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

Persuasive technologies are increasingly ubiquitous, but the strategies they utilise largely originate in America. Consumer behaviour research shows us that certain persuasion strategies will be more effective on some cultures than others. We claim that the existing strategies will be less effective on non-American audiences than they are on American audiences, and we use information from interviews to show that there exists much scope to develop persuasive technologies from a collectivismfocused perspective. To illustrate the development of such a tool, we describe the design of a collectivism-focused financial planning tool.

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Our place or mine? exploration into collectivism-focused persuasive technology design

Agile methods rely on face-to-face communication but are being used in distributed projects. We have conducted grounded theory research with Agile practitioners to collate the strategies they use to overcome the challenges in distributed projects. In this paper, we argue that trust is one of the key factors in determining the success or failure of distributed Agile projects, and describe how trust can be generated and sustained by increasing effective communication and understanding cultural differences.

Understanding the Importance of Trust in Distributed Agile Projects: A Practical Perspective

Cultural differences often arise in distributed software development. The impact of cultural differences on distributed teams is under-explored. The lack of knowledge of cultural differences can cause major problems to the distributed teams. We have conducted a Grounded Theory study to uncover the strategies adopted by Agile practitioners to overcome the cultural differences in distributed software development. We interviewed 18 Agile practitioners across 10 software companies in the USA and India over a period of 1.5 years. In this paper, we report that our participants adopt five effective strategies to bridge cultural differences in distributed Agile software development: engendering cultural awareness, understanding cultural differences, sharing work practices, rotating team ambassadors, and managing language barriers.

Bridging cultural differences: a grounded theory perspective

Large amounts of software have been written since the Java language was created. There is little known about the word structure Java within class names. We have created visualizations of words used in class names from the Java API specification and 91 open-source Java applications. Our visualizations will help expose which words are used in practice.

Visualizing the word structure of Java class names

The Java programming language provides both reflection and remote method invocation: reflection allows a program to inspect itself and its runtime environment, remote method invocation allows methods to be invoked transparently across a network. Unfortunately, the standard Java implementations of reflection and remote method invocation are incompatible: programmers cannot reflect on a remote application. We describe how Java systems can be extended to support Remote Reflection transparently by extending the standard Java API. Remote reflection can support remote debuggers, performance monitors, programming environments, application component servers such as Enterprise JavaBeans, and any other Java system that can be distributed across a network.

James Noble

Papers

Our place or mine? exploration into collectivism-focused persuasive technology design

Understanding the Importance of Trust in Distributed Agile Projects: A Practical Perspective

Bridging cultural differences: a grounded theory perspective

Visualizing the word structure of Java class names

Reflections on remote reflection