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This paper provides a review of the impact of the unforeseen on an organisation. In the work by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Black Swan Theory proposes that a holistic approach/thought process should be considered instead of the normal statistical analyses based on historical data, in order to meet the challenges that Black Swan events pose. Although such events are unpredictable and with huge impact, generally on a global scale; this paper suggests that a chain of unforeseen events can result in a near-catastrophic outcome for an organisation - its own Black Swan. The earthquake/tsunami on the Japanese coast (11 March 2011) followed by Nuclear Power Plant failures, Environmental Activism, and Political Decisions resulting in a significant impact on associated organisations (e.g. nuclear power producer TEPCO and uranium miner Cameco) is a case in point. This paper encourages organisations to prepare themselves for such an eventuality through out-ofthe- box thinking, increasing systems' robustness and developing rapid response capability. An organisation's preparedness analytics should be challenged to include such outliers as the Black Swan event (extremely low probability) in order to face increasing uncertainties in the rapidly changing global business: financial, technological and socio-political environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Armies around the world face the dilemma of reaching the right size of the logistics chain, without compromising the effectiveness of it. The stocking of spares for maintaining the equipment and the vehicles of the army is done with just in case philosophy which results in huge inventories that have associated holding and carrying costs. Material managers of the army must learn lessons from the industry about rightsizing their inventories. Concepts like lean and agile must find place in managing spares of army. Both these concepts have their inherent positives which must be exploited by making use of them at the opportune time. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The paper starts with discussing the case study of spare parts supply of army. The paper then presents a framework where both lean and agile methods of managing inventory can be used in army. The paper also brings out salient aspects of both these concepts as relevant to spares management in army. The paper also proposes use of automation incorporating MIMOSA database and Ontology-based knowledge repositories. Findings – The paper brings out the fact that both lean and agile supply chains can be used for spares replenishment in army. The paper also gives out a framework to implement the concept. Originality/value – This concept has been used in the field of healthcare, however, this paper is original in its approach to use it for the army spare parts replenishment. Use of Ontology and MIMOSA as proposed in the paper is also an original attempt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Not many researchers have attempted to numerically quantify a supply chain’s degree of leanness or agility. Although focusing predominantly on food, the purpose of this paper is to propose a simple and universal methodology to quantify the degrees of leanness and agility at any point within any supply chain. Design/methodology/approach – Daily processing capacities of stochastic model runs and real supply chain data were projected onto a standardized Euclidean surface. Indexes that calculate, amongst others, the agility, leanness, baseline production and ceiling conditions were derived. Findings – The indexes were often well correlated across the various supply chains. Leanness correlates negatively with agility, as can be expected, however, these attributes do not stand opposed to each other. Most supply chains seem to exhibit both lean and agile attributes simultaneously. Sugar, various types of tomatoes, avocado and onion supply chains are discussed and compared. Although a large amount of data were analysed, there exists an opportunity to widen this study significantly. Originality/value – This paper presents a unique and simple approach to quantify the degree of supply chain leanness and agility. Although these terms are often used, only a few authors have made attempts to quantify these attributes and in most cases the approaches are relatively cumbersome. The relatively simple indexes create an opportunity for supply chain management to measure, evaluate and communicate their strategies along the supply chain and between different chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence-driven software development paradigms have been attracting much attention in academia, industry and the government. More specifically, within the last 5 years, a wave of data analytics is affecting businesses from all domains, influencing engineering management practices in many industries and making a difference in academic research. Several major software vendors have been adopting a form of “intelligent” development in one or more phases of their software development processes. Agile for example, is a well-known example of a lifecycle used to build intelligent and analytical systems. The agile process consists of multiple sprints; in each sprint a specific software feature is developed, tested, refined and documented. However, because agile development depends on the context of the project, testing is performed differently in every sprint. This paper introduces a method to predict software failures in the subsequent agile sprints. That is achieved by utilizing analytical and statistical methods (such as using Mean Time between Failures and modelling regression). The novel method is called: analytics-driven testing (ADT). ADT predicts errors and their locations (with a certain statistical confidence level). That is done by continuously measuring MTBF for