Emerging Issues &Challenges in Cloud Computing—A Hybrid Approach

As cloud computing continues to gain more momentum in the IT industry, more issues and challenges are being reported by academics and practitioners. In this paper, we aim to attain an understanding of the types of issues and challenges that have been emerging over the past five years and identify gaps between the focus of the literature and what practitioners deem important. A systematic literature review as well as interviews with experts have been conducted to answer our research questions. Our findings suggest that researchers have been mainly focusing on issues related to security and privacy, infrastructure, and data management. Interoperability across different service providers has also been an active area of research. Despite the significant overlap between the topics being discussed in the literature and the issues raised by the practitioners, our findings show that some issues and challenges that practitioners consider important are understudied such as software related issues, and challenges pertaining to learning fast-evolving technologies.

User Experience Design and Agile Development: From Theory to Practice

We used existing studies on the integration of user experience design and agile methods as a basis to develop a framework for integrating UX and Agile. We performed a field study in an ongoing project of a medium-sized company in order to check if the proposed framework fits in the real world, and how some aspects of the integration of UX and Agile work in a real project. This led us to some conclusions situating contributions from practice to theory and back again. The framework is briefly described in this paper and consists of a set of practices, artifacts, and techniques derived from the literature. By combining theory and practice we were able to confirm some thoughts and identify some gaps—both in the company process and in our proposed framework—and drive our attention to new issues that need to be addressed. We believe that the most important issues in our case study are: UX designers cannot collaborate closely with developers because UX designers are working on multiple projects and that UX designers cannot work up front because they are too busy with too many projects at the same time.

Empirically evaluating virtual reality’s effect on reservoir engineering tasks

To help determine in what ways virtual reality(VR)technologies may benefit reservoir engineering workflows,we conducted a usability study on a prototype VR tool for performing reservoir model analysis tasks.By leveraging the strengths of VR technologies,this tool’s aim is to help advance reservoir analysis workflows beyond conventional methods by improving how one understands,analyzes,and interacts with reservoir model visualizations.To evaluate our tool’s VR approach to this,the study presented herein was conducted with reservoir engineering experts who used the VR tool to perform three common reservoir model analysis tasks:the spatial filtering of model cells using movable planes,the cross-comparison of multiple models,and well path planning.Our study found that accomplishing these tasks with the VR tool was generally regarded as easier,quicker,more effective,and more intuitive than traditional model analysis software while maintaining a feeling of low task workload on average.Overall,participants provided positive feedback regarding their experience with using VR to perform reservoir engineering work tasks,and in general,it was found to improve multi-model cross-analysis and rough object manipulation in 3D.This indicates the potential for VR to be better than conventional means for some work tasks and participants also expressed they could see it best utilized as an addition to current software in their reservoir model analysis workflows.There were,however,some concerns voiced when considering the full adoption of VR into their work that would be best first addressed before this took place.