UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
             COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents


               "Agile Software Development at a Distance:
                 A Distributed Cognition Perspective"

                      Prof. Helen Sharp
                  (The Open University, U.K.)

                     9 March  2016  (Wednesday)
                          1 pm - 2 pm


                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                     Lecture Theatre LF233

                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available


Abstract:

 Mature agile teams are highly collaborative and self-organizing.  One
of the hallmarks of a co-located agile team is the simple and open flow
of information between its members. In a co-located setting, peripheral
awareness, osmotic communication and simple information radiators support
agile principles such as collective ownership, minimal documentation
and simple design, and facilitate smooth collaboration. However agile
teams operating at a distance cannot rely on these mechanisms, so what
happens? There is plenty of research looking at distributed teams,
i.e. where several teams are located in different places. We have been
focusing on dispersed and remote working, i.e. where each individual team
member is located in a different place (dispersed) or one team member
is located away from his co-located team mates (remote). In this talk
I will use distributed cognition analyses which focus on information
propagation and transformation within the team to investigate how
teams collaborate when working at a distance. Findings from co-located,
dispersed and remote working scenarios will be presented.

Biography:

Helen Sharp is Professor of Software Engineering at the Open University,
UK. Helen's research focuses on the study of professional software
practice with a particular focus on human and social aspects of
software development. She has been conducting qualitative studies of
software practice since the early 1990s, and has adopted techniques
and theoretical frameworks from other disciplines such as distributed
cognition, cognitive dimensions, and technological frames. She is very
active in both the software engineering and interaction design (HCI)
communities and has had a long association with practitioner-related
conferences. Helen is joint author of one of the leading textbooks
on Interaction Design (id-book.com) now in its third edition. She is
associate editor for Transactions on Software Engineering, a member of
the Advisory Board for IEEE Software, and reviews for many journals and
conferences. For more information see http://mcs.open.ac.uk/hcs2




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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://homepages.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq/