Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

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

Lincoln, Yvonna, and Egon Guba, "Postpositivism and the Naturalist Paradigm," pp. 14-46 in Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry . Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985.*

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

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

We have conducted face-to-face questionnaire based survey sessions with twenty-three Vietnamese software practitioners in order to determine software process improvement (SPI) de-motivators. The main objective of this study is to provide SPI practitioners with some insight into designing appropriate SPI implementation strategies and to maximize practitioners support for SPI.

We asked practitioners to choose and rank various SPI de-motivator against the five types of assessments (high, medium, low, zero or do not know). From this, we propose the notion of 'perceived value' associated with each SPI de-motivator. We have identified 'high' and 'medium' perceived values demotivators that can undermine SPI initiatives. We have identified what demotivates developers and managers to be actively involved in SPI initiatives. We have also identified SPI de-motivators of small-medium and large sized organisations.

De-motivators of software process improvement: an analysis of vietnamese practitioners' views

Software product line engineering aims at achieving systematic reuse by exploiting commonalities among related products in order to reduce cost and time-to market. Before adopting this approach, organizations are likely to estimate the benefits they can expect to achieve and the level of investment required to transition to product line engineering. Several economic models and analysis approaches have been developed in order to help make a sound business case. There is a need to review the existing approaches in order to better understand the overall landscape of economic models. To this objective, this paper provides an overview of some existing economic models and discusses important issues and directions in product line economic modeling.

https://ulir.ul.ie/bitstream/handle/10344/1122/ali_comparative.pdf?sequence=2

A Comparative Survey of Economic Models for Software Product Lines

Scenario-based methods for evaluating software architecture require a large number of stakeholders to be collocated for evaluation meetings. Collocating stakeholders is often an expensive exercise. To reduce expense, we have proposed a framework for supporting software architecture evaluation process using groupware systems. This paper presents a controlled experiment that we conducted to assess the effectiveness of one of the key activities, developing scenario profiles, of the proposed groupware-supported process of evaluating software architecture. We used a cross-over experiment involving 32 teams of three 3rd and 4th year undergraduate students. We found that the quality of scenario profiles developed by distributed teams using a groupware tool were significantly better than the quality of scenario profiles developed by face-to-face teams (p?<?0.001). However, questionnaires indicated that most participants preferred the face-to-face arrangement (82%) and 60% thought the distributed meetings were less efficient. We conclude that distributed meetings for developing scenario profiles are extremely effective but that tool support must be of a high standard or participants will not find distributed meetings acceptable.

Comparing distributed and face-to-face meetings for software architecture evaluation: A controlled experiment

The distribution of project stakeholders in Global Software Development (GSD) projects provides significant risks related to project communication, coordination and control processes. There is growing interest in applying agile practices in GSD projects in order to leverage the advantages of both approaches. In some cases, GSD project managers use agile practices to reduce project distribution challenges. We use an existing coordination framework to identify GSD coordination problems due to temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distances. An industry-based case study is used to describe, explore and explain the use of agile practices to reduce development coordination challenges.

How Can Agile Practices Minimize Global Software Development Co-ordination Risks?

Global Software Engineering (GSE) has become a mainstream trend in industry. An increasing number of companies, irrespective of size and location, have been getting their software developed in an arrangement where a majority of stakeholders are distributed across geographical, temporal, and socio-cultural boundaries. The transformation of GSE from a phenomenon to a paradigm has been spearheaded not only by business needs and organizational desires but also consistent efforts of the GSE community. There has been a dedicated conference series to this area, the International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE) and its 6 edition provided the two articles that have been included in this special section. This editorial aims at not only to introduce the two articles included in this special section but also to report a sample of the topical trends of research published in the ICGSE series on challenges identified and solutions. It is quite clear that there was a huge amount of efforts dedicated to identifying and reporting GSE challenges but the community has been slow on reporting potential solutions to the known challenges. Whilst it is important to make researchers and practitioners aware of the potential challenges and risks, it is even better to systematically devise, empirically assess, and sufficiently report solutions to the known challenges. Through this editorial we also introduce a framework of ten heuristics for devising, developing, and managing a GSE team for successful implementation of the GSE paradigm in an organization.

Muhammad Ali Babar

Papers

De-motivators of software process improvement: an analysis of vietnamese practitioners' views

A Comparative Survey of Economic Models for Software Product Lines

Comparing distributed and face-to-face meetings for software architecture evaluation: A controlled experiment

How Can Agile Practices Minimize Global Software Development Co-ordination Risks?

Editorial: Global software engineering: Identifying challenges is important and providing solutions is even better