Scrum (software development) | EPFL Graph Search

Scrum is an agile project management system commonly used in software development and other industries. Scrum prescribes for teams to break work into goals to be completed within time-boxed iterations, called sprints. Each sprint is no longer than one month and commonly lasts two weeks. The scrum team assesses progress in time-boxed, stand-up meetings of up to 15 minutes, called daily scrums. At the end of the sprint, the team holds two further meetings: one sprint review to demonstrate the work for stakeholders and solicit feedback, and one internal sprint retrospective. Scrum's approach to product development involves bringing decision-making authority to an operational level. Unlike a sequential approach to product development, scrum is an iterative and incremental framework for product development. Scrum allows for continuous feedback and flexibility, requiring teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration, and mandating frequent commu

Delineating policies: governing spaces with no coextensive institutions

Thomas Charles Marie Pierre Favre-Bulle

Many policies are spatially targeted: they attempt to foster or incent policy actions in areas meeting specific criteria. The identification and delineation of the spatial reality of interest is a major challenge to spatially targeted policies. In many cases, this spatial reality has an ambiguous meaning and no coterminous governing institution, leading to the need for institutional collaboration around policies. This project investigates the discrepancy occurring when the functional space relevant for polices and the institutional space of government produced by historical processes do not share the same extent. The research examines two spatial realities of importance for public policies in the United States: metropolitan areas and disadvantaged communities. Because they are the main social unit of urban life, metropolitan areasâsuch as the San Francisco Bay Areaâare the target of housing or economic development policies. Disadvantaged communities are targeted by programs intending to mitigate inequalities between communities. In both cases, specialists and laymen alike have a sense of what these spatial realities are, but charting a robust, actionable definition is problematic. The three articles of this doctoral project form a coherent path to scrutinize and resolve the spatial reality / institutional space disjunction. The first, Identifying the space of urban life, investigates spatial practices of individuals and how, collectively, they cast a unit of urban life, the metropolitan area. The second paper, On point: designing robust spatial targeting for public policies, analyzes how these practices can be integrated in a robust policy targeting, taking the example of disadvantaged communities in California. The third paper, The place and scale of consent takes a bottom-up approach to show how individuals perceive and express preferences for resolving that discrepancy. I show that neither of the currently used definitions for metropolitan areas and disadvantaged communities is robust because they use a strict threshold on a continuous metric that is not exhibiting clear breakpoints. Furthermore, definitions are not geographically consistent. A single definition does not capture the same reality of a metropolitan area in a coastal region or in the rural west, or of a disadvantaged community in a large urban region or in a rural county. Therefore, these definitions fail to provide a dependable policy target. Moreover, I show that local preferences for policy collaboration to resolve the discrepancy vary geographically, further undermining the relevance of a one-size-fits-all definition. I recommend that definitions of spatial targets for policies use a continuous scale instead of a discrete, binary one. These definitions should also be adapted to the geographical context they are applied in. Randomized vignette experiments can be used to understand residents' preferences.

EPFL2017

The Model Architecture Frame: Quality Managment in a Multi Method Environment

Most quality management systems (QMS) which integrate software development are based on a single software development method. This particular method is enforced on all projects. The resulting QMS has to fulfil the ISO 9000 standards [13] and enables the control of the projects and the improvement of the development process, supporting it with all necessary guidelines and providing one terminology for the whole company. However, using only one specific method is not necessarily the best solution for a company with very heterogeneous projects and products. Requirements of customers, existing experience and training in the teams, projects still using structured methods and newer ones using object-oriented methods, adaptation of methods for special circumstances, and evolving modelling techniques, all of these factors call for the coexistence of different modelling methods within one company. If a QMS is based on only a single method, many projects might run outside the quality management regulations, unless the QMS excludes the details of the software development process. This problem can be overcome by the use of model architectures and model architecture frames. A model architecture describes the models that are developed within one specific method or project. All the different model architectures are derived from the generic model architecture frame. Such a frame, and not just one specific method, becomes the basis for the company wide regulations. This paper describes reasons for having multiple methods and life cycle models within one QMS, explains the basic concepts of defining a QMS using model architectures and model architecture frames, and shows how this approach may be applied in a project.

1995

Delineating policies: governing spaces with no coextensive institutions

Thomas Charles Marie Pierre Favre-Bulle

EPFL2017