software components, and using a forecasting regression model for estimating where and what types of software system failures are likely to occur. ADT is presented and evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile Software Development (ASD) has become the mainstream software development method of choice. Its core fundamentals are based on Teamwork factors and the higher value of individuals and their interactions over processes and tools. However, there is no common understanding regarding the factors that should be considered for defining an ASD Teamwork construct. Driven by this problem, we present a thematic network that synthesizes the information presented in the literature, and eases knowledge sharing by defining a terminology. The thematic network is the result of the following process: (i) studies definition to be used as data source through a literature review; (ii) data extraction from these studies; (iii) data translation into codes; (iv) codes translation into themes; (v) creation of higher-order themes model; and (vi) assessment of synthesis trustworthiness. The resulting thematic network comprises four higher-order themes: Cohesion, Orientation, Shared Leadership, and Autonomy. We also evaluate the applicability of the identified themes in ASD Teamwork constructs in the literature. We concluded that the constructed thematic network can be generalized to ASD, and used as basis by researchers who intend to explore ASD Teamwork. Further, practitioners can use our results to understand agile teams' dynamics better and improve their efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kaiser Permanente's Clinical Library, which provides access to internally created clinical guidance documents as well as to librarian services and electronic resources, had not been redesigned since 2010. Usage statistics obtained prior to the release of the redesigned site showed that site use had plateaued. This paper examines the value of using a user experience design (UXD) methodology to inform the redesign of an enterprise-wide intranet library site. User satisfaction with the redesigned site was positive as measured by user survey data and user feedback collected through the site feedback form. Usage statistics from the five-month period immediately following the release showed an increase in use as measured by both total visits and unique visitors to the site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Despite the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommendation to screen adults for unhealthy alcohol use, the implementation of alcohol screening in primary care remains suboptimal. Methods: A pre and post-implementation study design that used Agile implementation process to increase screening for unhealthy alcohol use in adult patients from October 2021 to June 2022 at a large primary care clinic serving minority and underprivileged adults in Indianapolis. Results: In comparison to a baseline screening rate of 0%, the agile implementation process increased and sustained screening rates above 80% for alcohol use using the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test – Consumption tool (AUDIT-C). Conclusions: Using the agile implementation process, we were able to successfully implement evidence-based recommendations to screen for unhealthy alcohol use in primary care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile methods have been widely adopted by the industry and its teaching has seen a surge, particularly in the software development field. However, these methods have a number of limitations which affect product outcomes, such as the fact that many software development companies now use Scrum to get developers to work without interruption between iterations, rather than to maintain a sustainable rhythm. Agile experts have stated the importance of incorporating creativity into Scrum, and although there are several agile resources that help with the learning process, it seems essential to approach such learning from a practical point of view. Furthermore, none of these resources introduce creativity. In this paper, we present an educational resource in the form of a serious game that allows you to acquire all the key concepts of agile and creative methods. The game is based on the use of LEGO pieces to simulate a real project, applying the key concepts of the Scrum and Design Thinking frameworks in a gamified way. It was assessed in a professional training centre of computer science by using surveys through which participants evaluated their previous knowledge of agile and creativity methods. We analysed the improvement of these competences, as well as the general level of satisfaction with the game. After the game, the results showed that the participants' knowledge of the Scrum and Design Thinking frameworks had improved and that they were very satisfied with the whole experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper investigates the importance of traceability in the meat industry. It explains that the global market's intense competition and consumers' increased expectations have forced companies to implement electronic traceability systems to improve efficiency, reduce errors, and mitigate incidents and fraud. The meat industry is facing increased consumer awareness and concern about food quality and safety. Consumers are extremely sensitive to food production conditions, and traceability can help companies increase consumers' trust. This work describes the design and implementation of a customized traceability system, developed using the Agile method, for the local meat industry. For the needs of the project, advanced and innovative information and communication technologies and tools, such as cloud computing and the Internet of Things, were also used. The main problem that this research aims to address is the lack of transparency in three phases: transparency within the