Michiel van Genuchten

“Is It Already 4 a.m. in Your Time Zone?”: Focus Immersion and Temporal Dissociation in Virtual Teams

Using a sample of students (N = 118) engaged in an 8-week project to build an e-book chapter, this study finds that cognitive absorption impacts interpersonal conflict and team performance. In particular, virtual teams with aggregated higher levels of focus immersion and temporal dissociation (dimensions of cognitive absorption) demonstrate higher levels of performance and interpersonal conflict. Furthermore, there is an interaction effect between focus immersion and temporal dissociation that moderates the impact on performance and interpersonal conflict. The teams with aggregated high levels of focus immersion and aggregated low levels of temporal dissociation demonstrated the best performance and lowest levels of interpersonal conflict. The authors also found that individuals with high levels of focus immersion preferred asynchronous communication media, whereas individuals with low levels of temporal dissociation preferred synchronous communication media. The implications are discussed.

Communication in Virtual Teams: Ten Years of Experience in Education

Engineering teams are often globally distributed and comprise participants from multiple disciplines and cultures who rely on professional communication support. Companies, organizations, and institutions increasingly embrace these virtual teams and use a variety of information and communication technologies to support synchronous and asynchronous team interaction (e.g., chat, videoconferencing, email, group support systems, instant messaging, and forums). More and more, communication takes place without being face-to-face. Students should be prepared for such a workplace. However, it is difficult to emulate the specifics of real-world projects in a 100-hour university course. One way to bring the real world into the classroom is by combining the efforts of 100 students into a 10,000-hour project. This paper describes the Hong Kong-Netherlands project (HKNet) as an example of an integrated learning activity among multiple international institutions that brings the reality of engineering management with professional communication into educational contexts. Virtual teams comprising students from different parts of the world build websites on specific software topics that are then integrated into a single product. HKNet has entered its tenth year, and over 1000 students have participated.

Targets, drivers and metrics in software process improvement: Results of a survey in a multinational organization

This paper reports on a survey amongst software groups in a multinational organization. The survey was initiated by the Software Process Improvement (SPI) Steering Committee of Philips, a committee that monitors the status and quality of software process improvement in the global organization. The paper presents and discusses improvement targets, improvement drivers, and metrics, and the degree to that they are being recognized in the software groups. The improvement targets ‘increase predictability’ and ‘reduce defects’ are being recognized as specifically important, joined for Capability Maturity Model (CMM) level three groups by ‘increase productivity’ and ‘reduce lead time’. The set of improvement drivers that was used in the survey appears to be valid. Three improvement drivers that were rated highest were: ‘commitment of engineering management’, ‘commitment of development staff, and ‘sense of urgency’. Finally, it could be seen that metrics activity, both in size and in quality, increases significantly for CMM level three groups. However, no consensus regarding what metrics should be used can be seen.

Virtual Meetings with Hundreds of Managers

This paper describes the use of a Group Support System (GSS) in a distributed meeting with hundreds of managers. All were managing directors of the local banks of Rabobank. The distributed meeting has contributed to reducing the lead-time of a decision of hundreds of managers from an estimated 6 months to 4 weeks while at the same time increasing the involvement of the managers. The paper discusses the processes followed, the results achieved, the feedback from the managers as collected in a survey and the lessons learned. The experience shows that large-scale virtual meetings with business managers are feasible today. The participants recognize the usefulness of the virtual meeting but also indicate the need to improve the processes followed and the IT used.

Why is Software Late

In practice there is frequently a difference between the planned and the actual progress of a software project. A recent survey in the Netherlands (Siskens 1989) shows that in 30 percent of large projects the planned costs and lead time are overrun by more than 50 percent. The reasons why projects do not run according to plan are less clear, however. It is important to reveal the reasons for delay because an insight into these reasons can lead to actions for improvement enabling future projects to follow the plan more closely. This chapter describes a number of empirical studies regarding the reasons for differences between plan and reality which were carried out in 1988 and 1989 in various software development departments in a multinational organization.

Quantifying Software's Impact

Softwares impact on various industries is the topic of 15 columns published in IEEE Software since 2010. This article describes how to quantify softwares impact using metrics such as compound average growth rate and software mileage.

The long-term growth rate of evolving software: Empirical results and implications: Software Growth Rate

The amount of code in evolving software‐intensive systems appears to be growing relentlessly, affecting products and entire businesses. Objective figures quantifying the software code growth rate bounds in systems over a large time scale can be used as a reliable predictive basis for the size of software assets. We analyze a reference base of over 404 million lines of open source and closed software systems to provide accurate bounds on source code growth rates. We find that software source code in systems doubles about every 42 months on average, corresponding to a median compound annual growth rate of 1.21 ± 0.01. Software product and development managers can use our findings to bound estimates, to assess the trustworthiness of road maps, to recognise unsustainable growth, to judge the health of a software development project, and to predict a systems hardware footprint.

Introduction and Definition of the Problem

Software has become an important product during the first decades of its existence. It is now present in many forms. For example: embedded in electronic equipment or cars, in information systems that allow orders to be accepted automatically and in factory automation systems that enable a few men to run a chemical plant. The amount of software that needs to be developed has increased from virtually nothing around 1950 to an estimated value of 140 billion dollars worldwide in 1985 (Boehm 1988).

Managing Software's Impact

As a review of past articles in IEEE Softwares Impact department shows, software economics largely determines a software products success, and volume plays a key role.

Changes in Software Engineering Control

The term software engineering has been in use since the late sixties. Software engineering is an example of a young engineering discipline. The circumstances in which software engineering has taken place have changed considerably over the first decades of its history and its evolution is the subject of this chapter. The software engineering process and its control will be characterized in terms of the Process-Control-Information model, as mentioned earlier. Software engineering used to be controlled in what will be called ‘traditional’ control. We will show why traditional control fitted in with the traditional software engineering process and examine to what extent it is still appropriate for the current, changed software engineering process.