Our estimate that 85% of all health research is being avoidably “wasted” [Chalmers & Glasziou, 2009] commonly elicits disbelief. Our own first reaction was similar: “that can’t be right?” Not only did 85% sound too much, but given that $200 billion per year is spent globally on health and medical research, it implied an annual waste of $170 billion. That amount ranks somewhere between the GDPs of Kuwait and Hungary. It seems a problem worthy of serious analysis and attention. But how can we estimate the waste?
Black Harvard economics professor wrote a research paper investigating whether racial differences in police shooting rates were the result of “racial bias” or “statistical discrimination”. Statistical discrimination = an individual or institution treats people differently based on data that reflects the average behavior of a racial group. Racial bias = if police pull over black drivers at a rate that disproportionately exceeded their likelihood of drug possession, that would be an irrational behavior representing individual or institutional bias.
Jewish Harvard Health & Human Rights Fellow finds flaws in methodology, but also shows extreme lack of neutrality to social science research! These are two of his opening statements: 1. "There should be no argument that black and Latino people in Houston are much more likely to be shot by police compared to whites." 2. "the idea of “statistical discrimination” is just as abhorrent as “racial bias”."
Methodological flaw one seems valid.
1. pulling people over who are most likely to have done something illegal, and making more arrests is rational behavior by police. It isn't the right approach to shootings though, as police officers are not trying to rationally maximize the number of shootings.
2. flaw two is described as this: actual study assumes a population of people who are shot by police OR people who are arrested. Proper approach is to assume a population of drivers stopped by police that can have one of two outcomes: they can be arrested, or not. This is a less valid criticism, because "proper approach" doesn't even have shooting as an outcome! Finding is that of the two groups (shot OR arrested), racial disparity in arrest rates is larger than the racial disparity in police shooting.
System Thinking insists that systems (of all kinds) must be analyzed as a whole in order to understand its emergent properties and the interrelatedness of its constituent parts (McDermott & O'Connor, 1997). Action Research is a research methodology that lay emphasis on researchers to work with practitioners rather than on them. The modern workplace requires systems thinking because it’s a complex whole that exhibits emergence and it is also in urgent need of expert guidance and knowledge that enables its inhabitants to become more productive and efficient. In the light of the bare minimum of options present for such possibilities, the author makes the case that action research can both teach and enable practitioners to incorporate systems thinking in their workplace. The paper gives a brief introduction to systems thinking and action research then makes the case for action research in the workplace and finally rounds off with strategies for conducting successfully action research.
We are tired of XP, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, Software Craftsmanship (aka XP-Lite) and anything else getting in the way of...Programming, Motherfucker.
We are tired of being told we're autistic idiots who need to be manipulated to work in a Forced Pair Programming chain gang without any time to be creative because none of the 10 managers on the project can do...Programming, Motherfucker.
Europäische Geschichte Online (EGO) is an online European transcultural history composed of multimedia knowledge items encompassing the period from 1450 to 1950. EGO is methodologically pragmatic, international and interdisciplinary. It combines a variety of approaches and perspectives from debates in multiple languages and thus interlinks international scholars working in the various disciplines of European history.
IceScrum is an J2EE application for using Scrum while keeping the spirit of a collaborative workspace. It also offers virtual boards with post-its for sprint backlog, product backlog and others.
The tool offers everything that is in Scrum :
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The role management: Product Owner, ScrumMaster, Team member and StakeHolder
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The product backlog management with advanced features for prioritizing stories
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Scrum lifecycle including a roadmap view
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Release planning
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Sprint backlog, as a task board facilitating the Scrum ceremonial
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Management of impediments
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Chart production such as burndown charts, velocity charts, cumulative flow diagram
Icescrum offers others agile practices like :
* Roadmap
* Vision
* Features
* User stories
* Acceptance tests associated to stories
* User roles
* Planning poker
WebSM website is dedicated to the methodological issues of Web surveys, but it also covers the broader area of modern technologies and survey data collection. It provides latest news and a database on literature, software, events, and people. WebSM site was funded by the European Union in 2003-2005.
Recent functional neuroimaging studies have shown that reflecting on representations of the present self versus temporally distant selves is associate...
However I don't think this is the key point about agile
methods. Lack of documentation is a symptom of two much deeper
differences:
Agile methods are adaptive rather than predictive.