industry's internal processes, transparency in the life of the animal from the moment of its birth, and transparency towards the consumer. The objectives of this research are twofold. First, we aim to digitize the Greek meat industry. Concurrently, we intend to create a traceability system that will generate important data, thereby providing valuable information for all stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of project management and the benefits of using a project management approach for the successful execution of projects are well known. However, there needs to be more clarity in selecting a project management approach for a specific project. According to the PMBOK® Guide - Seventh Edition, "Development approach is the means used to create or evolve product, service or result during the project life cycle." Based on the increasing need for iteration, the development approach can be predictive (least iterative) to adaptive (most iterative) with a hybrid in the middle. In the context of this paper, the authors consider the predictive approach to essentially mimic a waterfall approach and the adaptive approach as agile. This article discusses the selection, application, and benefits of management approaches for healthcare projects - most notably, ensuring quality-driven and timely patient care. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the details of each approach and debate if this differentiation between project approaches exists. A project is executed in a specific environment and context, such as a business problem it is supposed to solve. The project manager (PM) is responsible for selecting the most appropriate and available way to achieve the targets and results. A good PM will draw from various approaches, tools, and working methods and use project tailoring approaches to derive the best-fit approach to suit the project's unique characteristics and context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While coursework provides undergraduate data science students with some relevant analytic skills, many are not given the rich experiences with data and computing they need to be successful in the workplace. Additionally, students often have limited exposure to team-based data science and the principles and tools of collaboration that are encountered outside of school. In this paper, we describe the DSC-WAV program, an NSF-funded data science workforce development project in which teams of undergraduate sophomores and juniors work with a local non-profit organization on a data-focused problem. To help students develop a sense of agency and improve confidence in their technical and non-technical data science skills, the project promoted a team-based approach to data science, adopting several processes and tools intended to facilitate this collaboration. Evidence from the project evaluation, including participant survey and interview data, is presented to document the degree to which the project was successful in engaging students in team-based data science, and how the project changed the students' perceptions of their technical and non-technical skills. We also examine opportunities for improvement and offer insight to other data science educators who may want to implement a similar team-based approach to data science projects at their own institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's fast-paced world of rapid technological change, software development teams need to constantly revise their work practices. Not surprisingly, regular reflection on how to become more effective is perceived as one of the most important principles of Agile Software Development. Nevertheless, running an effective and enjoyable retrospective meeting is still a challenge in real environments. As reported by several studies, the Sprint Retrospective is an agile practice most likely to be implemented improperly or sacrificed when teams perform under pressure to deliver. To facilitate the implementation of the practice, some agile coaches have proposed to set up retrospective meetings in the form of retrospective games. However, there has been little research-based evidence to support the positive effects of retrospective games. Our aim is to investigate whether the adoption of retrospective games can improve retrospective meetings in general and lead to positive societal outcomes. In this paper, we report on an Action Research project in which we implemented six retrospective games in six Scrum teams that had experienced common retrospective problems. The received feedback indicates that the approach helped the teams to mitigate many of the "accidental difficulties" pertaining to the Sprint Retrospective, such as lack of structure, dullness, too many complaints, or unequal participation and made the meetings more productive to some degree. Moreover, depending on their individual preferences, different participants perceived different games as having a positive impact on their communication, motivation-and-involvement, and/or creativity, even though there were others, less numerous, who had an opposite view. The advantages and disadvantages of each game as well as eight lessons learned are presented in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The purpose of this paper is to examine the work strategies adopted by leading Indian IT companies post COVID-19 and their institutional and individual level implications. Following the exploratory sequential mixed-method approach, in the first phase, the data were collected from 8 leading IT companies in India to understand the work strategies implemented post COVID -19 to ensure employees’ safety without disrupting client deliverables. In the second phase, the primary qualitative interviews were conducted and selected IT companies' financial statements with a systematic analysis of financial indicators were used to gauge the impact of new work strategies. The study reveals