural variations. VSEs from various cultural backgrounds might therefore find it difficult to adapt such a standard. This paper raises the issue that the current ISO/IEC29110 should recognize the impacts of cultural variation on software processes and cultural suggestions. It also point out one cultural dimension has a significant impact on software processes and their efficacy. Furthermore, the concepts of cultural consideration should not be limited to regions but, also cover the management perspective of individual VSE. In this paper, we identified two opposite cultural types which affect their software processes significantly. We propose that to make software process standards more practical for VSEs from different cultural backgrounds.

Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association, 2011

In this research we focus on understanding the nature of the knowledge used during the various phases of the software development process. We have found that there are two types of knowledge involved in software development: (1) descriptive knowledge represented by conversion and coding rules, e.g., a rule for splitting a class into two; and (2) prescriptive knowledge required for deployment of global or local strategies at a micro design level; e.g., knowledge required to answer the question “why should a class should be split into two?” Most of the already existing knowledge management solutions address descriptive knowledge. Elicitation and management of the prescriptive knowledge is difficult in the sense that it is probabilistic, personalized, distributed and context specific. Also we have found that prescriptive knowledge tends to be used in decision making processes involving multiple stakeholders with different perspectives (e.g., designer, tester, software architect and pro...

Several evolutions in software engineering (SE) relate to the development of a reliable communication process among the project stakeholders. The models resulting from these improvements are the key instruments of communication in SE. There are studies that relate several problems in SE to user-engineers interactions during the modeling process.

2020

The theme for this year’s conference is 2020 vision. Like in optometry, software quality relies on standards and best practices to guide improvement. Frameworks such as Agile, Devops, CMMI, ITIL, ISO 12207, and the PMBOK act like corrective lenses to provide sound development life cycle processes and, in theory, enable better software solutions to be delivered. However, frameworks and rubrics that are designed a priori often are deficient in addressing the nuances of emergent phenomenon and constructivist meaning in complex human endeavors, especially in large enterprises. This deficiency may lead to failure of an enterprise project, with the root cause ultimately traceable to implicit bias of the participants involved. This paper treats software development as an emergent phenomenon and explores how the meaning of quality is dependent on cultural constructs and communities of meaning. The authors believe software emerges in reflection of an organization’s culture, engendering a mea...

2009

Software development is a process tasked with the development of artefacts that are used to implement organizational information systems. Depending on the social, economical and environmental setting, different software practices are used. These, however, have an effect on the resultant software product. In this paper, the authors investigate some of the software development practices that are used in South Africa. Through the use of interview techniques, the study highlighted a plethora of methods, techniques and tools that are used during the software development process. This paper advocates for a paradigm shift in the way information systems are developed. It motivates for developers to consider the social context of organizational information systems when developing software products. In a social context, capturing the organizational culture, context and human aspect contributes to the system's responsiveness and its adaptiveness to the ever changing organizational environment.

The main challenges during global software development projects are related to the lack of face-to-face communication. Since stakeholders satisfaction is crucial as a factor that can inuence a team performance, we have focused our research on the need of people feeling comfortable with the technology they use. In this article we introduce an approach that proposes a way of choosing the most suitable technology for a given group of people, taking advantage of information about stakeholders' cognitive characteristics, and we present preliminary results of an experiment we have carried out to validate our proposal.

International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE)

In the context of software development, requirement engineering is one of the crucial phases that leads to software project success or failure. According to several disruptive changes in the software engineering landscape as well as the world’s challenge of virus pandemic, the provision of practical and innovative software applications is required. Therefore, issues resolution in requirement elicitation is potentially one of the key success factors resulting in enhanced quality of system requirement. The authors have striven to create new ways of requirement elicitation according to factor effects of communication, culture, competency, and stakeholder, by incorporating tools, processes, methods, and techniques to solve the problems comprehensively, and then proposed an adaptive and applicable conceptual framework. To illustrate these effects, the authors performed a literature review from the past 8 years, and then data analysis from interviews of 27 practitioners, observations and ...