Sarah Beecham

University of Limerick | UL · Lero

Context: Today’s digital world with millions of users results in vast amounts of data. This ‘big data’, characterized according to its volume, variety, velocity, and veracity, is impacting the lives of data users worldwide in many ways and has become important for day-to-day decision-making. Problem: Requirements engineering (RE) - approaches used...

Preamble The objective of developing this protocol is to have a guideline for conducting a systematic mapping study on requirements engineering approaches in big data applications development. In designing and developing software, choosing the right approach is an important activity that has been performed to have a good product. This systematic ma...

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4768913

Objective This study aims to gather public opinion on the Irish “COVID Tracker” digital contact tracing (DCT) App, with particular focus on App usage, usability, usefulness, technological issues encountered, and potential changes to the App. Methods A 35-item online questionnaire was deployed for 10 days in October 2020, 3 months after the launch...

Together with many success stories, promises such as the increase in production speed and the improvement in stakeholders' collaboration have contributed to making agile a transformation in the software industry in which many companies want to take part. However, driven either by a natural and expected evolution or by contextual factors that challe...

Together with many success stories, promises such as the increase in production speed and the improvement in stakeholders' collaboration have contributed to making agile a transformation in the software industry in which many companies want to take part. However, driven either by a natural and expected evolution or by contextual factors that challe...

Background: Digital contact tracing apps have the potential to augment contact tracing systems and disrupt COVID-19 transmission by rapidly identifying secondary cases prior to the onset of infectiousness and linking them into a system of quarantine, testing, and health care worker case management. The international experience of digital contact tr...

BACKGROUND The silent transmission of COVID-19 has led to an exponential growth of fatal infections. With over 3 million deaths world-wide, the need to control and stem transmission has never been more critical. New COVID-19 vaccines offer hope. However, administration timelines, long-term protection, and effectiveness against variants are still un...

Background: The silent transmission of COVID-19 has led to an exponential growth of fatal infections. With over 4 million deaths world-wide, the need to control and stem transmission has never been more critical. New COVID-19 vaccines offer hope. However, administration timelines, long-term protection, and effectiveness against potential variants...

Older adults (OAs) are a growing and dominant part of the global population, with specific communication and usability needs. Information technology, such as smartphone applications, has the potential to help OAs stay connected, yet some designs do not appeal to this group of users. Current recommendations for the design of usable smartphone applic...

Due to the global pandemic, in March 2020 we in academia and industry were abruptly forced into working from home. Yet teaching never stopped, and neither did developing software, fixing software, and expanding into new markets. Demands for flexible ways of working, responding to new requirements, have never been so high. How did we manage to conti...

BACKGROUND Novel software applications (“Apps”) that can potentially simplify the laborious work of manual contact tracing during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic are a tempting prospect. Given this potential, many countries have designed, developed and deployed Apps before their efficacy has been established. The Irish health service launched the “CO...

Background Digital Contact Tracing is seen as a key tool in reducing the propagation of Covid-19. But it requires high uptake and continued participation across the population to be effective. To achieve sufficient uptake/participation, health authorities should address, and thus be aware of, user concerns. Aim This work manually analyzes user rev...

BACKGROUND Digital contact tracing apps (DCTAs) have the potential to augment contact tracing systems and disrupt Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) transmission. Despite many countries deploying DCTAs, few have disrupted COVID-19 transmission sufficiently to avoid the most restrictive social distancing measures. OBJECTIVE Our aim was to describe and pro...

Driven by the need to coordinate activities of multiple agile development teams cooperating to produce a large software product, software-intensive organizations are turning to scaling agile software development frameworks. Despite the growing adoption of various scaling agile frameworks, there is little empirical evidence of how effective their pr...

Digital Contact Tracing (DCT) is seen as a key tool in reducing the propagation of viruses such as Covid-19, but it requires uptake and participation in the technology across a large proportion of the population to be effective. While we observe the pervasive uptake of mobile device usage across our society, the installation and usage of contact tra...

Distributed development involving globally distributed teams in different countries and timezones adds additional complexity into an already complex undertaking. This paper focuses on the effect of global software development on motivation. Specifically, we ask, what impact does misalignment between needed and actual autonomy have on global team mo...

Driven by the need to coordinate activities of multiple agile development teams cooperating to produce a large software product, software-intensive organizations are turning to scaling agile software development frameworks. Despite the growing adoption of various scalin g agile frameworks, there is little empirical evidence of how effective their p...

The increased susceptibility of world’s population to diseases augmented with the decrease in the healthcare workforce leads to over-reliance on caregivers. This increased burden on caregivers adversely impacts their quality of life. However, information and communication technology (ICT) has the potential to facilitate caregiving. Therefore, the o...

Context: Many researchers advocate “tailoring” agile methods to suit a project’s or company’s specific environment and needs. This includes combining agile methods with more traditional “plan driven” practices. Objective: This study aims to assess to what extent projects actually combine agile and traditional practices. Method: Data from the HELENA...

