Design guidelines for software processes knowledge repository development

Context

Staff turnover in organizations is an important issue that should be taken into account mainly for two reasons:

1.

Employees carry an organization’s knowledge in their heads and take it with them wherever they go

2.

Knowledge accessibility is limited to the amount of knowledge employees want to share

Objective

The aim of this work is to provide a set of guidelines to develop knowledge-based Process Asset Libraries (PAL) to store software engineering best practices, implemented as a wiki.

Method

Fieldwork was carried out in a 2-year training course in agile development. This was validated in two phases (with and without PAL), which were subdivided into two stages: Training and Project.

Results

The study demonstrates that, on the one hand, the learning process can be facilitated using PAL to transfer software process knowledge, and on the other hand, products were developed by junior software engineers with a greater degree of independence.

Conclusion

PAL, as a knowledge repository, helps software engineers to learn about development processes and improves the use of agile processes.     

Post-agility: What follows a decade of agility?

Context

Agile information systems development (ISD) has received much attention from both the practitioner and researcher community over the last 10-15 years. However, it is still unclear what precisely constitutes agile ISD.

Objective

Based on four empirical studies conducted over a 10-year time period from 1999 to 2008 the objective of this paper is to show how the meaning and practice of agile ISD has evolved over time and on this basis to speculate about what comes next.

Method

Four phases of research has been conducted, using a grounded theory approach. For each research phase qualitative interviews were held in American and/or Danish companies and a grounded theory was inductively discovered by careful data analysis. Subsequently, the four unique theories have been analyzed for common themes, and a global theory was identified across the empirical data.

Results

In 1999 companies were developing software at high-speed in a desperate rush to be first-to-market. In 2001 a new high-speed/quick results development process had become established practice. In 2003 changes in the market created the need for a more balanced view on speed and quality, and in 2008 companies were successfully combining agile and plan-driven approaches to achieve the benefits of both. The studies reveal a two-stage pattern in which dramatic changes in the market causes disruption of established practices and process adaptations followed by consolidation of lessons learnt into a once again stable software development process.

Conclusion

The cyclical history of punctuated process evolution makes it possible to distinguish pre-agility from current practices (agility), and on this basis, to speculate about post-agility: a possible next cycle of software process evolution concerned with proactively pursuing the dual goal of agility and alignment through a diversity of means.     

Conceptual framework for business processes compositional verification

Context

To guarantee the success of Business Process Modelling (BPM) it is necessary to check whether the activities and tasks described by Business Processes (BPs) are sound and well coordinated.

Objective

This article describes and validates a Formal Compositional Verification Approach (FCVA) that uses a Model-Checking (MC) technique to specify and verify BPs.

Method

This is performed using the Communicating Sequential Processes +Time (CSP+T) process calculus, which adds new constructions to timed Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) modelling entities for non- functional requirement specification.

Results

Using our proposal we are able to specify the BP Task Model (BPTM) associated with BPs by formalising the timed BPMN notational elements. The proposal also allows us to apply MC to BPTM verification. A real-life example of verifying a BPTM in the field of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is discussed as a practical application of FCVA.

Conclusion

This approach facilitates the verification of complex BPs from independently verified local processes, and establishes a feasible way to use process calculi to verify BPs using state-of-the-art MC tools.     

A profiling method by PCB hooking and its application for memory fault detection in embedded system operational test

Context

An operational test means a system test that examines whether or not all software or hardware components comply with the requirements given to a system which is deployed in an operational environment.

Objective

It is a necessary lightweight-profiling method for embedded systems with severe resource restrictions to conduct operational testing.

Method

We focus on the Process Control Block as the optimal location to monitor the execution of all processes. We propose a profiling method to collect the runtime execution information of the processes without interrupting the system’s operational environment by hacking the Process Control Block information. Based on the proposed method applied to detect runtime memory faults, we develop the operational testing tool AMOS v1.0 which is currently being used in the automobile industry.

Results

An industrial field study on 23 models of car-infotainment systems revealed a total of 519 memory faults while only slowing down the system by 0.084-0.132×. We conducted a comparative analysis on representative runtime memory fault detection tools. This analysis result shows our proposed method that has relatively low overhead meets the requirements for operational testing, while other methods failed to satisfy the operational test conditions.

Conclusion

We conclude that a lightweight-profiling method for embedded system operational testing can be built around the Process Control Block.     

Assessing PSP effect in training disciplined software development: A Plan-Track-Review model

Context

In training disciplined software development, the PSP is said to result in such effect as increased estimation accuracy, better software quality, earlier defect detection, and improved productivity. But a systematic mechanism that can be easily adopted to assess and interpret PSP effect is scarce within the existing literature.

