Small Development Teams Research Articles

EAGLE Vertical Take-off and Landing Aerial Rescue Platform

DM Aero Safe Group, a small Israeli research and development team, has developed a totally new high-rise rescue technology to retrieve trapped people from areas which cannot be reached by conventional aerial ladder or aerial platform, conventional helicopter or a helicopter equipped with a Heli-Basket. The proposed Eagle Vertical Take-Off and Landing Aerial Rescue Platform is developed with the aim to rescue up to ten people at a time by approach and direct mooring at any level of a high-rise building or structure in case of natural or man-made disasters. Eagle can access narrow canyons, city streets, smokestacks, bridges and towers.

A Guttman Scaling of CMM Level 2 Practices: Investigatingthe Implementation Sequences Underlying Software EngineeringMaturity

The Capability Maturity Model specifies several hundred key practices that must be implemented as a team moves from Level 1 to Level 5 of the model. However, the model does not specify within each level the optimal sequence in which to implement the practices. Level 2 contains 121 such practices grouped under six key process areas (KPAs) which are further subdivided into five common feature areas (CFAs). Although the KPA/CFA structure has a logical fit with the organizational structure of very large software development teams, it does not correspond to the reality of small teams. Using Level 2 audit data collected on 10 small software development teams, the authors try to determine whether the data itself can point to a more appropriate implementation strategy for small teams. The data is analyzed using Guttman scaling techniques (scalogram analysis). The results indicate that there is a single underlying, orderable dimension at Level 2 which lays out a step-by-step path upward from Level 1. The order of the items is found to map well to the familiar Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle widely used by project managers to organize and control work efforts. The extracted scale can be used as an assessment tool to provide management with a quick snapshot of a team‘s current position relative to Level 2.

Negotiating Boundaries. Configuration Management in Software Development Teams

Using case-study material from three small software development teams, this paper analyses the regionalisation of ’design spaces‘. Its main purpose is to understand problems and practices of cooperative work in such spaces. ’Configuration management‘ is used to denote both a practice and supporting software tools and their relationship. A major concern is how to develop practices and tools that support cooperation across multiple organisational and social boundaries while simultaneously being ’respectful of regionalisations‘.

Connecting to a relational database application from Interleaf 5 using Lisp

The Interleaf 5 (15) desktop publishing software provides a powerful customization environment based on Lisp. A small development team, including the author, used this environment to build a tightly integrated 15 user interface (UI) for Interleaf's Relational Document Manager (RDM). This paper describes the part of this program that implements the connection between 15 Lisp and the RDM Application Program Interface (API).