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Software development consists to a large extend of humanbased processes with continuously increasing demands regarding interdisciplinary team work. Understanding the dynamics of software teams can be seen as highly important to successful project execution. Hence, for future project managers, knowledge about non-technical processes in teams is significant. In this paper, we present a course unit that provides an environment in which students can learn and experience the impact of group dynamics on project performance and quality. The course unit uses the Tuckman model as theoretical framework, and borrows from controlled experiments to organize and implement its practical parts in which students then experience the effects of, e.g., time pressure, resource bottlenecks, staff turnover, loss of key personnel, and other stress factors. We provide a detailed design of the course unit to allow for implementation in further software project management courses. Furthermore, we provide experiences obtained from two instances of this unit conducted in Munich and Karlskrona with 36 graduate students. We observed students building awareness of stress factors and developing counter measures to reduce impact of those factors. Moreover, students experienced what problems occur when teams work under stress and how to form a performing team despite exceptional situations.
Wasted paradise – imagining the Maldives without the garbage island of Thilafushi : Version 1.2
(2016)
To address the high level of waste production in the Maldives, the local government decided to transform the coral island of Thilafushi into an immense waste dumb in 1992. Meanwhile, each day, 330 tons of waste is ferried to Thilafushi. The policy had the positive consequence of relieving the garbage burden in Malé, the main island, and surrounding tourist atolls. However, it can also lead to serious environmental and economic damage in the long range. First, the garbage is in visual range of one of the most prominent tourist destinations. Second, if the wind blows a certain way, unfiltered fumes from burning waste travels to tourist atolls. Third, water quality can erode as hazardous waste from batteries and other toxic waste is floating in the ocean. Over time, these effects can accumulate to significantly hamper the number of tourists that travel to the Maldives – one of the state’s main sources of financial income. In our paper, we lay out the situation in more detail and translate it into a simulation model. We test different policies to propose the Maldives government how to better solve the waste problem.
Based on well-established robotic concepts of autonomous localization and navigation we present a system prototype to assist camera-based indoor navigation for human utilization implemented in the Robot Operating System (ROS). Our prototype takes advantage of state-of-the-art computer vision and robotic methods. Our system is designed for assistive indoor guidance. We employ a vibro tactile belt to serve as a guiding device to render derived motion suggestions to the user via vibration patterns. We evaluated the effectiveness of a variety of vibro-tactile feedback patterns for guidance of blindfolded users. Our prototype demonstrates that a vision-based system can support human navigation, and may also assist the visually impaired in a human-centered way.
Today the optimization of metal forming processes is done using advanced simulation tools in a virtual process, e.g. FEM-studies. The modification of the free parameters represents the different variants to be analysed. So experienced engineers may derive useful proposals in an acceptable time if good initial proposals are available. As soon as the number of free parameters growths or the total process takes long times and uses different succeeding forming steps it might be quite difficult to find promising initial ideas. In metal forming another problem has to be considered. The optimization using a series of local improvements, often called a gradient approach may find a local optimum, but this could be far away from a satisfactory solution. Therefore non-deterministic approaches, e.g. Bionic Optimization have to be used. These approaches like Evolutionary Optimization or Particle Swarm Optimization are capable to cover a large range of high dimensional optimization spaces and discover many local optima. So the chance to include the global optimum increases when using such non-deterministic methods. Unfortunately these bionic methods require large numbers of studies of different variants of the process to be optimized. The number of studies tends to increase exponentially with the number of free parameters of the forming process. As the time for one single study might be not too small as well, the total time demand will be inacceptable, taking weeks to months even if high performance computing will be used. Therefore the optimization process needs to be accelerated. Among the many ideas to reduce the time and computer power requirement Meta- and Hybrid Optimization seem to produce the most efficient results. Hybrid Optimization often consists of global searches of promising regions within the parameter space. As soon as the studies indicate that there could be a local optimum, a deterministic study tries to identify this local region. If it shows better performance than other optima found until now, it is preserved for a more detailed analysis. If it performs worse than other optima the region is excluded from further search. Meta-Optimization is often understood as the derivation of Response Surfaces of the functions of free parameters. Once there are enough studies performed, the optimization is done using the Response Surfaces as representatives e.g. for the goal and the restrictions of the optimization problem. Having found regions where interesting solutions are to be expected, the studies available up to now are used to define the Response Surfaces. In many cases low degree polynomials are used, defining their coefficients by least square methods. Both proposals Hybrid Optimization and Meta-Optimization, sometimes used in combination often help to reduce the total optimization processes by large numbers of variants to be studied. In consequence they are highly recommended when dealing with time consuming optimization studies.
