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Efficient Software Development Through Agile Methods
No full textContext: Distributed teams characterize Global Software Engineering (GSE). GSE
stakeholders are from different cultures, geographic places and potentially
time zones. These conditions have significant consequences on communication,
coordination and control of software projects. Given these constraints,
distributed teams need to highly rely on each other. Trust is the glue that
holds them together and enables more open communication, which increases their
performance and quality of delivered products.
Simultaneously, in striving for more efficient software development approaches,
Agile values and principles were formulated. Agile methods encourage
establishing close collaboration between customers and developers, continuous
requirements gathering and frequent face-to-face communications.
Objective: The major objective of the research is to study efficient software
development approaches particularly in (globally) distributed settings. Thus,
the dynamics of trust in GSE are investigated for bringing useful trust
improvement suggestions to project managers. Furthermore, Agile practices that
have been efficiently applied in GSE are identified through two different
systematic literature review approaches (i.e. systematic literature review and
backward snowballing). The differences identified in the use of Agile practices
lead to a need to better understand and assess Agility.
Method: The research methods, include systematic literature reviews and case
studies, are applied in different empirical cases. Then, a variety of secondary
data collection methods are utilized such as semi-structured interviews,
questionnaires, open discussions and presentations.
Result: Achieving trust was realized to be crucial and the success factor for
trust was the “awareness” of particular GSE challenges, which shall be
communicated properly to all distributed team members and proper actions shall
be taken to address them.
Besides, the literature indicated several successful combinations of Agile and
GSE. However, despite utilizing two different literature search methods the
identified patterns were similar. The most common practices were “standup
meetings” and “sprints/iterations”.
Nevertheless, the current literature reports “Agile” as a general term and
“distributed team” as the most common team/organization setting, which
motivated examining the applicability of existing Agile assessment tools in an
industrial setting. We found one of the studied tools sufficiently applicable
in the context of the case organization.
Conclusions: Trust achievement is crucial for efficient GSE collaborations
regardless of the applied software development approach. Although Agile
promotes trust among team members, it was formulated without considering teams’
distribution. Hence, combining Agile and GSE is challenging.
The literature contains several successful cases of implementing Agile in GSE
while practitioners and researchers are not yet consistent regarding their
perception of Agile practices and documenting them.
Therefore, they need to collaborate closely, illustrate the practices, agree on
the terminology, how to document the context, and how to profile/assess
Agility. For this purpose, we examined the applicability of a set of Agile
assessment tools and proposed one tool for the case organization
Routes, Routines and Emotions in Decision Making of Emergency Call Takers
No full textEmergency call takers listen to callers expressing mundane errands, but also to
callers who describe severe accidents, agony and deaths. The emergency setting
is further complicated by having to perform triage under time-pressure, but
without possibilities of seeing the patient. The setting rests on an imperative
of speedy management—there are few or no possibilities to postpone or
reconsider decisions. At the same time, the mode of communication (telephone)
may cause overflow or insufficient information, resulting in an uncertain and
ambiguous decision setting. A focal point for the organization is therefore the
individual capability of conducting triage. However, call takers are also
helped by organizational routines, which are manifested in decision support
systems, in order to navigate this uncertain and ambiguous setting.
Taken together, the emergency setting brings a tension to the fore—how does
this emotional setting, with features of vivid and interruptive experiences
that possibly detour normative decisions, interact with routines that are
supposed to provide for both stability and that recurrent decisions can be made
under similar conditions? Drawing on the fields of psychology, decision making,
organization theory and communication theory the tension is investigated by a
series of four studies.
The first study is a field study of the emotional landscape of emergency call
taking. Emergency call takers rated callers’ emotional expressions in authentic
emergency calls, the level of intensity and expressed need for help. The second
study is an experiment, using a speech sample from authentic emergency calls in
order to find out whether expressed emotion and intensity contribute to
perceived need for help.
The third study focuses on management strategies of call takers. More
specifically, how do emergency call takers manage double-faced emotional
management—i.e., their own and the caller’s emotions—simultaneously? The fourth
study focuses on how call takers make decisions, more specifically how call
takers use intuitive and emotional capabilities to complement or challenge
rational aspects of the decision support systems.
The studies reveal that certain emotions occur more often than others and that
the level of intensity of expression contributes to perceived help need. Call
takers have also developed specific emotional management strategies in order to
cope with both callers’ and their own emotions. Finally, call takers were found
to use rational and formal routines as well as non-formal, intuitive and
emotionally based individual routines in order to derive their decisions. These
findings are put into organizational context in terms of implications for
emergency call taking. Limitations to the development of situation-specific
expertise and obstacles for organizational learning are identified. Also,
emergency call taking would benefit from drawing on knowledge found outside of
the medical domain. However, the most important finding is that interpretation
of emotional expressions in callers’ voices can trigger modifications of the
triage routine in use
Eliminating the Effects of Freezing Frames on User Perceptive by Using a Time Interleaving Technique
No full textStreaming video over a wireless network faces
several challenges such as high packet error rates, bandwidth variations, and
delays, which could have negative effects on the video streaming and the viewer
will perceive a frozen picture for certain durations due to loss of frames.
