Disaster Planning

Running head: Java Developer 1

Table of Contents

Methodology6

What is Action Research?..............................................................................................6

History of Action Research ............7

Applications of Action Research..8

Action Research Process...8

Action Research Approach for Internship...11

References13

List of Figures

Figure 1: Seven-step process for conducting action research.9

Ikkon group is a leading software solutions provider company present in New Jersey, USA. The company provides specialized solutions to clients globally. Core competency and building block of the company is technical focus and client satisfaction. The company gives at most importance to its customers by its proven methodologies, global talent and by continued focus on R and D. The company has expertise in various fields such as mobile applications, remote support, knowledge management and software application development. It provides services ranging from outsourced application development, managed services and professional services. It always strives to accomplish excellence in high-end technology and creates ground-breaking products and services to its clients (Ikkon Group,2012).

The main objective of the company is to provide a one stop destination for its clients. The company helps its clients to understand complex business difficulties. The vision of the company is to be a prevalent supplier of imaginative business results, leveraging key innovations to enhance our clients' aggressiveness, development, and productivity. The company helps its clients in achieving and maintaining their mission critical applications at peak performance and scalability levels. The company employs effective methodologies for predicting system behavior and performance under real life stress conditions and helps its clients to achieve their bottom line (Ikkon Group,2012)..

Ikkon consists of skilled professionals who are capable of finding out the root cause of the problems and helps its clients in solving the problems within time and saves money. They find out all the potential causes of the problem and provide a detailed report on what needs to be fixed to its clients. The strengths of the company include in-depth expertise and experience in wide range of technologies, platforms, tools and business solutions; proactive, repeatable performance framework consisting of in-house tools and solutions; and reduction of licenses cost through alliance with HP. The predictive performance framework of the company predicts the application performance before deployment into production and performs analysis of potential hardware configuration (Ikkon Group,2012).

Ikkon offers anticipatory application solutions to help its business clients to stay ahead of the competition. The company studies and understands the unique and distinct processes of its client and develops applications specific to them. The company enables its clients to leverage IT to realize their business strategies, and to explore new opportunities. Ikkon delivers innovative solutions across number of technology platforms. Java/J2EE is one of the technologies used in the company. This technology is used in the development of various applications in many companies because of its benefits such as security, performance improvement, efficiency, and internationalization (A. Kankanala, personal communication, September 4, 2014).

The internship program offered to me at Ikkon Group is a Java Developer role. The main responsibilities of the role include (A. Kankanala, personal communication, September 4, 2014)

Designing and coding programs, creating and running unit tests and assisting with user acceptance testing to find errors and to revise programs.

Writing and reporting the documentation describing the design, installation steps, and system constraints and operating procedures.

Writing programs of moderate complexity and scope, working with web based java applications.

Interaction with the designers, business clients and other developers in the tem to design, code, test and implement application programs.

Developing code for web pages that are available in the front-end applications.

Through this project, I will be able to improve my programming skills as the internship deals with developing code for the programs and have an opportunity to work with experienced professionals, through which I can conduct some informational interviews with them and gather data about the industry. It also helps me to gain real-world experience. This project involves participation in meetings and discussions, which helps me to gain more information from other team members and improve my skills. Furthermore, it helps me to understand the structure and procedure for building and deploying any web application.

Methodology

What is Action Research?

Brighton & Moon (2007) emphasizes that Action research is a systematic, disciplined inquiry focused on addressing a specific, identifiable research question using the appropriate methods; quantitative and/or qualitative to answer that question (p. 24). It is a systematic and rigorous process involving question formation, data collection, analysis, implementation and reflection of the implementation (Koch, Kiener & Gitchel, 2009). Action research differs from other forms of research mainly by emphasis on scientific study, which means the researcher studies the problem systematically. Apart from the emphasis on scientific study, AR differs from other researches in turning the people to researchers; willingly applying the things learnt, as they do the research themselves; solving real world problems; and openly expressing their bias with other participants, at the same time remaining objective. A significant part of the researchers time during AR is spent on refining the methodological devices that suit the urgency of the circumstances, and on collecting, analyzing, and presenting information on a progressive, cyclical basis (OBrien, 2001).

