Shaowen Qin

Managing process change in software organizations: Experience and reflection

Managing process change in software organizations involves many challenges. It requires an array of skills beyond the technical expertise associated with the process change. Based on the authors recent industrial working experience at Motorolas Global Software Group (GSG) as an organizational technology deployment champion, this article identifies challenges of change management through real world case studies and provides a summary of good practices and lessons learned in implementing process change in todays software organizations. Upon further reflection of the process change management experience and other relevant learning and observations, the author proposes the notion of creating a perception of freedom as a more fundamental success strategy and suggests that the strategy together with the change be built into software tools to facilitate seamless process change deployment. Copyright

Operationalising CMMI: integrating CMMI and CoBIT perspective

– The use of capability maturity model integration (CMMI) on its own can be problematic for the organisation because it does not provide a roadmap to implementation or identification of key process improvement areas, but instead only provides the goals for each level of implementation. Addition of another framework such as control objectives for information and related technology (CoBIT) can add the required operational data, but poses some unique challenges for implementation. However, the integration of Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), CoBIT, and ISO/IEC 22007 provides a roadmap to the integration of CMMI and CoBIT. The purpose of this paper is to discuss this co‐implementation and integration of the two frameworks, as well as the underlying framework of a new proposed integration model., – A literature review approach is used to address issues that have evolved from the empirical literature regarding the integration of CMMI and ITIL with other standards and determining whether this approach can be applied to the integration of CMMI and CoBIT as well. This literature review also provides insight into roadblocks to the implementation and structural improvements for CMMI., – The literature review demonstrated that the integration of CMMI and CoBIT could potentially be performed using the same techniques used in integrating ITIL and CoBIT, which provides a valuable guideline for further research into this area. However, further work will be required in order to determine the specifics of integration., – The paper adds to the existing literature by discussing the integration of CMMI and CoBIT and examining how these two frameworks can work together in order to create the basis for a new integration model.

Scheduling and Routing of AMOs in an Intelligent Transport System

Autonomous moving objects (AMOs), such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and autonomous robots, have widely been used in the industry for decades. In an intelligent transport system with a great number of AMOs involved, it is important to eliminate potential congestion and deadlocks among AMOs to maintain a well-organized traffic flow. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that adapts bitonic merge sort algorithm for concurrent scheduling and routing of a great number (i.e., 4n 2) of AMOs on an ntimesn mesh topology of path network without congestion or deadlocks among AMOs during their moves. The results are tested by experiments with randomly generated data and the comparison of a related model.

Hospital occupancy and discharge strategies: a simulation-based study

Increasing demand for hospital services has resulted in more arrivals to emergency department (ED), increased admissions, and, quite often, access block and ED congestion, along with patients’ dissatisfaction. Cost constraints limit an increase in the number of hospital beds, so alternative solutions need to be explored.

Hospital Event Simulation Model: Arrivals to Discharge - design, development and application

In this paper we outline the design, development and application of a hospital patient flow management support tool – Hospital Event Simulation Model: Arrivals to Discharge (HESMAD). The model captures the patterns of patient flows within Flinders Medical Centre, a teaching hospital located in South Australia, through extensive exploitation of an existing hospital patient journey database (PJD). HESMAD employs mathematical and statistical modelling techniques, as well as the concept of modular design, to construct functions and processes that are embedded in a discrete event simulation system. The current structure of HESMAD reflects many iterations of refinements based on feedback from relevant industry experts. It places great emphasis on providing an engaging visualisation of the dynamics of events, and a convenient interface for domain experts: doctors, hospital managers and other health care professionals. An illustrative example of HESMAD’s wider applicability is presented.

Deriving Software Acquisition Process from Maturity Models—An Experience Report

The establishment of an existing practice scenario was an essential component in providing a basis for further research in the area of COTS software acquisition within the organisation. This report details the identification of means of describing the existing practice of software acquisition within an organisation and identification of models that could be used to present this view. The chosen best practices descriptions for the idealized model were maturity models, including SA-CMM, CMMI-ACQ, and ISO/IEC 12207. This report describes these models briefly and then describes the process of identifying the requirements for idealizing these maturity models into process frameworks that could be identified to actually business process models from a real organisation in order to identify gaps and optimizations within the organisation’s realization of the best practices model. It also identified the next steps in identification of the theoretical best practice framework, which will involve translation of the model to YAWL Petri nets and simulation of the process in order to identify potential modelling flaws or issues with framework efficiency. Implications of the currently ongoing research include the identification and correspondence of specific tasks and activities from ITIL and CoBiT frameworks with the generic key process areas of software acquisition frameworks and identification of sufficiently detailed structural framework models for each level in order to identify appropriate frameworks for application even in cases where these frameworks were not explicitly identified by the organisation or the researcher.

Split Private and Shared L2 Cache Architecture for Snooping-based CMP

Cache access latency and efficient usage of on-chip capacity are critical factors that affect the performance of the chip multiprocessor (CMP) architecture. In this paper, we propose a SPS2 cache architecture and cache coherence protocol for snooping-based CMP, in which each processor has both private and shared L2 cache to balance latency and capacity. Our protocol is expressed in a new state graph form, through which we prove our protocol by formal verification method. Simulation experiments shows that the SPS2 structure outperforms private L2 and shared L2 structure.

Hospital’s instability wedges

ABSTRACT In this study, we define a hospital congestion episode as a situation where the number of new patients needing admission is greater than the number of available beds in the hospital, and investigate the likelihood that the current day’s midnight occupancy will exceed any specified threshold level. We demonstrate that this measure of risk exhibits a characteristic sensitivity phenomenon that we have named as hospital’s instability wedge. In particular, it is seen that frequently even small changes in the numbers of patients admitted or discharged can dramatically change the risk of exceeding the threshold, thereby changing the risk of subsequent congestion episodes. While this finding captures a salient difficulty of operating a modern public hospital, it also opens up an opportunity for monitoring and alleviating the above defined risk with only small changes in admission, discharge, and cancellation rates. A case study with recent patient journey data from Flinders Medical Centre in South Australia is presented.

Managing process change in software organizations: Experience and reflection: Research Sections

Workflows emphasize the partial order of activities, and the flow of data between activities. In contrast, cooperative processes emphasize the sharing of artefact, and its gradual evolution toward the final product, under the cooperative and concurrent activities of all the involved actors. This article contrasts workflow and cooperative processes and shows that they are more complementary than conflicting and that, provided some extensions, both approaches can fit into a single tool and formalism. This article presents Celine, a concurrent engineering tool that can also define and support classic workflows and software processes. We claim that the availability of both classes of features allows for the modeling and support of very flexible processes, closer to software engineering reality. Copyright

Implementing process change in a software organization – an experience based study

No matter how much better our software process becomes, it would not bring us much benefit without being adopted by the targeted process users. Based on the authors recent industrial working experience at Motorola Global Software Group (GSG) as an organizational technology deployment champion, with the implementation of Motorolas Enterprise Project Management System in GSG during 2001 – 2003 as a background story, this paper presents a study on the real world challenges in implementing process change in todays software organizations. Upon reflection of the good practices and the do-differentlies, the paper provides some strategic as well as practical recommend-dations on dealing with the challenges, and points out the key success practices for software process change management.