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

Outsourcing is common for software development, and is the context for many projects using agile development processes. This paper presents two case studies concentrating on the customer role in projects using outsourcing and extreme programming (XP). The studies follow an interpretive approach based on in-depth interviews, and suggest some tensions between some contractual arrangements in outsourcing, and the XP process. In particular, one suggests XP worked well in the context of their particular outsourcing arrangements, and the other study suggests difficulty in aligning XP with a different set of outsourcing arrangements.

When XP Met Outsourcing

Social software (SSW), nowadays increasingly widespread, has excellent potential for use as persuasive technology. What differentiates it from many other persuasive technology platforms is that it is inherently collective, making group dynamics a powerful factor in any SSW context of persuasion. Based on the psychology of groups, persuasion, and cross-cultural theory, we discuss affiliation, access, and participation as themes that are important in understanding SSW's use as a persuasive technology platform.

Investigating social software as persuasive technology

The object-capability model is one of the industry standards adopted for the implementation of security policies for web-based software. Object-capabilities in various forms are supported by programming languages such as E, Joe-E, Newspeak, Grace, and the newer versions of Javascript. Unfortunately, code written using capabilities tends to concentrate on the low-level mechanism rather than the high-level policy. In this position paper, we argue that current specification methodologies cannot adequately capture all aspects of the capability policies required to support object-capability systems. We outline informally the features that such security policies should support, and we demonstrate (also informally) how we can reason that examples satisfy the capability policies.

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The need for capability policies

Programmers often need to initialise circular structures of objects. Initialisation should be safe (so that programs can never suffer null pointer exceptions or otherwise observe uninitialised values) and modular (so that each part of the circular structure can be written and compiled separately). Unfortunately, existing languages do not support modular circular initialisation: programmers in practical languages resort to Tony Hoare's "Billion Dollar Mistake": initialising variables with nulls, and then hoping to fix them up afterward. While recent research languages have offered some solutions, none fully support safe modular circular initialisation.

We present placeholders, a straightforward extension to object-oriented languages that describes circular structures simply, directly, and modularly. In typed languages, placeholders can be described by placeholder types that ensure placeholders are used safely. We define an operational semantics for placeholders, a type system for placeholder types, and prove soundness. Incorporating placeholders into object-oriented languages should make programs simultaneously simpler to write, and easier to write correctly.

The billion-dollar fix: safe modular circular initialisation

As agile software development gains awareness and popularity in the software industry, it also continues to capt ure the interest of the research community. There are several topics within the agile software development area that demand deeper understanding and research. One such topic is 'Agil e Project Management' which relates to the management of software projects that are developed using various agile fra meworks such as eXtreme Programming (XP) and Scrum. This paper outlines proposed research on agile proj ect management. In particular we hope to explore the ro le of the project manager, the process and problems of transi tioning into an agile framework, and the management of outsourced agile projects.

James Noble

Papers

When XP Met Outsourcing

Investigating social software as persuasive technology

The need for capability policies

The billion-dollar fix: safe modular circular initialisation

Agile Project Management