History of Action Research

Action Research came into presence on account of social analyst Kurt Lewin, yet behind its existence a number of social activists, legislative and nongovernmental associations, and scientists having direct and indirect influences were present (Glassman, Erdem, & Bartholomew, 2013).

According to Barton, Stephens, & Haslett (2009), Action Research mainly consists of two stages (a) Diagnostic stage, where the problem is analyzed and hypotheses are developed and (b) Therapeutic stage, where the hypotheses are tested by a change experiment, in a social life situation. AR can be treated as a relationship between social action and research to discover a transformative social change. In AR, members of social groups connect, participate in discussions about the group relationships and participate together in a learning methodology to make social change within their community. This implies that AR is not an individual effort but rather a change in entire community framework to work collectively for shared goals. AR consists of a series of standards and procedures that depict how the events are to be sequenced to initiate progress in human communities. Research acts as a driving force for making a social action and to get out of the habitual thought process. AR insists that the most ideal approach to change goal-driven activity is by changing the interactional patterns of the community. These new patterns in the community drive in the direction of democratic decision-making to think of new possibilities for an action (Glassman et al., 2013).

Applications of Action Research

According to Brighton & Moon, action research has the potential to:

Provides the basis for evaluating faculty teaching, student academics and clinical performance, and educational program improvement using systematic and rigorous procedures (Koch, Kiener & Gitchel, 2009).

Solves issues that are of prompt concern for instructors, counselors, directors, and other educators without holding up for others to intercede on their behalf. (as cited in Mills, 2000 &Tomlinson, 1995).

places instructors in a dynamic part in the school change process and shapes school culture that supports data-driven change; (as cited in Mills, 2000 &Tomlinson, 1995).

enables individuals through coordinated effort with others and fosters them to reflect on practice; (as cited in Mills, 2000 &Tomlinson, 1995).

enables individuals to explore issues or problems, and serves as a model for evaluating learners, curriculum, or some aspect of program delivery. It has everything to offer those in the real world (N. Padak & G. Padak, 2014).

Action Research Process

According to Brighton & Moon (2007), Action Research process consists of seven steps, which are explained in detail below:

Figure 1: Seven-step process for conducting action research. Adapted from Step-by-Step: A tool for educators to change their worlds by by Brighton & Moon, 2007, Gifted Child Today, 30(2), 23-27.

Identify an area of focus. This step involves gathering of information to understand the area of study. Data gathering includes finding, inspecting writings on the topic to determine how specialists view the phenomena; getting inputs from other partners in the group; refining the topic to a specific research question that is to be answered in the ongoing action research process (Brighton & Moon, 2007). A good research question consists of three major characteristics. First, the issue chosen is to be important, and the issue should either be a problem or a new program that is to be evaluated. Second quality is that the question should directly related to the problem chosen to investigate, if there are multiple questions, each needs to be related to each other and the questions together should solve the overall problem. Third quality is that the question posed is to be answerable and answers are to be based on descriptions or observations, which implies that a good question begins with why, how or what (N. Padak & G. Padak, 2014).

Write an action plan to guide the inquiry process. In this step, researchers create an action plan for carrying out the inquiry process and start investigating. In some cases, this phase includes specific timeline for collecting data, sharing findings and enacting action. A document that outlines the steps in the action research process is developed in this step (Brighton & Moon, 2007).

Collect data to address the research question. Data collection is made to better understand the identified area of topic. The quality and the quantity of the data collected as a part of the inquiry process assists the researcher to find an action to be made (Brighton & Moon, 2007). Good data directly answers the posed question. It is good to collect data from more than one source of information for a question to get valid results. Furthermore, readily available information can serve as a good source to answer questions, which is not only efficient but also saves time (N. Padak & G. Padak, 2014).

