Managing knowledge on communication and information flow in global software projects

Communication is a key success factor of distributed software projects. Poor communication has been identified as a main obstacle to successful collaboration. Global projects are especially endangered by information gaps between collaborating sites. Different communication styles, technical equipment, and missing awareness of each other can cause severe problems. Knowledge about actual and desired channels, paths, and modes of communication is required for improving communication in a globally distributed project. However, many project participants know little about communication and information flow in their projects. In this contribution, we focus on knowledge about communication and information flow. It is acquired by modelling on‐going and desired flows of information, including documented and non‐documented channels of information flow. We analyzed a distributed software project from the information flow perspective. Based on the findings, we developed specific techniques to improve information flow in distributed software development according to the FLOW Method. In a second distributed project, we evaluated one of the techniques. We found the FLOW mapping technique to be suitable for effectively spreading knowledge about communication and information flow in global software projects.     

Agile vs. structured distributed software development: A case study

In globally distributed software development, does it matter being agile rather than structured? To answer this question, this paper presents an extensive case study that compares agile (Scrum, XP, etc.) vs. structured (RUP, waterfall) processes to determine if the choice of process impacts aspects such as the overall success and economic savings of distributed projects, the motivation of the development teams, the amount of communication required during development, and the emergence of critical issues. The case study includes data from 66 projects developed in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The results show no significant difference between the outcome of projects following agile processes and structured processes, suggesting that agile and structured processes can be equally effective for globally distributed development. The paper also discusses several qualitative aspects of distributed software development such as the advantages of nearshore vs. offshore, the preferred communication patterns, and the effects on project quality.     

Load balancing in project assignment

In this paper, we study a project assignment problem. Specifically, a set of projects, each of which needs to be finished over a project development cycle, are to be assigned to a group of identical engineers over a discrete planning horizon. The workload of the projects is different and fluctuates over their development cycles. In each period, engineers have a maximum allowed workload. The objective of the problem is to assign the projects to engineers with the objective of balancing the total workload among the engineers; the load balance is measured by the difference between the maximum and the minimum total workload. Such a problem is new to the literature. After proving the problem is strongly NP-hard, we propose a two-stage heuristic approach to solve it. Extensive numerical experiments show that the proposed approach can achieve optimal or nearly optimal solutions for all test cases; such performance is much better than what can be obtained from an IP model solved with ILOG CPLEX. An analysis of the algorithm has also been provided to explain how the superior performance has been achieved.     

Waste identification as the means for improving communication in globally distributed agile software development

Agile approaches highly values communication between team members to improve software development processes, even though, communication in globally distributed agile teams can be difficult. Literature proposes solutions for mitigating the challenges encountered in these environments. These solutions range from general-level recommendations and practices to the use of communication tools. However, an approach covering the whole development process for identifying challenges, and improving communication in globally distributed agile development projects, is missing. In order to address this, we conducted a case study within a globally distributed agile software development project focused on using the concept of waste as a lens for identifying non-value producing communication elements. In order to achieve this, we constructed a waste identification approach through which we identified five communication wastes, and solutions to mitigate them. These wastes can help companies identify communication issues that are present in their development efforts, while the presented waste identification technique gives them a mechanism for waste identification and mitigation. This work contributes to the scientific community by increasing the knowledge about communication in globally distributed agile development efforts.     

Fear of trying: the plight of rookie project managers

Most software engineers do not want the hassle of project management. Poor project management is the number one cause of software project failure. How do we grow good project managers? What do we teach the rookies who have just been appointed to lead their first software project? Regardless of the training or mentoring approach you use, I suggest focusing on four major attributes, which I describe in their order of importance: communication, negotiation, organization and facilitation     

Introducing the personal software process

The personal software process (PSP) has been developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) to address the improvement needs of individual software engineers. It should also be of help to small projects and modest-sized software organizations. In a one-semester graduate-level course, engineers are introduced to measurement, planning, and quality control methods. A defined sequence of programming exercises are used to illustrate these methods and the exercise data are used to provide the students with feedback on their performance. The PSP course has been taught at five universities at both the graduate and senior undergraduate level. Various PSP introduction methods have also been tried at four industrial organizations, but the course format has also been found most effective. Results to date indicate that PSP training motivates engineers to use disciplined methods and it helps them to achieve significant quality and productivity improvements. While PSP principles have been demonstrated with software engineering students, their effectiveness has not yet been measured in industrial practice. This paper describes the PSP process, the strategic approach and experience to date.This work is supported by the US Department of Defense.     

How experienced project managers assess risk

Software development projects, given their diverse and abstract nature, offer unique challenges and risks. Although a substantial body of literature has been written to address project risk management, my experience in the field led me to question whether this literature accurately mirrors the concerns of real-world project managers. To confirm my suspicions, I surveyed 14 experienced application systems developers, all located in Ireland. All survey participants manage custom-built, software-intensive application development projects that originate from external clients. The survey focused on three major areas: (1) Which characteristics of the customer, the application, and so on, do experienced software project managers consider important when planning new development projects for new, external clients? (2) How do these characteristics relate to accepted software project risk drivers? (3) Do most project managers characterize new projects in generally the same way, or do different project managers use different perceptual lenses when viewing new projects? This survey of a homogenous group of project managers revealed a surprising diversity of risk management concerns     

Distributed Java applets for project management on the Web

The rapid evolution of our data communications infrastructure is making distributed projects increasingly viable. Without a common infrastructure, computer-supported collaborative tools for distributed teams have been prohibitively expensive to build and maintain. However, the increasing availability of the Internet is enabling companies to develop cost-effective collaborative solutions. Traditional desktop project management software is designed as a single-user tool that lets the project manager track tasks, milestones and deliverables. As teams spread over geographic distances with multiple centers of control, the communication, coordination, and tracking of ongoing project activity become key issues for project success. This article looks beyond the traditional planning focus of project management applications to a network-centric focus on collaboration. It describes the implementation of ActionPlan, a 100 percent Java-based application from Netmosphere that supports real-time collaboration among Java thin clients to facilitate distributed project management     

Single development project

An often-cited problem in undergraduate software engineering courses states that some topics are difficult to teach in a university setting and, although laboratory work is a useful supplement to the lectures, it is difficult to make projects realistic and relevant. In recognition of this problem, and based on our past experience, we started preparing a new course by examining the pedagogies and curricular aspects of software engineering that are important for the Net Generation of software engineers.The course project described in this paper concentrates on those aspects that can be dealt with effectively within the environment, i.e., the software lifecycle, system interdependences, teamwork, and realistic yet manageable project dynamics, all supported by various means of communication. The workload per students must be balanced with their lack of knowledge and skills, so that their unpreparedness to deal with complex issues does not abate their motivation.The approach was tested on six large projects over the period of one semester. We believe that the results reflect the students’ strong interest and commitment, and demonstrate their ability to stay focused and work at a level that is well above the obvious.     

Model-based testing approaches selection for software projects

Selecting software technologies for software projects represents a challenge to software engineers. It is known that software projects differ from each other by presenting different characteristics that can complicate the selection of such technologies. This is not different when considering model-based testing. There are many approaches with different characteristics described in the technical literature that can be used in software projects. However, there is no indication as to how they can fit a software project. Therefore, a strategy to select model-based testing approaches for software projects called Porantim is fully described in this paper. Porantim is based on a body of knowledge describing model-based testing approaches and their characterization attributes (identified by secondary and primary experimental studies), and a process to guide by adequacy and impact criteria regarding the use of this sort of software technology that can be used by software engineers to select model-based testing approaches for software projects.     

Social ties,knowledge sharing and successful collaboration in globally distributed system development projects

Traditionally, the main focus of the information system (IS) literature has been on technical aspects related to system development projects. Furthermore, research in the IS field has mainly focused on co-located project teams. In this respect, social aspects involved in IS projects were neglected or scarcely reported. To fill this gap, this paper studies the contribution of social ties and knowledge sharing to successful collaboration in distributed IS development teams. Data were drawn from two successful globally distributed system development projects at SAP and LeCroy. Data collected were codified using Atlas.ti software. The results suggest that human-related issues, such as rapport and transactive memory, were important for collaborative work in the teams studied. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for theory and suggesting a practical guide to enhance collaborative work in globally distributed teams.     

关于项目管理的几点体会

随着各行各业IT建设的不断发展,越来越多项目的投入建设和使用,然而,其中失败的例子也并不少见,因此,项目管理也日益受到各方的重视,究竟项目管理的问题何在,文章结合笔者多年从事IT项目的实践、经验和思考,对项目管理进行了初步的探讨和阐述,供各位同行参考。     

Using metrics in management decision making

The amount of code in NASA systems has continued to grow over the past 30 years. This growth brings with it the increased risk of system failure caused by software. Thus, managing the risks inherent in software development and maintenance is becoming a highly visible and important field. The metrics effort within NASA's Mission Operations Directorate has helped managers and engineers better understand their processes and products. The toolkit helps ensure consistent data collection across projects and increases the number and types of analysis options available to project personnel. The decisions made on the basis of metrics analysis have helped project engineers make decisions about project and mission readiness by removing the inherent optimism of “engineering judgment”     

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.

