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1. Perceived scrum values, conflict resolution ability, and cultural self-awareness among system design and analysis students

   Jaiswal, A.; Patel, K.; Patel, D.; Magana, A.J. (January 2022, Proceedings ASEE annual conference)

   Teamwork has been identified as one of the essential professional skills for the 21st century. Business, industries, and corporates require their employees to work in teams on various projects. Therefore, it is crucial to introduce and train undergraduate students on teamwork skills. Working in teams is not easy as one needs to collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds, skillsets, and opinions. The disagreement among the team members may lead to conflict and chaos that jeopardizes the team's harmony. Therefore, just creating teams and assigning a group project is insufficient to help undergraduate students develop teamwork skills. Instructors need to help students become cognizant of their teamwork skills, such as conflict resolution, scrum values, and cultural self-awareness. In this research paper, we intend to understand the perception of students enrolled in a sophomore-level system's course regarding conflict resolution skills, scrum values, and cultural self-awareness. We also want to understand how the perception of these values is related to one another. In the light of this study, we want to answer the following research questions (1) How do students' reported conflict management skills relate to their reported scrum values? (2) How do students' cultural self-awareness relate to their conflict management skills? (3) How do students' cultural self-awareness relate to their reported scrum values? A course on system analysis and design followed a project-based cooperative learning approach. The students were required to work in teams and complete the course deliverables, including the final course project. The team projects followed a scrum approach that helped students identify the project requirements, perform modeling and develop a prototype. Since students worked on scrum- driven projects in a cooperative learning environment, the students were required to participate in a survey study that allowed the instructional team to develop an understanding of the students' perception of conflict management, scrum values, and cultural self-awareness. The responses of the students were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The results suggest that students found themselves competent in managing conflict, adhering to scrum values, and demonstrating a high-level cultural self-awareness. 

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2. Perceived Scrum Values, Conflict Resolution Ability, and Cultural Self-Awareness among System Design and Analysis Students.

   Jaiswal, A.; Patel, K.; Patel, D.; & Magana, A.J. (January 2022, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   Teamwork has been identified as one of the essential professional skills for the 21st century. Business, industries, and corporates require their employees to work in teams on various projects. Therefore, it is crucial to introduce and train undergraduate students on teamwork skills. Working in teams is not easy as one needs to collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds, skillsets, and opinions. The disagreement among the team members may lead to conflict and chaos that jeopardizes the team's harmony. Therefore, just creating teams and assigning a group project is insufficient to help undergraduate students develop teamwork skills. Instructors need to help students become cognizant of their teamwork skills, such as conflict resolution, scrum values, and cultural self-awareness. In this research paper, we intend to understand the perception of students enrolled in a sophomore-level system's course regarding conflict resolution skills, scrum values, and cultural self-awareness. We also want to understand how the perception of these values is related to one another. In the light of this study, we want to answer the following research questions (1) How do students' reported conflict management skills relate to their reported scrum values? (2) How do students' cultural self-awareness relate to their conflict management skills? (3) How do students' cultural self-awareness relate to their reported scrum values? A course on system analysis and design followed a project-based cooperative learning approach. The students were required to work in teams and complete the course deliverables, including the final course project. The team projects followed a scrum approach that helped students identify the project requirements, perform modeling and develop a prototype. Since students worked on scrum- driven projects in a cooperative learning environment, the students were required to participate in a survey study that allowed the instructional team to develop an understanding of the students' perception of conflict management, scrum values, and cultural self-awareness. The responses of the students were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The results suggest that students found themselves competent in managing conflict, adhering to scrum values, and demonstrating a high-level cultural self-awareness. 