In this study, we propose a Time Interleaving Robust
Streaming (TIRS) technique to significantly reduce the
frozen video problem and provide a satisfactory quality for
the mobile viewer. This is done by reordering the streaming video frames as
groups of even and odd frames. The objective of streaming the video in this way
is to avoid the losses of a sequence of neighbouring frames in case of a long
sequence interruption. We evaluate our approach by using a user panel and mean
opinion score (MOS) measurements; where the users observe three levels of frame
losses. The results show that our technique significantly improves the
smoothness of the video on the mobile device in the presence of frame losses,
while the transmitted data are only increased by almost 9% (due to reduced time
locality)
A Study investigating Challenges in the Interface Between Product Development and Manufacturing in the Development of Software-Intensive Automotive Systems
No full textThe automotive industry is facing a tremendous growth in the engineering of
software-intensive systems, giving rise to various challenges. To prevent
problems related to the fit of new software technologies in vehicles and the
manufacturing processes, a well functioning interaction between the
functions for product development and manufacturing is crucial. This is
complicated by the fact that the changeable nature of software development
causes unprecedented needs for collaboration and coordination between these two
functions. This paper reports on a process assessment that focuses on the
interface between the functions for product development and manufacturing in
the development and design of software-intensive automotive systems. The main
purpose of the study was to identify the key issues for improvement in the area
assessed. The assessment was performed
at two Swedish automotive companies where data were collected from documents
and in interviews with practitioners. Nine key improvement issues were
established ranging from challenges in requirements engineering to the need for
knowledge transfer between manufacturing and product
development. In addition, to increase the understandability of the results and
map possible avenues for solution and future research, the paper provides an
extensive analysis of each improvement issue in relation to the
state-of-the-art
Tumor size as measured at initial X-ray examination, not length of bile duct stricture, predicts survival in patients with unresectable pancreatic cancer
No full textBackground: The survival of unresectable pancreatic cancer patients is
extremely poor. The aim of this study was to examine if tumor size could
predict survival length in order to optimize patient care.
Methods: A retrospective observational study was performed on 185 consecutive
patients with unresectable pancreatic cancer (ICD10: C250-2 and C258) who were
diagnosed from 2003 to May 2010. The patients' initial radiographs at
presentation of symptoms were reviewed by the same radiologist, and tumor
extent was determined.
Results: The largest tumor diameter of the primary tumor was measured in 132
patients, 22 by an ultrasound and the other patients by a CT scan. In 53
patients, the tumor size could not be delimited and measured. Seventy-five
patients (41%) had liver metastases at presentation of symptoms. Median
survival for the entire patient group was only 119 days. The median diameter of
the patient's largest tumor was 4.35 cm, while the sample groups ranged from
1.2 to 14 cm. Patients were divided into two groups: those with a largest tumor
diameter of <= 4.3 cm (66 patients) and those with a largest tumor diameter of
>4.3 cm (66 patients). Median survival for these groups was 149 and 94 days (p
= 0.019), respectively. Cox regression showed a hazard ratio for tumor size of
1.48 (95% CI 1.02, 2.07) (p = 0.038), adjusted for the gemcitabine treatment
which had been given to 49 patients and the presence of liver metastasis. In 88
patients, stricture length could be measured at ERCP. When comparing stricture
lengths of >= 2 cm and >2 cm, no difference in survival time was noted within a
Kaplan-Meier analysis.
Conclusion: The size of the maximum tumor diameter of the primary tumor during
the initial X-ray examination of patients with pancreatic cancer may predict
survival time for those patients who had no surgical resection. Stricture
length at ERCP gave no information on survival
Mechanical Properties and Life-Cycle Sustainability Aspects of Natural Fibre
No full textIn order to understand the basic definition of the natural material,
references of recently published articles were studied. From these articles,
the definition of different terms like renewable material, recyclable material,
biodegradable material, sustainable material and finally natural material were
collected. Furthermore, a classification of natural fibre was drawn. One of
these natural fibres - the coconut was chosen for a more detail analysis in
mechanical point of view. An integrated method to analyse the sustainability of
the coconut fibre as one of the blend components in building construction will
be suggested. Finally, several uses of the fibre are reviewed
Team learning activities: Reciprocal learning through the development of a mediating tool for sustainable learning
No full textPurpose: The purpose of this article is to show how a model for sustainable
learning has been formed in the meetings between practitioners and researchers.
