A field study of the requirements engineering practice in Australian software industry

Empirical studies have demonstrated that requirements errors introduced during software development are most numerous in the software life-cycle, making software requirements critical determinants of software quality. This article reports an exploratory study which provides insight into industrial practices with respect to requirements engineering (RE). A combination of both qualitative and quantitative data is collected, using semi-structured interviews and a detailed questionnaire from 28 software projects in 16 Australian companies. The contribution of this RE study is threefold: Firstly, it includes a detailed examination of the characteristics of the RE activities involved in the projects. Secondly, it reconstructs the underlying practiced process models. Thirdly, it compares these models to one another and with a number of well-known process models from RE literature to give insight into the gap between RE theory and practice.     

Identifying software productivity improvement approaches and risks:construction industry case study

The realities of the global economy are forcing US manufacturers to identify ways to control software development more effectively, even if the discipline presently lacks agreed-upon processes and standard quality metrics. To foster improvements in software research and development, interdisciplinary, cross-pollination approach can provide many benefits within individual and group settings. Using a popular training video from the construction industry, the authors identify ways to overcome cultural, institutional, and implementation barriers to software process improvement     

The influencing causes of software unavailability: A case study from industry

Software unavailability can lead to disastrous consequences ranging from delays and cancellation to a loss of millions of dollars of technology. However, research on the causes that can make systems unavailable is still little. The aim of this paper is to investigate such causes in an industrial context using 2 qualitative approaches ((a) interview and (b) retrospective analysis) using archival data and records from a student information system. As a result, connectivity, human, hardware, storage, and software were found to be the important categories of causes for the unavailability. Besides, the critical lessons to be learned that relate to activities of software management and software business are also discussed. This includes vendor support, systems documentation, health check process, licensing, and software updating or upgrading. To strengthen the claim that our findings are promising, we compare our main findings with those of a previous study. This study can generally assist software engineering people including engineers, developers, project managers, vendors. Additionally, this paper dis cusses the threats to the study's validity and suggests open problems for future research.     

Measuring software quality: a case study

The National Security Agency's (NSA) mission is to provide support for the security of the United States. Over the years, the Agency has become extremely dependent on the software that makes up its information technology infrastructure. NSA has come to view software as a critical resource upon which much of the world's security, prosperity, and economic competitiveness increasingly rests. To ensure cost effective delivery of high quality software, NSA has analyzed effective quality measures applied to a sample code base of 25 million lines. This case study dramatically illustrates the benefits of code level measurement activities     

Value-based software engineering: a case study

The information technology field's accelerating rate of change makes feedback control essential for organizations to sense, evaluate, and adapt to changing value propositions in their competitive marketplace. Although traditional project feedback control mechanisms can manage the development efficiency of stable projects in well-established value situations, they do little to address the project's actual value, and can lead to wasteful misuse of an organization's scarce resources. The value-based approach to software development integrates value considerations into current and emerging software engineering principles and practices, while developing an overall framework in which these techniques compatibly reinforce each other.     

Macro-level software evolution: a case study of a large software compilation

Software evolution studies have traditionally focused on individual products. In this study we scale up the idea of software evolution by considering software compilations composed of a large quantity of independently developed products, engineered to work together. With the success of libre (free, open source) software, these compilations have become common in the form of ‘software distributions’, which group hundreds or thousands of software applications and libraries into an integrated system. We have performed an exploratory case study on one of them, Debian GNU/Linux, finding some significant results. First, Debian has been doubling in size every 2 years, totalling about 300 million lines of code as of 2007. Second, the mean size of packages has remained stable over time. Third, the number of dependencies between packages has been growing quickly. Finally, while C is still by far the most commonly used programming language for applications, use of the C++, Java, and Python languages have all significantly increased. The study helps not only to understand the evolution of Debian, but also yields insights into the evolution of mature libre software systems in general.

A user-centred approach to requirements elicitation in medical device development: a case study from an industry perspective

The healthcare industry is dependent upon the provision of well designed medical devices. To achieve this it is recommended that user-centred design should begin early, and continue throughout device development. This is a challenge, particularly for smaller companies who may lack the necessary expertise and knowledge. The aim of this study was to conduct a rigorous yet focused investigation into the user requirements for a new medical imaging device. Open-ended semi-structured interviews were conducted with potential clinical users of the device to investigate the clinical need for the device and the potential benefits for patients and clinical users. The study identified a number of new and significant clinical needs that suggested that the concept of the device should be fundamentally changed. The clinical and organisational priorities of the clinical users were identified, as well as a number of factors that would act as barriers to the safe and effective adoption of the device. The developers reported that this focused approach to early requirements elicitation would result in an improved product, reduce the time to market, and save the time and cost of producing and evaluating an inappropriate prototype.     

