The research examines the value and potential usefulness of using systemic thinking, which looks at the interconnectedness of things, to comprehend the complexities of software development projects and the technical and human factors involved. It considers two different aspects of systemic thinking - psychological and sociological - and posits that these can assist in understanding how software teams function and attain their objectives, as well as the goals of the entities for which they work. Our research aims to provide a novel contribution to the field by investigating the use of systemic thinking in software development teams and organizations. We evaluate the reliability and validity of the survey applied to different groups of relevant participants, relate our findings to existing literature, and identify the most representative factors of systemic thinking. Despite the popularity of various factors that fall under the umbrella of ’systems thinking’, there is limited understanding of their effectiveness in improving organizational performance or productivity, particularly when it comes to psychological and sociological systemic factors. The relationship between the use of systems thinking and organizational performance is often based on anecdotal evidence, rather than the identification and application of specific factors. Our work emphasizes the importance of understanding and applying such factors in order to build a solid foundation for the effective use of system dynamics and systems thinking tools, which is crucial for software development teams.

Complex problems involve a concerted effort by the software team and can absorb vital resources, but our understanding of how the software team forms and succeeds has been minimal. It is not possible to explain the relationships between team achievement and scale, concentration, and especially team expertise by confound- ing elements, such as age group, additional participation from other individuals who are not in the team, or by team structures. This generates a need to understand software teams using systemic theory. This position paper presents the efforts we have undertaken to study the impact of systemic factors on software development teams and how systemic theory can be used to understand software teams. Our approach looks at the effect of psychological and sociological systemic variables on software teams to identify a way to represent software teams as systems

The increasing number of options of digital board games is exciting not only from an entertainment perspective but also from an academic prospect. It enables, for example, the application of modern computational techniques and algorithms for extracting and analyzing data from a variety of games - which range from classics like Chess and Go to modern board games with complex rules like Settlers of Catan and Terra Mystica. It is intuitive that different digital board games require distinct representation schemes and data structures to save, for example, the status or snapshot of a particular game at a specific moment. The choice for a representation model and data-structures is a crucial design decision that affects the selection of an algorithmic solution as well as the suitableness for artificial intelligence agents. This survey focuses on the different schemes and data structures used to represent game states, physical components, players, actions and rules for digital board games that have been reported in the academic literature. This study aims to lay the groundwork for the development of a game-independent computational framework which includes a generic game representation to facilitate and promote the application of computational techniques such as, for example, artificial intelligence and machine learning to this domain.

The use of biological signals to understand software development has become more popular in the last few years but poses new challenges with respect to the overall experimental settings.In this paper we present such challenges and the approach we took to overcome them.We illustrate our approach by evaluating two programming situations: pair programming and programming with music.The subjects involved in the experimentation are mostly students, however, in the largest case we involved graduate students coming from industry with at least three years of working experience.The results in general support the validity of this approach and encourage to go further in this research line.Moreover, as a byproduct, the analysis of pair programming confirms, from a biological perspective, early hypotheses that pair programming induces higher level of concentration.