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A statement “Prevention is better than cure” for illnesses in medical sciences also applies to the software development life cycle in terms of software defects. A defect is a deviation from actual functionality of the application in terms of the correctness and completeness of the specification of the customer requirements. Defective software fails to meet its customer requirements leading to the development of applications with poor quality. Quality is a top priority in every enterprise...
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Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, not the isolated intervention of individual organizations.
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Why local ownership and commitment are the exception in most development efforts—and what development professionals can do about this problem.
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Over the last decade, the field of so-called Agile software development has grown to be a major force in the socio-economic arena of delivering quality software on time, on budget, and on spec. The acceleration in changing needs brought on by the rise in popularity of the Internet has helped push Agile practices far beyond their original boundaries, and possibly into domains where their application is not the optimal solution to the problems at hand. The question of where Agile software...
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Adaptive management is a framework for resource conservation that promotes iterative learning-based decision making. Yet there remains considerable confusion about what adaptive management entails, and how to actually make resource decisions adaptively. A key but somewhat ambiguous distinction in adaptive management is between active and passive forms of adaptive decision making. The objective of this paper is to illustrate some approaches to active and passive adaptive management with a...
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Adaptive management has become the tonic of natural resources policy. With its core idea of “learning while doing,” adaptive management has infused the natural resources policy world to the point of ubiquity, surfacing in everything from mundane agency permits to grand presidential proclamations. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that these days adaptive management is natural resources policy. But is it working? Does appending “adaptive” in front of “management” somehow make natural...
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Designers have traditionally focused on enhancing the look and functionality of products. Recently, they have begun using design techniques to tackle more complex problems, such as finding ways to provide low-cost healthcare throughout the world. Businesses were the first to embrace this new approach—called design thinking—and nonprofits are beginning to adopt it too.
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Systems thinking is commonly accepted as the backbone of a successful systems engineering approach. As such, the Body of Knowledge and Curriculum to Advance Systems Engineering (BKCASE) team chose to leverage a systems thinking based tool, called Systemitool, to describe our project to the vast audience that would potentially become involved directly or indirectly in the success of the project. This paper describes the process and steps used by the authors and the BKCASE team to develop the...
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The need to bridge the digital divide is no longer a point of discussion and therefore focus has shifted to the design and implementation of programs that have the potential to close the information and knowledge gap between the developing and developed nations. Unfortunately, the majority of these programs are small and mimic what has been successful in the developed world. It has become increasingly clear that these successes do not necessarily translate well in the context of developing...
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Inroduces the stages of adoption of Design in organizations, with a visual tool.
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The concept of good enough governance provides a platform for questioning the long menu of institutional changes and capacity-building initiatives currently deemed important (or essential) for development. Nevertheless, it falls short of being a tool to explore what, specifically, needs to be done in any real world context. Thus, as argued by the author in 2004, given the limited resources of money, time, knowledge, and human and organisational capacities, practitioners are correct in...
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Today's environments of increasing business change require software development methodologies that are more adaptable. This article examines how complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory can be used to increase our understanding of how agile software development practices can be used to develop this capability. A mapping of agile practices to CAS principles and three dimensions (product, process, and people) results in several recommendations for “best practices” in systems development.
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Only for the recipients of foreign aid is something akin to central planning seen as a way to achieve prosperity. The end of poverty is achieved with free markets and democracy—where decentralized “searchers” look for ways to meet individual needs—not Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) to achieve Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The PRSPs and MDGs create lots of bureaucracy but hold no one specific agency in foreign aid accountable for any one specific task. Planners in foreign...
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Discussions with traditional developers and managers concerning agile software development practices nearly always contain two somewhat contradictory ideas. They find that on small, stand-alone projects, agile practices are less burdensome and more in tune with the software industry's increasing needs for rapid development and coping with continuous change. Managers face several barriers, real and perceived, when they try to bring agile approaches into traditional organizations. They...
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This article challenges a normative assumption about accountability in organizations: that more accountability is necessarily better. More specifically, it examines two forms of “myopia” that characterize conceptions of accountability among service-oriented nonprofit organizations: (a) accountability as a set of unconnected binary relationships rather than as a system of relations and (b) accountability as short-term and rule-following behavior rather than as a means to longer-term social...
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