Data mining source code for locating software bugs: A case study in telecommunication industry

In a large software system knowing which files are most likely to be fault-prone is valuable information for project managers. They can use such information in prioritizing software testing and allocating resources accordingly. However, our experience shows that it is difficult to collect and analyze fine-grained test defects in a large and complex software system. On the other hand, previous research has shown that companies can safely use cross-company data with nearest neighbor sampling to predict their defects in case they are unable to collect local data. In this study we analyzed 25 projects of a large telecommunication system. To predict defect proneness of modules we trained models on publicly available Nasa MDP data. In our experiments we used static call graph based ranking (CGBR) as well as nearest neighbor sampling for constructing method level defect predictors. Our results suggest that, for the analyzed projects, at least 70% of the defects can be detected by inspecting only (i) 6% of the code using a Naïve Bayes model, (ii) 3% of the code using CGBR framework.     

Visual requirements analytics: a framework and case study

For many software projects, keeping requirements on track needs an effective and efficient path from data to decision. Visual analytics creates such a path that enables the human to extract insights by interacting with the relevant information. While various requirements visualization techniques exist, few have produced end-to-end value to practitioners. In this paper, we advance the literature on visual requirements analytics by characterizing its key components and relationships in a framework. We follow the goal–question–metric paradigm to define the framework by teasing out five conceptual goals (user, data, model, visualization, and knowledge), their specific operationalizations, and their interconnections. The framework allows us to not only assess existing approaches, but also create tool enhancements in a principled manner. We evaluate our enhanced tool support through a case study where massive, heterogeneous, and dynamic requirements are processed, visualized, and analyzed. Working together with practitioners on a contemporary software project within its real-life context leads to the main finding that visual analytics can help tackle both open-ended visual exploration tasks and well-structured visual exploitation tasks in requirements engineering. In addition, the study helps the practitioners to reach actionable decisions in a wide range of areas relating to their project, ranging from theme and outlier identification, over requirements tracing, to risk assessment. Overall, our work illuminates how the data-to-decision analytical capabilities could be improved by the increased interactivity of requirements visualization.     

Conceptualizing organizational innovation: The case of the Brazilian software industry

This paper presents and tests a conceptual model that explains the innovation practices and innovation outcomes in Brazilian software firms. In terms of internal and external innovation capabilities, the ability to manage the relationship between people and their organizational contexts plays an important role in organizational innovation. Based on these results, we propose that the disparities between software firms in building organizational innovation can be attributed, in part, to differences in their internal capabilities. The paper aims at encouraging and supporting managers to develop internal capabilities as a means of effectively leveraging the internally and externally distributed knowledge essential to innovation development.     

Evaluation of Workflow-type software products: a case study

The main objective of this paper is to propose a set of indicators for the evaluation of Workflow software-type products within the context of Information Systems. This paper is mainly based on a comprehensive bibliographical review of all topics referring to the Workflow Technology and Information Systems. Next, sets of indicators are presented for the selection of a Workflow software based on the realities of the business world, including a method of examination so as to obtain an integral evaluation on the Workflow software. Finally, the evaluation method for two types of Workflow software is applied: Lotus Domino/Notes^® and Microsoft Exchange^®, for the billing subsystems of a company called MANAPRO Consultants, Inc.^®.     

The role of distances in requirements communication: a case study

Requirements communication plays a vital role in development projects in coordinating the customers, the business roles and the software engineers. Communication gaps represent a significant source of project failures and overruns. For example, misunderstood or uncommunicated requirements can lead to software that does not meet the customers’ requirements, and subsequent low number of sales or additional cost required to redo the implementation. We propose that requirements engineering (RE) distance measures are useful for locating gaps in requirements communication and for improving on development practice. In this paper, we present a case study of one software development project to evaluate this proposition. Thirteen RE distances were measured including geographical and cognitive distances between project members, and semantic distances between requirements and testing artefacts. The findings confirm that RE distances impact requirements communication and project coordination. Furthermore, the concept of distances was found to enable constructive group reflection on communication gaps and improvements to development practices. The insights reported in this paper can provide practitioners with an increased awareness of distances and their impact. Furthermore, the results provide a stepping stone for further research into RE distances and methods for improving on software development processes and practices.