the selected IT companies were embracing Work-From-Home or Work-From-Anywhere as their work strategies by ensuring little to no disruption, were armed with a host of technology tools that allowed employees' swathes to new work-norm within hours. The study findings manifold implications of the new work-norm are that it has no negative impact on the companies' client deliverables and profitability. The paper confirms that the remote-working approach has resulted in reduced carbon footprint, work-life balance, and de-urbanization while identifying the flip side of this approach as the negative impact on team cohesiveness and employee emotional wellbeing. This research confirms the critical lesson learned from COVID-19 is agile companies must plan for a range of incomprehensible contingencies to ensure business continuity and growth. The research findings contribute towards understanding the Indian IT sector experiences in adopting the remote-work strategies and taken as lessons that can be useful for other global IT sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The combination of Agile methods and distributed software development via remote teams represents an emerging approach to address the challenges such as late feedback, slow project timelines, and high cost, typically associated with software development projects. However, when projects are implemented using an Agile model with distributed human resources, there are a number of challenges that need to be considered and mitigated. The objectives of our work are multifold. First, we would like to understand the reasons and conditions that lead to the adoption of distributed Agile software engineering (DASE) practices. Second, we would like to investigate and find out the most important risks that threaten a DASE approach and what mitigation strategies exist to address them. Finally, we would like to highlight which of the available approaches among the existing Agile methodologies has been successfully adopted by the community. We intend to solidify our findings by exploring the strength of the evidence that has been reported in the literature. We carried out a systematic literature review of DASE techniques and approaches. This systematic literature review found time zone difference, knowledge of resources, lack of infrastructure, missing roles, and responsibilities as being the primary challenges that needed to be addressed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lean practices are meant to reduce the unwanted activities from a system and use only as much resources as are necessary for that matter. In today's world, the manufacturing organisations are trying tooth and nail to get an edge over their competitors. This makes them obligatory to improve their production process which in turn requires a very effective and efficient supply chain system. It has made the researchers focus on this area of manufacturing and add some valuable contributions towards the betterment of manufacturing industry and the society as a whole. Review papers provide a great help to researchers in identifying the areas that need improvement and avoid redundancy of the efforts. Although a wide range of researches has been done on lean and supply chain separately, the integrated view of lean and supply chain is still suffering to receive the attention of a large stream of researchers. In the same context, to help researchers, this paper tries to identify the important researches and also find some key aspects that need to be explored. As, to the knowledge of the researchers, there are no review papers on lean supply chain till now, this paper assumes a greater relevance. The literature on the lean supply chain is exhaustively covered under the limitations of the resources, is classified on the bases of year, country, industry and journal and discussed lucidly followed by findings and conclusion. The literature identifies three phases of researches and highlights future research avenues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reassess the evaluation of ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI) in relation to the agile development of information systems in the domain of crisis management. The authors analyse the differing assessment needs of a move from a traditional approach to the development of information systems to an agile approach, which offers flexibility, adaptability and responds to the needs of users as the system develops. In turn, the authors argue that this development requires greater flexibility and an iterative approach to assessing ELSI. The authors provide an example from the Horizon 2020 EU-funded project iTRACK (Integrated system for real-time TRACKing and collective intelligence in civilian humanitarian missions) to exemplify this move to an iterative approach in practice, drawing on the process of undertaking an ethical and privacy impact assessment for the purpose of this project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decision to incrementally improve existing processes and products or introduce breakthrough innovations depends on the context a company is facing. In situations where problems are known, it is better to incrementally improve, while in complex situations where problems are not known, a probe-sense-respond approach based on experimentation and the exploration of new solutions is preferable. Lean management adapts well to the first type of context, while agile management fits the second type of context. However, organizations must increasingly consider both approaches and become ambidextrous by introducing incremental improvements and breakthrough innovations simultaneously. This requires embracing the paradox between exploiting and exploring, adopting a new leadership mindset, and dual strategic, organizational, and behavioral models. This paper proposed a framework to implement lean and agile approaches simultaneously using