Organize data. In this stage all the data that has been collected is to be organized and managed effectively. Data that is not organized properly may affect the quality of the data collected and thus affects the actions. This stage is sometimes regarded as unnecessary, but is critical as analyzing unorganized data takes lot of time and might miss some required information to answer the question (Brighton & Moon, 2007).

Analyze and interpret data. This phase involves examination of the data that is gathered and organized in the previous stages to interpret the results (Brighton & Moon, 2007). Analysis of data involves sorting the entire data into different categories. The sorting is made is such a way that each category shares some broader characteristic. Then a summary is developed for each category that captures the essence as a whole (N. Padak & G. Padak, 2014).

Share findings with identified stakeholders. This phase involves sharing the findings from the analysis stage with some specified stakeholders. This helps to get opinions in different perspectives from the stakeholders on the design, analysis and findings which offer valuable service before determining the final course of action (Brighton & Moon, 2007). Sharing can be done either formally or informally through discussions and conversations. Writing about the research in this phase provides additional insights about the research and it also serves as a material for further analysis and interpretation. In addition, documenting the research helps to have a permanent record of the research which can be used by others to learn from the project (N. Padak & G. Padak, 2014).

Develop the action plan. An action plan is developed based on the analysis made on the findings to create a change (Brighton & Moon, 2007).

Action Research Approach for Internship

Action Research provides a framework for systematic inquiry process for an individuals own practice. It can be conducted for any business projects or for academic works to find a solution to a specific question. Action research is considered local and focuses directly on the issues faced by students, individuals or anyone who conducts the research. It is not appropriate to generalize the findings from the action research as opposed to formal researches. The results or findings from the Action research after conducting analysis are specific only to a particular circumstance. Thus the Action research can be applied to the internship in findings results for any specific research question posed during performing the internship. Initially a topic that one likes to investigate is selected. For example, one could look at the strategies and procedures follow to develop an application. Action research can be used to investigate how a change in the strategies affects the developing efficiency and what new programming techniques can be used for better development of the application. After selecting the topic to investigate, a research question is posed and the goal is to develop a situation to improve it. Then after, a plan is designed for carrying out the investigation, gathering and organizing the data, analyzing the information to reflect on and improve the application development process. The results help to reflect on, to learn from the mistakes and to plan for the next iteration effectively.

References

Barton, J., Stephens, J., & Haslett, T. (2009). Action Research: Its foundations in open systems thinking and relationship to the scientific method. Systemic Practice & Action Research, 22(6), 475-488. doi:10.1007/s11213-009-9148-6

Brighton, C. M., & Moon, T. R. (2007). Step-by-Step: A tool for educators to change their worlds. Gifted Child Today, 30(2), 23-27.

Glassman, M., Erdem, G., & Bartholomew, M. (2013). Action research and its history as an adult education movement for social change. Adult Education Quarterly, 63(3), 272-288. doi:10.1177/0741713612471418

Ikkon Group (2012). Ikkon Group. Retrieved on September 7, 2014 from http://www.ikkongroup.com/

Koch, L., Kiener, M. S., & Gitchel, D. (2009). Action Research in rehabilitation education: Curricular applications. Rehabilitation Education, 23(3/4), 205-213.

Mills, G. E. (2000). Action research: Aguide for the teacher researcher. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.

OBrien, R. (2001). An overview of the methodological approach of action research. Retrieved from http://www.web.net/~robrien/papers/arfinal.html

Padak, N., & Padak,G. (Last Updated: 07/29/2014 10:29:41). Research to practice: Guidelines for planning action research projects. Retrieved from http://literacy.kent.edu/Oasis/Pubs/0200-08.htm

Tomlinson, C. A. (1995). Action research and practical inquiry: An overview and an invitation to teachers of gifted learners. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 18, 467484.