Software Teams Research Articles

Analysis of Readiness for enhanced health literacy in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus.

To estimate the prevalence of Readiness for enhanced health literacy in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus through the diagnostic accuracy of the defining characteristics. A diagnostic accuracy study on the diagnosis of Readiness for enhanced health literacy in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus was conducted using the latent class analysis model. The sample comprised 180 individuals attending a referral outpatient clinic in Maranhão, Brazil. The data analysis was conducted in the R Core Team software. The prevalence of the nursing diagnosis was 55.23%. The main defining characteristics were expresses desire to enhance health communication with healthcare providers and expresses desire to enhance the understanding of health information to make healthcare choices. All defining characteristics showed significant specificity values. Accurate diagnoses contribute to individualized care plans for patients. The diagnosis Readiness for enhanced health literacy should be considered in implementing care plans, including interventions to reduce complications in the health status of patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus.

Interaction Between Agile Methods and Organizational Culture – A Qualitative Study

Background: Agile practices have gained popularity in the 21st century. There is also a growing body of research on agile methods. While some earlier research on agile practices and organizational culture exists with the assumption that the optimal combination of agile practices and organizational culture exists, we examine how agile methods and organizational culture interact and are mutually adjusted. Method: To find out how agile methods and organizational culture are related in practice, we conducted 50 semi-structured interviews with software and embedded software developers from five Japanese companies and three software teams from Finland. Results: Adopting agile methods does not necessarily cause convergence of organizational culture toward democratic which seems to be most compatible with archetypal agile practices. Agile methods can be adapted to organizational cultures that are sometimes challenging to modify. We demonstrate that companies tried to fit agile practices into hierarchical organizational cultures, demonstrating that organizational culture can occasionally be viewed as an exogenous variable influenced firm-, product-, and industry-specific features. Also, it is possible to transform organizational cultures to democratic. The examples demonstrate how companies alter their culture in part through HRM techniques. It should be noted, however, that these efforts to conform to culture can have some restrictions. Conclusion: There is not a single ideal combination of agile methods and organizational culture, despite what some earlier studies suggested. The results show how organizational culture and agile methods interact and adapt to one another in different ways. According to several earlier studies, different organizational cultures may support different facets of agile methods. They do not presuppose organizational culture diversity; in that it goes beyond the notion of a one-to-one relationship between agile methods and democratic organizational culture. While implementing agile practices in various organizational cultural contexts, practitioners must consider how agile methods and organizational culture are interconnected.

The Future Workplace: Characterizing the Spectrum of Hybrid Work Arrangements for Software Teams

This article systemizes a spectrum of emerging work arrangements for teams, including hybrid teams, partially aligned teams and, more importantly, variegated teams with fully aligned alternation of office presence. Our team typology is based on the practical insights from “Alpha,” “InterSoft,” Valtech, IBM, Brandwatch, and Ericsson.

Fairness in Design: A Framework for Facilitating Ethical Artificial Intelligence Designs

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Transformation (DT) technologies become increasingly ubiquitous in modern society, the flaws in their designs are starting to attract attention. AI models have been shown to be susceptible to biases in the training data, especially against underrepresented groups. Although an increasing call for AI solution designers to take fairness into account, the field lacks a design methodology to help AI design teams of members from different backgrounds brainstorm and surface potential fairness issues during the design stage. To address this problem, we propose the Fairness in Design (FID) framework to help AI software designers surface and explore complex fairness-related issues, that otherwise can be overlooked. We explore literature in the field of fairness in AI to narrow down the field into ten major fairness principles, which assist designers in brainstorming around metrics and guide thinking processes about fairness. FID facilitates discussions among design team members, through a game-like approach that is based on a set of prompt cards, to identify and discuss potential concerns from the perspective of various stakeholders. Extensive user studies show that FID is effective at assisting participants in making better decisions about fairness, especially complex issues that involve algorithmic decisions. It has also been found to decrease the barrier of entry for software teams, in terms of the pre-requisite knowledge about fairness, to address fairness issues so that they can make more appropriate related design decisions. The FID methodological framework contributes a novel toolkit to aid in the design and conception process of AI systems, decrease barriers to entry, and assist critical thinking around complex issues surrounding algorithmic systems. The framework is integrated into a step-by-step card game for AI system designers to employ during the design and conception stage of the life-cycle process. FID is a unique decision support framework for software teams interested to create fairness-aware AI solutions.