the paradox theory to justify and manage this co-existence. This framework is threefold. First, managers need to differentiate between lean and agile, finding ways of keeping the two approaches separated. Second, lean and agile should be integrated so that synergies between the two approaches can be generated. Finally, managers need to achieve a dynamic equilibrium over time between lean and agile. Contributions to the theory and practice of this approach were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A tremendous amount of literature has been published about the merits of agile development practices. But in today’s environment, agile development practices are quickly being supplemented with major technology breakthroughs that enhance software quality, improve enterprise performance and provide business resiliency. This paper describes three major breakthroughs; services-based architectures, cloud computing, and DevOps practices. A brief overview of each technology is discussed and how the three technologies working together provide enterprise value. The paper concludes with a discussion on the skills and talents required to implement these technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out a strategic template for innovating in zero-risk environments such as modern airports. For the purpose of the paper, a zero-risk environment is defined as one where damage, disruption or systemic failure can result in irreversible consequences. The paper starts by outlining a facial recognition experiment conducted by Finavia, Finnair and digital engineering and innovation consultancy Futurice at Helsinki Airport during 2017. It explores whether the widespread introduction of biometrics can speed up the passage of consumers through airports, thus heading off a predicted capacity crunch at major hubs. It then uses the experience and outcomes of the Helsinki experiment to address the broader innovation theme, making reference to other technological advances in the sector. While it is tempting for airports to focus on biometrics as an efficiency tool, a key line of argument in the paper is the need to focus on customer experience and ensure employee buy-in when trialling innovations in high-risk environments. With customer experience likely to become a key differentiator for airports and airlines, it advocates a machine+human approach as opposed to a machine versus human approach. At the same time, it discusses the advantages of keeping the experiment phase lean and avoiding operational integration. The Helsinki experiment highlighted the potential for using off-the-shelf technology and developing a mobile-centric experience. This has positive implications in terms of the cost of hardware investment. While focusing on the importance of customer experience, the paper acknowledges that the airline industry places a strong emphasis on proving return-on-investment. As a result, it advocates the development of an innovation business case to help champions within the company argue the case for implementation and integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carrying great promises, Agile methods nevertheless imply rights and duties, which must be enshrined in an adequate legal framework; especially in an industry like the Entertainment where large risks are at stake, contract and trust-issues are numerous, and flexibility is a key to remain competitive. Thus, we will explore Agile contracts to evaluate their ability to cope with the main issues that often hurdle entertainment projects and be an asset to support projects within the entertainment industry. Throughout this paper we will consider five types of contracts; to rank those feasible alternatives, we will evaluate them using several criteria and undertake a qualitative and quantitative analysis. In the end, we will observe that Target-Cost and Incremental Project Delivery contracts stand out, as both strongly support the implementation of Agile methods, while being singularly helpful for Entertainment companies. Indeed, those two types of contract can be a shield against many pitfalls and foster some vital key success factors. In addition, we will study some best practices regarding performance monitoring. Ultimately, we will state a simple yet essential idea: where proper Contract Management goes, project success follows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses structure, quality and content of the currently available agile maturity models. It presents two approaches on how to deal with such models. As a first step of the analysis, the paper contains a compilation of maturity level naming used by these agile maturity models because the variety of level naming is a sign of the variety of understanding and of definition of agile maturity. While many papers deal with agile from an inside perspective, this paper is written from the perspective of Software Process Improvement (SPI) and Capability Determination, the European Certification and Qualification Association PI Manager Certification Scheme and also the SPI Manifesto. The paper does not explicitly present its own agile maturity model. The analysis approaches presented in the paper show that the currently available agile maturity models are not fit for industrial use. The synthesis of an acceptable model seems to be feasible as the analysed models address typical organisational processes including life cycle management. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the problem of coordination and supervision of virtual teams and their capabilities. The goal is to develop a model suitable for managing virtual student teams specialized in the development of smart environments. The developed model is based on SAFe and DevOps, which when combined provide us with a framework for the evaluation of team capabilities in an academic environment. Additionally, DevOps principles can be more efficiently leveraged through an agile methodology to provide students with a better understanding of continuous value delivery. Through the application of the proposed model, virtual student teams gained practical experience in self-organization and virtual team management while being efficiently monitored and guided through the project lifecycle. Virtual student teams were likewise encouraged to be more agile, as this change in mindset is imperative in business, and as such must also be adopted in academic environments. By incorporating best practices of the corporate environments into the existing curriculum, we have proven that by adopting the proposed model these changes can be feasibly incorporated to the satisfaction of both the students and their future employers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenged by complex problems and the speed of technological, social, and environmental change, the joint approach of Lean Management and the Agile Mindset has been explored in business as a management model. This paper aimed to carry out a bibliometric analysis of Lean Agile Management, pointing out trends in scientific research. To this end, an exploratory and descriptive study was developed, with a quantitative approach and based on secondary data from the Web of Science and Scopus, between 1994 and 2022. Bibliometric indicators pointed to 1808 different papers in 897 sources, with 18 citations per paper, and higher scientific productivity of U.S. (276), India (221), and UK (191), with production peaks in 2018 and 2021, suggesting the diffusion and contemporaneity of the research topic. The laws of bibliometrics were not met for this research subject, and dense networks of collaboration and co-citation among researchers were identified, mainly in four application domains, including supply chain, manufacturing, sustainability, and software development as corroborated by the word network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents some initial insights into practical translation problems that can occur during agile localization. Although agile localization is not a novel approach to software localization, the range of possible translation problems and their causes and solutions have not yet been described. In order to write this paper, an ad hoc monolingual English corpus made up of user interface strings of one agile localized software product was used. The corpus was analyzed string by string, and various causes of translation problems, mostly relating to lacking context, were identified. The paper presents and discusses sample cases of these problems. This paper tries to show that while agile localization can be used as an alternative to traditional localization, the development team must be open to cooperation with the localization team in order for agile localization to be successfully implemented; otherwise, problems will occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the challenging environment of the construction industry and especially after the Corona pandemic crisis in Iran, supply chains (SCs) needed to adopt a new management model to continue the activity. Among the investigated approaches, the four sustainable, anti-fragile, agile and lean (SAAL) approaches were given more attention. The main objective of this paper is to draw a conceptual model for SAAL SCs with the aim of improving their operational, economic and environmental performance. For this purpose, several performance measures have been proposed. This concept is drawn based on the literature review of four supply chain management (SCM) approaches and their performance measurement system. Among the measures proposed by SAAL, which affect SC performance, are just-in-time relationships as well as supplier relationships (modular suppliers) and creating anti-fragile infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Estimating the effort required for software engineering tasks is incredibly tricky, but it is critical for project planning. Issue reports are frequently used in the agile community to describe tasks, and story points are used to estimate task effort. Aim: This paper proposes a machine learning regression model for estimating the number of story points needed to solve a task. The system can be trained from raw input data to predict outcomes without the need for manual feature engineering. Method: Hierarchical attention networks are used in the proposed model. It has two levels of attention mechanisms implemented at word and sentence levels. The model gradually constructs a document vector by grouping significant words into sentence vectors and then merging significant sentence vectors to create document vectors. Then, the document vectors are fed into a shallow neural network to predict the story point. Results: The experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art technique Deep-S which uses Recurrent Highway Networks. The proposed model has improved Mean Absolute Error (MAE) by an average of 16.6% and has improved Median Absolute Error (MdAE) by an average of 53%. Conclusion: An empirical evaluation shows that the proposed approach outperforms the previous work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although agile methods gained popularity and became globally widespread, developing secure software with agile methods remains a challenge. Method elements (i.e., roles, activities, and artifacts) that aim to increase software security on one hand can reduce the characteristic agility of agile methods on the other. The overall aim of this paper is to provide small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with the means to improve the sustainability of their software development process in terms of software security despite their limitations, such as low capacity and/or financial resources. Although software engineering literature offers various security elements, there is one key research gap that hinders the ability