There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

物件導向軟體之架構(Object-Oriented Software Construction)探討

The tension between software architecture and agility is not well understood by agile practitioners or researchers. If an agile software team spends too little time designing architecture up-front then the team faces increased risk and higher chance of failure, if the team spends too much time the delivery of value to the customer is delayed, and responding to change can become extremely difficult. This paper presents a grounded theory of agile architecture that describes how agile software teams answer the question of how much upfront architecture design effort is enough. This theory, based on grounded theory research involving 44 participants, presents six forces that affect the team's context and five strategies that teams use to help them determine how much effort they should put into up-front design.

How much up-front?: a grounded theory of agile architecture

Many contemporary object-oriented programming languages support first-class queries or comprehensions. These language extensions make it easier for programmers to write queries, but are generally implemented no more efficiently than the code using collections, iterators, and loops that they replace. Crucially, whenever a query is re-executed, it is recomputed from scratch. We describe a general approach to optimising queries over mutable objects: query results are cached, and those caches are incrementally maintained whenever the collections and objects underlying those queries are updated. We hope that the performance benefits of our optimisations may encourage more general adoption of first-class queries by object-oriented programmers.

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Caching and incrementalisation in the java query language

Team dynamics are patterns of interaction among team members that determine the performance of the team Success of Agile software development depends on team interaction Team interactions are, however, affected in distributed teams Through a Grounded Theory study that involved 40 Agile practitioners from 24 different software companies in the USA, India, and Australia, we investigate the key concerns of distributed Agile teams We found Agile teams depend significantly on team interaction, and adopt six strategies that promote effective team interaction in distributed software development

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Understanding Team Dynamics in Distributed Agile Software Development

Aspect-oriented advice increases the number of places one must consider during reasoning, since advice may affect all method calls and field accesses. MAO, a new variant of AspectJ, demonstrates how to simplify reasoning by allowing programmers, if they choose, to declare limits on the control and heap effects of advice. Heap effects, such as assignment to object fields, are specified using concern domains--declared partitions of the heap. By declaring the concern domains affected by methods and advice, programmers can separate objects owned by the base program and by various aspects. When desired, programmers can also use such concern domain annotations to check that advice cannot interfere with the base program or with other aspects. Besides allowing programmers to declare how concerns interact in a program, concern domains also support a simple kind of semantic pointcut. These features make reasoning about control and heap effects easier.

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MAO: ownership and effects for more effective reasoning about aspects

The initial definition of XP resulted in many people interpreting the on-site customer to be a single person. We have conducted extensive qualitative research studying XP teams, and one of our research questions was “who is the customer”? We found that, rather than a single person, a customer team always exists. In this paper we outline the different roles that were typically on the team, which range from the recognized “Acceptance Tester” role to the less recognized roles of “Political Advisor” and “Super-Secretary”.

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James Noble

Papers

How much up-front?: a grounded theory of agile architecture

Caching and incrementalisation in the java query language

Understanding Team Dynamics in Distributed Agile Software Development

MAO: ownership and effects for more effective reasoning about aspects

The XP Customer Team: A Grounded Theory