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Digital technology is ubiquitous and has transformed many aspects of domestic and business life. At a personal level there is an ‘app for everything’, in commerce banks are shifting online and even the heat and oil of the factory floor is being transformed by industry 4.0. In some cases, the changes are incremental, simply making existing process more efficient, or allowing online access to previous face-to-face services. However, there are also more radical changes. Some of these are within the methods of digital production from the perpetual beta of Web 2.0 and A-B testing of user interfaces to agile software development. Other changes are enabled by digital technology, such as more flexible industrial processes due to digital fabrication and applications of AI in medicine. There is a distinctly digital eye that allows us to think differently about the world, for example greater levels of personalisation in consumer products, or more dynamic sensor-rich industrial processes. Sometimes these innovations happen by accident, but we can explicitly adopt this viewpoint to prompt more radical design practice. In this talk I will draw out some of the facets and design heuristics of this new mode of digital thinking.

In agribusiness, the treatment and sustainable management of waste in intensive production systems must consider productivity and economic gains in the short term and the sustainability of agricultural production. The acquisition of technical information, and the knowledge about the characteristics of the rural property, are fundamental for stakeholders, especially considering the adequacy of sustainable environmental practices. It is necessary to provide a web-based system to support stakeholders in discovering and understanding their productive context. This paper proposes a solution to support stakeholders' decision-making to improve sustainable practices in agribusiness. The proposed solution is applied in the agricultural domain, focusing on sustainability, by implementing a web system supported by an ontology to organize and provide strategic information through a mobile app. Technical and regulatory environmental practices documents are recommended for a relevant context, considering a feasibility study with experts in the field. As a result, the approach provided decision-making support offering technical information efficiently and agile for stakeholders.

Online experimentation is an agile software development practice that plays an essential role in enabling rapid innovation. Existing solutions for online experimentation in Web and mobile applications are unsuitable for cloud applications. There is a need for rethinking online experimentation in the cloud to advance the state-of-the-art by considering the unique challenges posed by cloud environments. In this paper, we introduce Iter8, an open-source system that enables practitioners to deliver code changes to cloud applications in an agile manner while minimizing risk. Iter8 embodies our novel mathematical formulation built on online Bayesian learning and multi-armed bandit algorithms to enable online experimentation tailored for the cloud, considering both SLOs and business concerns, unlike existing solutions. Using Iter8, practitioners can safely and rapidly orchestrate various types of online experiments, gain key insights into the behavior of cloud applications, and roll out the optimal versions in an automated and statistically rigorous manner.

Background: Prototyping is an established practice for user interface design and for requirements engineering within agile software development, even so there is a lack of theory on prototyping. Aims: The main research objective is to provide a means to categorise prototyping instances, in order to enable comparison and reflection of prototyping practices. Method: We have performed a systematic mapping study of methodological aspects of prototyping consisting of thirty-three primary studies upon which we designed a model of prototyping that was validated through a focus group at a case company. Results: Our model consists of four aspects of prototyping, namely purpose, prototype scope, prototype use, and exploration strategy. This model supported the focus group participants in discussing prototyping practices by considering concrete prototyping instances in terms of the concepts provided by our model. Conclusions: The model can be used to categorise prototyping instances and can support practitioners in reflecting on their prototyping practices. Our study provides a starting point for further research on prototyping and into how the practice can be applied more cost-effectively to elicit, validate, and communicate requirements.

The field of software technologies has been seeing a steady growth worldwide recently. Engineering job roles might require candidates to know several different programming paradigms, languages, frameworks, and cloud technologies. Each of these technologies constantly evolve to improve or become obsolete, which requires educational materials for teaching them to be constantly updated. Software engineering has classical texts that have been updated over many editions. These are large volumes with numerous chapters that include older and newer techniques, history, and a variety of extra material, which makes them expensive textbooks. This also make them contain too much material to cover in undergraduate courses. As published textbooks are always updated slower than the pace of technology that changes project dependencies every three months or so, practical materials may still become outdated between editions. Open educational resources (OERs) provide solutions to these problems by allowing adopters to update and customize materials for a given syllabus. An OER can simply mean a no-cost textbook or a resource that is publicly available for teaching. In this work, we present a preliminary OER for software development or engineering courses for undergraduate information technology (IT) majors.

The 2017 Curriculum Guidelines for Baccalaureate Degree Programs in Information Technology now stresses the importance of soft skills (section 5.2.1), communication skills, and team skills training for IT majors. Applied improvisation techniques can be used in teaching of technical concepts such as cybersecurity, agile development, database design, programming concepts, and most importantly, how to better one's communication and teamwork skills. This workshop is designed for those who want to learn more about some of the various techniques used and how they can be incorporated into the IT curriculum. Nearly 20 years ago, the National Academy of Sciences Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) recognized the importance of improvisation as tool to help IT practitioners become more creative. Creative problem-solving methodologies such as design thinking all tie into the use of improvisation. Companies such as Twitter, IDEO, and Google are using improvisation methods as a way of creating better collaborative teams and a work environment that says YES before NO. Improvisation training can help students and faculty to become better listeners, communicators, collaborators, innovators, and those who can better focus on the organization or team story and not their own story.