Objective

The purpose of this study is to explore the possibility of devising a feasible assessment model that ties up critical software engineering values with the pertinent PSP metrics.

Method

A systematic review of the literature was conducted to establish such an assessment model (we called a Plan-Track-Review model). Both mean and median approaches along with a set of simplified procedures were used to assess the commonly accepted PSP training effects. A set of statistical analyses further followed to increase understanding of the relationships among the PSP metrics and to help interpret the application results.

Results

Based on the results of this study, PSP training effect on the controllability, manageability, and reliability of a software engineer is quite positive and largely consistent with the literature. However, its effect on one’s predictability on project in general (and on project size in particular) is not implied as said in the literature. As for one’s overall project efficiency, our results show a moderate improvement. Our initial finding also suggests that a prior stage PSP effect could have an impact on later stage training outcomes.

Conclusion

It is concluded that this Plan-Track-Review model with the associated framework can be used to assess PSP effect regarding a disciplined software development. The generated summary report serves to provide useful feedback for both PSP instructors and students based on internal as well as external standards.     

Pattern-based framework for modularized software development and evolution robustness

Context

Software development is now facing much more challenges than ever before due to the intrinsic high complexity and the increasing demands of the quick-service-ready paradigm.

Objective

As the developers are now called for more quality software systems from the industries, there is insufficient guidance from the methodologies and standards of software engineering that can provide assistance to the rapid development of qualified business software.

Method

In this work, we discuss the advantages of the pattern-based software development. We verify the benefits using a pattern-based software framework called OS2F, and a corresponding system design architecture that is intended for the rapid development of web applications.

Results

The objective of the framework/architecture is that, through software patterns, developers should be able to separate the work of system development from the business rules so as to reduce the problems caused by a developer’s lack of business experiences.

Conclusion

Through a suitable pattern-based software framework, the quality of the product can thus be enhanced, software development time and cost decreased, and software evolution robustness improved.     

On the relationship of concern metrics and requirements maintainability

Context

Maintainability has become one of the most essential attributes of software quality, as software maintenance has shown to be one of the most costly and time-consuming tasks of software development. Many studies reveal that maintainability is not often a major consideration in requirements and design stages, and software maintenance costs may be reduced by a more controlled design early in the software life cycle. Several problem factors have been identified as harmful for software maintainability, such as lack of upfront consideration of proper modularity choices. In that sense, the presence of crosscutting concerns is one of such modularity anomalies that possibly exert negative effects on software maintainability. However, to the date there is little or no knowledge about how characteristics of crosscutting concerns, observable in early artefacts, are correlated with maintainability.

Objective

In this setting, this paper introduces an empirical analysis where the correlation between crosscutting properties and two ISO/IEC 9126 maintainability attributes, namely changeability and stability, is presented.

Method

This correlation is based on the utilization of a set of concern metrics that allows the quantification of crosscutting, scattering and tangling.

Results

Our study confirms that a change in a crosscutting concern is more difficult to be accomplished and that artefacts addressing crosscutting concerns are found to be less stable later as the system evolves. Moreover, our empirical analysis reveals that crosscutting properties introduce non-syntactic dependencies between software artefacts, thereby decreasing the quality of software in terms of changeability and stability as well. These subtle dependencies cannot be easily detected without the use of concern metrics.

Conclusion

The correlation provides evidence that the presence of certain crosscutting properties negatively affects to changeability and stability. The whole analysis is performed using as target cases three software product lines, where maintainability properties are of upmost importance not only for individual products but also for the core architecture of the product line.     

Software process improvement success factors for small and medium Web companies: A qualitative study

Context

The context of this research is software process improvement (SPI) in small and medium Web companies.

Objective

The primary objective of this paper is to identify software process improvement (SPI) success factors for small and medium Web companies.

Method

To achieve this goal, we conducted semi-structured, open-ended interviews with 21 participants representing 11 different companies in Pakistan, and analyzed the data qualitatively using the Glaserian strand of grounded theory research procedures. The key steps of these procedures that were employed in this research included open coding, focused coding, theoretical coding, theoretical sampling, constant comparison, and scaling up.

Results

An initial framework of key SPI success factors for small and medium Web companies was proposed, which can be of use for small and medium Web companies engaged in SPI. The paper also differentiates between small and medium Web companies and analyzes crucial SPI requirements for companies operating in the Web development domain.

