Best practice fusion of CMMI-DEV v1.2 (PP,PMC, SAM) and PMBOK 2008

ContextThe establishment of effective and efficient project management practices still remains a challenge to software organizations. In striving to address these needs, “best practice” models, such as, CMMI or PMBOK, are being developed to assist organizations interested in improving project management. And, although, those models share overlapping content, there are still differences and, therefore, each of the models offers different advantages.ObjectiveThis paper proposes a set of unified project management best practices by integrating and harmonizing on a high-level perspective PMBOK (4th ed.) processes and CMMI-DEV v1.2 specific practices of the basic project management process areas PP, PMC and SAM.MethodBased on the analysis of both models, a unified set of best practices has been defined by a group of researchers with theoretical and practical expertise on the CMMI framework and software process improvement as well as project management and the PMBOK. The proposed set has been revised by different researchers from different institutions in several review rounds until consensus was achieved.ResultsAs a result, a set of unified best practices is defined and explicitly mapped to the correspondent PMBOK processes and CMMI specific practices of the current versions of both models.ConclusionWe can conclude that an integration and harmonization of both models is possible and may help to implement and assess project management processes more effectively and efficiently, optimizing software process improvement investments.     

Open source software and the algorithm visualization community

Algorithm visualizations are widely viewed as having the potential for major impact on computer science education, but their quality is highly variable. We report on the software development practices used by creators of algorithm visualizations, based on data that can be inferred from a catalog of over 600 algorithm visualizations. Since nearly all are free for use and many provide source code, they might be construed as being open source software. Yet many AV developers do not appear to have used open source best practices. We discuss how such development practices might be employed by the algorithm visualization community, and how they might lead to improved algorithm visualizations in the future. We conclude with a discussion of OpenDSA, an open-source project that builds on earlier progress in the field of algorithm visualization and hopes to use open-source procedures to gain users and contributors.     

Seven pitfalls to avoid on the hunt for best practices

A recent US Defense Science Board study recommended the identification and implementation of best practices as a critical need for successful acquisition programs. Practices in this sense go beyond the development-related guidance of the popular Capability Maturity Models, including approaches organizations use to manage others creating software for them under contract. The study identified several traditional project-management practices such as configuration management and risk management, as well as newer practices such as executable architectures and limiting development time.     

Knowledge for software security

A critical challenge facing software security today is the dearth of experienced practitioners. Approaches that rely solely on apprenticeship as a method of propagation won't scale quickly enough to address this burgeoning problem, so as the field evolves and establishes best practices, knowledge management can play a central role in encapsulating and spreading the emerging discipline more efficiently. This article is about the kinds of security knowledge that can provide a solid foundation for software security practices.     

Maven在企业Java软件产品中的应用

Maven是目前Java项目的主要项目管理工具,它具有管理方便、容易扩展的特点。该文简单介绍了Maven的原理、功能和生命周期等概念,重点结合Maven在网络管理软件产品中的实例应用,分析和总结了Maven在企业级软件产品中的具体使用。     

软件外包项目管理问题与对策

软件外包近年来在国内的迅速发展,也带来了项目管理方面一些棘手的问题。文章就软件外包项目管理面临的项目过程管理、成本控制、人员问题、信息安全与知识产权保护等方面的典型问题展开探讨,并给出一些解决这些问题的办法。这些解决方法主要来自笔者作为甲方和乙方在实施外包项目管理的过程中的经验总结。     

Adopting a software security improvement program

Leading software shops (including Microsoft) are working hard to improve the way they build security into their products. Software security initiatives have proven beneficial for those organizations that have implemented them. Such initiatives involve the adoption and rollout of various types of best practices. The article describes an approach that works, with an emphasis on business process engineering that might be unfamiliar to technical practitioners. By following some commonsense steps, a software security improvement program has a greater chance of achieving its ultimate goal: software security that makes business sense.     