Background: Software organizations increasingly need developers with high skills for social interactions. Managers, leaders, and academics need to know the human factors influencing the individuals, the development team, and the software project activities. Despite the increasing number of secondary studies about human factors in Software Engineering (SE) and in Agile Software Development (ASD), there is no study synthesizing which human factors influence software development without a specific perspective from SE or human factor thematic. Objective: We aim to summarise human factors and their influence on SE development teams and ASD teams. Method: We executed a tertiary study. We used thematic analysis to examine the resulting data. Results: We found 29 systematic literature reviews and systematic mapping studies addressing the human perspective in SE teams. We identified 101 human factors and 79 influences grouped in 4 categories (Team member, Team, Project, and Organization). Also, we identified 71 human factors and 60 influences on ASD. The most investigated human factors are Communication, Collaboration, Knowledge, and Motivation. Conclusions: The identified human factors and their influences can be considered most significant by software organizations, researchers, and academics in SE practices. Based on our results, practitioners might propose activities that enhance human capital behaviors that influence individual motivation, agile mindset, team climate, software quality, or agile transition in traditional organizations.

There is no specific professional responsible for quality assurance in agile teams, such as the Test Engineer. Thus, the skills, competencies, and attributions inherent to this professional are the responsibility of all team members. Due to Exploratory Testing (ET) benefits in agile development, there is a need to train agile professionals. In this sense, this paper aims to investigate the contributions and limitations of adopting Problem-Based Learning (PBL) and Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) in ET teaching-learning. For this, we conducted a course in remote learning format with agile developers, distributed geographically. Data were collected through an online questionnaire and examined with quantitative and qualitative analysis at the end of the course. Our main findings are that (1) the collaboration between the participants and the adoption of a real problem, along with (2) activities and resources made available before the class, and (3) the existence of specific tool support for ET sessions optimized learning in the context of remote learning.

The COVID-19 pandemic has lasted for over 1 year. During the pandemic, several software development companies migrated to working from home (WFH). Several studies have recorded an initial moment of adaptation to WFH. This study investigated how Brazilian software development teams dealt with WFH after 1 year of a pandemic and how this change in work was on the software development process. We applied a survey with 67 participants of software development teams and investigated aspects, as: work routine, collaboration, communication, productivity, financial assistance and software development process. We performed a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the survey results and compared them with previous studies. Our key findings are: (i) 56.71% of the participants said that it has an impact on the work routine related to work overload and exceeds the company’s standard hours; (ii) 92.54% of the participants consider their team to be collaborative; (iii) 82.70% are satisfied with the communication at WFH; (iv) 86.55% has meetings once or twice a day; (v) 59.7% had an improvement in productivity in WFH and 75% are satisfied with their productivity; (vi) 79.60% receive some assistance from the company for WFH; (vii) 82.1% said that the company intends or probably intends to continue in the WFH, and (viii) 55.2% said they had changed in the software development process due to WFH. The main positive changes in the process are related to the practices of: daily meetings, agile processes, code review, pair programming and code versioning.

Free-living assessment and remote monitoring is important for healthcare researchers. Moving research beyond the laboratory provides habitual environments for remote assessment that allows research to remain agile even when facing uncontrollable external factors e.g., the SARS-COV-2 pandemic. Emergent technologies have the potential to make this form of assessment feasible by providing accessible and affordable mechanisms for conducting free-living research. This paper presents findings from a study that was halted due to the pandemic, but this work highlighted a series of challenges that may present themselves to researchers conducting similar work. By transparently reporting the challenges and solutions rather than just methods, it is hoped that the lessons learned from this study could provide researchers with greater awareness in future studies.

Due to the dynamic nature of changes in various ICT technologies nowadays, the gaps between industry, research, and academia need to be bridged in order to adequately support STEM students towards their future career paths. With the COVID-19 pandemic, and restrictions on access to university premises, an agile transition of both teaching and experimentation was essential, and adjustments in the curriculum were needed more than ever. Therefore, in this paper we present an adaptive and on-demand education framework for engineering students, thereby enabling remote experimentation and adjustments of exercise content to enhance students' learning experience. We present the two types of practical experimentation environments, i.e., cloud and real-life net-working testbed, for performing remote laboratory exercises, as well as the assessment of students' experience that is used as an input for the dynamic adjustments of the exercise content. Our results show that students consider they significantly improved the baseline skills our courses tend to build and strengthen towards preparing students for their future jobs.

Developing a safety-critical embedded system poses a high risk, since such systems must usually comply with (potentially changing) rigorous standards set by customers and legal authorities. To reduce risk and cope with changing requirements, manufacturers of embedded devices increasingly use iterative development processes and prototyping both for hard- and firmware. However, hard- and firmware development are difficult to align in a common process, because hardware development cycles are typically longer and more expensive. Thus, seamlessly transitioning software to new hardware revisions and reusing old hardware revisions can be problematic. In this paper, we describe an industrial case study for veterinary anesthesia in which we also faced this problem. To solve it, we introduced preprocessor-based variability to create a small configurable system that could flexibly adapt to our needs. We discuss our solution, alternative solutions for hardware evolution, as well as their pros and cons. Our experiences generalize an interesting evolution scenario for systems that are planned and delivered as a single system, but exhibited variability to cope with problems during agile development processes.

