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swinburne JUne 2009 Maren Rawlings workplace 14 No joke when it’s survival of the funniest story by Bianca Nogrady & Rebecca Thyer In uncertain economic times when many people are worried about keeping their jobs, it’s understandable that some workplaces may be losing the jocular banter that otherwise relieves the working day. But this doesn’t mean that humour has left the office. Quite the contrary, it seems, with humour acquiring a competitive edge as it becomes part of some people’s survival strategy. Qualitative evidence uncovered by ,, When stress levels increase people tend to use their humour competitively.” Maren Rawlings photo: paul Jones Swinburne PhD researcher Maren Rawlings suggests that some types of humour – the type that targets particular people as the butt of jokes – regularly occurs in the workplace. And this type of humour could be on the rise. Ms Rawlings, a psychologist in Swinburne’s Faculty of Life and Social Sciences and a former teacher, says that the rate of competitive humour clearly increases as work environments become more stressed. “People are very generous to each other when things are going well, but that starts to change when workplaces become tense. People start to compete and humour becomes strategic.” Although it might seem a trivial consequence of a downturn in global fortunes, this sort of humour has wider implications. Ms Rawlings’s research is finding, unsurprisingly, that ‘bad humour’ can reduce people’s job satisfaction and their perception of their own and others’ productivity. Ms Rawlings has measured the impact on organisations of how humour is used at work. This has led to her development of a tool that assesses workplace humour. Called the Humour at Work scale (HAW) it is a proxy measure of the atmosphere of a workplace and it predicts employees’ job satisfaction. She has found that it can explain variations in productivity between offices or worksites. The HAW scale is likely to be commercialised later this year for use by human resources units to sample an office climate, without the need to ask unwelcome questions. “It asks about humour in the workplace, not about an individual’s fear or job satisfaction, so workers are more likely to respond to it,” Ms Rawlings says. Ms Rawlings began studying how humour is used at work and the difference it can make to the office environment as part of her PhD at Swinburne, with Dr Bruce Findlay. She wrote 150 items, 75 about how an individual uses humour and 75 about how an individual sees other people use humour, and gave them to more than 350 participants in an international internet survey. From this research, which examined the reasons why people use humour and also other people’s reactions to that humour, she was able to articulate two clear sets of factors defining ‘pleasant’ or ‘unpleasant’ humour environments. These led to two scales: one for a pleasant climate where humour puts people at ease and its flipside, an unpleasant climate, where humour is nasty. The next step was to ascertain what difference these climates made. To answer this, Ms Rawlings surveyed 400 Australian working people to calibrate her humour scale against job satisfaction and other workplace measures, including one that predicted productivity. She found the more there was positive humour in a workplace, the more satisfied employees were. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but she found it did fly in the face of a common management belief that ‘joking around’ was bad for workplace efficiency. High results on the unpleasant humour climate scale correlated strongly with low job satisfaction and with low scores on the occupational climate measure that predicted productivity. Continuing research has allowed her to show that an unpleasant workplace environment, particularly the presence of negative humour, could be increasing people’s anxiety at work and eroding people’s job satisfaction so much that productivity levels could be reduced by nearly 20 per cent compared with those being achieved in more relaxed or ‘fun’ workplaces. Because her research has coincided with the deteriorating global economy, Ms Rawlings has received anecdotal evidence on its impact on office humour too: “People are either saying there is now no humour at work or that the humour is grim,” she says. “Also, when stress levels increase people tend to use their humour competitively.” •• * Ms Rawlings’ humour knowledge has been recognised internationally. In July 2008 she was awarded a Certificate of Merit and a cash prize from the International Society for Humour Studies for her postgraduate presentation at its conference in Spain. Contact. . Swinburne University of Technology 1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946) magazine@swinburne.edu.au www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine
June 2009 swinburne New environment to debug global-scale I.T. upgrades story by David Adams Testing new computer systems before they go live is usually standard procedure for introducing new software across a business. But when it comes to large, distributed systems such as those used by global companies, this is not an easy exercise. While existing testing technologies can emulate, to a certain extent, enterprisescale IT environments, they tend to be time-consuming to deploy and require considerable resources to operate. There is a lack of scalable testing environments that can efficiently and realistically imitate the complex interactions that occur among the tens of thousands of systems across big businesses on a daily basis. Professor Jun Han, who heads Swinburne University of Technology’s Software and Enterprise Systems research program, says that a typical large enterprise will have thousands of different IT systems supporting various parts of the business (from procurement to personnel management, and involving different software and hardware), each of which may need to interact with the other. For example, he says employees often have specific clearances to access different IT systems – a set-up that is usually done with one entry through an identity management system, which will talk to all the other systems. But the identity management system itself needs to be tested before being deployed. “And that generally is a problem,” Professor Han says. “How do you test this software? You can’t test it in a production environment, and in a development environment you can’t set up a realistic physical testing environment running 10,000 systems.” The existing methods for testing scenarios such as this are complex and cumbersome and there is currently no single method or tool that can efficiently test all the issues involved. It is necessary to rely on a combination of tools and techniques, each of which tests different facets of the issues that may arise in large-scale inter-connected enterprise environments. Examples of these techniques include networks of virtual machines, load generation tools and custom scripts and software agents. Setting up a network of virtual machines, for example, may involve running up to 100 machines and seeing whether they interact correctly. “This may work with 100 systems but not with 1000 or 10,000 systems, in meeting quality expectations like response time and throughput,” Professor Han says. It is a global challenge and Professor Han is now leading a collaborative research project between Swinburne and an international IT group, CA Labs, to develop a software environment that runs on just one or two computers while emulating widely distributed computing conditions and systems within a business. Using a scalable prototype system means that the testing environment can involve as many systems as required and provide a realistic enterprise setting. Alongside the ability to conduct functional and performance testing on a large scale, Professor Han says it is envisaged that the new emulation environment being developed would also enable other system qualities – such as how the system responds to delay or to unpredictable behaviour – to be more accurately tested than has previously been possible. “That’s the ‘it’ factor we want to achieve in this emulation environment: to emulate thousands of systems in real time with predetermined and unpredictable behaviour. It’s about quality assurance (QA), knowing that a new system will function properly, no matter how many systems it needs to talk to and even if some of these systems are not available or down.” The project is being funded by CA Labs, which was established by global software firm CA in 2005 to strengthen relationships between the company and research communities. It has been running for two years and is expected to continue beyond its initial three-year timetable. illustration: Justin garnsworthy ,, That’s the ‘it’ factor we want to achieve in this emulation environment: to emulate thousands of systems in real time with predetermined and unpredictable behaviour.” Professor Jun Han As well as Professor Han, the team of Swinburne researchers working on the project includes Dr Jean-Guy Schneider, Dr Lars Grunske and PhD student Cameron Hine. The project is based on, and further extends, Swinburne’s research expertise in system integration, software architecture, and system performance and reliability. A prototype system, known as REACTO, was demonstrated at the four-day CA World conference in Las Vegas in November 2008. The demonstration emulated 10,000 enterprise systems successfully interacting with CA’s ‘Identity Manager’ software as the system under test. Dr Steve Versteeg, a research staff member at CA Labs in Melbourne and also a member of the project team, says the concept has already attracted considerable interest within CA and its customer base, which represents many of the world’s largest enterprises. Noting that while all CA software is already comprehensively tested before it goes out, Dr Versteeg adds that the scalable emulation project would further enhance that. “QA has existing methods for testing the scalability of a system,” he notes. “What this can do is to unify that and simplify and extend it.” •• Contact. . Swinburne University of Technology 1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946) magazine@swinburne.edu.au www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine Information Technology 15
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