Günther Schuh, Jan Hicking, Max-Ferdinand Stroh, Justus Benning
The number of available technologies is constantly rising. Be it additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence (AI) or distributed ledger technologies. The choice of the right technologies may decide the fate of a company. Due to the overwhelming amount of information sources, regular technology market research becomes increasingly challenging, especially for SMEs. In order to assist the technology management process, the authors will introduce the architecture of an automated, AI-based technology radar. The architecture will automatically collect data from relevant sources, assess the relevance of the respective technology (i.e. their maturity level) and then visualize it on the radar map.
Holacracy can be seen as a strategy for decentralized management and organizational governance in which authority and decision-making are delivered by means of autonomous and self-organizing groups or teams. Although the topic is not new, its application in software development has not a long history behind it. This study is meant to give an overview on holacracy for software development teams, its features, benefits gained, as well as its challenges. To do so, in this paper, authors present a multivocal literature review in which a panoply of sources including research and grey literature is reviewed. Our study shows that adapting holacracy towards self-organizing software development teams can result in increased product transparency, improved decision making, more efficient progress, and a higher sense of individual responsibility. However, there are reported challenges such as implementation difficulty and increase in employee outflows.
Jake McCarthy, Ruben O Callaghan, Christopher B. Stanley
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) acts as a medium for transferring value amongst members of a shared network. Tokenization is a prominent factor enabling this type of value transfer by allowing non-DLT based assets to undergo a digital transformation to a distributed ledger environment. With the advent of new and emerging asset classes, it is necessary to explore the suitability of migrating these non-DLT based assets from their conventional data forms to a distributed ledger environment. In this paper, assets are examined to evaluate if their investment appeal is increased after tokenization, by analyzing changes in the underlying assets’ structure and potential disruption to external parties. This study reviews the existing body of knowledge at the intersection of DLT, digitalization and finance to map the benefits of tokenization on different asset classes. Additionally, this paper aims to contribute to existing research by providing a framework to assess the suitability of tokenizing an asset. For this paper, tokenization is viewed as the consolidation of embedding financial functionality (improvements to an asset’s liquidity, composability or available information)(Merton & Bodie, 1995) and digitalization (disruption to the actors, settings or offerings) of an asset (Hagberg et al. 2016). The following question will be addressed: How can the tokenization suitability framework derived in this paper be used as a decision support tool?
Stakeholder participation is a cornerstone of effective Requirements Engineering (RE). It supports the development and evolution of software systems so that they fit their intended purpose within their application domain. To enable successful stakeholder participation RE experts have created a broad variety of approaches for different circumstances and project phases. These approaches focus on traditionally dedicated software systems, which have closed and location-bound user groups. The stakeholders of these systems usually are members of the organizations that commission or build the system. Meanwhile, technological development has opened doors for ubiquitously deployed and openly available software systems. Stakeholders of these systems are rarely members of those organizations. Instead, they are so-called outside organizational reach and typically unknown to RE experts. Hence, in contrast to stakeholders of traditionally dedicated software systems, they can neither straightforwardly be identified nor be requested to participate in RE. Moreover, they are likely location-independent, numerous and highly heterogeneous. Current RE approaches do not suffice to address these challenges. Established RE approaches provide limited means to identify stake- holders outside organizational reach, let alone motivate them to voluntarily participate in RE. They also cannot support collaboration in distributed settings or on a large scale, yet, collaboration is known to be essential for the development of novel systems and in unknown domains. Feedback mechanisms and social network sites enable distributed and large-scale collaboration. However, their effectiveness is limited as they originally have no RE purpose and typically are restricted to their members. Latest RE approaches close this gap and also apply motivation strategies, which, however, are simplified, missing the high heterogeneity of stakeholders out- side organizational reach; thus, risking to demotivate them. This thesis presents the GARUSO (Game-based Requirements Elicitation) approach, a novel RE approach specifically designed for stakeholders outside organizational reach. It provides (1) a strategy to identify them and (2) a social media based platform that enables their collaborative participation in RE and applies gamification to motivate them to do so. The GARUSO platform is the core of the thesis. Its conceptual solution is inspired by the structure of user stories, the experiential learning theory, motivational psychology and game design. As a proof of concept, it was implemented to elicit and prioritize requirements and evaluated in a field study with promising results: The identified stakeholders build a highly heterogeneous crowd which participated - over a period of three months - in platform activities. They perceived the platform easy to understand, interesting to use and during their participation increased their knowledge on the application domain of the software system of interest.
Valentina Lenarduzzi, Maria Ilaria Lunesu, Michele Marchesi, Roberto Tonelli
We present an application of Blockchain technology and Smart Contracts to the management of Agile projects, using Scrum or Lean-Kanban processes. In our application the duties of the Product Owner for certifying the correctness of the outcomes are delegated to one or more Smart Contracts deployed on the Ethereum Blockchain and written in Solidity. An agreement with the Customer can also allow the Smart Contracts to automatically enable payments, to introduce penalties or grants on the basis of the outcome. Product Owner duties and work can thus be relieved allowing to allocate resources on more profitable and productive tasks. Other possibilities are examined as well.
Simone Porru, Andrea Pinna, Michele Marchesi, Roberto Tonelli
The Blockchain technology is reshaping finance, economy, money to the extent that its disruptive power is compared to that of the Internet and the Web in their early days. As a result, all the software development revolving around the Blockchain technology is growing at a staggering rate. In this paper, we acknowledge the need for software engineers to devise specialized tools and techniques for blockchain-oriented software development. From current challenges concerning the definition of new professional roles, demanding testing activities and novel tools for software architecture, we take a step forward by proposing new directions on the basis of a curate corpus of blockchain-oriented software repositories, detected by exploiting the information enclosed in the 2016 Moody's Blockchain Report and teh market capitalization of cryptocurrencies. Ensuring effective testing activities, enhancing collaboration in large teams, and facilitating the development of smart contracts all appear as key factors in the future of blockchain-oriented software development.
The rapid development of the blockchain technology and its various applications has rendered it important to understand the guidelines for adopting it. The comparative analysis method is used to analyze different dimensions of the maturity model, which is mainly based on the commonly used capability maturity model. The blockchain maturity model and its adoption process have been discussed and presented. This study serves as a guide to institutions to make blockchain adoption decisions more systematically.