Pair programming promotes immediate, informal collaboration over coding activities. The driving developer writes the code and controls the keyboard and mouse; the navigating developer checks the code as it is written by the driver; the developers swap their roles frequently. In agile development, programmers often code in pairs, in order to detect errors faster, produce higher code quality and discover better solutions.There is substantial research providing evidence of enhanced self-confidence and programming and communication skills if pair programming is used in teaching. However, the use of pair programming in higher education is mostly in co-located settings at campus-based universities. Our overall objective is to investigate how the benefits of pair programming can be brought to students learning to program online at a distance.This paper presents two initial studies looking at remote pair programming (RPP) also called distributed pair programming, in a part-time distance education setting, where students typically follow an unscheduled self-study style, have little interaction with each other, and have little time for extra activities. We investigated: whether readily available generic communication tools, instead of purpose-built academic prototypes, were sufficient for RPP; whether student pairs ‘jelled’ (learned to function well together) quickly; whether the ways in which the partners interact, or existing programming experience, affected jelling; and whether students felt positive about, and saw benefits in RPP, despite the overhead on their limited study time.In the paper, after describing particular challenges encountered, we present and discuss our findings and make recommendations for future implementation. The findings support the use of remote pair programming in teaching, with the majority of students considering it to be beneficial.

The author discusses telematic wearable music, recounting the design and evolution of improvised techniques and approaches in a remotely taught course offered to undergraduates. This new contribution to interactive interfaces for remote ensembles is musically motivated and inclusive for non-specialists who apply musical instincts they discover through participation. Students are introduced to wearable ”Internet of Things” (IoT) computing, synthesis, and sound design, with the goal of developing rich, movement responsive, individually and/or collectively playable wearable instruments. The course facilitates practice-situated investigation of accessible, agile, and inexpensive modes of distributed creativity in musical interaction through experiential inquiry and tinkering. Telematic wearable music aspires to enact shared, situated spaces and less ocularcentric modes of learning through embodied sonic telepresence, emphasizing and enhancing embodied participation in synchronous remote learning.

Agile methodologies have been recently proposed to be used in education. In this paper, we propose a rephrasing of the 12 Agile principles for learning context, and we provide concrete application-oriented interpretations for them. Additionally, a practical agile learning methodology is proposed to offer a framework where these principles could be applied. The principles together with the proposed methodology were applied to a concrete use case which is described and the resulting impact is analysed.

The use of containers in microservices has gained popularity as it facilitates agile development, resource governance, and software maintenance. Container reallocation aims to achieve workload balance via reallocating containers over physical machines. It affects the overall performance of microservice-based systems. However, container scheduling and reallocation remain an open issue due to their complexity in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Phase Local Search (MPLS) algorithm to optimize container reallocation. The experimental results show that our optimization algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods. In practice, it has been successfully applied to Microsoft 365 system to mitigate hotspot machines and balance workloads across the entire system.

An Agile development team estimates the effort of a work item to plan a sprint (i.e., an iteration in Scrum). Hence, reliable effort estimation would help the team create a reliable sprint plan. Prior studies proposed automated approaches to help the team to estimate the effort accurately. However, the effort estimated by the previously proposed approaches may become inaccurate when the related information is changed. Especially when the estimated effort is changed after the sprint has been planned, the sprint plan may be invalidated and the team might waste their time and effort spent in planning. This thesis aims to help the Agile development team improve the stability of effort estimation (in the Story Points unit) while aligning with the just-in-time practice of Agile. Hence, we first conduct empirical studies using mixed-methods approaches to investigate the potential impact of instability of Story Points. To help an Agile team to achieve reliable effort estimation with optimal effort, we will develop approaches to predict the future Story Points changes and the future information changes to help the team cope with uncertainty when finalizing the sprint plan.

While agile software development is increasingly adopted in large organizations, there is still a lack of studies on how traditionally organized enterprises adopt and scale agile forms of organization. This industrial multiple embedded case study explores how the organizational model of a large public sector entity evolved over four years to support the adoption of agile software development methods. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and document analysis. We describe the change in three phases: pre-transformation, initial transformation, and maturing. Changes in three subcases of organizational units are further described in detail. Moving from an outsourced project-based way-of-working with separate business, IT and vendor organizations, the new organizational design emphasizes internal development capability, cross-functional autonomous teams organized around products and grouped in product areas, and continuous delivery. Starting from the IT department, the transformation expanded to the whole organization, and went beyond software development to the finance and leadership. We describe the target and intermediate organizations employed when adopting agile development methods for the whole organization and three organizational units responsible for different services. Defining suitable product boundaries, achieving alignment across teams, enhancing the competence of product owners, the coexistence of old and new types of systems, processes, and structures, and balancing the teams’ need for autonomy with the organizational needs for coordination and control are remaining challenges.

The introduction of agile software development methods has brought about diverse benefits to the industry. These range from rapid deployment of software products to satisfying the ever changing customer requirements among others. These have in turn fueled the rapid adoption of these methodologies within the industry. On the down side, agile approach has been proved to be weak in handling security and therefore not appropriate for developing secure systems. The framework we present in this paper addresses this by ensuring that security is in the development process from the beginning of the project to the end. It is modeled after the SSE-CMM as a standard for security engineering. Considering its process areas, it aims to achieve the intended security goals within the agile process to appropriate levels by adopting agility in the implementation of these activities. The criteria of implementation are agility plus the SSE-CMM process areas goals. The framework is tested through a case study to check the capability levels achieved and the agility of the resultant process.

