Andrey Maglyas, Uolevi Nikula, Kari Smolander and Samuel A. Fricker
Software product management (SPM) unites disciplines related to product strategy, planning, development, and release. There are many organizational activities addressing…
Abstract
Purpose
Software product management (SPM) unites disciplines related to product strategy, planning, development, and release. There are many organizational activities addressing technical, social, and market issues when releasing a software product. Owing to the high number of activities involved, SPM remains a complex discipline to adopt. The purpose of this paper is to understand what are the core and supporting SPM activities.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors adopted the research method of meta-ethnography to present a set of techniques for synthesizing individual qualitative studies to increase the degree of conceptualization. The results obtained from three empirical studies were synthesized using the meta-ethnography approach to enhance, rethink, and create a higher level abstraction of the findings.
Findings
The results show that the study has both theoretical and practical contribution. As the meta-ethnography synthesis has not been widely applied in software engineering, the authors illustrate how to use this research method in the practice of software engineering research. The practical contribution of the study is in the identification of five core and six supporting SPM activities.
Originality/value
The practical value of this paper is in the identification of core SPM activities that should be present in any company practicing SPM. The list of supporting SPM consists of activities that are not reported to product manager but affect the product success.
Details
Keywords
Negin Banaeianjahromi and Kari Smolander
Constant changes in the environment seem to have become the biggest challenge of a modern enterprise, which emphasizes the constant need to integrate the enterprise into its…
Abstract
Purpose
Constant changes in the environment seem to have become the biggest challenge of a modern enterprise, which emphasizes the constant need to integrate the enterprise into its changing environment. Aiming at eliminating the integration challenges, EA is proposed as a solution. The purpose of this paper is to survey and analyse the available literature on determining the role of EA in EI and also to identify gaps and state-of-the-art in research.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper presents a systematic mapping study that found 50 papers in the intersection of EA and EI, these papers were surveyed, analysed, and classified with respect to research focus, research method, and paper type.
Findings
Based on the analyses of the final 50 articles, the authors realized that “EA framework” is the dominating research focus of these studies. “Evaluation research” is recognized as the most common paper type in this area. However, “Experience paper” was a rare paper type in this research domain. “Constructive research” and “Case study/multiple case studies” are widely applied as the research method. “Survey”, “Delphi study” and “Grounded theory” are the least employed research methods. The conclusion was that there is a need for empirical research in this area. After analysing the articles based on their publication year, the authors also noticed a significant growth between 2004 and 2010. After 2010 the number of publications had a downward trend.
Originality/value
To the knowledge of the authors, this study is the first systematic literature study regarding the role of EA in EI. There are several systematic literature reviews about the EA or EI separately but none of them has addressed the specific realm of the research. Hence, the goal of this study is to provide a map of existing literature to enable improvement of the practice with the known research results and to identify gaps for future research.
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Erno Vanhala, Jussi Kasurinen and Kari Smolander
The purpose of this paper is to identify the peculiarity of computer game organizations and their human resources. It presents a stage model including four phases covering the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify the peculiarity of computer game organizations and their human resources. It presents a stage model including four phases covering the growth from demo group to full business. This study extends the research on how computer game organizations are formed and what it takes them to grow to financially self-sufficient. The study also broadens the understanding of the beginning phase of an organization.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper utilizes the grounded theory research method with 34 interview sessions among 11 computer game organizations. The interviewed persons include chief executive officers, designers and developers.
Findings
This paper presents empirical findings on what a computer game organization go through when they evolve from demo group phase, which is not discussed in existing literature, to full business. The authors observed that the core team is formed over a game designer and one or more developers. The team fortifies as the organization moves onwards to next phases. At the same time its reliance on partners and outsourcing changes to need based.
Research limitations/implications
As this is a qualitative study the observations are directly applicable only in the context of observed organizations. In the other context they are merely suggestions.
Practical implications
The study presents concrete growth model that can be utilized when building a computer game organization.
Originality/value
This paper illustrates the specialty of computer game organizations and their growth process. It also presents discussion of the beginning phase of organizations.
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Abstract
Details
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Chien-Wen Shen and Phung Phi Tran
This study aims to provide a more complete picture of blockchain development by combining numerous methodologies with diverse data sources, such as academic papers and news…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to provide a more complete picture of blockchain development by combining numerous methodologies with diverse data sources, such as academic papers and news articles. This study displays the developmental status of each subject based on the interrelationships of each topic cluster by analyzing high-frequency keywords extracted from the collected data. Moreover, applying above methodologies will help understanding top research topics, authors, venues, institutes and countries. The differences of blockchain research and new are identified.
Design/methodology/approach
To identify and find blockchain development linkages, researchers have used search terms such as co-occurrence, bibliographic coupling, co-citation and co-authorship to help us understand the top research topics, authors, venues, institutes and countries. This study also used text mining analysis to identify blockchain articles' primary concepts and semantic structures.
Findings
The findings show the fundamental topics based on each topic cluster's links. While “technology”, “transaction”, “privacy and security”, “environment” and “consensus” were most strongly associated with blockchain in research, “platform”, “big data and cloud”, “network”, “healthcare and business” and “authentication” were closely tied to blockchain news. This article classifies blockchain principles into five patterns: hardware and infrastructure, data, networking, applications and consensus. These statistics helped the authors comprehend the top research topics, authors, venues, publication institutes and countries.
Research limitations/implications
Since Web of Science (WoS) and LexisNexis Academic data are used, the study has few sources. Others advise merging foreign datasets. WoS is one of the world's largest and most-used databases for assessing scientific papers.
Originality/value
This study has several uses and benefits. First, key concept discoveries can help academics understand blockchain research trends so they can prioritize research initiatives. Second, bibliographic coupling links academic papers on blockchain. It helps information seekers search and classify the material. Co-citation analysis results can help researchers identify potential partners and leaders in their field. The network's key organizations or countries should be proactive in discovering, proposing and creating new relationships with other organizations or countries, especially those from the journal network's border, to make the overall network more integrated and linked. Prominent members help recruit new authors to organizations or countries and link them to the co-authorship network. This study also used concept-linking analysis to identify blockchain articles' primary concepts and semantic structures. This may lead to new authors developing research ideas or subjects in primary disciplines of inquiry.