Software stories: three cultural perspectives on the organizational practices of software development

Postindustrial organizations have come to depend upon the steady production and modification of software products to meet their competitive needs. This study reports insights into software development practices that were revealed through a cultural interpretation of organizational stories told by members of SWC, a company engaged in software development. Through interviews with 38 members of SWC, 83 stories were extracted and analyzed to identify their main themes. By grouping these content themes, we produced nine broader cultural themes that represented the organization's cultural context. Two management practices applied in SWC—development team organization and outsourcing—were subjected to an analysis in which cultural themes were interpreted from each of three perspectives proposed by Martin, J. [(1992) Cultures in Organisations; Three Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press]: integration, differentiation, and fragmentation.The interpretation provides a rich reading of SWC's cultural context. Despite management attempts to develop a unified culture based on collaboration and communication among development groups, the team approach to software development was problematic. Imposing teamwork upon groups that manifested distinct subcultural differences disturbed the work life of group members, and the change was only partially successful. SWC's management also sought survival and tighter strategic focus through an outsourcing arrangement. However, our interpretation identified significant difficulties created by the partnership between two organizations with very different cultures. The presence of the outsourcing partner also brought greater uncertainty and ambiguity because work priorities and practices were subject to constant renegotiation. Members from both organizations dealt with contradictions between their previous norms, values and work practices and those required by the new relationship.Overall, our analysis demonstrates the importance of understanding the cultural foundation of management practices used in software development. These practices evoke interpretations from members of a culture, who collectively redefine what might have been intended. A cultural analysis may prepare management to move more gradually or to introduce special approaches to managing change.     

离岸外包开发中的软件工程

主要研究在离岸软件外包项目中,领域驱动开发在实际项目应用中的方式和方法.特别针对作者从事的离岸外包的金融投资交易系统的开发和维护.离岸软件外包在实际进展环节中,项目知识积累和控制人员流动对项目的影响是主要应对其项目风险的主要方法.领域驱动的设计与开发实践可以很好地解决上述问题.提出了具有实践意义的一些解决方法.     

Industrial-strength management strategies

As our industry undertakes ever larger development projects, the number of defects occurring in delivered software increases exponentially. Drawing on his experiences in the defense industry, the author offers nine best practices to improve the management of large software systems: (1) risk management; (2) agreement on interfaces; (3) formal inspections; (4) metrics-based scheduling and management; (5) binary quality gates at inch/pebble level; (6) program-wide visibility of progress vs. plan; (7) defect tracking against quality targets; (8) configuration management; and (9) people-aware management accountability     

探索软件开发过程的CMM最佳实践方法

基于中、小型规模的软件开发特点,通过融合多种软件过程开发实践,保证快速、合理、低代价和清晰的软件开发过程控制基础上,作者基于工程实践的总结和归纳,提出一种基于组件构建软件系统的CMM和RUP的有序过程控制的最佳实践方法,该方法具有清晰过程控制、可被重复检验和理解,允许在软件过程中进行适应性的自我调整和完善。通过实际案例的统计和规律性分析,证明该种软件开发过程的最佳实践方法在实际的工程项目管理中具有较强的工程指导意义和现实参考价值。     

Knowledge management at Infosys

Knowledge management (KM) is important to software engineering, because organizations need more than just human capital to successfully distribute and use their employees' knowledge. Knowledge might be inexpensive, but effectively using and managing it is not. This article reviews KM practices at Infosys, highlighting KM's importance and benefits     

Semi-automatic inductive construction of reference process models that represent best practices in public administrations: A method

Business process management often uses reference models to improve processes or as starting point when creating individual process models. The current academic literature offers primarily deductive methods with which to develop these reference models, although some methods develop reference models inductively from a set of individual process models, focusing on deriving and representing common practices. However, there is no inductive method with which to detect best practices and represent them in a reference model. This paper addresses this research gap by proposing a method by which to develop reference process models that represent best practices in public administrations semi-automatically and inductively. The method uses a merged model that retains the structure of the source models while detecting their common parts. It identifies best practices using query constructs and ranking criteria to group the source models’ elements and to evaluate these groups. We provide a conceptualization of the method and demonstrate its functionality using an artificial example. We describe our implementation of the method in a software prototype and report on its evaluation in a workshop with domain and method experts who applied the method to real-world process models.     

The usage of best practices and procedures in the database community

Database management has an important role to play in the management of data assets which are at the heart of every organization. In a fast moving technological era, where data is rapidly expanding, understanding the current best practices and procedures is important for continuous improvement. This paper investigates how databases are actually administered and identifies what practices and procedures are utilized throughout the database lifecycle. The paper highlights the demographics of people who manage database systems and the diverse requirements of database systems given the wide range of software and hardware available. The results of this paper show the breadth of issues relevant to database management. The paper concludes by showing where existing practice and procedures are not optimal, and by highlighting the complexities in the field.     

