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The role of psychological safety in promoting software quality in agile teams
Psychological safety continues to pique the interest of scholars in a variety of disciplines of study. Recent research indicates that psychological safety fosters knowledge sharing and norm clarity and complements agile values. Although software quality remains a concern in the software industry, academics have yet to investigate whether and how psychologically safe teams provide superior results. In this study, we explore how psychological safety influences agile teams’ quality-related behaviors aimed at enhancing software quality. To widen the empirical coverage and evaluate the results, we chose a two-phase mixed-methods research design with an exploratory qualitative phase (20 interviews) followed by a quantitative phase (survey study, N = 423). Our findings show that, when psychological safety is established in agile software teams, it induces enablers of a social nature that advance the teams’ ability to pursue software quality. For example, admitting mistakes and taking initiatives equally help teams learn and invest their learning in their future decisions related to software quality. Past mistakes become points of reference for avoiding them in the future. Individuals become more willing to take initiatives aimed at enhancing quality practices and mitigating software quality issues. We contribute to our endeavor to understand the circumstances that promote software quality. Psychological safety requires organizations, their management, agile teams, and individuals to maintain and propagate safety principles. Our results also suggest that technological tools and procedures can be utilized alongside social strategies to promote software quality.
Journal Article
Rhetorical code studies : discovering arguments in and around code
\"In Rhetorical Code Studies, Kevin Brock explores how software code serves as a means of meaningful communication through which amateur and professional software developers construct arguments--arguments that are not only made up of logical procedures but also of implicit and explicit claims about how a given program works (or should work). These claims appear as procedures and as conventional discourse in the form of code comments and in email messages, forum posts, and other venues for conversation with other developers. To investigate the rhetorical qualities of code, Brock extends ongoing conversations in rhetoric and composition on software by turning to a number of case examples ranging from large, well-known projects like Mozilla Firefox to small-scale programs like the \"FizzBuzz\" test common in many programming job interviews. These examples, which involve specific examination of code texts as well as the contexts surrounding their composition, demonstrate the variety and depth of rhetorical activity taking place in and around code, from individual differences in style to changes in large-scale community norms\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Noise Channels
To err is human; to err in digital culture is design. In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, Peter Krapp identifies creative reservoirs of computer-mediated interaction. Throughout new media cultures, he traces a resistance to the heritage of motion studies, ergonomics, and efficiency, showing how creativity is stirred within the networks of digital culture.
eBook
Technology and engagement : making technology work for first generation college students
\"Technology and Engagement is based on a four-year study of how first generation college students use social media, aimed at improving their transition to and engagement with their university. Through web technology, including social media sites, students were better able to maintain close ties with family and friends from home, as well as engage more with social and academic programs at their university. This 'ecology of transition' was important in keeping the students focused on why they were in college, and helped them become more integrated into the university setting. By showing the gains in campus capital these first-generation college students obtained through social media, the authors offer concrete suggestions for how other universities and college-retention programs can utilize the findings to increase their own retention of first-generation college students\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Behind the Screen
An eye-opening look at the invisible workers who protect us from seeing humanity's worst on today's commercial internetSocial media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material-sometimes thousands of items per day. Sarah T. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry. Based on interviews with workers from Silicon Valley to the Philippines, at boutique firms and at major social media companies, she contextualizes this hidden industry and examines the emotional toll it takes on its workers. This revealing investigation of the people \"behind the screen\" offers insights into not only the reality of our commercial internet but the future of globalized labor in the digital age.
eBook
Folksonomies. Indexing and Retrieval in Web 2.0
In Web 2.0 users not only make heavy use of Col-laborative Information Services in order to create, publish and share digital information resources - what is more, they index and represent these re-sources via own keywords, so-called tags. The sum of this user-generated metadata of a Collaborative Information Service is also called Folksonomy. In contrast to professionally created and highly struc-tured metadata, e.g. subject headings, thesauri, clas-sification systems or ontologies, which are applied in libraries, corporate information architectures or commercial databases and which were developed according to defined standards, tags can be freely chosen by users and attached to any information resource. As one type of metadata Folksonomies provide access to information resources and serve users as retrieval tool in order to retrieve own re-sources as well as to find data of other users.