Die Alterungsbeständigkeit von geschirmten Kabeln und Kontaktpaaren gewinnt angesichts des zunehmenden Einsatzes elektronischer softwarebasierter Steuerungen in Transportmitteln an Relevanz. Elektro- und Hybridantriebe sowie die Implementierung von Fahrassistenzsystemen bis hin zu autonom fahrenden Fahrzeugen führen zu komplexen Kabelbäumen mit einer großen Zahl von geschirmten Kabeln und Steckverbindern.
Um die Stabilität von Kontaktsystemen hinsichtlich ihrer Stabilität zu prüfen, werden Hochspannungskabel unterschiedlicher Hersteller und Dimensionierung für den Einsatz in Hybridfahrzeugen untersucht. Diese wurden mit Modellsteckern versehen, die die Schimung kontaktierten und hinreichend gewährleisteten.
Impedanz und Schirmwirkungsdämpfung wurden an thermisch belasteten Kabeln und Kontaktpaaren vergleichend zu Neuteilen untersucht. Der Einfluss der in Anlehnung an die LV 214 induzierten thermischen Alterung auf das frequenzabhängige Übertragungsprofil sowie den Gesamtstreuverlust wurde messtechnisch ermittelt. Zusätzlich wurden die Alterungseffekte an den Leitungsmaterialien mittels moderner bildgebender Analytik dokumentiert.
Context: Companies need capabilities to evaluate the customer value of software intensive products and services. One way of systematically acquiring data on customer value is running continuous experiments as part of the overall development process. Objective: This paper investigates the first steps of transitioning towards continuous experimentation in a large company, including the challenges faced. Method: We conduct a single-case study using participant observation, interviews, and qualitative analysis of the collected data. Results: Results show that continuous experimentation was well received by the practitioners and practising experimentation helped them to enhance understanding of their product value and user needs. Although the complexities of a large multi-stakeholder business to-business (B2B) environment presented several challenges such as inaccessible users, it was possible to address impediments and integrate an experiment in an ongoing development project. Conclusion: Developing the capability for continuous experimentation in large organisations is a learning process which can be supported by a systematic introduction approach with the guidance of experts. We gained experience by introducing the approach on a small scale in a large organisation, and one of the major steps for future work is to understand how this can be scaled up to the whole development organisation.
IT environments that consist of a very large number of rather small structures like microservices, Internet of Things (IoT) components, or mobility systems are emerging to support flexible and agile products and services in the age of digital transformation. Biological metaphors of living and adaptable ecosystems with service-oriented enterprise architectures provide the foundation for self-optimizing, resilient run-time environments and distributed information systems. We are extending Enterprise Architecture (EA) methodologies and models that cover a high degree of heterogeneity and distribution to support the digital transformation and related information systems with micro-granular architectures. Our aim is to support flexibility and agile transformation for both IT and business capabilities within adaptable digital enterprise architectures. The present research paper investigates mechanisms for integrating Microservice Architectures (MSA) by extending original enterprise architecture reference models with elements for more flexible architectural metamodels and EA-mini-descriptions.
Analysis is an important part of the enterprise architecture management process. Prior to decisions regarding transformation of the enterprise architecture, the current situation and the outcomes of alternative action plans have to be analysed. Many analysis approaches have been proposed by researchers and current enterprise architecture management tools implement analysis functionalities. However, few work has been done structuring and classifying enterprise architecture analysis approaches. This paper collects and extends existing classification schemes, presenting a framework for enterprise architecture analysis classification. For evaluation, a collection of enterprise architecture analysis approaches has been classified based on this framework. As a result, the description of these approaches has been assessed, a common set of important categories for enterprise architecture analysis classification has been derived and suggestions for further development are drawn.