Thanks to the increased computing power of processors, developers can develop more complex software applications. Software developers need to follow the software design life cycle to meet consistent high standard software output. The only constant component of software projects is human. The diversity of the teams leads to different understandings during the exchange of information and communication between the teams. Using the traditional method can create inefficient processes and lower quality products. In addition, code readability, code management becomes difficult, and technical debt increases as overtime. The Agile method provides flexibility and high efficiency to teams. Teams that adopt the agile method have advantages in interaction with the customer, in rapid response to changes, and in strong communication. This paper presents the modernization of the teams experiencing the difficulties of the traditional method with the agile method with a real case study. Within the scope of modernization, it has been worked on under three main headings: changing the module-based way of doing business, reducing technical borrowing and renewing distribution strategies. With this transformation, we are able to prioritize customer requests, measure the value of the business, constantly make useful parts available, easily maintain software, and allocate time for new ideas.

Nowadays, software development must face the challenge of integrating security and privacy elements from the earliest stages of any software development process. A correct and complete implementation starting from the requirements definition allows to significantly increase the security level of each single phase/iteration and consequently of the final system. Therefore, it is necessary to support the team throughout the software lifecycle trying to provide operational guidelines of security by design and privacy by design. Taking these aspects into account, the paper presents a Human Centered Design (HCD) approach of security and privacy-oriented software development, integrated within the Scrum agile methodology, defined as HCD-Security Scrum. The goal is to support developer decisions at all stages of software development in integrating security and privacy requirements through the formalization of key elements defined in a knowledge base, i.e., the Privacy Knowledge Base.

We demonstrate an innovative framework (CoEvSoarRL) that leverages machine learning algorithms to optimize and simulate a resilient and agile logistics enterprise to improve the readiness and sustainment, as well as reduce the operational risk. The CoEvSoarRL is an asymmetrical wargame simulation that leverages reinforcement learning and coevolutionary algorithms to improve the functions of a total logistics enterprise value chain. We address two of the key challenges: (1) the need to apply holistic prediction, optimization, and wargame simulation to improve the total logistics enterprise readiness; (2) the uncertainty and lack of data which require large-scale systematic what-if scenarios and analysis of alternatives to simulate potential new and unknown situations. Our CoEvSoarRL learns a model of a logistic enterprise environment from historical data with Soar reinforcement learning. Then the Soar model is used to evaluate new decisions and operating conditions. We simulate the logistics enterprise vulnerability (risk) and evolve new and more difficult operating conditions (tests); meanwhile we also coevolve better logistics enterprise decision (solutions) to counter the tests. We present proof-of-concept results from a US Marine Corps maintenance and supply chain data set.

Persistent surveillance is an essential tool in many damage prevention and mitigation scenarios. Existing approaches to conduct surveillance over an area either require deploying static equipment on the ground or are expensive and have a high ecological footprint. The era of commercial drones has facilitated the development of lightweight, agile vehicles that can carry a wide variety of payloads with a very low ecological footprint. In this paper, we present a new airborne surveillance system using drone swarms. We explore the concept of Swarm Utility and present a mobility model for persistent surveillance that achieves maximum utility while being energy efficient. We program the drones in the swarm to follow trajectories defined by the model, eliminating the need to control the drones manually. Additionally, we augment our system with an object detection framework that runs on accumulated video feed streamed by the swarm to detect objects of interest in the area with high accuracy.

With the widespread of DevOps and agile developments, and IT industries are concerning about license and compliance issues while adopting commercial developing solutions. Those IT industries desperately need open-source alternative solutions, as well as guidelines to follow SDLC standards. This study planned to establish a one-key seamless open-source DevOps developing platform, to solve interconnecting issues between open-source DevOps tools, boost CI/CD efficiency, and assure quality of software developments and products.

Context: Continuous Software Engineering (CSE) involves a set of practices that aims at making software development continuous and integrated to business. However, moving from traditional to integrated, agile and data-driven software development requires changes in the organization´s culture, practices and structure, which may not be easy. Objective: Our focus is to help organizations get an overall view of the CSE practices they perform, identify where they are in the CSE evolutionary path and which areas should be improved. Method: We created a diagnosis instrument, called Zeppelin, to evaluate the adoption of CSE practices and applied it in five Brazilian software organizations. Results: Zeppelin was recognized as a useful tool to help organizations have a more comprehensive view of their CSE practices and envision the evolution and improvement path they can follow. Conclusion: Zeppelin supports software development organizations to get a big picture of CSE practices and identify their position in the CSE evolution path. Moreover, it contributes to identify strategies to advance software development towards a CSE environment.

Software development processes play a key role in the software and system development life cycle. Processes are becoming complex and evolve rapidly due to the modern-day continuous software engineering (CSE) concepts, which are mainly based on continuous integration, continuous delivery, infrastructure-as-code, automation and more. The fast growing Chinese software development industry adopts various processes to achieve potential benefits offered in the international market. This study is conducted with the aim to investigate the trends of processes in practice in the Chinese industry. The survey questionnaire data is collected from 34 practitioners working in software development firms across the China and the results highlight that iterative and agile processes are extensively used in industrial setting. Furthermore, agile and traditional approaches are combined to develop the hybrid processes. Most of the participants are satisfied using the current development processes, however, they show interest to continuously improve the existing process models and methods. Finally, we noticed that majority of the software development organizations used the ISO 9001 standard for process assessment and improvement activities. The given results provide preliminary overview of processes deployed in the Chinese industry.