Are software projects evaluated using software teams’ success criteria? A systematic literature review

As diverse as software project stakeholders are, so are their project needs and interests. Furthermore, the criteria to measure project success are based on the stakeholder groups’ various needs. It is on the basis of these diverse measurement criteria that project success has become an elusive moving target. Despite this, the measurement and achievement of project success remains a critical milestone in project management for the satisfaction of stakeholders, including software project teams (SPTs). Several research studies have reported project success or failure from various stakeholders’ perspective. However, recent studies have projected SPTs as the most neglected key stakeholder group by software project managers and researchers in the project management field. Given this backdrop, conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) research study to determine if there are empirical studies that have evaluated software project success from SPTs’ perspective would be of interest to many in the field. According to the study's authors there is no study that has been conducted to determine this. The study found one (1) paper, which evaluated a project based on the SPTs’ success criteria, thus showing a research gap and indicating the neglect of this group of stakeholders when it comes to establishing whether software projects meet their needs or not. This study recommends that empirical studies be conducted to close this research gap.

The Gnarly Dilemma – To Launch or Not

Bill Lumbergh, the Sr. Director of Product Strategy for Initech, peered through the window in his office after finishing a design review meeting for the latest release of the company’s flagship software TPS SOLUTION. During this meeting, major product issues were revealed which could put the reputation of Initech at risk and, potentially, harm patients receiving radiation therapy. Bill and his software teams had embarked on a complete redesign of TPS SOLUTION’s architecture. The redesign, which had starved TPS SOLUTION’s customers of new features for the past 18 months (about 1 and a half years), was now behind schedule.

A digital patient-reported outcome (electronic patient-reported outcome) system for patients with severe psychiatric disorders: User-centered development study and study protocol of a multicenter-controlled trial.

The effective treatment of patients with severe psychiatric disorders primarily relies on subjective reporting of symptoms and side-effects. This information is crucial for a clinician's decision regarding medication adjustment. Treatment adjustment usually happens at a low frequency (∼4-8 weeks). In between points of care, patients are left alone with their symptoms and side-effects. This leads to uncertainty regarding the treatment, non-adherence, possible relapse, and rehospitalization. We aim to design a flexible electronic patient-reported outcome (ePRO) system, which allows patients with severe psychiatric disorders to: (a) record their symptoms using an app; (b) share the data with the clinical team at points of care; and (c) utilize the data to support therapy decisions. In this article, we describe the development process which included the following steps: (a) formation of a co-design team; (b) stakeholder interviews with patients, practitioners, and digital health experts to access needs, requirements, and barriers; (c) prototype conceptualization and design; (d) user acceptance testing and refinement; and (e) finalization of the system for testing in a pilottrial. We included input from patients with lived experience of psychiatric disorders, clinical team members, software engineers, and researchers. A prototype system was refined, and iterative changes were made before finalization during a series of operational meetings. The system allows patients to digitally self-report their symptoms and provides longitudinal ePRO symptom data for export into the electronic health record. Routine ePRO collection has the potential to improve outcomes and hereby also reduce health service costs. We have successfully developed a trial-ready ePRO system for severe psychiatric disorders. The findings were incorporated in the planning of a feasibility pilot trial. Assuming feasibility will be established, the system might be subjected to a certification process evaluation of safety and efficacy including a randomized controlled trial.

On the Relationship Between Organizational Structure Patterns and Architecture in Agile Teams

Forming members of an organisation into coherent groups or teams is an important issue in any large-scale software engineering endeavour, especially so in agile software development where teams rely heavily on self-organisation and organisational flexibility. But <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">is there a recurrent organisational structure pattern in agile software engineering teams?</i> and if so <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">what does that pattern imply, in terms of software architecture quality?</i> We address these questions using mixed-methods research in industry featuring interviews, surveys, and Delphi studies of real agile teams. In our study of 30 agile software teams we found that, out of seven organisational structure patterns that recur across our dataset, a single organisational pattern occurs over 37% of the time. This pattern: (a) reflects young communities (1-12 months old); (b) disappears in established ones (13+ months); and (c) reflects the highest number of architecture smells reported. Finally, we observe a negative correlation between a proposed organisational measure and architecture smells. On the one hand, these insights may serve to aid architects in designing not only their architectures but also their communities to best support their co-evolution. On the other hand, we observe that organisational structures in software engineering influence much more than simply software architectures, and we expect our results to lay the foundations of more structured and rigorous approaches to organisational structure studies and use in software engineering research and practice.