In Global Software Development (GSD), the additional complexity caused by global distance requires processes to ease collaboration difficulties, reduce communication overhead, and improve control. How development tasks are broken down, shared and prioritized is key to project success. While the related literature provides some support for architect...

Background: Agile methods are no longer restricted to small projects and co-located teams. The last decade has seen the spread of agile into large scale, distributed and regulated domains. Many case studies show successful agile adoption in GSD, however, taken as a whole, it remains unclear how widespread this trend is, and what form the agile adop...

We are pleased to introduce this Special Issue on Global Software Engineering Education published by the ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE) that focuses on educational practices to prepare students for a global workplace. This issue comes at a time when universities are recognizing the need to provide courses that address the challenges...

Drivers for globalization are significant where today’s organizations look for cheaper and faster ways to develop software as well as ways to satisfy quality and investment requirements imposed by customers, shareholders, and governments. Given these needs, Global Software Development (GSD) has become a “normal” way of doing business. Working in GS...

Drivers for globalization are significant where today's organizations look for cheaper and faster ways to develop software as well as ways to satisfy quality and investment requirements imposed by customers, shareholders, and governments. Given these needs, Global Software Development (GSD) has become a "normal" way of doing business. Working in GS...

Context Global software development (GSD), although now a norm in the software industry, carries with it enormous challenges mostly regarding communication and coordination. Aforementioned challenges are highlighted when there is a need to transfer knowledge between sites, particularly when software artifacts assigned to different sites depend on e...

Global Software Development (GSD) continues to grow substantially and although is fast becoming the norm is fundamentally different from local Software Engineering development. With the promised benefits of GSD, come many challenges and communication overheads. In this context, the Global Teaming Model (GTM) is a CMMI style process model designed t...

The implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in the public sector has been widely adopted in recent years, with the objective of improving these institutions’ organisational efficiency and services. However, the dynamism of governmental rules and specific restrictions on this sector have made ERP project management a task subjec...

In this chapter, we revisit our research into the current status of industry/academia collaboration, as introduced in the IEEE Computer column “Making Software Engineering Research Relevant” (S. Beecham, J. Noll, and I. Richardson (2014) Using agile practices to solve global software development problems – a case study. In Methods and Tools for Pro...

Mobile Devices can be beneficial for older adults (OAs) if used effectively. Yet current research suggests a low level of take-up. We investigated the extent to which OAs use mobile devices to identify their likes, dislikes and expectations in order to find new ways to increase their interaction. We conducted a survey with 202 OAs (aged 50-86). Man...

The objective of our research is to produce a set of reusable recommendations applicable for designing and developing Social Network Systems (SNS) for older adults (OA). SNSs can reduce social isolation of this cohort, thereby enhancing their quality of life. We have undertaken a systematic literature review and an empirical study to understand th...

Explanation of the viability of the mobile application to enhance active social engagement and healthcare of older adults. In addition, the preliminary results of evaluation and directions towards future work were also discussed.

The adoption, scaling and tailoring of agile methods depends on several factors, such as the size of the software development organization, business goals, and operative model. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was developed to support organizations in scaling agile practices across the enterprise. Large multi-national enterprises report that adop...

Context: Case studies are a useful approach for conducting empirical studies of software engineering, in part because they allow a phenomenon to be studied in its real-world context. However, given that there are several kinds of case studies, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, researchers need to know how to choose which kind to employ fo...

The Product Owner (PO) is critical for translating business needs into a software implementation by gathering and prioritizing requirements, and assessing whether features have met the definition of "done." There is a paucity of detail about how POs achieve this daunting task in practice with potential negative consequences for project success. In...

High staff turnover has a negative impact on software development productivity and product quality. Further, offshore outsourcing has a widely held reputation for particularly poor employee retention. Interestingly, in-house sites (regardless of location) do not suffer such high levels of staff turnover. We want to understand the factors affecting...

Context: How to adopt, scale and tailor agile methods depends on several factors such as the size of the organization, business goals, operative model, and needs. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was developed to support organizations to scale agile practices across the enterprise. Problem: Early adopters of SAFe tend to be large multi-national en...

Social isolation is a recognised problem for the older adults (OAs). This problem is becoming more prevalent because the proportion of OAs is increasing throughout the developed world. Technology is regarded as a possible way to overcome this, allowing for the creation of a more inclusive society, where, for example, social network systems (SNSs) c...

Global software development has become the norm rather than the exception for even the smallest companies. However, global software development is known to lead to numerous negative effects among distributed teams. This paper focuses on the effect of global software development on motivation. Specifically we ask: “Does increased autonomy, through t...

Scrum is an increasingly common approach to software development adopted by organizations around the world. However, as organizations transition from traditional plan-driven development to agile development with Scrum, the question arises as to which Scrum role (Product Owner, Scrum Master, or Scrum Team Member) corresponds to a Project Manager, or...