Context: Sustainability has become an important topic for researchers and is gaining popularity among software development companies, but integrating it into their development processes is still lacking. Objectives: This paper aimed to discuss the purpose of doctoral research, the research questions, the steps to answer the research questions, and the research's current progress concerning sustainability in the software development life cycle. Results: I have presented the high-level plans for the doctoral research and outlined the first part of the results of phase 1. As part of this phase 1, I have conducted an extensive literature review to collect data about sustainability in companies' agile methods. I found only a few studies reporting sustainability in agile software development, and this finding proposes that either this field was not studied, or the results have not been widely published, indicating a gap in research.

Deep neural network has been adopted as the standard model to predict ads click-through rate (CTR) for commercial online advertising systems. Deploying an industrial scale ads system requires to overcome numerous challenges, e.g., hundreds or thousands of billions of input features and also hundreds of billions of training samples, which under the cost budget can cause fundamental issues on storage, communication, or the model training speed. In this work, we present Baidu's industrial-scale practices on how to apply the system and machine learning techniques to address these issues and increase the revenue. In particular, we focus on the strategy for developing GPU-based CTR models combined with quantization techniques to build a compact and agile system which noticeably improves the revenue. With quantization, we are able to effectively increase the model (embedding layer) size without increasing the storage cost. This brings an increase in prediction accuracy and yields a 1% revenue increase and 1.8% higher relative click-through rate in the real sponsored search production environment.

The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions development and the rise of agile development utilization, combined with the so-called “low touch economy” and the recent discussions on privacy and data protection brought several demands related to Information Security. Despite the existence of several efforts – either academic or not – focused on the definition and implementation strategies for certification of Information Security models designed for Information Technology and Communications (ICT) solutions, these aren't widely adopted. In addition, there are significant differences between typical IoT solutions and ICT solutions as traditionally presented, which ends up demanding different certification strategies. Continuous and more dynamic certification models (using cutting edge technologies such as blockchain, self-regulation, analytics, and artificial intelligence) are demanded in this context. This work discusses more effective forms of certification, using innovative edge concepts and technologies, at first aiming to identify a set of inhibiting factors, offenders, challenges or issues that need to be addressed correctly when developing an effective large-scale security certification model.

This paper aims to identify and analyze which individual perceptions are more frequent in the transition process between traditional and agile methods in the context of software development in a large company. The motivation for this work is due to the observation of the growing adoption of agile work models by large companies and the human aspects involved in this scenario. Thus, the particularity of this research is to offer a perspective focused on the individual aspect of each person involved in the process. This objective is achieved through the qualitative analysis of the speech of four professionals in the I.T. area of a large company concerning their perceptions about a transition from a traditional development model to an agile development model. To survey the interview questions, we used GQM. An analysis of the collected data was carried out according to procedures of the Grounded Theory, aiming to identify emerging topics among the views exposed by the interviewees. Thus, the following topics were highlighted in the context of the transition: perceived benefits for the team, difficulties faced and solutions to these difficulties.

In order to adapt to a competitive business scenario, the decision-making needs to be fast and reliable. In this panorama, agile business intelligence emerges as a resource to provide agile solutions. To achieve agile business intelligence solutions, organizations consider real-time data warehousing a powerful technique. Thus, we propose in this paper a framework based on data warehouse virtualization and real-time data warehousing concepts, called Agile ROLAP. The framework is comprised of an approach designed to be compatible with the main consolidated DW concepts. Furthermore, a set of components that enable the deployment of each step of the Agile ROLAP process was implemented. We evaluated our proposed approach in an experimental study where we deployed dimensional models from three distinct databases. It was analyzed the approach viability and the performance through query performance. The results indicate that the approach is viable, and the performance is satisfactory for no very large databases.

Nowadays, there are several technologies (methods, techniques, among others) that help agile development teams to improve the Usability and User eXperience (UX) in their projects. Usability and UX are relevant aspects of software quality. In the literature, we find few technologies that help to improve the Usability and UX jointly at the beginning of agile process, mainly during the design phase, where to perform changes is easier and cheaper. Therefore, in our paper, we present the technique User Experience and Usability Guidelines for Agile Project (UXUG-AP), that aims to support the Usability and UX design. UXUG-AP is composed by categories, subcategories, and specific guidelines to help the prototyping process. We also present an observational study with agile professionals. The study was done to evaluate the ease of use, perceived usefulness and the intention to future use from UXUG-AP. The results show that is necessary requirements well defined in order to have a better use of the technique. In additional, we present an interview with experts in agile design which provide their opinions about UXUG-AP. The interview results show that some designers are used to evaluating their projects after development, instead of avoiding usability and UX issues at the beginning of process.

Traditional software engineering approaches were developed based on the old manufacturing process, in terms of roles, responsibilities, tasks, and hierarchy. Modern approaches, such as, Agile approaches, are based on a fusion of these traditional approaches and the Agile Manifesto, which changes the perspective of main software process objectives. These approaches are designed to encourage self-management, which may be challenging even in big or very small software companies. This paper proposes a software engineering complementary framework called Atta 2.0 (Atta 2), which is an approach inspired by a nature organization and aims to deal with the difficulties of self-organization issues. We performed a case study on a start-up company, that follows Scrum guidelines, has a very small team, and maintains several projects at the same time. As the outcome, we have success running the Atta 2 and obtained gains in terms of self-organization, structure, and visibility. Based on this we advocate that Atta 2 improved Sprint planning and execution, tasks creation and distribution, and slightly the quality of delivered artifacts. We also focus that Atta 2 helped to integrate new team members and to extract the best from the new ones and old team members. We advocate that Atta 2, may have value to the community, once it is a complementary option to aggregates value to well-known agile or traditional approaches. Thus, we concluded that Atta 2 can be used jointly with other management approaches, in order to promote the best-aggregated value.