     

CMMI资源模型设计方案

资源模型是CMM或CMMI过程资产库的构建技术之一,用于描述软件项目中资源投入的分布情况,常常供组织的软件项目在鲔划估计时使用,它是组织晋升成熟度等级3的基本过程技术要求,也是软件度量的一大难点.该文探讨与资源模型相关的一些概念和问题,采用数学方法给出CMMI资源模型解决方案.     

项目管理在移动通信工程项目中的应用研究

本文从项目管理的概念入手,引入移动通信项目管理概念,分析项目管理的目的,以及当前移动通信工程项目面临的困难与挑战,探讨了如何在移动通信工程项目中成功实施项目管理。     

A systematic methodology for the creation of Six Sigma projects: A case study of semiconductor foundry

Nowadays, Six Sigma has been widely adopted in a variety of industries in the world and it has become one of the most important subjects of debate in quality management. Six Sigma is a well-structured methodology that can help a company achieve expected goal through continuous project improvement. Some challenges, however, have emerged with the execution of the Six Sigma. For examples, how are feasible projects generated? How are critical Six Sigma projects selected given the finite resources of the organization? This study aims to develop a novel approach to create critical Six Sigma projects and identify the priority of these projects. Firstly, the projects are created from two aspects, namely, organization’s business strategic policies and voice of customer. Secondly, an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model is implemented to evaluate the benefits of each project and; a hierarchical failure mode effects analysis (FMEA) is also developed to evaluate the risk of each project; and from which the priority of Six Sigma projects can be determined. Finally, based on the project benefits and risk, projects can be defined as Green Belt, Black Belt, or others types of projects. An empirical case study of semiconductor foundry will be utilized to explore the effectiveness of our proposed approach.     

Leverage your lessons [project management]

In today's fast-moving market, software project teams don't have time to make several attempts to meet a customer's requirements. Teams need to be smart about what they do learning from the experiences of colleagues within their own organization and in the industry. In short, teams need to take the time to do things as “right” as they can because they don't have time to do things over. Why do we often have to do things over? Why do we repeat the mistakes of the past? It's related to this: Insanity is doing things the same way we did them before, but expecting different results. It's hard for a team to get better at what it's doing if it doesn't think about its work and how to improve it. Some project teams do, in fact, think about how and why their projects worked. They gather and document lessons learned. Some teams share that information with others in their organization, and a few teams attempt to review what others have learned as they start a new project or new phase of a project. But many teams do none of this. They're the ones that encounter the same problems over and over again, attributing them to bad luck when, in fact, poor project learning and poor organizational learning are the underlying causes     

A hybrid cognitive/reactive intelligent agent autonomous path planning technique in a networked-distributed unstructured environment for reinforcement learning

This paper proposes a path planning technique for autonomous agent(s) located in an unstructured networked distributed environment, where each agent has limited and not complete knowledge of the environment. Each agent has only the knowledge available in the distributed memory of the computing node the agent is running on and the agents share some information learned over a distributed network. In particular, the environment is divided into several sectors with each sector located on a single separate distributed computing node. We consider hybrid reactive-cognitive agent(s) where we use autonomous agent motion planning that is based on the use of a potential field model accompanied by a reinforcement learning as well as boundary detection algorithms. Potential fields are used for fast convergence toward a path in a distributed environment while reenforcement learning is used to guarantee a variety of behavior and consistent convergence in a distributed environment. We show how the agent decision making process is enhanced by the combination of the two techniques in a distributed environment. Furthermore, path retracing is a challenging problem in a distributed environment, since the agent does not have complete knowledge of the environment. We propose a backtracking technique to keep the distributed agent informed all the time of its path information and step count including when migrating from one node to another. Note that no node has knowledge of the entire global path from a source to a goal when such a goal resides on a separate node. Each agent has only knowledge of a partial path (internal to a node) and related number of steps corresponding to the portion of the path that agent traversed when running on the node. In particular, we show how each of the agents(s), starting in one of the many sectors with no initial knowledge of the environment, using the proposed distributed technique, develops its intelligence based on its experience and seamlessly discovers the shortest global path to the target, which is located in a different node, while avoiding any obstacle(s) it encounters in its way, including when transitioning and migrating from one distributed computing node to another. The agent(s) use (s) multiple-token-ring message passing interface (MPI) to perform internode communication. Finally, the experimental results of the proposed method show that single and multiagents sharing the same goal and running on the same or different nodes successfully coordinate the sharing of their respective environment states/information to collaboratively perform their respective tasks. The results also show that distributed multiagent sharing information increases by an order of magnitude the speed of convergence to the optimal shortest path to the goal in comparison with the single-agent case or noninformation sharing multiagent case.