Investigating Peace Education and Peace Culture Activities in the Curriculum of Secondary Schools of Pakistan

Peace has always been a fundamental need of humanity and social beings. Despite of all the worldly, scientific and materialistic progress in almost every domain of life, eternal peace is missing. Peace education is a process of achieving peace, at personal, inter-personal, national and international levels, through education, focusing on promoting universal brotherhood, fraternity, global citizenship and the culture of peaceful co-existence. This article aims to institutionalize peace education and culture at secondary government schools of Lahore, Pakistan. A questionnaire focusing on peace education and inculcating of peace culture was used for data collection. The data revealed peace education is implicitly taught but it is not practiced in schools and hence, is not part of school curriculum. Also peace culture-related activities are missing in the school curriculum and there is a dire need of such activities.

Iscrum: An Improved Scrum Process Model

Transition of Software industry from classical software development to Agile software development is because of the continuously changing market needs and complex business transformations. By offering faster delivery of quality product with better collaboration and customer satisfaction, Agile approaches fulfil the demands of highly dynamic market environments. There are several Agile methodologies such as Crystal, Extreme programming, DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method), Scrum, Feature-driven development (FDD), etc. Scrum is one of the most popular Agile process models. It is adaptive and versatile in nature and based on iterative and incremental practices. This methodology has yielded a significant increase in productivity and quality of the product. However, there are certain weak areas where we need to focus on including documentation, testing, team?s performance, visibility of work during a Sprint, and maintenance. This work has not only identified these problem areas but also proposed a solution to overcome the problems. This customized version of Scrum has brought innovation by addition and adaptation of certain practices while keeping intact the simplicity and integrity of Scrum model. The proposed solution has tailored and adapted Agile Scrum in different areas for software process improvement that in turn lead to increased productivity and product quality. A case study and a survey have been conducted to explore the validity of proposed model. In addition to that, a pragmatic evaluation has been carried out to assert if IScrum outperforms the Scrum in those challenging areas while achieving the desired objectives. It has been manifested through the quantitative and qualitative data that proposed model has improved the traditional Scrum in most of the development extents.