We report from a research-based professional development program - the fellowship program - aimed at scaling digital design literacy in Danish K-9 education. The fellowship program was designed to engage with experienced K-9 teachers to provide them with the knowledge, experience and resources needed to further develop digital design literacy in their local school environment and to create networks for continuous exchange between researchers, educators of teachers and in-service teachers. In this paper we present the motivation, strategy, partnerships and execution of the fellowship program and report from survey results assessing participants gains and learning outcomes. We position the fellowship program within the broader discourse of leveraging teacher training in computing education and digital design literacy. We suggest that the fellowship format has a number of qualities that make it a potentially valuable addition to established teacher training initiatives. This includes the establishment of feedback loops and networks between researchers and practitioners, scaling through local peer-to-peer training, a modular and agile setup and the collaboration between educators of teachers and in-service teachers.

The Product Development Module of the CYBATHLON @school series brings rapid prototyping, hardware and software development to regular school lessons or project weeks, combines it with entrepreneurship and fosters inclusion of people with disabilities. Engineering students and persons with disabilities conduct the units. Pupils aged 12 to 18 team up in their virtual startup and identify day-to-day issues of a person with a paralyzed arm. They develop solutions to mitigate those challenges with the help an assistive technology, the educational exoskeleton Flexo. They use modern rapid prototyping technologies to iteratively develop a gripper for the Flexo, using special software-assisted laser cutting and 3D printing. A knowledge integrated software interface helps them to program it using Python. The teams present their grippers in a final competition. Preliminary feedback suggests that the module is well received.

In much of the world, electricity grids are not instrumented at the customer level, limiting insights into the power quality experienced by utility customers. Moreover, to understand grid performance, regulators and investors must depend on utilities to self-report reliability data. To address these challenges, we introduce PowerWatch, an agile methodology to directly measure customer experience and aggregated grid performance without relying on the utility for deployment or management. PowerWatch employs a system of distributed sensors coupled with cloud-based analytics. We evaluate the PowerWatch methodology by deploying 462 sensors in homes and businesses in Accra, Ghana for over a year, yielding the largest open-source data set on electricity reliability at the customer-level in the region. We describe the architecture, design, and performance of PowerWatch, as well as the data that are collected, explaining how we determine the accuracy and coverage of our methodology without ground truth. Finally, we report on grid performance issues, finding nearly twice as many outages as the utility observed, suggesting a need for better grid performance monitoring.

This paper turns to one of HCI's central value systems, i.e. its commitments to usefulness and the ideal that technology enables social progress, productivity, and excellence. Specifically, we examine how the seemingly “positive” ideal to make technology “useful” – i.e. to build systems and devices that advance social and technological progress – masks various forms of violence and injustice such as colonial othering, racist exclusions, and exploitation. Drawing from ethnographic research, we show how design and computing methods from design thinking to agile theory and entrepreneurial approaches in tech production and higher education are the latest techniques in the cultivation of useful bodies on behalf of the state, the corporation, the university, and the economy. Aligning with feminist, critical race and critical computing commitments, this paper offers a genealogical approach to show how injustice and violence endure, despite and because of a narrative of progress and positive change.

Nowadays, as organizations operate in very fast-paced and competitive environments, workforce has to be agile and adaptable to regularly learning new job skills. However, it is nontrivial for talents to know which skills to develop at each working stage. To this end, in this paper, we aim to develop a cost-effective recommendation system based on deep reinforcement learning, which can provide personalized and interpretable job skill recommendation for each talent. Specifically, we first design an environment to estimate the utilities of skill learning by mining the massive job advertisement data, which includes a skill-matching-based salary estimator and a frequent itemset-based learning difficulty estimator. Based on the environment, we design a Skill Recommendation Deep Q-Network (SRDQN) with multi-task structure to estimate the long-term skill learning utilities. In particular, SRDQN recommends job skills in a personalized and cost-effective manner; that is, the talents will only learn the recommended necessary skills for achieving their career goals. Finally, extensive experiments on a real-world dataset clearly validate the effectiveness and interpretability of our approach.

To carry out a quality project, the company collaborators need to rely on an efficient management methodology. It is the key to organize the project in a structured and streamlined manner, it helps the team to be more structured. The traditional methods are usually used on projects based on very precise ideas with very detailed specifications and planning which anticipated all possible risks. Nevertheless, these do not allow any kind of interaction with the customer, who will receive the project once it is finished. For that reason, solutions like eXtreme Programming and Scrum have been proposed by project management experts respecting the interaction with the customer, ability to change, and so on. These methods share the same values and principles, but each one has its own singularities. In this paper, we will present the process flow model of the Scrum and XP methods. For this process flow model, we used the BPMN models.

