Jarkko Hyysalo

Supporting Collaboration in the Geographically Distributed Work with Communication Tools in the Remote District SME's

In the global software development environment, the companies face the challenges of collaboration. This is particularly challenging for software companies in rural areas, which are typically small companies with limited resources. Often their customers and partners are also geographically dispersed. These factors, in addition to geographical distances, highlight the challenges of communication and collaboration. The focus of this research is to find out how to support geographically dispersed/distributed projects. We addressed this problem by identifying the key categories of collaboration challenges from the literature and conducting an empirical study on companies of the area. The study consists of 30 interviews with 13 companies sited mostly in Finnish rural area, Kainuu region. The company interviews revealed that, instead of the project management purposes, communication tools are needed to provide an infrastructure for collaborative sessions, to interact with colleagues and customers. Limited resources also add the challenges of the communication tools and processes implementation.

Collaborative embedded systems development: survey of state of the practice

This paper describes the results of a survey about the problems of and solutions for collaborative SW development. The survey was done through several interviews of companies doing collaborative development and also through a literature search to find already published experiences and solutions. As a result, we found that the literature focuses on solutions for more general issues like communication and team building, and industrial problems are related to specific engineering tasks. Mapping and practical examples of general solutions to specific tasks are needed to support collaborative software development

Supporting Cognitive Work in Software Development Workflows

Both the increasing complexity of developing software systems and the growing significance of knowledge work require new innovations to support developers’ cognitive activities in product development. A workflow is one aid to the development process. Current workflow models support business process management and logical ordering of tasks, but provide insufficient cognitive support for developers’ daily work. We argue that cognitive support should also be provided. This paper addresses the topic through an empirical study. A model to support cognitive work in product development workflows has been developed and validated in an action research intervention. The empirical results indicate that the model tackles the identified challenges in workflows, increases the development process’s efficiency, and provides better results. The findings of this study offer new insights into workflows and work support for both scholars and practitioners.

Privacy as a Service: Protecting the Individual in Healthcare Data Processing

Health applications involve many data sources, individuals, and services that work against guarantees that an individuals personal data will not be used without consent. The proposed privacy-centered architecture integrates data security and semantic descriptions into a trust-query framework, enabling the provision of user consent as a service.

Architecture Enabling Service-oriented Digital Biobanks

In Finland, the Biobank Act entered into effect in 2013. The primary motivation for the act is to enable the utilization of collected biological sample material for medical research. However, in order to effectively utilize this data, there exists a need to develop new technological solutions to support the collection and management of potentially large sets of sensitive data through multiple stages of processing. The cumulative data stored within biobanks will enable multidisciplinary research and new innovations. We propose an architecture that addresses several challenges involved in defining and deploying a biobank infrastructure including consent management, data management and data transfer. Our architecture expedites the development of this important area within the research and industrial communities, and enables the deployment of service-oriented biobanks.

Software Development as a Decision-Oriented Process

Developing software systems is a challenging business with short development cycles, changing needs, and unstable processes. Processes must deliver products that meet the customer needs and provide value for the stakeholders. There is no one way of achieving the development goals; instead, alternative routes should be possible within the boundaries of acceptable performance. Software development is therefore a set of problem-solving and decision-making activities. The problem is how to support the decision-oriented process, and how to provide justification, rationale, and how to provide the information that decision makers need. Case studies in the automation and telecom industries revealed that understanding the development process as a decision-oriented process, and controlling and coordinating the work through decision points offer an approach that addresses several challenges. The findings of this study offer new insights for scholars and practitioners.

A New Way to Organize DFX in a Large Organization

Efficient requirements engineering and design is a demanding task. Design for excellence (DFX) offers a way to bring together different views and harmonizing practices. There are still impediments, for example, in having internal and external customers valued appropriately. The organizational implementation of DFX in itself is a debated question. We present a new way to organize the DFX concept in a large organization. The results are based on experiences of a large organization that operates in the area of ICT systems, and has had a successful implementation of the DFX concept for several years. Contrary to the traditional way of managing the DFX within R&D it is beneficial to organize it within also other parts of the operational subsystem, as this makes the concept and its improvement more visible and widespread in the organization. However, this requires seeing the concepts of problem domain and solution domain from a new angle.

Defining an architecture for evolving environments

The architecture of a system specifies how the system should be designed and built. However, shortcomings are identified in current architecture process frameworks concerning evolving domains like healthcare. We claim that an iterative architecture process is required, where the technical concerns are separated from the non-technical ones. Furthermore, a strong guiding vision is required. Based on our experiences from a biobank IT infrastructure process, we present an architecture process that is modular, interoperable, controlled and abstracted, thus being capable of handling complex systems with large uncertainties.

A Design Theory for Cognitive Workflow Systems

This paper addresses the design problem of providing cognitive support for workflow systems in software development. Software development is demanding knowledge work that requires creativity and adaptability to changing requirements and situations. This type of work involves cognitive actions that require substantial support in several forms in order to address needs such as collaboration, communication, knowledge management, awareness and transparency, and the coordination and structuring of the development processes. The literature and our empirical results show that there is a lack of cognitive support in current workflow models. Hence, we identify the need for a design theory for cognitive workflow systems (CWS). In this paper, such a theory is presented. The proposed design theory for CWS is validated through an action research intervention. This design theory has important implications from both research and practical perspectives. The results will help developers in their daily work, enhance the efficiency of the development processes, and facilitate decision-making activities.

Consent management architecture for secure data transactions

Digitalization of data intensive services presents several challenges, such as how to safely manage and use the multitude of personal data across various public, private and commercial service providers. Guaranteed privacy is especially critical in sensitive cases like health data management and processing. A key challenge and enabler for efficient data utilization is the need for an adequate consent management framework that meets the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To facilitate sensitive secure data transactions where end-control always resides with the individual, a consent management architecture (CMA) is defined, utilizing the new MyData approach. The proposed CMA enables context-driven authorization of multisourced data for safe access by various health services. CMA proof-of-concept and experiences are described and discussed to concretize and evaluate the suggested architecture. Consent management and authorization topics are discussed as a service function of the MyData Operator. The technical APIs required for registering and authorizing data sources and data services via the Operator are demonstrated and analyzed to expedite development of this important area within the research and industrial communities.