Design/methodology/approach: With the point of departure in an interactive
research approach, the authors have worked with learning and common knowledge
development. Empirical data were collected from nine learning seminars, which
were carried out within the framework of an EU project. Findings: It is shown
by means of empirical examples from an ongoing EU project how the pedagogic
method of learning seminars came to be a mediating tool for reciprocal learning
between researchers, project leaders and project participants.
Originality/value: The learning seminars constituted an important part of a
reflexive learning process where the learning consists of both practicable and
theoretically anchored knowledge. Together with the project participants, the
authors developed a model for sustainable learning. This model consists of a
reflection model, which rests on four fundamental conditions; pedagogic
leadership, the learning group, problem areas/situation and time aspects. This
article fills a significant knowledge gap in terms of the development of
learning within organizations
Teaching Ethics in Schools of Public Health in the European Region: Findings from a Screening Survey
No full textA survey targeting ASPHER members was launched in 2010/11, being a first
initiative in improving ethics education in European Schools of Public Health.
An 8-items questionnaire collected information on teaching of ethics in public
health. A 52% response rate (43/82) revealed that almost all of the schools
(95% out of 40 respondents with valid data) included the teaching of ethics in
at least one of its programmes. They also expressed the need of support, (e.g.:
a model curriculum (n=25), case studies (n=24)), which indicates further work
to be met by the ASPHER Working Group on Ethics and Values in Public Health
Synthetic Aperture Radar Signal and Image Processing for Moving Target Indication and Side Lobe Suppression
No full textThe thesis summarizes a selection of my research within Synthetic Aperture
Radar (SAR). Mainly the research is aimed at applying and developing signal
processing methods to single channel and multi channel SAR for wideband
systems. SAR systems can generate images looking very similar to optical
pictures, i.e. photos, and sometimes with much finer resolution compared to
optical systems orbiting Earth. SAR has also for instance been used to obtain
fine resolution images of the moon, Venus and the satellites of Saturn. Other
applications for SAR has is to detect changes in ice sheets and deforestation.
In this thesis, SAR systems capable of very high resolution imaging are con-
sidered, and data from such systems, namely the VHF system CARABAS-II and the
UHF system LORA, is used. High resolution imaging in this thesis refers to high
resolution with regard to wavelength, this independent of system operating
frequency.
Two of the topics in this thesis are related to detection and parameter
estimation of moving objects in SAR, the first one using CARABAS-II data and
the second with LORA data. On the CARABAS-II data, a speed estimation and
refocusing method is introduced and applied to single channel CARABAS-II data.
The results show good estimation accuracy as well as good ability to focus the
object and suppress forest clutter by ap- plying the refocusing algorithm. The
results on LORA data are satisfactory especially with regard to forest clutter
suppression. The ability to detect and focus images of ships allow for
surveillance of coastal areas and help in rescue of ships lost at sea.
Detection and location of cars and trucks allow for traffic monitoring to
obtain statistics of how many cars travel the roads and their speed.
In the thesis, two more important aspects for SAR processing is presented. One
paper presents windowing of UWB SAR images. A strong object such as a power
line in a SAR image cause ringing on both sides of the power line. This ringing
can cause a small house to be covered by these so called side lobes. Applying a
window can make these side lobes in the image much suppressed, however if
windowing too much, the power line will smear over the image, covering the
small house. The last topic in the thesis concern with theoretical limits for
measurement accuracy of parameters for a moving object in a SAR image. These
parameters are position, velocity, radar cross section and phase. The
theoretical expressions are verified using simulations for a single channel
system for estimation accuracy of target speed and relative speed
A parallel heuristic for fast train dispatching during railway traffic disturbances: Early results
No full textRailways are an important part of the infrastructure in most countries. As the
railway networks become more and more saturated, even small traffic
disturbances can propagate and have severe consequences. Therefore, efficient
re-scheduling support for the traffic managers is needed. In this paper, the
train real-time re-scheduling problem is studied in order to minimize the total
delay, subject to a set of safety and operational constraints. We propose a
parallel greedy algorithm based on a depth-first branch-and-bound search
strategy. A number of comprehensive numerical experiments are conducted to
compare the parallel implementation to the sequential implementation of the
same algorithm in terms of the quality of the solution and the number of nodes
evaluated. The comparison is based on 20 disturbance scenarios from three
different types of disturbances. Our results show that the parallel algorithm;
(i) efficiently covers a larger portion of the search space by exchanging
information about improvements, and (ii) finds better solutions for more
complicated disturbances such as infrastructure problems. Our results show that
the parallel implementation significantly improves the solution for 5 out of 20
disturbance scenarios, as compared to the sequential algorithm