This paper aims to explore how blockchain technology can help us to achieve supply chains that are agile but also lean, which is also demanded by the modern business environment. A role playing simulation was used to evaluate the benefits provided by different levels of visibility in a typical supply chain. A distributed ledger enabling supply chain visibility was designed. A supply chain performance framework was developed in order to measure the supply chain performance from both lean and agile aspects. The results show a significant correlation in performance with the degree of visibility, but it is not a linear relationship. An effective LeAgile supply chain can be achieved with the enhancement of visibility. In order to implement visibility, an appropriate information sharing frequency (drumbeat) is needed. Blockchain allows users to more securely and transparently track all types of transactions, to improve Supply Chain Visibility. We also find the complex relationship between trust and visibility. This is one of the first papers, taking human factors into consideration, to investigate how blockchain technology can be used to enhance supply chain visibility, which is needed for leagile supply chain performance.

Agile approaches arose as a way of addressing some of the main challenges in software development. Some of the challenges are changing requirements, lack of understanding about the system's scope, and out-of-sync between code, requirements, and documentation. Software companies' professionals have adopted Design Thinking (DT) to support software development to understand better what customers want, fostering the creation of features and products. Due to the importance of requirement engineering to software development success, this study aimed to characterize what DT benefits and challenges were perceived in requirements engineering by the Brazilian software development community. The current study used mixed methods combining two qualitative methods, a focus group to collect and understand the professionals' DT usage opinions and a survey to confirm the professionals' challenges and benefits. This study identified that DT has helped the professionals improve the requirements gathering and specification, reflecting on better users' real needs understanding and building fittable solutions to support them. The results serve to understand better DT potential, perceived by software industry professionals, to anticipate and support these issues with other professionals.

Background: The literature presents distinct models to assess the Teamwork Quality (TWQ) for agile teams. These models have different constructs and, consequently, measures. Unfortunately, there are no results of empirical studies contrasting the existing models. Goal: To fill this gap, this study aims to provide a deep insight into how two state-of-the-art TWQ models (i.e., instruments) compare to each other with respect to the calculated results for practical use. Method: We performed an empirical study to compare both models in terms of their constructs and measures. For comparing their constructs, we ranked the variables from both models, given their relative impact on teamwork quality, and compared the ranks. For comparing their measures, we collected data using both instruments by interviewing 158 team members from two software development companies. First, we theoretically mapped the variables from both models, given their definition. Afterward, from the collected data, we calculated each of the models' variables using the procedures proposed by their creators. Then, we analyzed the level of agreement between the models for each variable, using the Mean Relative Error (MRE). Results: In terms of the constructs, for practical purposes, both models are equivalent, except for including a variable for Team Autonomy. For the measures, the instruments produced similar results for five variables (i.e., Communication, Coordination, Balance of Member Contribution, Effort, and Cohesion). For the sixth variable (Mutual Support), we presented evidence that the results are similar in the models. Still, we believe that more research is needed to analyze it. Conclusions: We believe that we have enough evidence to claim that, for practical purposes, both models yield similar results. Thus, the study indicates that, it is up to the teams to choose which model best suits their context. Still, we concluded that there is a need for more research regarding how to assess TWQ for agile teams.

Forecasts of the effort or delivery date can play an important role in managing software projects, but the estimates provided by development teams are often inaccurate and time-consuming to produce. This is not surprising given the uncertainty that underlies this activity. This work studies the use of Monte Carlo simulations for generating forecasts based on project historical data. We have designed and run experiments comparing these forecasts against what happened in practice and to estimates provided by developers, when available. Comparisons were made based on the mean magnitude of relative error (MMRE). We did also analyze how the forecasting accuracy varies with the amount of work to be forecasted and the amount of historical data used. To minimize the requirements on input data, delivery date forecasts for a set of user stories were computed based on takt time of past stories (time elapsed between the completion of consecutive stories); effort forecasts were computed based on full-time equivalent (FTE) hours allocated to the implementation of past stories. The MMRE of delivery date forecasting was 32% in a set of 10 runs (for different projects) of Monte Carlo simulation based on takt time. The MMRE of effort forecasting was 20% in a set of 5 runs of Monte Carlo simulation based on FTE allocation, much smaller than the MMRE of 134% of developers' estimates. A better forecasting accuracy was obtained when the number of historical data points was 20 or higher. These results suggest that Monte Carlo simulations may be used in practice for delivery date and effort forecasting in agile projects, after a few initial sprints.

As social robots are increasingly entering the real world, developing a viable robot application has become highly important. While a growing body of research has acknowledged that the integration of an agile development methodology with user-centered design (UCD) provides advantages for both organizations and end users, integrating UCD in an agile methodology has been a challenging endeavor. The present paper illustrates a user-centered agile approach that integrates user perspectives through formative usability testing during an agile development process of a robot application and thus differentiates from most robot application evaluations, which conduct summative usability testing (i.e., they quantitatively test goal achievement after technological developments). Through an active involvement of organization and end users, the intermediate results of our ongoing project show that the developed social robot application is both useful and usable.

