Tony Cowling

A follow up study of the effect of personality on the performance of software engineering teams

This paper describes ethnographic observations and analysis of the performance of student teams working on year-long software projects (2004-2005 UK academic year) for industrial clients. Personality types were measured using an online version of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), as a basis for studying how individuals interacted within the teams, and the effects of disruptive issues on the quality of work produced by the team. The behavior of the observed teams is analyzed and the results compared with those from the previous years (2003-2004) research, also carried out on student teams. A significant finding in 2003-2004 was that issues which teams did not discuss adequately caused more problems for the quality of work than issues which produced actual disruption within the team; the results from 2004-2005 differ in that actual disruptions proved most damaging to the teams involved.

The positive affect of the XP methodology

This paper describes a longitudinal study on how the XP methodology acts as a positive mood inducer to SE teams. The results provide empirical evidence of the ability of these practices to alleviate the positive feeling amongst SE teams and there is a strong relationship between the positive moods experienced by the teams and the number of the XP practices used.

Evaluation of a selective distributed discovery strategy in a fully decentralized biologically inspired environment

The increased demand and complexity of services operating within open distributed environments has emphasized the need for systems that are adaptive, self-organizing and more robust. In order to address these issues some agent oriented approaches have adopted ideas from natural systems as possible solutions. The introduction of biological properties, especially birth and death of agents as expected events, generates an extremely dynamic environment where it is difficult to maintain the overall connectivity of the overlay network and facilitate efficient discovery processes. In this paper we evaluate the performance of a selective discovery mechanism in a distributed bio-inspired multi-agent community through a simulation study. The primary focus of the study is on the impacts which death and (sexual/asexual) reproduction events have on the effectiveness of the discovery process in different overlay networks.

Model-driven development and the future of software engineering education

This paper argues that the research area of model-driven development is likely to lead before long to tools being produced that will automate most of the construction activity within software development processes. It therefore discusses the impact that such developments would have on the software engineering curriculum, in terms of both the body of knowledge and the structures of courses, drawing on analogies with the impact during the 1960s of the development of problem-oriented programming languages and compilers for them.

Adjusting to XP: observational studies of inexperienced developers

Extreme programming (XP) has been introduced in various scenarios primarily because some in industry argued for a move away from what they feel are rigid documentation-based development techniques. This has usually taken place with experienced developers. This paper describes attempts by researchers from the University of Sheffield to introduce XP to relatively inexperienced student developers. This paper describes some of the important findings and provides evidence relating to common problems encountered when students attempt to adjust to XP.

Evaluation of Selective Distributed Discovery within Distributed Bio-active Agent Community

The increased demand and complexity of the services operating within open distributed environments has emphasized the need for more robust, adaptive and self-organizing solutions. To address these problems some agent oriented approaches, like the Bio-Networking architecture, have adopted ideas from large scale biological collectives as a solution. However the introduction of biological properties, like birth and death events, generates an extremely dynamic system, making it difficult to maintain the overall connectivity of the agent network and discovery of resources within the system. Towards this end, in this paper the performance of a selective discovery mechanism is evaluated through multi-agent simulation studies. The primary focus of this study is on the impacts which death and (sexual/asexual) reproduction events have on the effectiveness of the discovery process in different overlay networks.