The book delivers insights into typical applications of Folksonomies, especially within Collaborative Information Services, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Folksonomies as tools of knowl-edge representation and information retrieval. More-over, it aims at providing conceptual considerations for solving problems of Folksonomies and presents how established methods of knowledge representa-tion and models of information retrieval can successfully be transferred to them.
eBook
The Metaverse as a Virtual Form of Smart Cities: Opportunities and Challenges for Environmental, Economic, and Social Sustainability in Urban Futures
Data infrastructures, economic processes, and governance models of digital platforms are increasingly pervading urban sectors and spheres of urban life. This phenomenon is known as platformization, which has in turn given rise to the phenomena of platform society, where platforms have permeated the core of urban societies. A recent manifestation of platformization is the Metaverse, a global platform project launched by Meta (formerly Facebook) as a globally operating platform company. The Metaverse represents an idea of a hypothetical “parallel virtual world” that incarnate ways of living and working in virtual cities as an alternative to smart cities of the future. Indeed, with emerging innovative technologies—such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, the IoT, and Digital Twins—providing rich datasets and advanced computational understandings of human behavior, the Metaverse has the potential to redefine city designing activities and service provisioning towards increasing urban efficiencies, accountabilities, and quality performance. However, there still remain ethical, human, social, and cultural concerns as to the Metaverse’s influence upon the quality of human social interactions and its prospective scope in reconstructing the quality of urban life. This paper undertakes an upper-level literature review of the area of the Metaverse from a broader perspective. Further, it maps the emerging products and services of the Metaverse, and explores their potential contributions to smart cities with respect to their virtual incarnation, with a particular focus on the environmental, economic, and social goals of sustainability. This study may help urban policy makers to better understand the opportunities and implications of the Metaverse upon tech-mediated practices and applied urban agendas, as well as assess the positives and negatives of this techno-urban vision. This paper also offers thoughts regarding the argument that the Metaverse has disruptive and substantive effects on forms of reconstructing reality in an increasingly platformized urban society. This will hopefully stimulate prospective research and further critical perspectives on the topic.
Journal Article
Better together: Elements of successful scientific software development in a distributed collaborative community
Many scientific disciplines rely on computational methods for data analysis, model generation, and prediction. Implementing these methods is often accomplished by researchers with domain expertise but without formal training in software engineering or computer science. This arrangement has led to underappreciation of sustainability and maintainability of scientific software tools developed in academic environments. Some software tools have avoided this fate, including the scientific library Rosetta. We use this software and its community as a case study to show how modern software development can be accomplished successfully, irrespective of subject area. Rosetta is one of the largest software suites for macromolecular modeling, with 3.1 million lines of code and many state-of-the-art applications. Since the mid 1990s, the software has been developed collaboratively by the RosettaCommons, a community of academics from over 60 institutions worldwide with diverse backgrounds including chemistry, biology, physiology, physics, engineering, mathematics, and computer science. Developing this software suite has provided us with more than two decades of experience in how to effectively develop advanced scientific software in a global community with hundreds of contributors. Here we illustrate the functioning of this development community by addressing technical aspects (like version control, testing, and maintenance), community-building strategies, diversity efforts, software dissemination, and user support. We demonstrate how modern computational research can thrive in a distributed collaborative community. The practices described here are independent of subject area and can be readily adopted by other software development communities.
Journal Article
Interventions to reduce social isolation and loneliness during COVID-19 physical distancing measures: A rapid systematic review
A significant proportion of the worldwide population is at risk of social isolation and loneliness as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We aimed to identify effective interventions to reduce social isolation and loneliness that are compatible with COVID-19 shielding and social distancing measures.
In this rapid systematic review, we searched six electronic databases (Medline, Embase, Web of Science, PsycINFO, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and SCOPUS) from inception to April 2020 for systematic reviews appraising interventions for loneliness and/or social isolation. Primary studies from those reviews were eligible if they included: 1) participants in a non-hospital setting; 2) interventions to reduce social isolation and/or loneliness that would be feasible during COVID-19 shielding measures; 3) a relevant control group; and 4) quantitative measures of social isolation, social support or loneliness. At least two authors independently screened studies, extracted data, and assessed risk of bias using the Downs and Black checklist. Study registration: PROSPERO CRD42020178654. We identified 45 RCTs and 13 non-randomised controlled trials; none were conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. The nature, type, and potential effectiveness of interventions varied greatly. Effective interventions for loneliness include psychological therapies such as mindfulness, lessons on friendship, robotic pets, and social facilitation software. Few interventions improved social isolation. Overall, 37 of 58 studies were of \"Fair\" quality, as measured by the Downs & Black checklist. The main study limitations identified were the inclusion of studies of variable quality; the applicability of our findings to the entire population; and the current poor understanding of the types of loneliness and isolation experienced by different groups affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many effective interventions involved cognitive or educational components, or facilitated communication between peers. These interventions may require minor modifications to align with COVID-19 shielding/social distancing measures. Future high-quality randomised controlled trials conducted under shielding/social distancing constraints are urgently needed.
Journal Article