0000000000328746
AUTHOR
Even ÅBy Larsen
Explaining Change Paths of Systems and Software Development Practices
This chapter discusses how systems development practices are shaped. Based on interviews conducted in ten development organizations and previous literature, we identify eight types of change paths in systems development practices: emergence, adoption, idealization, formalization, abandonment, informalization, entropy, and disobedience. We argue that the eight change path types provide an integrated theoretical framework on the study of how systems development practices change in organizations, projects, and among individual developers in a given context. We discuss how this framework complements existing theories and concepts of the contemporary literature on systems development.
Setting the Pace: Experiments With Keller's PSI
The ideal of self-paced learning, which was introduced nearly 50 years ago by Keller in his Personalized System of Instruction (PSI), has not yet been widely adopted. In spite of its perceived promise of helping students to learn at the speed aligned to their individual backgrounds, motivation, and skills, PSI has been challenging to implement. University teaching practice with weekly plans means that instructors expect students to learn at the same pace. Against this backdrop, this paper reports experiences from deploying PSI in multiple offerings of an introductory programming course at a Scandinavian university over five years. These include variations, such as a buddy system, rightsizin…
Towards a Framework for Building Theory from ISD Practices
The paper presents a framework for building theory from ISD practices. The framework locates ISD practices in a learning loop that is situated in a development context. The framework recognizes that ISD practices are related to their learned rationale that may come from previous experiences, i.e. observed impacts of practices, or from existing theory. These concepts recognized by the framework are needed for building theory from ISD practices, for designing research approaches for studying ISD, for evaluating existing research on ISD practices and for evaluating ISD methods. The framework is also used in the analysis of three recent studies on ISD practices and a discussion about the uses o…