Experiences With Conservation Agriculture in the Eastern Gangetic Plains: Farmer Benefits, Challenges, and Strategies That Frame the Next Steps for Wider Adoption

While there are numerous studies that explore the agronomic and the economic benefits of Conservation Agriculture in South Asia, only few studies have explored the farmers' experiences and the drivers of its adoption. This study aims to learn directly from current users through exploration of their decision processes, evaluations, and experiences in extrapolating the concept for the broader scaling of Conservation Agriculture across the Eastern Gangetic Plains (EGPs) of South Asia. We analyzed a total of 57 qualitative and semi-structured individual interviews with the farmers who are currently implementing Conservation Agriculture practices across six locations. These farmers faced a variety of hurdles including hesitation in accepting and adopting the technology, technical performance challenges, information gaps, and subsidy/project dependence. To overcome these, respondents adopted various strategic approaches such as assuming the role of an educator by sharing their knowledge with other farmers in the community, changing mindsets for stover retention, adoption through self-investment, and opting for communal purchase of machinery to reduce project dependence. This led farmers to identify a range of benefits including improved socio-economic condition, increased respect in the community, and increased free time to pursue diverse interests and opportunities. Additionally, strengthened information networks such as improved interpersonal connection with agricultural universities, government extension systems, and local farmers groups have positively enhanced the uptake, allowing them to overcome further limitations. These findings provide novel learnings on how farmers overcome nine key friction points, and what this means for increasing the farmer uptake of new practices across the region, which are crucial for successful future interventions as implemented by the government and development organizations.

Usability Cost-Benefit Analysis for Information Technology Applications and Decision Making

Usability is an important quality attribute for information technology (IT) applications. However, integrating usability design and evaluation as an integral part of the development processes in information technology development organizations is still a challenge. This chapter gives an overview on the usability cost-benefit analysis models and provides some example cases of the importance of usability. These models and cases can be used by usability professionals to motivate the organizational management to provide resources for usability work and to integrate usability work as part of the development process. The target audience for this chapter are professionals and researchers working in the field of IT, managers in IT development organizations, as well as managers in organizations acquiring and using IT.

Metastructuring for Standards

This chapter focusses on the appearance and implementation of process standards in software development organizations. The authors are interested in the way organizations handle the plurality of process standards. Organizations respond by metastructuring to the increasing demand for standardizing their development processes. Standards metastructuring summarizes all organizational mechanisms for facilitating the ongoing adaption of global standards to the organizational context. Based on an in-depth single case study of a software developing organization in the automotive technology sector, the authors found four areas of metastructuring, four roles for standard mediation, and four types of metastructuring activities. With the case study, they encourage further research that proves standards in use and how organizations respond to the challenges of standardization.

Threat Modeling in Agile Software Development

Threat modeling is a way to get an overview of possible attacks against your systems. The advantages of threat modeling include tackling security problems early, improved risk assessments, and more effective security testing. There will always be limited resources available for security, and threat modeling will allow you to focus on the most important areas first. There is no one single “correct” way of doing threat modeling, and “agile” is no excuse for not doing it. This chapter describes the authors' experiences with doing threat modeling with agile development organizations, outlining challenges to be faced and pitfalls to be avoided.

Evaluating for Resilient and Sustainable Livelihoods: Applying a Normative Framework to Emerging Realities

Evaluation has to reflect the evolving priorities of development and measure progress on their achievement. At the same time, evaluation must also incorporate newer demands from within the field such as increasing equity focus in evaluations, gender mainstreaming, and human rights. Environment and climate change became mainstreamed into the programming of development organizations following the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and formation of financing mechanisms such as the Global Environment Facility (GEF) in 1991. This chapter reflects on how the Independent Office of Evaluation (IOE) of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) addressed the growing demands on the evaluation function in terms of incorporating concerns on environment and climate within existing methodological frameworks, and also adapting its methodology to meet internal and external evaluation demands. The chapter considers how evolving methodologies, methods, and tools have helped IFAD overcome these issues.

Boosting the Competitiveness of Organizations With the Use of Software Engineering

Software has become the core of organizations in different domains because the capacity of their products, systems, and services have an increasing dependence on software. This fact highlights the research challenges to be covered by computer science, especially in the software engineering (SE) area. On the one way, SE is in charge of covering all the aspects related to the software development process from the early stages of software development until its maintenance and therefore is closely related to the software quality. On the other hand, SE is in charge of providing engineers able to provide technological-base solutions to solve industrial problems. This chapter provides a research work path focused on helping software development organizations to change to a continuous software improvement culture impacting both their software development process highlighting the human factor training needs. Results show that the implementation of best practices could be easily implemented if adequate support is provided.

Measuring Developers' Software Security Skills, Usage, and Training Needs

Software security does not emerge fully formed by divine intervention in deserving software development organizations; it requires that developers have the required theoretical background and practical skills to enable them to write secure software, and that the software security activities are actually performed, not just documented procedures that sit gathering dust on a shelf. In this chapter, the authors present a survey instrument that can be used to investigate software security usage, competence, and training needs in agile organizations. They present results of using this instrument in two organizations. They find that regardless of cost or benefit, skill drives the kind of activities that are performed, and secure design may be the most important training need.

Researchers’ View on R&D Organizational Change Using the Grief Cycle

<p>When change becomes a need, research and development organizations must likewise be adaptable to new challenges. The necessary changes will provide difficulties for management to manage human resource development. Failure, stagnation, or success is the eventual consequence of every organizational reform. Organizational changes are effective or unsuccessful based on the implementation strategies used, emphasizing the significance of human development managerial skills, leadership communication, and organizational interpersonal communication. This study aims to present an empirical study of changes occurring in research and development companies using grief cycle analysis. This research utilizes a variety of aspects and documents from prior studies to analyze the collective grief cycle phenomena associated with organizational changes in the R&amp;D sector. The empirical description of the grieving cycle analysis demonstrates that the outcome of the grief cycle process indicates that the organization is not prepared to undertake changes, resulting in the crisis of certain workers. An empirical account of grieving cycle analysis reveals that time and the process of habituation play a significant influence in organizational members acceptance of changes in research and development organizations. Leadership communication and organizational interpersonal communication are critical in influencing organizational members' comprehension and acceptance of organizational goals and change processes..</p><p> </p>Keywords: grief cycle, organizational change R&amp;D, acceptance, HR management, leadership communication, organizational interpersonal communication