How to get mature global virtual teams: a framework to improve team process management in distributed software teams

Managing global software development teams is not an easy task because of the additional problems and complexities that have to be taken into account. This paper defines VTManager, a methodology that provides a set of efficient practices for global virtual team management in software development projects. These practices integrate software development techniques in global environments with others such as explicit practices for global virtual team management, definition of skills and abilities needed to work in these teams, availability of collaborative work environments and shared knowledge management practices. The results obtained and the lessons learned from implementing VTManager in a pilot project to develop software tools for collaborative work in rural environments are also presented. This project was carried out by geographically distributed teams involving people from seven countries with a high level of virtualness.     

Processes for producing secure software

Summarizes work initiated at the National Cybersecurity Summit, held 2-3 December 2003 in Santa Clara, California. Attendees representing industry, academia, and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) formed five task forces to focus on specific topic areas. This report describes, the key problems and recommendations identified by the Software Process subgroup of the "Security Across the Software Development Lifecycle" task force. Producing secure software is a multifaceted problem of software engineering, security engineering, and management. Thus, producing secure software starts with outstanding software engineering practices, augmented with sound technical practices, and supported by management practices that promote secure software development. We discuss these practices.     

Negotiated learning contracts in team projects

The successful evolution of a negotiated learning practice in software engineering team projects is described. The background to negotiated learning practices is reviewed and it is noted that a concern for process issues might be related to software quality management concerns. Negotiated learning was used to develop learning autonomy and to encourage process improvement. The integration of learning contracts and existing software engineering quality management techniques has produced an approach which has enabled teams of students to effectively define and reflect on systems development and learning processes. Individual assessment was enhanced by including processes for the visibility and traceability of contributions in the negotiation process. The gradual evolution of the practice is described with some detail of the current context provided. Evaluations have indicated that teams can become more actively engaged in learning and develop reflective skills in a structured manner by exploiting mechanisms for negotiation.     

Open Collaboration within Corporations Using Software Forges

A software forge is a tool platform for collaborative software development, similar to integrated CASE environments. Unlike CASE tools, however, software forges have been designed for the software development practices of the open source community. The authors discuss their experiences using a software forge to bring open source best practices into corporations. They present the design principles and benefits of a firm-internal software forge and include a case study of how one project at SAP benefitted significantly from being on the forge.     

The business of software improvement

Leading software practitioners have an ongoing responsibility: the education of nontechnical software project stakeholders. Software practitioners sometimes perceive upper management and other nontechnical staff to be blocking the use of better practices. We complain that they fall to support better practices or even undermine them. I've generally found, however, that upper management, sales, marketing, product support, and other personnel are receptive to improved software practices when I take the time to explain those practices to them. Indeed, they are acutely aware of the problems caused by current practices and are eager to hear how they can help improve software projects.     

A systematic mapping study on best practices for domain-specific modeling

Model-driven software development comes in different styles. While standard-based approaches leverage existing language standards (e.g., UML), tooling, and development processes, domain-specific modeling (DSM) requires languages and tool support to be created prior to the actual software development. The design, implementation, and testing of languages and tool support require a wide spectrum of methods and techniques which introduce complexity and new challenges. To tackle these DSM-specific challenges, best practices have been collected from various application domains and published in literature to guide the development and application of DSM solutions. It is the goal of this paper to identify studies reporting best practices on domain-specific modeling. Moreover, a systematic and comprehensive compilation of best practices should act as a starting point to identify literature that facilitates industrial adoption of DSM. To search for literature and classify identified studies, we conduct a systematic mapping study (SMS). Furthermore, we perform an in-depth analysis of the identified studies to answer how practices overlap, complement, or contradict each other. The systematic search resulted in 21 studies reporting 321 best practices. From these 321 practices, we compiled 192 unique best practices. We found that the DSM community created a substantial corpus of best practices for DSM. The large majority of practices (75%) are only reported once. The top best practices by number of reports contain only practices that are reported at least four times. However, the frequency of reports does not necessarily imply a high importance of practice, as the application of practices is always context specific.