Conclusion

The results of this work, in particular the use of qualitative techniques - allowed us to obtain rich insight into SPI success factors for small and medium Web companies. Future work comprises the validation of the SPI success factors with small and medium Web companies.     

The agile requirements refinery: Applying SCRUM principles to software product management

Context

Although agile software development methods such as SCRUM and DSDM are gaining popularity, the consequences of applying agile principles to software product management have received little attention until now.

Objective

In this paper, this gap is filled by the introduction of a method for the application of SCRUM principles to software product management.

Method

A case study research approach is employed to describe and evaluate this method.

Results

This has resulted in the ‘agile requirements refinery’, an extension to the SCRUM process that enables product managers to cope with complex requirements in an agile development environment. A case study is presented to illustrate how agile methods can be applied to software product management.

Conclusions

The experiences of the case study company are provided as a set of lessons learned that will help others to apply agile principles to their software product management process.     

Reconciling software development models: A quasi-systematic review

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to characterize reconciliation among the plan-driven, agile, and free/open source software models of software development.

Design/methodology/approach

An automated quasi-systematic review identified 42 papers, which were then analyzed.

Findings

The main findings are: there exist distinct - organization, group and process - levels of reconciliation; few studies deal with reconciliation among the three models of development; a significant amount of work addresses reconciliation between plan-driven and agile development; several large organizations (such as Microsoft, Motorola, and Philips) are interested in trying to combine these models; and reconciliation among software development models is still an open issue, since it is an emerging area and research on most proposals is at an early stage.

Research limitations

Automated searches may not capture relevant papers in publications that are not indexed. Other data sources not amenable to execution of the protocol were not used. Data extraction was performed by only one researcher, which may increase the risk of threats to internal validity.

Implications

This characterization is important for practitioners wanting to be current with the state of research. This review will also assist the scientific community working with software development processes to build a common understanding of the challenges that must be faced, and to identify areas where research is lacking. Finally, the results will be useful to software industry that is calling for solutions in this area.

Originality/value

There is no other systematic review on this subject, and reconciliation among software development models is an emerging area. This study helps to identify and consolidate the work done so far and to guide future research. The conclusions are an important step towards expanding the body of knowledge in the field.     

Analyzing evolution of variability in a software product line: From contexts and requirements to features

Context

In the long run, features of a software product line (SPL) evolve with respect to changes in stakeholder requirements and system contexts. Neither domain engineering nor requirements engineering handles such co-evolution of requirements and contexts explicitly, making it especially hard to reason about the impact of co-changes in complex scenarios.

Objective

In this paper, we propose a problem-oriented and value-based analysis method for variability evolution analysis. The method takes into account both kinds of changes (requirements and contexts) during the life of an evolving software product line.

Method

The proposed method extends the core requirements engineering ontology with the notions to represent variability-intensive problem decomposition and evolution. On the basis of problemorientation, the analysis method identifies candidate changes, detects influenced features, and evaluates their contributions to the value of the SPL.

Results and Conclusion

The process of applying the analysis method is illustrated using a concrete case study of an evolving enterprise software system, which has confirmed that tracing back to requirements and contextual changes is an effective way to understand the evolution of variability in the software product line.     

Is software “green”? Application development environments and energy efficiency in open source applications

Context

The energy efficiency of IT systems, also referred to as Green IT, is attracting more and more attention. While several researchers have focused on the energy efficiency of hardware and embedded systems, the role of application software in IT energy consumption still needs investigation.

Objective

This paper aims to define a methodology for measuring software energy efficiency and to understand the consequences of abstraction layers and application development environments for the energy efficiency of software applications.

Method

We first develop a measure of energy efficiency that is appropriate for software applications. We then examine how the use of application development environments relates to this measure of energy efficiency for a sample of 63 open source software applications.

Results

Our findings indicate that a greater use of application development environments - specifically, frameworks and external libraries - is more detrimental in terms of energy efficiency for larger applications than for smaller applications. We also find that different functional application types have distinctly different levels of energy efficiency, with text and image editing and gaming applications being the most energy inefficient due to their intense use of the processor.

Conclusion

We conclude that different designs can have a significant impact on the energy efficiency of software applications. We have related the use of software application development environments to software energy efficiency suggesting that there may be a trade-off between development efficiency and energy efficiency. We propose new research to further investigate this topic.     

The value of software sizing

Context

One of the difficulties faced by software development Project Managers is estimating the cost and schedule for new projects. Previous industry surveys have concluded that software size and cost estimation is a significant technical area of concern. In order to estimate cost and schedule it is important to have a good understanding of the size of the software product to be developed. There are a number of techniques used to derive software size, with function points being amongst the most documented.