     

The personal software process: a cautionary case study

In 1995, Watts Humphrey introduced the Personal Software Process in his book, A Discipline for Software Engineering (Addison Wesley Longman, Reading, Mass.). Programmers who use the PSP gather measurements related to their own work products and the process by which they were developed, then use these measures to drive changes to their development behavior. The PSP focuses on defect reduction and estimation improvement as the two primary goals of personal process improvement. Through individual collection and analysis of personal data, the PSP shows how individuals can implement empirically guided software process improvement. The full PSP curriculum leads practitioners through a sequence of seven personal processes. The first and most simple PSP process, PSPO, requires that practitioners track time and defect data using a Time Recording Log and Defect Recording Log, then fill out a detailed Project Summary Report. Later processes become more complicated, introducing size and time estimation, scheduling, and quality management practices such as defect density prediction and cost-of-quality analyses. After almost three years of teaching and using the PSP, we have experienced its educational benefits. As researchers, however, we have also uncovered evidence of certain limitations. We believe that awareness of these limitations can help improve appropriate adoption and evaluation of the method by industrial and academic practitioners     

Managing requirements specifications for product lines - An approach and industry case study

Software product line development has emerged as a leading approach for software reuse. This paper describes an approach to manage natural-language requirements specifications in a software product line context. Variability in such product line specifications is modeled and managed using a feature model. The proposed approach has been introduced in the Swedish defense industry. We present a multiple-case study covering two different product lines with in total eight product instances. These were compared to experiences from previous projects in the organization employing clone-and-own reuse. We conclude that the proposed product line approach performs better than clone-and-own reuse of requirements specifications in this particular industrial context.     

Assessing architectural drift in commercial software development: a case study

Objectives: Software architecture is perceived as one of the most important artefacts created during a system's design. However, implementations often diverge from their intended architectures: a phenomenon called architectural drift. The objective of this research is to assess the occurrence of architectural drift in the context of de novo software development, to characterize it, and to evaluate whether its detection leads to inconsistency removal. Method: An in vivo, longitudinal case study was performed during the development of a commercial software system, where an approach based on Reflexion Modelling was employed to detect architectural drift. Observation and think‐aloud data, captured during the system's development, were assessed for the presence and types of architectural drift. When divergences were identified, the data were further analysed to see if identification led to the removal of these divergences. Results: The analysed system diverged from the intended architecture, during the initial implementation of the system. Surprisingly however, this work showed that Reflexion Modelling served to conceal some of the inconsistencies, a finding that directly contradicts the high regard that this technique enjoys as an architectural evaluation tool. Finally, the analysis illustrated that detection of inconsistencies was insufficient to prompt their removal, in the small, informal team context studied. Conclusions: Although the utility of the approach for detecting inconsistencies was demonstrated in most cases, it also served to hide several inconsistencies and did not act as a trigger for their removal. Hence additional efforts must be taken to lessen architectural drift and several improvements in this regard are suggested. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Requirements for a COTS software component: A case study

The goal of the GUARDS project is to design and develop a generic fault-tolerant computer architecture that can be built from predefined standardised components. The architecture favours the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software components. However, the assessment and selection of COTS components is a non-trivial task as it requires balancing a myriad of requirements from end-users and the preliminary architecture design. In this paper, we present the requirements and assessment criteria for a specific COTS software component, the operating system kernel. As an interface specification constitutes a major compatibility criterion for the selection of COTS components in GUARDS, a particular emphasis is placed on operating system conformance to the POSIX 1003.1 standard. We discuss the general lessons learned from the assessment process and raise a number of questions relevant to the assessment of any COTS software component.     

Knowledge based evaluation of software systems: a case study

Solving software evaluation problems is a particularly difficult software engineering process and many contradictory criteria must be considered to reach a decision. Nowadays, the way that decision support techniques are applied suffers from a number of severe problems, such as naive interpretation of sophisticated methods and generation of counter-intuitive, and therefore most probably erroneous, results. In this paper we identify some common flaws in decision support for software evaluations. Subsequently, we discuss an integrated solution through which significant improvement may be achieved, based on the Multiple Criteria Decision Aid methodology and the exploitation of packaged software evaluation expertise in the form of an intelligent system. Both common mistakes and the way they are overcome are explained through a real world example.     

Information technology and the accountant: a case study

The factors leading to the success or failure of IT implementations by accountants are investigated in a health service situation. Tbe case study adopts the participant observation methodology and the factors observed are classified as motivators and demotivators. Using a project dependent definition of success, a catastrophe theory framework is used to describe the outcome of the combined influence of these factors. Four particular IT projects are discussed and the factors observed include: the influence of higher levels in the organizational hierarchy, some systems characteristics, the seduction of technology, external pressures, the 'rate of change', skills shortage and reliability. By comparing the examples described with features mentioned by other authors, it is noted that some factors appear to be generally applicable, whereas others may be context dependent.