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

Aspect oriented programming promotes the separation of the different aspects of a system into their natural form. Synchronisation is an important aspect of concurrent object-oriented systems, but treating synchronisation as a single monolithic aspect leads to inflexibility and limited possibilities for reuse. We suggest that synchronisation has a number of different aspects, and introduce the synchronisation rings model which allows the aspects of a synchronised object to be specified independently. By separating the different aspects of synchronisation we can provide flexible, generic implementations of common synchronisation constraints, which can be re-used in many different contexts.

Aspects of synchronisation

Trust among team members is imperative for blending agility with distributed software development. Little is known about how team members who are dispersed across different geographical locations, time zones and cultures can build trust while working together in Agile software development projects. Through a Grounded Theory study that involved 55 participants from 38 different software companies in the USA, India and Australia, we investigate the key concerns of distributed teams in Agile software development. We found that trust among members of a distributed team is important for bridging spatial, temporal and socio-cultural distances in order for them to work together as one team. In this paper, we present techniques for building trust in Agile software development with distributed teams.

Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams: Agility, Distribution and Trust

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2nd International Symposium on Wikis -- WikiSym 2006. As its name suggests, this is the second meeting of the academic community of research, practice, and use that has built up around lightweight editable web sites. Growing from Ward Cunningham's original wiki --- the Portland Pattern Repository --- up to Wikipedia, one of the largest sites on the Web (over 1.2 million pages in English alone at time of writing), wikis are rapidly becoming commonplace in the experience of millions of people every day. The Wiki Symposium exists to report new developments in wiki technology, to describe the state of practice, and to reflect on that experience.The call for papers for this year's symposium attracted 27 submissions of research papers and practitioner reports, on a wide variety of topics. Ten research papers and one practitioner report were accepted by the symposium programme committee and to be presented at the symposium: These presentations will make up the symposiums' technical programme. Every submitted paper was reviewed by at least three members of the programme committee; while papers submitted by committee members were reviewed by at least four committee members who had not themselves submitted papers to the symposium.The symposium proceedings also include abstracts for the keynote talks, panels, workshops, and demonstrations to provide a record of the whole of the symposium as well as an interview with Angela Beesley, the opening keynoter, on the topic of her talk.

Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Wikis

Agile software development methods and their proponents suggest 'just enough' documentation on agile projects. However, for practitioners of these methods it remains unclear how much is 'just enough' documentation. Based on a grounded theory study of 58 agile practitioners from 23 different software organisations in New Zealand and India, we found several documentation strategies being used by agile teams to overcome various challenges they faced. These documentation strategies include documenting electronic back-ups of physical paper artefacts that are prone to damage and loss; documenting change decisions by customers to trace changes and avoid disagreements; documenting business terminology for more effective requirements elicitation; documenting the traditional way when collaborating with non-agile teams; and documenting positive customer feedback to demonstrate advantage of agile adoptions. These documentation strategies collectively help define 'just enough' documentation by describing the different forms and amounts of documentation agile teams engage in.

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Documentation strategies on agile software development projects

Inheritance is a key feature of object-oriented programming. Overriding is one of the most important parts of inheritance, allowing a subclass to replace methods implemented in its superclass. Unfortunately, the way programmers use overriding in practise is not well understood.

We present the first large-scale empirical study of overriding. We describe a suite of metrics that measure overriding and present a corpus analysis that uses those metrics to analyse 100 open-source applications, containing over 100,000 separate classes and interfaces. We found substantial overriding: most subclasses override at least one method and many classes that only declare overriding methods. We also found questionable uses of overriding, such as removing superclass method implementations by overriding them with empty method bodies.

James Noble

Papers

Aspects of synchronisation

Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams: Agility, Distribution and Trust

Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Wikis

Documentation strategies on agile software development projects

An empirical study of overriding in open source Java