Background. The proportion of older adults (OAs) is increasing throughout the developed world. Social isolation is a recognised problem for this sector. Technology is regarded as a possible way to create a more inclusive society, where for example social network systems (SNSs) can keep OAs in contact with local communities, create new communities,...

Distributed development involving globally distributed teams in different countries and timezones adds additional complexity into an already complex undertaking. This paper focuses on the effect of global software development on motivation. Specifically, we ask, what impact does misalignment between needed and actual autonomy have on global team mo...

The International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE) had its twentieth anniversary in 2016, with that year’s edition hosted in Limerick, Ireland. Founded in 1997, the EASE conference was the first event solely dedicated to encouraging empirical research in software engineering, and its founders have been longtime...

Global software development has become the norm rather than the exception for even the smallest companies. But distributed development involving globally distributed teams in different countries and timezones introduces additional complexity into an already complex undertaking. Geographic distribution and timezone differences also introduce barrier...

Global software engineering (GSE) is becoming common. It's thus important to educate university software engineering students in GSE. The authors discuss challenges to and recommendations for implementing such instruction.

Pioneering educators discuss how they inject realism into global-software-engineering education.

An ITiCSE 2015 conference working group report has recently delivered a comprehensive systematic review of the literature addressing the challenges and solutions in teaching global software engineering courses. In this panel session, a group of authors of that report will review the findings, and present their own views on teaching such courses, th...

Technical Support (TS) is a post sales service provided to users of Information Technology (IT) products. Effective customer support can increase an IT company’s revenue, improve the quality of their software, build customer loyalty, and enhance their reputation. However, not all companies realise these benefits as many customers and users are choo...

Geographic separation, lack of timezone overlap, and cultural differences are widely recognized as factors that impede communication and collaboration of globally distributed software development teams. While much research has been done into how these factors affect communication and collaboration, there needs to be a way of measuring how much effe...

The Global Software Development (GSD) paradigm has, over the last fifteen years, shifted from being novel and ground breaking to being widely adopted and mainstream. This wide adoption is partly owing to the many benefits provided by GSD, such as reduced labour costs, proximity to new markets and access to a diverse and experienced skills pool. Yet...

Users of software systems need support. When users choose to go directly to online forums rather than report issues to the source of the problem, the development organization loses out in terms of gathering information on where their systems could be improved, and can lose customer loyalty and goodwill. This in turn will have a negative effect on f...

Context: Working in a distributed environment poses new challenges to software engineer motivation. Problem: Where should global project managers focus their efforts so that they have the best chance of motivating their teams, for higher staff retention, increased productivity and improved software quality? Method: We asked a group of software engi...

Education providers experiment with different pedagogical strategies that depart from traditional modes of delivery. Problem-based learning (PBL), which enhances and leverages practitioners’ competencies and skill-sets, is one such strategy. Transitioning to PBL can prove challenging for course design teams. This paper provides evidence-based insig...

In this paper we propose a new framework to assess survivability of software projects accounting for media capability details as introduced in Media Synchronicity Theory (MST). Specifically, we add to our global engineering frame- work the assessment of the impact of inadequate conveyance and convergence available in the communication infrastructur...

In this paper we propose a new framework to assess survivability of software projects accounting for media capability details as introduced in Media Synchronicity Theory (MST). Specifically, we add to our global engineering framework the assessment of the impact of inadequate conveyance and convergence available in the communication infrastructure...

Context: Global Software Engineering (GSE) has become the predominant form of software development for global companies and has given rise to a demand for students trained in GSE. In response, universities are developing courses and curricula around GSE and researchers have begun to disseminate studies of these new approaches. Problem: GSE differs...

The quality of an organization's support services can be key to maintaining and extending its customer base and to its future survival. As such, support services need to be considered in software process improvement initiatives and not left as an afterthought or stand‐alone effort. However, to identify areas in need of improvement requires a good u...

The evaluation of educational approaches is frequently challenging as it involves humans and requires the consideration of several angles depending on the educational objectives. On occasions, these objectives involve academic and industrial environments, thus implying additional challenges. Education in Global Software Development (GSD) has recent...

Simulation has been applied in several Software Engineering fields, and is shown to be a useful method in industrial training. As part of our research work, we have used simulation to provide training in Global Software Development (GSD). We have developed a platform to strengthen GSD skills by simulating realistic settings in which learners intera...

Motivation, although difficult to quantify, is considered to be the single largest factor in developer productivity; there are also suggestions that low motivation is an important factor in software development project failure. We investigate factors that motivate software engineering teams using survey data collected from software engineering prac...

Context: One of the chief challenges of Global Software Development (GSD) is for globally, culturally and linguistically diverse team members to communicate effectively. Failing to meet this challenge can lead to misunderstandings that impede project success. To prepare practitioners for remote and diverse forms of communication we have developed V...