Engineering methods tend to try to plan out a large part of the software
process in great detail for a long span of time, this works well until
things change. So their nature is to resist change. The agile methods,
however, welcome change. They try to be processes that adapt and
thrive on change, even to the point of changing themselves.
Agile methods are people-oriented rather than
process-oriented. The goal of engineering methods is to define a
process that will work well whoever happens to be using it. Agile
methods assert that no process will ever make up the skill of the
development team, so the role of a process is to support the
development team in their work.In the following sections I'll explore these differences in
more detail, so that you can understand what an adaptive and
people-centered process is like, its benefits and drawbacks, and
whether it's something you should use: either as a developer or
customer of software.
Mit Unterstützung des Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) erarbeitet eine gemeinsame Initiative von Universitäten und Unternehmen einen neuartigen Ansatz für den systematischen Aufbau webbasierter Anwendungen. Ziel ist es, Methoden und Technologien für die hocheffiziente Entwicklung komplexer, dynamischer Web-Applikationen bereitzustellen.
Das auf einen Zeitraum von drei Jahren ausgelegte Forschungsvorhaben WISE - Web Information and Service Engineering ist ein Projekt der Initiative „Software Engineering 2006“, mit der das BMBF die technologische Wettbewerbsfähigkeit auf dem Gebiet der Software-Entwicklung erhalten und ausbauen möchte.
"Relying on CVS and Subversion [...] with access controls limited to the select few committers makes it very difficult for those on the fringes to get more involved."
If you have an idea for a new feature in the morning, you can write it and push it to the production servers before lunch. And when you can do that, you have more ideas.
Business process management (BPM) – while also its own independent practice / school of thought – is an application of technology that is served by many products, not the least of which is jBPM. The best definition of BPM that I've found is: "Business Process Management (BPM) is the concept of shepherding work items through a multi-step process. The items are identified and tracked as they move through each step, with either specified people or applications processing the information. The process flow is determined by process logic and the applications (or processes) play virtually no role in determining where the messages are sent.".
Agile Modeling (AM) is a practice-based methodology for effective modeling and documentation of software-based systems. Simply put, Agile Modeling (AM) is a collection of values, principles, and practices for modeling software that can be applied on a software development project in an effective and light-weight manner. As you see in Figure 1 AM is meant to be tailored into other, full-fledged development methodologies such as XP or RUP, enabling you to develop a software process which truly meets your needs. The techniques of AM, in particular Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD), the lifecycle for which is depicted in Figure 2, enable you to scale agile software development to very complex situations.
Description of Phenomenology, the background and associated research methods. Rather easy to understand and helpful for putting research into practice.
Agile Development is one of the big buzzwords of the software development industry. But what exactly is it? Agile Development is a different way of managing software development projects. The key principles, and how Agile Development fundamentally differs from a more traditional Waterfall approach to software development, are as follows:
The concepts
The CodeCount toolset is a collection of tools designed to automate the collection of source code sizing information. The CodeCount toolset spans multiple programming languages and utilizes one of two possible Source Lines of Code (SLOC) definitions, physical or logical.
The CodeCount toolset is provided in source code only, and may be used as is, modified or further distributed subject to certain limitations.
The tools in the collection are supplied in C source code only. You are responsible for compiling and building executable versions.
The Product
The CodeCount toolset is copyright USC Center for Software Engineering but is made available with a Limited Public License which permits the distribution of the modifications you make provided you return a copy to us so we can further enhance the toolset for the benefit of all.
"Online QDA is a set of training support materials which address common problems (both early and advanced) of using Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) methods and selected Computer Assisted Qualitative Data AnalysiS (CAQDAS) packages"
Crap4j is a Java implementation of the CRAP (Change Risk Analysis and Predictions) software metric – a mildly offensive metric name to help protect you from truly offensive code.
The CRAP metric combines cyclomatic complexity and code coverage from automated tests (e.g. JUnit tests) to help you identify code that might be particularly difficult to understand, test, or maintain – the kind of code that makes developers say: “This is crap!” or, if they are stuck maintaining it, “Oh, crap!”.
The best way to learn more about CRAP and Crap4j is to check the various articles, newsgroups and blogs about them.
the most effective learning situation is one where a small number of apprentices work alongside an even smaller number of journeyman, who are receiving guidance from a master craftsman