Objective

In this paper we explore the utility of function point software sizing techniques when applied to two levels of software requirements documentation in a commercial software development organisation. The goal of the research is to appraise the value (cost/benefit) which functional sizing techniques can bring to the project planning and management of software projects within a small-to-medium sized software development enterprise (SME).

Method

Functional counts were made at the bid and detailed functional specification stages for each of five commercial projects used in the research. Three variants of the NESMA method were used to determine these function counts. Through a structured interview session, feedback on the sizing results was obtained to evaluate its feasibility and potential future contribution to the company.

Results

The results of our research suggest there is value in performing size estimates at two appropriate stages in the software development lifecycle, with simplified methods providing the optimal return on effort expended.

Conclusion

The ‘Estimated NESMA’ is the most appropriate tool for use in size estimation for the company studied. The use of software sizing provides a valuable contribution which would augment, but not replace, the company’s existing cost estimation approach.     

Towards understanding the underlying structure of motivational factors for software engineers to guide the definition of motivational programs

Aim

In this article, factors influencing the motivation of software engineers is studied with the goal of guiding the definition of motivational programs.

Method

Using a set of 20 motivational factors compiled in a systematic literature review and a general theory of motivation, a survey questionnaire was created to evaluate the influence of these factors on individual motivation. Then, the questionnaire was applied on a semi-random sample of 176 software engineers from 20 software companies located in Recife-PE, Brazil.

Results

The survey results show the actual level of motivation for each motivator in the target population. Using principal component analysis on the values of all motivators, a five factor structure was identified and used to propose a guideline for the creation of motivational programs for software engineers.

Conclusions

The five factor structure provides an intuitive categorization for the set of variables and can be used to explain other motivational models presented in the literature. This contributes to a better understanding of motivation in software engineering.     

A framework for analysis and design of software reference architectures

Context

A software reference architecture is a generic architecture for a class of systems that is used as a foundation for the design of concrete architectures from this class. The generic nature of reference architectures leads to a less defined architecture design and application contexts, which makes the architecture goal definition and architecture design non-trivial steps, rooted in uncertainty.

Objective

The paper presents a structured and comprehensive study on the congruence between context, goals, and design of software reference architectures. It proposes a tool for the design of congruent reference architectures and for the analysis of the level of congruence of existing reference architectures.

Method

We define a framework for congruent reference architectures. The framework is based on state of the art results from literature and practice. We validate our framework and its quality as analytical tool by applying it for the analysis of 24 reference architectures. The conclusions from our analysis are compared to the opinions of experts on these reference architectures documented in literature and dedicated communication.

Results

Our framework consists of a multi-dimensional classification space and of five types of reference architectures that are formed by combining specific values from the multi-dimensional classification space. Reference architectures that can be classified in one of these types have better chances to become a success. The validation of our framework confirms its quality as a tool for the analysis of the congruence of software reference architectures.

Conclusion

This paper facilitates software architects and scientists in the inception, design, and application of congruent software reference architectures. The application of the tool improves the chance for success of a reference architecture.     

Conducting a Business Ethnography in Global Software Development projects of small German enterprises

Context

Studying work practices in the context of Global Software Development (GSD) projects entails multiple opportunities and challenges for the researchers. Understanding and tackling these challenges requires a careful and rigor application of research methods.

Objective

We want to contribute to the understanding of the challenges of studying GSD by reflecting on several obstacles we had to deal with when conducting ethnographically-informed research on offshoring in German small to medium-sized enterprises.

Method

The material for this paper is based on reflections and field notes from two research projects: an exploratory ethnographic field study, and a study that was framed as a Business Ethnography. For the analysis, we took a Grounded Theory-oriented coding and analysis approach in order to identify issues and challenges documented in our research notes.

Results

We introduce the concept of Business Ethnography and discuss our experiences of adapting and implementing this action research concept for our study. We identify and discuss three primary issues: understanding complex global work practices from a local perspective, adapting to changing interests of the participants, and dealing with micro-political frictions between the cooperating sites.

Conclusions

We identify common interests between the researchers and the companies as a challenge and chance for studies on offshoring. Building on our experiences from the field, we argue for an active conceptualization of struggles and conflicts in the field as well as for extending the role of the ethnographer to that of a learning mediator.     