to provide such means. It remains unclear not only how much individual security elements contribute to software security but also how they impact the agility and costs of software development. To address the gap, we identified security elements found in the literature and evaluated them for their impact on software security, agility, and costs in an international study among practitioners. Finally, we developed a novel lightweight approach for evaluating agile methods from a security perspective. The developed approach can help SMEs to adapt their software development to their needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe the localization of a phone app that was completed by students enrolled in a university translation program. The app in question serves the university campus community. The experience related herein follows the earlier localization of a COVID-related app, described in Warburton and Krishnan (2021). The current project was larger in scope, covered more subject areas, included additional languages, leveraged different technologies (as a result of lessons learned), and repurposed more linguistic resources. We also reflect on phone apps as a genre and the impacts of their increasing role in society for the localization industry. We demonstrate that the Functionalist approach to translation is appropriate for app localization. However, challenges, both technical and linguistic, point to the need for better internationalization practices and localization tools. The localization of phone apps would benefit from further research of this genre in translation theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile methods are used more and more frequently to develop products by reducing development time. Requirements are typically written in user stories or epics. In this paper, a new method called UX Poker is presented. This is a method to estimate the impact of a user story on user experience before development. Thus, there is the opportunity that the product backlog can also be sorted according to the expected UX. To evaluate UX Poker, a case study was conducted with four agile teams. Besides, a workshop followed by a questionnaire was conducted with all four agile teams. The goal of being able to estimate the UX even before development was achieved. Using UX Poker to create another way to sort the product backlog can be considered achieved in this first evaluation. The results show that UX Poker can be implemented in a real-life application. Additionally, during the use of UX Poker, it was found that a shared understanding of UX began. The participants clarified in the team discussion about UX Poker what related to influence the user stories had on UX and what UX meant for their product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human Digital Twins (HDTs) have emerged as a key technology in digitalizing human-centered applications, able to enhance decision-making, personalize healthcare, and optimize workplace environments. However, despite a growing research body, there exists a critical lack of guidance for designing sophisticated, user-centric HDTs. In addressing this gap, this paper reports a systematic literature review of 44 papers in the field of HDTs (published between 2022 and 2023) to distill key design process insights and identify gaps in the current understanding and approaches to HDT design. Based on insights from this review, we introduce ETHICA, a systematic methodology that advocates for an iterative development process, emphasizing stakeholder collaboration and focusing on ethical and user-centric principles throughout the design life cycle. The resulting ETHICA methodology offers a robust blueprint for constructing sophisticated HDTs that harmonizes technological advancements with human-centered design and ethical considerations, encouraging a shift towards more holistic and human-centric approaches in the emerging field of Digital Twin technologies.

Data analytics is beginning to have a significant impact on a number of professions, but project management is a relatively late adopter. This paper outlines the potential impact on specific project management roles, ranging from supplementing current roles through to radically transforming them. We highlight the need for project managers to acquire new advanced digital skills or face the risk of obsolescence as data scientists and analysts provide evidencebased insights tailored to the conditions of the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies in the field of software engineering show that the problems frequently occur in the planning and managing phase rather than in the developing phase. Consequently, it is obvious that some other skills beyond pro-gramming and technical excellence are needed. However, those soft skills are not always easy to learn or acquire. Its adoption and correct usage can be very hard even for experienced software engineers, and thus students must prepare in advance and proposals from various authors have been enumerated. Human factor can accelerate, but it can also impede the acquisition of agile values due to lack of knowledge, cultural issues, resistance to change, wrong mind set and lack collaboration. Furthermore, there are some aspects that usually do not occur in real-world. Students are usually distracted with some other activities, do not have a common working place causing additional effort when "meeting" in distributed context. Literature review had been done to find possible solutions to avoid some of afore- mentioned issues. This paper elicits common problems mentioned in literature expanded with some issues, opinions and suggestions from authors' point of view according to authors' previous experiences of using agile methodologies in software development courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Software developing organizations strive to achieve flexibility to maintain