No abstract

The observation of helical surface states in Bi-based three-dimentional topological insulators has been a challenge since their theoretical prediction. The main issue raises when the Fermi level shifts deep into the bulk conduction band due to the unintentional doping. This results in a metallic conduction of the bulk which dominates the transport measurements and hinders the probing of the surface states in these experiments. In this study, we investigate various strategies to reduce the residual doping in Bi-based topological insulators. Flakes of Bi2Se3 and Bi1.5Sb0.5Te1.7Se1.3 are grown by physical vapor deposition and their structural and electronic properties are compared to mechanically exfoliated flakes. Using Raman spectroscopy, we explore the role of the substrate in this process and present the optimal conditions for the fabrication of high quality crystals. Despite of this improvement, we show that the vapor phase deposited flakes still suffer from structural disorder which leads to the residual n-type doping of the bulk. Using magneto-measurements we show that exfoliated flakes have better electrical properties and are thus more promising for the probing of surface states. arXiv:2001.04368v2 [cond-mat.mes-hall]

Agile/XP (Extreme Programming) software teams are expected to follow a number of specific practices in each iteration, such as estimating the effort ("points") required to complete user stories, properly using branches and pull requests to coordinate merging multiple contributors' code, having frequent "standups" to keep all team members in sync, and conducting retrospectives to identify areas of improvement for future iterations. We combine two observations in developing a methodology and tools to help teams monitor their performance on these practices. On the one hand, many Agile practices are increasingly supported by web-based tools whose "data exhaust" can provide insight into how closely the teams are following the practices. On the other hand, some of the practices can be expressed in terms similar to those developed for expressing service level objectives (SLO) in software as a service; as an example, a typical SLO for an interactive Web site might be "over any 5-minute window, 99% of requests to the main page must be delivered within 200ms" and, analogously, a potential Team Practice (TP) for an Agile/XP team might be "over any 2-week iteration, 75% of stories should be '1-point' stories". Following this similarity, we adapt a system originally developed for monitoring and visualizing service level agreement (SLA) compliance to monitor selected TPs for Agile/XP software teams. Specifically, the system consumes and analyzes the data exhaust from widely-used tools such as GitHub and Pivotal Tracker and provides team(s) and coach(es) a "dashboard" summarizing the teams' adherence to various practices. As a qualitative initial investigation of its usefulness, we deployed it to twenty student teams in a four-sprint software engineering project course. We find an improvement of the adherence to team practice and a positive students' self-evaluations of their team practices when using the tool, compared to previous experiences using an Agile/XP methodology. The demo video is located at https://youtu.be/A4xwJMEQh9c and a landing page with a live demo at https://isa-group.github.io/2019-05-eagle-demo/.

No abstract

Developers frequently move into new teams or environments across software companies. Their onboarding experience is correlated with productivity, job satisfaction, and other short-term and long-term outcomes. The majority of the onboarding process comprises engineering tasks such as fixing bugs or implementing small features. Nevertheless, we do not have a systematic view of how tasks influence onboarding. In this paper, we present a case study of Microsoft, where we interviewed 32 developers moving into a new team and 15 engineering managers onboarding a new developer into their team -to understand and characterize developers' onboarding experience and expectations in relation to the tasks performed by them while onboarding. We present how tasks interact with new developers through three representative themes: learning, confidence building, and socialization. We also discuss three onboarding strategies as inferred from the interviews that managers commonly use unknowingly, and discuss their pros and cons and offer situational recommendations. Furthermore, we triangulate our interview findings with a developer survey (N = 189) and a manager survey (N = 37) and find that survey results suggest that our findings are representative and our recommendations are actionable. Practitioners could use our findings to improve their onboarding processes, while researchers could find new research directions from this study to advance the understanding of developer onboarding. Our research instruments and anonymous data are available at https://zenodo.org/record/4455937#.YCOQCs_0lFd.