Running head: Java Developer

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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

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

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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

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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.

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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 realworld 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

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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

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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:

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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).

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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).

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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

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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.

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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.