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Digital transformation in the public sector provides digital services to the citizens aiming at increasing their quality of life, as well as the transparency and accountability of a public administration. Since adaptation to the citizens changing needs is central for its success, Agile methodologies seem best suited for the software development of digital services in that area. However, as well documented by an attempt to use Scrum for an important Public Administration in Italy, substantial modifications to standard Agile were needed, giving rise to a new proposal called improved Agile (in short, iAgile). Another notable example is the Scrum@IMI method developed by the City of Barcelona for the deployment of its digital services. However, given the importance of digital transformation in the public sector and the scarcity of efforts (documented in the scholarly literature) to effectively bring Agile within it, a strategically important contribution that Computer Science can offer is a general paradigm describing how to tailor Agile methodologies and, in particular, Scrum, for such a specific context. Our proposal, called Scrum@PA, addresses this strategic need. Based on it, a public administration has a technically sound avenue to follow to adopt Scrum rather than a generic set of guidelines as in the current state of the art. We show the validity of our proposal by describing how the quite successful Scrum@IMI approach can be derived from Scrum@PA. Although iAgile can also be derived from our paradigm, we have chosen Scrum@IMI as a pilot example since it is publicly available on GitHub. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of model-based code generation and its limitations. While there have been successful industrial projects that have used code generation from abstract models, the widespread adoption of code generation from explicitly defined models has not been as successful. The article identifies several challenges, including developers' ability to think in abstract form, the limitations of existing tooling, the need for flexible adaptation of the generator, and weak tool support for defining abstraction levels in a model. The article suggests that a "smart" generator could address these challenges by generating code for various functionalities, such as data transportation, user interfaces, logging, and search functionality. However, the article acknowledges that current code generators are not yet capable of such smartness and that more work is needed in this area. [Extracted from the article]

National governments and international organizations such as the European Commission, are promoting the increased use of information and communication technologies to assist scientists in the "mining" of knowledge. A typical workflow for a hydrogeologist consists of investigating and reporting hydrogeological processes in a study area, from data collection to model-based analysis. While hydrogeologists may feel insufficiently skilled to undertake the self-automatizing and digitizing process, the digitalization of the aforementioned workflow can be easily obtained by means of agile and parsimonious methodologies based on free and open-source software, and by using existing standards. This route is demonstrated for the digitalization of a vadose-zone monitoring system, where a large number of raw data related to water infiltration through the vadose zone are collected. The main aspects of the proposed methodology are a structured database (DB) where field data are stored, and a Python script to manage and process the available data. The structured DB was designed to store data recorded by field sensors and to generate inputs to run a transfer-function-based model to simulate percolation to the water table. Field data and model outputs were also exploited to automatically generate summary reports, like plots and table statistics. The proposed methodology can be generalized to other hydrogeological processes and case studies, as it is based on commonly available standards, basic knowledge of data-storage and data-management, and elementary programming skills to connect the different components of its suite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research work presents a novel hybrid agile method for software development on mobile devices. The evaluation of several aspects is presented to show the advantages of this method, including level of agility the method, if the method is suitable or not to develop applications on mobile devices and its applicability on a real example. This new method was created after a process of five steps, which consisted on the analysis of current software for mobile devices and existent agile development methods, the design of an evaluation methodology for agile methods, the application of the evaluation method, the development of a hybrid agile development method and the use of the method in a real example. Components of the novel method, such as resources, schemas and artefacts used are described, since those elements can be useful for developers and project managers of mobile devices' software. The theoretical and practical evaluation of this new method indicates it possess the necessary characteristics to be consider an agile methodology. The method incorporates the strengths and improvements discovered in current agile development methods. Also, the application on the real example of development for mobile devices showed its applicability and good performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research develops a framework for organizational value creation from agile IT applications. Based on the four themes in the business value research—business process perspective, complementarities, application level of analysis, and extent of use—three antecedents (organizational fit, process assimilation, and network adoption) are identified as pre-requisites for realizing the value of agile supply chain applications. Advanced planning and scheduling (APS) systems are used as examples, and two case studies for their implementation in the electronics and consumer goods industry are reported to support the propositions. The theories of diffusion of innovation, complementarities, network externalities, and technology structuration are applied to develop the propositions for fit, assimilation, and network effects. Information sharing and industry clockspeed are identified as the moderating factors in the proposed model. The framework has both managerial and research relevance. The research guides managers regarding ways to more fully realize the value of agile applications and forms a basis for future research on the business value of IT applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1990s, agile or lightweight software development methodologies have experienced a meteoric rise of interest among systems developers who consider traditional systems development methodologies (such as Structured Systems Development, Information Engineering, and Rational Unified Process) too inflexible for building systems having unpredictable and changing requirements. Agile methodologies try to adapt to rapid requirement changes by having short, iterative development cycles and by encouraging frequent, open communication with customers. However, agile methodologies are still in the process of devising systematic approaches on how to be adaptive to unpredictable and changing requirements and how to incorporate customers into the systems development process. In this study, we show how an ethnographic research process called Strip Resolution can be applied as a systematic complement to projects applying agile development principles. We illustrate, in detail, how the Strip Resolution Process (SRP) enabled us, in the role of systems developers, to adapt to changing and unpredictable user requirements and to incorporate customers into the systems development process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) can provide an efficient decision-making environment for multi-disciplinary teams faced with the challenge of evaluating agile manufacturing systems. In this paper, the development and evaluation of CSCW prototypes to aid the systematic evaluation of agile manufacturing systems are described. An industrial case study involving the evaluation of alternative design configurations of a cellular manufacturing system (CMS) for agile manufacturing was used for testing with twelve multi-disciplinary teams. The results obtained suggest that engineering design teams can obtain productivity improvements through the use of CSCW tools. The results indicate that CSCW systems can assist decision-makers in reaching consensus especially when advanced decision making tools are incorporated into the problem-solving framework. In this study, we also found that an enhanced CSCW with a neural network module for preference aggregation outperformed a basic CSCW in: (1) decision quality, (2) users' satisfaction and agreement, (3) consensus. These results also have far reaching implications for distributed product development teams that face the problem of reaching consensus on a range of alternative designs with stringent pressures to reduce development time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Release engineering affects the software we build, how we build it, and how we can make money out of it. It also presents many challenges that will take time to overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Computer science is a predominantly male field of study. Women face barriers while trying to insert themselves in the study of computer science. Those barriers extend to when women are exposed to the professional area of computer science. Despite decades of social fights for gender equity in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education and in computer science in general, few women participate in computer science, and some of the reasons include gender bias and lack of support for women when choosing a computer science career. Open source software development has been increasingly used by companies seeking the competitive advantages gained by team diversity. This diversification of the characteristics of team members includes, for example, the age of the participants, the level of experience, education and knowledge in the area, and their gender. In open source software projects women are underrepresented and a series of biases are involved in their participation. This paper conducts a systematic literature review with the objective of finding factors that could assist in increasing women's interest in contributing to open source communities and software development projects. The main contributions of this paper are: (i) identification of factors that cause women's lack of interest (engagement), (ii) possible solutions to increase the engagement of this public, (iii) to outline the profile of professional women who are participating in open source software projects and software development projects. The main findings of this research reveal that women are underrepresented in software development projects and in open source software projects. They represent less than 10% of the total developers and the main causes of this underrepresentation may be associated with their workplace conditions, which reflect male gender bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]