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

SUMMARY A number of proposals to manage aliasing in Java-like programming languages have been advanced over the last five years. It is not clear how practical these proposals are, that is, how well they relate to the kinds of programs currently written in Java-like languages. To address this problem, we analysed heap snapshots from a corpus of Java programs. Our results indicate that object-oriented programs do in fact exhibit symptoms of encapsulation in practice, and that proposed models of uniqueness, ownership, and confinement can usefully describe the aliasing structures of object-oriented programs. Understanding the kinds of aliasing present in programs should help us to design formalisms to make explicit the kinds of aliasing implicit in object-oriented programs.

http://homepages.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~alex/files/PotaninNobleBiddleCCPE2004.pdf

Checking ownership and confinement

Pluggable types enable users to enforce multiple type systems in one programming language. We have developed a suite of tools, called the JavaCOP framework, that allows developers to create pluggable type systems for Java. JavaCOP provides a simple declarative language in which program constraints are defined over a program's abstract syntax tree. The JavaCOP compiler automatically enforces these constraints on programs during compilation. The JavaCOP framework also includes a dataflow analysis API in order to support type systems which depend on flow-sensitive information. Finally, JavaCOP includes a novel test framework which helps users gain confidence in the correctness of their pluggable type systems. We demonstrate the framework by discussing a number of pluggable type systems which have been implemented in JavaCOP in order to detect errors and enforce strong invariants in programs. These type systems range from general-purpose checkers, such as a type system for nonnull references, to domain-specific ones, such as a checker for conformance to a library's usage rules.

/pdf/javacop-declarative-pluggable-types-for-java-3k1h9iv06f.pdf

JavaCOP: Declarative pluggable types for java

The Customer is a critical role in XP, but almost all XP practices are presented for developers by developers. While XP calls for Real Customer Involvement, it does not explain what XP Customers should do, nor how they should do it. Using Grounded Theory, we discovered eight customer practices used by successful XP teams: Customer Boot Camp, Customer’s Apprentice, Customer Pairing, and Programmer’s Holiday support the well-being and effectiveness of customers; Programmer On-site and Road shows support team and organization interactions; and Big Picture Up Front and Re-calibration support Customers steering the whole project. By adopting these processes, XP Customers and teams can work faster and more sustainably.

/pdf/xp-customer-practices-a-grounded-theory-4ztqutriqc.pdf

XP Customer Practices: A Grounded Theory

Background: Trust fuels team performance and contributes to build an effective and cohesive team. The self-organizing and collaborative nature of Agile teams increases the importance of trust in software development teams. Trust is, however, affected in distributed teams. Aim: To investigate the emergent key concerns, particularly the impact of trust, in distributed Agile teams. Method: Through a Grounded Theory study that explores distributed software development from the specific perspective of Agile practitioners, we interviewed 45 participants from 28 different software companies in the USA, India, and Australia. Results: In this paper, we present the reasons for lack of trust and its adverse effects in distributed Agile teams that emerged from our analysis, using the causal-consequences theoretical model. Conclusion: Understanding the causes and consequences of lack of trust can develop awareness of the importance of trust in distributed teams, and pave ways for effectively building trust in project-oriented contexts.

/pdf/understanding-lack-of-trust-in-distributed-agile-teams-a-1dz7xkr05b.pdf

Understanding Lack of Trust in Distributed Agile Teams: A grounded theory study

Essential use cases are abstract, lightweight, technology-free dialogues of user intention and system responsibility that effectively capture requirements for user interface design. We describe how essential use cases can also drive object-oriented development directly, without any intervening translation, and allowing user interface development and object-oriented development to proceed in parallel. Working with essential use cases yields some unexpected further benefits: the crucial common vocabulary of responsibilities lets designers trace directly from the essential use cases to the objects in their design.

James Noble

Papers

Checking ownership and confinement

JavaCOP: Declarative pluggable types for java

XP Customer Practices: A Grounded Theory

Understanding Lack of Trust in Distributed Agile Teams: A grounded theory study

Essential use cases and responsibility in object-oriented development