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3. Collaborative experience between scientific software projects using Agile Scrum development

   https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3120  

   Baxter, Amanda_L; BenZvi, Segev_Y; Bonivento, Walter; Brazier, Adam; Clark, Michael; Coleiro, Alexis; Collom, David; Colomer‐Molla, Marta; Cousins, Bryce; Delgado_Orellana, Aliwen; et al (July 2022, Software: Practice and Experience)

   Abstract Developing sustainable software for the scientific community requires expertise in software engineering and domain science. This can be challenging due to the unique needs of scientific software, the insufficient resources for software engineering practices in the scientific community, and the complexity of developing for evolving scientific contexts. While open‐source software can partially address these concerns, it can introduce complicating dependencies and delay development. These issues can be reduced if scientists and software developers collaborate. We present a case study wherein scientists from the SuperNova Early Warning System collaborated with software developers from the Scalable Cyberinfrastructure for Multi‐Messenger Astrophysics project. The collaboration addressed the difficulties of open‐source software development, but presented additional risks to each team. For the scientists, there was a concern of relying on external systems and lacking control in the development process. For the developers, there was a risk in supporting a user‐group while maintaining core development. These issues were mitigated by creating a second Agile Scrum framework in parallel with the developers' ongoing Agile Scrum process. This Agile collaboration promoted communication, ensured that the scientists had an active role in development, and allowed the developers to evaluate and implement the scientists' software requirements. The collaboration provided benefits for each group: the scientists actuated their development by using an existing platform, and the developers utilized the scientists' use‐case to improve their systems. This case study suggests that scientists and software developers can avoid scientific computing issues by collaborating and that Agile Scrum methods can address emergent concerns. 

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4. Predicting and Comparing the Performance of Array Management Libraries

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS47924.2020.00097  

   Kang, Donghe; Rubel, Oliver; Byna, Suren; Blanas, Spyros (May 2020, 2020 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS))

   Many applications are increasingly becoming I/O-bound. To improve scalability, analytical models of parallel I/O performance are often consulted to determine possible I/O optimizations. However, I/O performance modeling has predominantly focused on applications that directly issue I/O requests to a parallel file system or a local storage device. These I/O models are not directly usable by applications that access data through standardized I/O libraries, such as HDF5, FITS, and NetCDF, because a single I/O request to an object can trigger a cascade of I/O operations to different storage blocks. The I/O performance characteristics of applications that rely on these libraries is a complex function of the underlying data storage model, user-configurable parameters and object-level access patterns. As a consequence, I/O optimization is predominantly an ad-hoc process that is performed by application developers, who are often domain scientists with limited desire to delve into nuances of the storage hierarchy of modern computers.This paper presents an analytical cost model to predict the end-to-end execution time of applications that perform I/O through established array management libraries. The paper focuses on the HDF5 and Zarr array libraries, as examples of I/O libraries with radically different storage models: HDF5 stores every object in one file, while Zarr creates multiple files to store different objects. We find that accessing array objects via these I/O libraries introduces new overheads and optimizations. Specifically, in addition to I/O time, it is crucial to model the cost of transforming data to a particular storage layout (memory copy cost), as well as model the benefit of accessing a software cache. We evaluate the model on real applications that process observations (neuroscience) and simulation results (plasma physics). The evaluation on three HPC clusters reveals that I/O accounts for as little as 10% of the execution time in some cases, and hence models that only focus on I/O performance cannot accurately capture the performance of applications that use standard array storage libraries. In parallel experiments, our model correctly predicts the fastest storage library between HDF5 and Zarr 94% of the time, in contrast with 70% of the time for a cutting-edge I/O model. 

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5. Initial Faculty Perceptions of Scrum for Departmental Change. In Content Access.

   Pembridge, J. J.; Wilson, T. A.; Roa, O. E. (January 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   This RESEARCH paper examines faculty perceptions regarding the use of Scrum for departmental operations. Scrum is an agile methodology that applies processes and procedures that encourage transparency, inspection, and adaptation in the creation of a product. Across the literature for engineering education change, there has been a focus on identifying the barriers and affordances to cultural change in engineering departments. The objective of this paper is to examine the driving factors and barriers to implementing Scrum for departmental operations. The paper will specifically address how a group of faculty about to adopt Scrum perceive the impact of that adoption on potential changes to departmental operations and culture. Findings indicate concerns with the traditional barriers of time and workload. However, they also indicate that there is some expectation for Scrum to decrease elements of the faculty workload and reduce time to complete tasks. These findings also build on the understanding of how faculty collaboration is perceived as both a barrier and affordance to departmental change. 

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