Community smells—The sources of social debt: A systematic literature review

Social debt describes the accumulation of unforeseen project costs (or potential costs) from sub-optimal software development processes. Community smells are sociotechnical anti-patterns and one source of social debt. Because community smells impact software teams, development processes, outcomes, and organizations, we to understand their impact on software engineering. To provide an overview of community smells in social debt, based on published literature, and describe future research. We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify properties, understand origins and evolution, and describe the emergence of community smells. This SLR explains the impact of community smells on teamwork and team performance. We include 25 studies. Social debt describes the impacts of poor socio-technical decisions on work environments, people, software products, and society. For each of the 30 community smells identified as sources of social debt, we provide a detailed description, management approaches, organizational strategies, and mitigation effectiveness. We identify five groups of management approaches: organizational strategies, frameworks, models, tools, and guidelines. We describe 11 common properties of community smells. We develop the Community Smell Stages Framework to concisely describe the origin and evolution of community smells. We then describe the causes and effects for each community smell. We identify and describe 8 types of causes and 11 types of effects related to the community smells. Finally, we provide 8 comprehensive Sankey diagrams that offer insights into threats the community smells pose to teamwork factors and team performance. Community smells explain the influence work conditions have on software developers. The literature is scarce and focuses on a small number of community smells. Thus, the community smells still need more research. This review helps by organizing the state of the art about community smells. Our contributions provide motivations for future research and provide educational material for software engineering professionals.

Dental schools in Brazil and their social, macro-regional and oral health policy repercussions

Dentistry is a profession that has shown considerable growth in the last few years, as far as qualitative aspects and scientific production are concerned, and also in the number of undergraduate courses. Objective: to describe the profile of dentistry courses through official data and unofficial data, such as the existence of student support programs, gender disparities and availability of study places. Material and Methods: to this end, a survey of the 565 Dentistry courses registered by the Ministry of Education was carried out by three trained researchers and then of their respective websites and public domain information, followed by data analysis (R 4.1.2 R Core Team software, Vienna) and georeferencing (Qgis and ArcGis software). Results: as for the profile of the institutions that offer the course, 89.4% are private and as for the unofficial data, 63% of the sites do not have information regarding the teaching staff, 44.2% of the courses present a woman as coordinator and more than half report having at least one type of student support activity. It was possible to observe that the greatest availability of Dentistry vacancies is offered by private institutions and in courses coordinated by men. Conclusion: considering the information available on the college websites, it is important to keep them up to date and complete, so that students have access to the support activities that are relevant to their education. KEYWORDS Access to public information; Dental students; Faculties of dentistry; Gender equity; Public health.

Communication Channels and their Challenges

Software development teams depend on the constant and varied use of technological tools that contribute to the fluidity of development activities. The communication channels provided by these tools contribute to the participatory culture of software development, where requirements include getting involved, learning and co-producing the code. However, the choice of channels to support development is still an open question in the scientific community. Through an investigation of closed remote software teams from a large public educational institution in Brazil during the COVID-19 Pandemic, we identified their preferred communication channels and analyzed them to learn how to improve collaboration. We also drew some comparison with social developers and took a look at the challenges that these channels impose and solutions adopted to mitigate these problems.

A software process improvement framework based on best practices

AbstractSoftware process improvement requires significant effort related not only to the identification of relevant issues and providing an adequate response to them, but also to the implementation and adoption of the changes. Best practices provide recommendations to software teams on how to address identified objectives in practice, based on aggregated experience and knowledge. In the paper, we present the GÉANT SPI framework based on best practices, together with the collected experience from the process of adopting the best practices.

The impact of working from home on the success of Scrum projects: A multi-method study

With the COVID-19 pandemic, Scrum teams had to switch abruptly from a traditional working setting into an enforced working from home one. This abrupt switch had an impact on software projects. Thus, it is necessary to understand how potential future disruptive events will impact Agile software teams’ ability to deliver successful projects while working from home. To investigate this problem, we used a two-phased Multi-Method study. In the first phase, we uncover how working from home impacted Scrum practitioners through semi-structured interviews. Then, in the second phase, we propose a theoretical model that we test and generalize using Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) surveying 138 software engineers who worked from home within Scrum projects. We concluded that all the latent variables identified in our model are reliable, and all the hypotheses are significant. This paper emphasizes the importance of supporting the three innate psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the home working environment. We conclude that the ability of working from home and the use of Scrum both contribute to project success, with Scrum acting as a mediator.

A deep learning-based expert finding method to retrieve agile software teams from CQAs

Currently, many software companies are looking to assemble a team of experts who can collaboratively carry out an assigned project in an agile manner. The most ideal members for an agile team are T-shaped experts, who not only have expertise in one skill-area but also have general knowledge in a number of related skill-areas. Existing related methods have only used some heuristic non-machine learning models to form an agile team from candidates, while machine learning has been successful in similar tasks. In addition, they have only used the number of candidates’ documents in various skill-areas as a resource to estimate the candidates’ T-shaped knowledge to work in an agile team, while the content of their documents is also very important. To this end, we propose a multi-step method that rectifies the drawbacks mentioned. In this method, we first pick out the best possible candidates using a state-of-the-art model, then we re-estimate their relevant knowledge for working in the team with the help of a deep learning model, which uses the content of the candidates’ posts on StackOverflow. Finally, we select the best possible members for the given agile team from among these candidates using an integer linear programming model. We perform our experiments on two large datasets C# and Java, which comprise 2,217,366 and 2,320,883 posts from StackOverflow, respectively. On datasets C# and Java, our method selects, respectively, 68.6% and 55.2% of the agile team members from among T-shaped experts, while the best baseline method only selects, respectively, 49.1% and 40.2% of the agile team members from among T-shaped experts. In addition, the results show that our method outperforms the best baseline method by 8.1% and 11.4% in terms of F-measure on datasets C# and Java, respectively.

Research Software Science: Expanding the Impact of Research Software Engineering

Software plays a central role in scientific discovery. Improving how we develop and use software for research can have both broad and deep impacts on a spectrum of challenges and opportunities society faces today. The emergence of the Research Software Engineer (RSE) as a role correlates with the growing complexity of scientific challenges and the diversity of software team skills. In this paper, we describe research software science (RSS), an idea related to RSE, and particularly suited to research software teams. RSS promotes the use of scientific methodologies to explore and establish broadly applicable knowledge. Using RSS, we can pursue sustainable, repeatable, and reproducible software improvements that positively impact research software toward improved scientific discovery.

Research on Strengthening Software Process Management and Becoming a Qualified Software Project Manager

With the continuous development of the Internet industry in recent years, traditional enterprises in various industries are gradually informatized, bringing new development opportunities to the software industry, the software market is expanding, facing a dramatic increase in software process management and software project management activities, the software industry for the software process and software project management gradually pay attention to it. How to choose a suitable software process to better meet the project requirements goals, software project managers as the core of the entire software project determine the success of the project, how to strengthen the software process management and how to become a qualified project manager, so as to ensure the overall progress and quality of the software project, are worth to study and research. In this paper, we outline some core concepts of software process and its management, introduce software organization and management methods, and provide an integrated, three-dimensional software reform framework provided by PSP (Personal Software Process), TSP (Team Software Process), and CMM (Capability Maturity Model Integration for Software) and RUP (Rational Unified Process)-based process model. Outlines the concept of project management and refinement to software project management in the software industry, for the role of software project manager, analyze its importance from multiple perspectives such as schedule, personnel, resources and communication, and refine its software project management related activities methods to better meet the needs of modern software management.

