Search results

Agile software development helps software producing organizations to respond to manifold challenges. While prior research focused on agility as a project or process phenomenon, the authors suggest that agility is an emergent phenomenon on the team level. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Using the theory of complex adaptive systems (CASs), the study captures the multiple influencing levels of software development teams (SDTs) and their interplay with self-organization and emergence. The authors investigate three agile SDTs in different contextual environments that participate with four or more different roles each.

The results suggest self-organization as a central process when understanding team agility. While contextual factors often provide restriction on self-organization, they can help the team to enhance its autonomy.

The theoretical contributions result from the development and test of theory grounded propositions and the investigation of mature agile development teams.

The findings help practitioners to improve the cost-effectiveness ratio of their team’s operations.

The study provides empirical evidence for the emergence of team agility in agile SDTs. Using the lens of CAS, the study suggests the importance of the team’s autonomy.

Research on agile software development (ASD) has so far primarily focused on processes and tools. Recently, researchers have started to investigate the social dimensions of ASD. The authors contribute to this and examine the largely invisible psychological factor of age stereotypes as one important social dimension of ASD. Driven by demographic change, employees of different age groups will need to work closely together in ASD in the future. However, age stereotypes can hinder many aspects of communication, cooperation and coordination in these self-managed teams. The purpose of this paper is to identify and differentiate age stereotypes in ASD.

A quantitative survey at the individual level was conducted with 464 employees in two software development companies. The authors developed an age stereotype model for ASD and developed two scales to measure performance expectations (PEs) in ASD.

Employees in ASD show a bias in general PEs, favoring middle-aged employees over both younger and older employees. The perceived PE of a developer decreases over working life. Furthermore, the data show a complex interplay of age and job role in both the research participants and the group evaluated. Younger developers hold the strongest negative age stereotypes and older developers suffer most from stereotypes.

Management should enact formal or informal measures against stereotypes when an older or younger employee joins a team of members of other age groups, or when a new team is formed. In addition, the authors propose human resources to create permeable career paths.

The study extends the stereotype content model by adding additional age groups and including job role as a moderating variable. It identifies obstacles in daily employee interactions in agile development, and proposes ways of incorporating invisible psychological aspects in ASD-specific theories.

Numerous design methods are available to facilitate digital innovation processes in user interface design. Nonetheless, little guidance exists on their appropriate selection within the design process based on specific situations. Consequently, design novices with limited design knowledge face challenges when determining suitable methods. Thus, this paper aims to support design novices by guiding the situational selection of design methods.

Our research approach includes two phases: i) we adopted a taxonomy development method to identify dimensions of design methods by reviewing 292 potential design methods and interviewing 15 experts; ii) we conducted focus groups with 25 design novices and applied fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to describe the relations between the taxonomy's dimensions.

We developed a novel taxonomy that presents a comprehensive overview of design conditions and their associated design methods in innovation processes. Thus, the taxonomy enables design novices to navigate the complexities of design methods needed to design digital innovation. We also identify configurations of these conditions that support the situational selections of design methods in digital innovation processes of user interface design.

The study’s contribution to the literature lies in the identification of both similarities and differences among design methods, as well as the investigation of sufficient condition configurations within the digital innovation processes of user interface design. The taxonomy helps design novices to navigate the design space by providing an overview of design conditions and the associations between methods and these conditions. By using the developed taxonomy, design novices can narrow down their options when selecting design methods for their specific situations.

In highly dynamic industries, business processes require exploitation, i.e. activities that are associated with an increase in productivity through automation, standardization, integrated architectures, and the usage of existing IT resources. As a complementary capability, exploration is needed, i.e. the ability to flexibly implement new and innovative IT resources (Lee et al., 2015). The purpose of this paper is to use the concept of ambidexterity, which is researched intensively outside the domain of business processes (e.g. Gibson and Birkinshaw, 2004; Tang and Rai, 2014), to address this paradoxical trade-off within business processes.

The paper follows a qualitative approach. A multiple case study comprising 11 interviews and additional document analysis in six organizations is conducted in the German energy sector to examine the proposed framework.

