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Scrum, an agile software development method, has gained major interest among software development organizations. The scrum master should be well equipped with specific leadership traits and exhibit leadership behavior to effectively manage his/her team. However, in a distributed team, which is spread across geographies, having scrum master to lead the project team at each location is not viable. Therefore, every member in the team is expected to have the capability to become one. This paper aims to explore the leadership mechanisms desired for effective functioning of distributed self-organized scrum team members, leading to project success and overall customer satisfaction.

A qualitative research methodology with an open-ended questionnaire is followed by semi-structured in-depth interviews. The unit of analysis is a scrum master.

The qualitative findings unearth the kind of leadership mechanisms required for scrum masters and the team members in a self-organizing scrum team, leading to their project success and customer satisfaction. It includes a set of leadership approaches and behaviors explicitly related to the role of scrum masters. Both inductive and deductive approaches are used to develop a leadership framework applicable for distributed self-organized scrum teams.

The proposed framework can be empirically tested with a large number of teams and more software organizations.

Organizations can use these identified specific leadership approaches and behaviors as parameters for identifying and selecting the potential scrum masters. They can be further trained on them to be an effective scrum master.

There is scant literature on the leadership mechanisms necessary for distributed scrum teams and their impact on project performance. This paper addresses this gap.

One of the themes of this paper is the clamour for full text. As of today, the three basic models of full text that seemed to be lining up a year ago have become a reality. These are publisher‐supplied full text; third‐party, or aggregator‐supplied full text; and distributed, “linked” full text ‐ in which a bibliographic database provider links to (usually) publisher‐supplied full text. This paper looks at each model in detail, with particular emphasis on the challenges they face.

Reviews recent interlending and document supply literature. Examines how the document delivery scene is being affected by the huge increase in available electronic resources, including electronic journals online full‐text and the creation of the digital library. Discusses the issues surrounding these changes such as copyright and related licensing schemes. Describes some of the various co‐operative ventures which are being implemented throughout the world.

The n‐dimensional direct search algorithm, DIRECT, developed by Jones, Perttunen, and Stuckman has attracted recent attention from the multidisciplinary design optimization community. Since DIRECT only requires function values (or ranking) and balances global exploration with local refinement better than n‐dimensional bisection, it is well suited to the noisy function values typical of realistic simulations. While not efficient for high accuracy optimization, DIRECT is appropriate for the sort of global design space exploration done in large scale engineering design. Direct and pattern search schemes have the potential to exploit massive parallelism, but efficient use of massively parallel machines is non‐trivial to achieve. A fully‐distributed control version of DIRECT that is designed for massively parallel (distributed memory) architectures is presented. Parallel results are presented for a multidisciplinary design optimization problem – configuration design of a high speed civil transport.

The chapter offers complete details of the latest SGL version particularly suitable for dealing with large security systems and emerging crisis situations. It describes main types of constants representing information, physical matter or both and five very different and specific types of variables operating in fully distributed spaces and even being mobile themselves when serving spreading algorithms. Also given full repertoire of the language operations, called rules, which can be arbitrarily nested and carry different navigation, creation, processing, assignment, control, verification, context, exchange, transference, echoing, timing and other loads. The rules equally operate with local and remote values, process both, matter and distributed networked knowledge, and can express active graph-based patterns navigating, matching, conquering and changing distributed environments. Elementary programming examples in SGL are also provided.

The chapter describes the basics of developed high-level spatial grasp technology (SGT) and its spatial grasp language (SGL) allowing us to create and manage very large distributed systems in physical, virtual and executive domains in a highly parallel manner and without any centralized resources. Main features of SGT with its self-evolving and self-spreading spatial intelligence, recursive nature of SGL and organization of its networked interpreter will be briefed. Numerous interpreter copies can be installed worldwide and integrated with other systems or operate autonomously and collectively in critical situations. Relation of SGT, with capability of holistic solutions in distributed systems, to the gestalt psychology and theory, showing unique qualities of human mind and brain to directly grasp the whole of different phenomena, will be explained too, with SGT serving as an attempt to implement the notion of gestalt for distributed applications.

This paper aims to realize a fully distributed multi-UAV collision detection and avoidance based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). To deal with the problem of low sample efficiency in DRL and speed up the training. To improve the applicability and reliability of the DRL-based approach in multi-UAV control problems.

In this paper, a fully distributed collision detection and avoidance approach for multi-UAV based on DRL is proposed. A method that integrates human experience into policy training via a human experience-based adviser is proposed. The authors propose a hybrid control method which combines the learning-based policy with traditional model-based control. Extensive experiments including simulations, real flights and comparative experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the approach.

A fully distributed multi-UAV collision detection and avoidance method based on DRL is realized. The reward curve shows that the training process when integrating human experience is significantly accelerated and the mean episode reward is higher than the pure DRL method. The experimental results show that the DRL method with human experience integration has a significant improvement than the pure DRL method for multi-UAV collision detection and avoidance. Moreover, the safer flight brought by the hybrid control method has also been validated.

The fully distributed architecture is suitable for large-scale unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms and real applications. The DRL method with human experience integration has significantly accelerated the training compared to the pure DRL method. The proposed hybrid control strategy makes up for the shortcomings of two-dimensional light detection and ranging and other puzzles in applications.

This paper proposes a distributed multi‐channel MAC protocol which is an extension of our early work GRID [1]. GRID is characterized by the following features: (i) it integrates a location‐aware channel assignment, (ii) it follows an “on‐demand” style to access the medium, (iii) the number of channels required is independent of the network topology, and (iv) no form of clock synchronization is required. The proposed protocol wants to further improve the GRID in two parts. First, we propose a fully distributed medium access mechanism without using a single control channel such that all of the network traffic can be distributed evenly over all data channels. Therefore, the network throughput will be increased significantly. Second, we can set the more suitable transmission range and GRID size by considering the factors of host density and packet arrival rate of the network within an specified area. Thus, all of channels will be reused more efficiently than GRID. Simulation results show that the throughput of our protocol is superior to GRID and IEEE 802.11.

In this chapter, different security-related examples are shown in SGL dealing with discovery, tracing and analysis of multiple mobile objects, technical or human, in distributed environments. Starting from how overall command and control of a hypothetical missile defence can be automatically managed in SGL by following and supervising the movement of multiple ballistic missiles on their full path from discovery to elimination. Other case is dealing with fully distributed tracing of cruise missiles with complex and tricky routes, which can be effectively chased, analysed and controlled by mobile spatial intelligence spreading through intelligent sensor network. Another one is providing high-level simulation and tracing of multiple objects in outer space to avoid collisions for new vehicles launched, with engagement of scattered space observation sensors integrated under SGT. The chapter also shows how to organize distributed simulation, assistance and control of flow of refugees through international borders.

This paper gives a bibliographical review of the finite element and boundary element parallel processing techniques from the theoretical and application points of view. Topics include: theory – domain decomposition/partitioning, load balancing, parallel solvers/algorithms, parallel mesh generation, adaptive methods, and visualization/graphics; applications – structural mechanics problems, dynamic problems, material/geometrical non‐linear problems, contact problems, fracture mechanics, field problems, coupled problems, sensitivity and optimization, and other problems; hardware and software environments – hardware environments, programming techniques, and software development and presentations. The bibliography at the end of this paper contains 850 references to papers, conference proceedings and theses/dissertations dealing with presented subjects that were published between 1996 and 2002.