Scrumage (SCRUM for AGile Education) is a recently proposed classroom management technique in which students are given autonomy to choose individually from a variety of pedagogies (e.g., traditional lectures, active learning, a flipped-based ap-proach, etc.). The result is multiple simultaneous pedagogical styles in a single course. In this paper we present the results of comparing six sections of an introductory programming course at the same university, three of which used Scrumage and three of which took a traditional approach. We adminis-tered surveys of both content acquisition and learning atti-tudes at the beginning and end of the course. While students in all sections improved in content learning, the students in the Scrumage classrooms outperformed those in the traditional sections. The improvement in content learning was also more uniformly distributed among students, not limited to the high achievers. Scrumage students showed generally improved atti-tudes about learning after the course, especially in the areas of Effort Regulation (perseverance in problem solving) and Con-trol of Learning (taking responsibility for learning success). We observed some correlation between this metalearning and improvements in content scores in the Scrumage sections, but not in the traditional sections. Finally, based on an analysis of student comments in the Scrumage sections, we show that as the course progressed, positive student comments about their abilities and confidence were more common, even as course material became more difficult. We believe that positive atti-tude changes we saw with Scrumage mean it has potential for widening the retention of students in Computer Science.

Students entering the corporate sphere, particularly in client-facing positions, find themselves in a world of ambiguity that needs to be analyzed, clarified, and effectively described and communicated in order to transform real-world problems into real-world computing solutions. Navigating this world involves skills ranging from requirements gathering and creative thinking through high-level design and communication. Academic programming experience is frequently based on assignments that are pre-defined in specific, unambiguous language. This approach leaves a skills gap in translating amorphous, ambiguous problem scenarios into specifications. Video scenarios are a flexible, ready-to-use tool to aid in developing the skills needed to fill this gap. The short videos show individuals discussing or experiencing situations for which they need computing assistance. However, the situations are presented in ways that are ambiguous, open-ended, and sometimes contradictory. Students must utilize critical listening, observation, and thinking skills to define the problem the characters are experiencing and design potential solutions. Video scenarios can be easily used to develop requirements gathering, design specification, and communication skills in classes ranging from general education through capstone seminars. They are particularly well suited for software engineering and design courses, including those in certificate programs. By putting a face on a problem, video scenarios highlight the role of the user and provide a setting for developing user stories, use cases, and interaction skills integral to agile development. Student feedback from using video scenarios in a software engineering course is also presented. Videos and materials are available at http://youtube.com/virt-university.

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen an unprecedented and agile global shift in the ways that we educate, and in the ways that students consume their learning activities. This necessary paradigm shift has allowed many educators to take a critical look at their teaching styles, and to use technology in innovative ways to create the best experience for their students. Computing is a subject which traditionally, focuses on experiential, in-person activities such as labs, groupwork, and tutorials. COVID-19 has forced educators to reconsider the use of time and catalyzed overnight innovation. Some of these new practices are ones that would be valuable to learn from and carry forward into our post-COVID teaching. This BoF will provide a platform for discussion of what the post-COVID academic landscape might look like, and how we can use lessons learned during this educational shift to improve our practice.

Computational modeling provides an excellent vehicle for raising scientific awareness of emergent and topical phenomena such as COVID-19. Now more than ever, it is crucial to provide students with factual information about how diseases spread and how their own actions can impact that spread. In order to both encourage computational thinking skills and build scientific knowledge of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have created a series of programming activities through which students construct their own computational models based on the emerging scientific consensus around COVID-19. Students are able to model everyday situations such as being in a crowded area or going to stores while unknowingly infected, and immediately see the consequences of those actions. By including accurate scientific variables such as the reproductive number of the virus, incubation period, and period of communicability, students are able to create their own epi-curves that demonstrate the severity of the disease and provide students with visual representation of how quickly COVID-19 spreads. We also use the scientific model and associated modeling activities to reinforce best practices at home and in the community. Finally, this curriculum development effort demonstrates how block-based computational modeling activities lend themselves to agile curricular re-design around emerging and topics of local interest

Challenge Based Learning (CBL) is a student-centered learning ap- proach that aims to prepare them to learn by asking relevant ques- tions and proposing solutions to real-world challenges. However, in the context of CBL in general, learning management is a diffi- culty faced by undergraduate students, and it is rarely addressed. In order to support learning management, this work proposes an agile learning management method based on Scrum to support students in a CBL learning cycle. In conjunction with the proposed method, a case study was carried out involving students from several under- graduate courses. The use of the method showed significant results in learning, in the administration of learning objectives (LOs)[1], and in the acceptance of its use by the participants.

Recently, Agile Development has emerged as an alternative approach in software engineering. The Agile Software Development (ASD) process provides the ability to cope with ever-changing requirements. On the other hand, the Capability Maturity Model Integration, one of the Software Process Improvement Framework, is widely used to provide software development organizations with structure and stability in their software process. It enables organizations to generate software processes with better quality software, the productivity increase of the development team, and minimal risk of failure. The idea behind combining the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and Agile aims to create a software development procedure that is stable and continues to improve while also providing agility for dealing with dynamic business needs. This research compiles the experiences of combining both software and identifies challenges for the collaborative implementation process. This study also highlights the extent of the compatibility of CMMI and Agile Development. This research followed a standardized Systematic Literature Review procedure and used the approach known as Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses or PRISMA. The findings indicate that the main challenges with regard to combining CMMI and Agile are the lack of relevant knowledge and experience and the culture of CMMI, Agile, or sometimes both. The limited scope of Agile itself poses another considerable challenge. Agile focuses on software development projects, while CMMI has a broader range, from project-level development to organization-level process improvement. This review also finds that Agile Development is compatible with CMMI at a maturity level of 2 and 3. Future studies should determine the optimal method for overcoming the obstacles associated with combining CMMI and Agile.