This paper shows the importance of balancing exploitative and explorative business process IT (BPIT) capabilities. The process-theoretical outcome of this study is the BPIT Capability Framework that provides explanation for the interaction between exploitation and exploration.

This study contributes to the understanding of how to build ambidextrous BPIT capabilities by explaining the underlying mechanisms for feedback loops that occur in cases of imbalance. The scope of the conducted study presents a limitation and thus future research is encouraged to further validate the findings of this paper.

By drilling down to the process level, this paper addresses the gaps that limited empirical studies have in business process management research (Recker and Mendling, 2015) and the focus on business processes that is lacking from the literature on organizational IT management (Gregory et al., 2015).

In organizations, individual user’s compliance with business processes is important from a regulatory and efficiency point of view. The restriction of users’ choices by implementing a restrictive information system is a typical approach in many organizations. However, restrictions and mandated compliance may affect employees’ performance negatively. Especially when users need a certain degree of flexibility in completing their work activity. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of directive explanations (DEs). DEs provide context-dependent feedback to users, but do not force users to comply.

The experimental study used in this paper aims at investigating how DEs influence users’ process compliance. The authors used a laboratory experiment to test the proposed hypotheses. Every participant underwent four trials for which business process compliance was measured. Two trial blocks were used to cluster the four trials. Diagrammatic DEs were provided in one of the trial blocks, while textual DEs were provided in the other. Trial blocks were counterbalanced.

The results of the experiment show that DEs influence a user’s compliance, but the effect varies for different types of DEs. The authors believe this study is significant as it empirically examines design characteristics of explanations from knowledge-based systems in the context of business processes.

This study is certainly not without limitations. The sample used for this study was drawn from undergraduate information systems management students. The sample is thus not representative of the general population of organizations’ IT users. However, a student sample adequately represents novice IT users, who are not very familiar with a business process. They are particularly suitable to study how users react to first-time contact with a DE.

The findings of this study are important to designers and implementers of systems that guide users to follow business processes. As the authors have illustrated with a real-world scenario, an ERP system’s explanation can lack details on how a user can resolve a blocked activity. In situations in which users bypass restricted systems, DEs can guide them to comply with a business process. Particularly diagrammatic explanations, which depict actors, activities, and constraints for a business process, have been found to increase the probability that users’ behavior is business process compliant. Less time may be needed to resolve a situation, which can result in very efficient user-system cooperation.

This study makes several important contributions to research on explanations, which are provided by knowledge-based systems. First, the authors conceptualized, designed, and investigated a novel type of explanations, namely, DEs. The results of this study show how dramatic the difference in process compliance performance is when exposed to certain types of DEs (in one group from 57 percent on the initial trial to 82 percent on the fourth trial). This insight is important to derive design guidelines for DE, particularly when multimedia material is used.

Escalation in the number of online food ordering platforms, along with extensive junk food marketing, lucrative offers and discounts, innovation in food flavors, and doorstep delivery of food, have triggered the consumption of high-calorie and unhealthy food products which pose serious threats to the health and future well-being of individuals by making them more obese. To date, several public policy frameworks have been developed to confront obesity; however, their efficacy seems debatable. Directionally, the objective of this study is to highlight the potential influence of “digital nudging” which aims at steering individuals in desired directions, at the same time delimiting their freedom of choice. The study also establishes the effectiveness of digital nudges promoting a healthy lifestyle by steering individuals toward healthier food choices. The author strongly believes that this conceptual perusal will offer immense inputs to healthy food marketers and researchers alike in addressing the matters of obesity. Addressing the menace of obesity calls for joint efforts of the government, the public, researchers, and more specifically food product manufacturers/marketers who should incorporate healthier food options into their portfolios. E-tailers are also urged to adopt such practices in virtual markets and promote healthier food options to effectively tackle obesity.

This study aims to offer a bibliometric analysis of the already substantial and growing literature on global virtual teams (GVTs).