Implementing Agile Testing Methodologies in Banking Software Project

Agile software development has been increasingly popular in a number of sectors in recent years. Financial businesses are used to this tendency since it requires them to respond to changes in their business environments more swiftly. Agile approaches have emerged to address the limitations of old ones. In response to the ever-changing and dynamic nature of the business environment, software development businesses are increasingly implementing agile methodologies. The word "Agile" originally arose in the disciplines of software development and project management around thirty years ago. It is used to research with wide-ranging implications, and it is utilized at different levels and in different circumstances. Scrum, kanban, large-scale scrum (LeSS), spotify model, continuous integration, Scaled Agile Lean Development (SCALeD), and many more variations of the agile methodology have emerged. Initially implemented at the individual software development and team level, agile has developed into projects, programs, solutions, and portfolios over time, ultimately reaching full-service growth into an enterprise level framework. In order to examine agile methodologies, models, and practices in a less researched area of the banking and financial services industry—from software development and modelling to large-scale case study organization levels—a unique methodology to surveying the literature has been presented in this paper. The study's conclusion outlines the contributing variables, best practices, advantages, and lessons that professionals in the banking and financial services industries may apply to create a simplified, agile deployment.

Cost analysis - the desirability of natural delivery and caesarean section with decision tree model

Objective: This article deals with the cost-benefit analysis of natural childbirth and caesarean section with decision tree model.&#x0D; Methods: This is a practical study in which 644 cases of natural and cesarean births (including 317 natural births and 327 cesarean births) were extracted and included in the relevant list. Then mothers who had been at least 3 months after giving birth were included in the study. The data was collected using the researcher's checklist and EQ-5D-3L structured questionnaire by the researcher. SPSS 26 and R Core Team (2021) software were used to perform the analysis. Results: Natural childbirth was more prevalent for pregnant women compared to cesarean delivery. which had a lower cost (26980930.90±16603206.35 Rials vs. 48883938.59 ± 6126709.15 Rials) and better utility (86.91± 4.353vs. 64.16±7.348) for all evaluated outcomes. Conclusions: It is necessary to control and manage cesarean section in cases without clinical indication. Also, other low-cost and easy-to-access strategies should be carried out for the awareness of mothers and cultural and legal foundation in the field of promoting natural childbirth.

Impact of ICT-Based Tools on Team Effectiveness of Virtual Software Teams Working From Home Due to the COVID-19 Lockdown

The research examines the usage of ICT tools by software engineering teams, especially the virtual teams during COVID-19 and how it impacts the effectiveness of the team. This research has adapted the framework proposed by Salas et al. and Hackman et al. to measure team effectiveness. Team effectiveness was measured using 10 constructs. The research instrument proposed by Nagy and Habok has been adapted to measure the usage of ICT tools. The moderating role of gender and age has also been examined in this study. The sample size is 136 software professionals. Quantitative approach has been adapted. The study is descriptive in nature, and cluster sampling is adapted. The data is gathered through a closed-ended questionnaire, and analysis is done through SPSS software. The results reveal that usage of ICT tools enhances the team effectiveness in virtual software teams.

Motivating members' involvement to effectually conduct collaborative software process tailoring.

Contemporary business and software environments are highly competitive and rapidly evolving, resulting in software projects that are highly customized and changeable during development. Therefore, software process tailoring (SPT) is important as software teams conduct SPT to adjust shared development processes and evolve the project to better meet unique and dynamic needs. SPT is a special type of teamwork in which members’ active participation and critical input are necessary for understanding and synthesizing various business and technical concerns that may be divergent and conflictual and then jointly identifying an integrated tailoring solution. In this context, this study examines members’ decisive and critical involvement in SPT and adopts a motivational perspective to explore how motivation can facilitate SPT performance. Specifically, we use empowerment theory to develop a model to theorize and examine how psychological empowerment (PE) in terms of meaningfulness, autonomy, potency, and impact motivates software teams to efficiently and effectively conduct SPT. The model also considers the power distance (PD) to understand how it functions in team-based critical thinking and decisional processes to energize team members’ participative effort. The investigation surveyed 102 software development teams and used partial least squares (PLS) to analyze the data. The results show that PE in terms of the four components has various influences on SPT performance and that PD has nonsignificant moderating effects. This study contributes to the software engineering literature by uncovering the contextual mechanism underlying the relationship between PE and PD in SPT. The limitations and possible extensions of this study are also outlined for future research.