a competitive advantage. There is no common understanding of what characterize flexibility for a software organization beyond the scope of the software product. Without a common understanding, it is difficult to evaluate the degrees of flexibility of software development approaches. The aim of this literature review is to collect attributes that characterize flexibility. The collected attributes are consolidated into a flexibility framework with 3 main attributes: properties of change, flexibility perspectives, and flexibility enablers. The resulting flexibility framework is then used to evaluate Agile and Lean practices. The evaluation shows that Agile and Lean practices address many flexibility attributes. However, some attributes are not addressed, such as infrastructure flexibility and strategic flexibility. On the basis of our evaluation, the classifications of flexibility attributes that we present in this paper could be used to aid software organization flexibility evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software models' comparison is an operation performed in all software development lifecycle processes. Comparison is one of the steps of software models refactoring, refinement, merging, quality estimation, etc. Such operations take place in different tasks in requirement analysis, software designing, testing, reengineering, etc. This article proposes analytical foundations for software models' representation and corresponding technique for their comparison. To describe software model structure it is proposed to use graph representation. Software models' comparison technique based on subgraphs matching is proposed. Following this technique important steps of software tool realization are described, namely, (i) grounding of the choice of development environment and tools for XMI files processing; (ii) the algorithm for extracting software model structure from XMI file; (iii) software models' comparison algorithm realization; (iv) description of software architecture. Peculiarity of proposed software tool is a possibility for visualizing elements of two software models that do not match each other directly in modeling environment. Data are extracted from XMI files by means of LINQ queries. After that they are stored in graph triples. To perform visualization, it is proposed to modify "layout" files, designed by Microsoft Visual Studio environment. Other important feature of the tool is a possibility to compare software models, designed in different modeling environments. It is done by means of involving new LINQ queries, considering specifics of storing software models in different modeling environments. Paper contains case study, explaining the process of software models'analytical representation, and comparison technique implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of Agile in Quality Management Systems. Design/methodology/approach: This paper provides a brief history of Agile and compares it to the management theory of W. Edwards Deming. The authors then examine the strengths and weaknesses of Lean, Agile, and Six Sigma in relationship to the four components of Deming's System of Profound Knowledge in order to clarify Agile's role in contemporary Quality Management Systems. In addition to the existing literature, the authors draw extensively on their experiences and observations from more than 50 years of experience in IT and quality (both as practitioners and academics) to substantiate the opinions expressed in the paper. Findings: This paper acknowledges that while Deming's management theory could be accurately described as "agile," Agile is not comprehensive enough to be considered an effective stand-alone Quality Management System. However, our analysis suggests that Agile can be an important part of a contingency or umbrella approach to Quality Management. Limitations: This is a very theoretical paper based on the authors' experiences and the existing literature. The next stage of this research is to conduct empirical studies in existing organizations to quantify the advantages and roadblocks of incorporating Agile methodologies in Quality Management Systems. Originality/value: This paper helps to fill a void in the academic literature concerning the relationships between Agile and Deming's management theory. Moreover, using the System of Profound Knowledge to understand the role of Lean, Six Sigma and Agile in a Quality Management System is a novel approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: Risks associated with software projects play a significant role on delivery of software projects within a given budget. These risks are due to volatility in project requirements, availability of experienced personnel, ever-changing technology and many more project cost factors. Effort spent on managing the risks is termed as the risk exposure of the project. In this research, this risk exposure has been added to effort estimate of a software project. This total effort is termed as the integrated effort estimate. Objective: To improve the accuracy of software effort estimates by integrating the risk exposure with the initial effort estimate of the project. Method: A formula to calculate integrated effort estimate of a software project has been proposed in the paper. This proposed formula has been tested on two datasets collected from industry, one for waterfall projects and another for agile projects. Initial effort estimates for waterfall projects are calculated using CoCoMo II and for agile projects are calculated using story point approach by Ziauddin. Results: The integrated effort estimates were more accurate than their corresponding initial effort estimates on all the four parameters: MMRE, SA, effect size and R2. Conclusion: Integrated effort estimates are more comprehensive, reliable, and accurate than the initial effort estimates for the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]