Using a systematic literature review approach, it identifies all articles in the Web of Science from 1999 to 2021 that include the term GVTs (in the title, the abstract or keywords) and finds 175 articles. The VOSviewer software was applied to analyze the bibliometric data.

The analysis revealed three dialogizing research clusters in the GVTs literature: a pioneering management information systems and organizational cluster, a general management cluster and a growing international management and behavioural studies cluster. Furthermore, it highlights the most cited articles, authors, journals and nations, and the network of strong and weak links regarding co-authorships and co-citations. Additionally, this study shows a change in research patterns regarding topics, journals and disciplinary approaches from 1999 to 2021. Finally, the analysis illustrates the position and centrality in the network of the most relevant actors.

The findings can guide management practitioners, educators and researchers to the most meaningful clusters of publications on GVTs, and help navigate and make sense of the vast body of the available literature. The importance of GVTs has been growing in the past two decades, and Covid-19 has accelerated the trend.

This study provides an updated and comprehensive systematic literature review on GVTs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is also the first systematic literature review and bibliometry on GVTs. It concludes by suggesting future research paths.

This study aims to the OQuaRE quality model to the developed methodology.

Ontologies are formal, well-defined and flexible representations of knowledge related to a specific domain. They provide the base to develop efficient and interoperable solutions. Hence, a proliferation of ontologies in many domains is unleashed. Then, it is necessary to define how to compare such ontologies to decide which one is the most suitable for the specific needs of users/developers. As the emerging development of ontologies, several studies have proposed criteria to evaluate them.

In a previous study, the authors propose a methodological process to qualitatively and quantitatively compare ontologies at Lexical, Structural and Domain Knowledge levels, considering correctness and quality perspectives. As the evaluation methods of the proposal are based on a golden-standard, it can be customized to compare ontologies in any domain.

To show the suitability of the proposal, the authors apply the methodological approach to conduct comparative studies of ontologies in two different domains, one in the robotic area, in particular for the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem; and the other one, in the cultural heritage domain. With these cases of study, the authors demonstrate that with this methodological comparative process, we are able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of ontologies, as well as the gaps still needed to fill in the target domains.

Using these metrics and the quality model from OQuaRE, the authors are incorporating a standard of software engineering at the quality validation into the Semantic Web.

Ontologies are prone to wide semantic variability due to subjective points of view of their composers. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach for maximal unification of diverse ontologies for controversial domains by their relations.

Effective matching or unification of multiple ontologies for a specific domain is crucial for the success of many semantic web applications, such as semantic information retrieval and organization, document tagging, summarization and search. To this end, numerous automatic and semi-automatic techniques were proposed in the past decade that attempt to identify similar entities, mostly classes, in diverse ontologies for similar domains. Apparently, matching individual entities cannot result in full integration of ontologies’ semantics without matching their inter-relations with all other-related classes (and instances). However, semantic matching of ontological relations still constitutes a major research challenge. Therefore, in this paper the authors propose a new paradigm for assessment of maximal possible matching and unification of ontological relations. To this end, several unification rules for ontological relations were devised based on ontological reference rules, and lexical and textual entailment. These rules were semi-automatically implemented to extend a given ontology with semantically matching relations from another ontology for a similar domain. Then, the ontologies were unified through these similar pairs of relations. The authors observe that these rules can be also facilitated to reveal the contradictory relations in different ontologies.

To assess the feasibility of the approach two experiments were conducted with different sets of multiple personal ontologies on controversial domains constructed by trained subjects. The results for about 50 distinct ontology pairs demonstrate a good potential of the methodology for increasing inter-ontology agreement. Furthermore, the authors show that the presented methodology can lead to a complete unification of multiple semantically heterogeneous ontologies.

This is a conceptual study that presents a new approach for semantic unification of ontologies by a devised set of rules along with the initial experimental evidence of its feasibility and effectiveness. However, this methodology has to be fully automatically implemented and tested on a larger dataset in future research.

This result has implication for semantic search, since a richer ontology, comprised of multiple aspects and viewpoints of the domain of knowledge, enhances discoverability and improves search results.

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study to examine and assess the maximal level of semantic relation-based ontology unification.