SOAdapt: A process reference model for developing adaptable service-based applications

Context

The loose coupling of services and Service-Based Applications (SBAs) have made them the ideal platform for context-based run-time adaptation. There has been a lot of research into implementation techniques for adapting SBAs, without much effort focused on the software process required to guide the adaptation.

Objective

This paper aims to bridge that gap by providing an empirically grounded software process model that can be used by software practitioners who want to build adaptable SBAs. The process model will focus only on the adaptation specific issues.

Method

The process model presented in this paper is based on data collected through interviews with 10 practitioners occupying various roles within eight different companies. The data was analyzed using qualitative data analysis techniques. We used the output to develop a set of activities, tasks, stakeholders and artifacts that were used to construct the process model.

Results

The outcome of the data analysis process was a process model identifying nine sets of adaptation process attributes. These can be used in conjunction with an organisation’s existing development life-cycle or another reference life-cycle.

Conclusion

The process model developed in this paper provides a solid reference for practitioners who are planning to develop adaptable SBAs. It has advantages over similar approaches in that it focuses on software process rather than the specific adaptation mechanism implementation techniques.     

A systematic review of research on open source software in commercial software product development

Context

The popularity of the open source software development in the last decade, has brought about an increased interest from the industry on how to use open source components, participate in the open source community, build business models around this type of software development, and learn more about open source development methodologies. There is a need to understand the results of research in this area.

Objective

Since there is a need to understand conducted research, the aim of this study is to summarize the findings of research that has ben carried out on usage of open source components and development methodologies by the industry, as well as companies’ participation in the open source community.

Method

Systematic review through searches in library databases and manual identification of articles from the open source conference. The search was first carried out in May 2009 and then once again in May 2010.

Results

In 2009, 237 articles were first found, from which 19 were selected based on content and quality, and in 2010, 76 new articles were found from which four were selected. Twenty three articles were identified in total.

Conclusions

The articles could be divided into four categories: open source as part of component based software engineering, business models with open source in commercial organization, company participation in open source development communities, and usage of open source processes within a company.     

Code churn estimation using organisational and code metrics: An experimental comparison

Context

Source code revision control systems contain vast amounts of data that can be exploited for various purposes. For example, the data can be used as a base for estimating future code maintenance effort in order to plan software maintenance activities. Previous work has extensively studied the use of metrics extracted from object-oriented source code to estimate future coding effort. In comparison, the use of other types of metrics for this purpose has received significantly less attention.

Objective

This paper applies machine learning techniques to unveil predictors of yearly cumulative code churn of software projects on the basis of metrics extracted from revision control systems.

Method

The study is based on a collection of object-oriented code metrics, XML code metrics, and organisational metrics. Several models are constructed with different subsets of these metrics. The predictive power of these models is analysed based on a dataset extracted from eight open-source projects.

Results

The study shows that a code churn estimation model built purely with organisational metrics is superior to one built purely with code metrics. However, a combined model provides the highest predictive power.

Conclusion

The results suggest that code metrics in general, and XML metrics in particular, are complementary to organisational metrics for the purpose of estimating code churn.     

Towards an ontology-based retrieval of UML Class Diagrams

Context

Software Reuse has always been an important area amongst software companies in order to increase their productivity and the quality of their products, but code reuse is not the only answer for this. Nowadays, reuse techniques proposals include software designs or even software specifications. Therefore, this research focuses on software design, specifically on UML Class Diagrams. A semantic technology has been applied to facilitate the retrieval process for an effective reuse.

Objective

This research proposes an ontology-based retrieval technique by semantic similarity in order to support effective retrieval process for UML Class Diagrams. Since UML Class Diagrams are a de facto standard in the design stages of a Software Development Process, a good technique is needed to reuse them, i.e. reusing during the design stage instead of just the coding stages.

Method

An application ontology modeled using UML specifications was designed to compare UML Class Diagram element types. To measure their similarity, a survey was conducted amongst UML experts. Query expansion was improved by a domain ontology supporting the retrieval phase. The calculus of minimal distances in ontologies was solved using a shortest path algorithm.

Results

The case study shows the domain ontology importance in the UML Class Diagram retrieval process as well as the importance of an element type expansion method, such as an application ontology. A correlation between the query complexity and retrieved elements has been identified, by analyzing results. Finally, a positive Return of Investment (ROI) was estimated using Poulin’s Model.

Conclusion

Because Software Reuse has not to be limited to the coding stage, approaches to reuse design stage must be developed, i.e. UML Class Diagrams reuse. This approach proposes a technique for UML Class Diagrams retrieval, which is one important step towards reuse. Semantic technology combined with information retrieval improves the retrieval results.