PhD student in Information Systems and Innovation
Research Interests
Thesis: 'Distributed development of large-scale, distributed systems: The case of the Particle physics Grid'
Systems development beyond the very smallest scale is inherently a collaborative activity. However, something has changed recently in the nature, the scale and the scope of the collaboration. The last decades have witnessed a steady trend towards the globalization of innovation, markets etc. This has impacted software development and the management, development and maintenance of software has increasingly become a political, multi-site and multi-cultural distributed undertaking. Although global software development has become the new trend in developing large-scale systems, there is still significant understanding to be achieved and working practices to be evolved before it becomes a mature discipline and its benefits are fully understood. The aim of this research is therefore to study the distributed development of large-scale distributed systems, through a case study of a Grid development project in particle physics – the GridPP project - and to address the following questions: What is the nature of systems development for such a large-scale and global project? How do collaborative practices emerge in response to the demands of such distributed development? How do these collaborative practices influence the development of large-scale and global systems?
The systems development setting studied here is the particle physics community, a community with a tradition of solving their own technological problems. Particle physicists have for many decades worked as a globally distributed community that thrives on democratic debates and discussions. They have been characterized as having distinctive history, culture and working practices and their collaboration has been described to be “exceptional”, something which we must expect will influences the working practices they employ. Thus, we hypothesize that embedded particle physicists’ working practices come to be reflected both in the way the Grid is being developed and in the way the collaborative effort is organised.
The theoretical framework is drawn from Activity theory in an attempt to present/frame the GridPP project as a complex activity system influenced by the community’s rules, norms, history, past experiences, shared visions and collaborative way of working. We propose to understand the Grid’s development as a series of contradictions between the elements of this activity system which are in a continuous situation of getting resolved in order for the activity system to achieve stability and balance.
Supervisor