External social capital and information systems development team flexibility

Context

ISD research based on the socio-technical perspective suggests that two sources of socio-technical change have a bearing on the performance of information systems development (ISD) projects: business requirements and development technology. To enhance project effectiveness, ISD teams need to enhance their flexibility in the face of the constant changes taking place from business and technical environments in which they operate. Flexibility is conceptualized as an outcome of capability development through constantly integrating and reconfiguring available resources within and outside of the organization where the team is embedded.

Objective

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between a team’s external social capital and team flexibility. More specifically, based on social capital theory, this study argues that external social capital leads to IS team flexibility, which in turn contributes to the successful project performance.

Method

A survey design was selected to collect data and test the proposed model. A snowballing strategy was employed to collect data. 118 information systems developers participated in the survey and the model was analyzed using partial least squares regression. Results: The findings show that, in general, the ISD teams’ external social capital do contribute to the team’s response to changes. However, they exhibit unique impacts on ISD team flexibility respectively.

Results

The findings show that, in general, the ISD teams’ external social capital does contribute to the team’s response to changes. However, they exhibit unique impacts on ISD team flexibility respectively.

Conclusion

The various external social capitals have distinctive effects on a team’s flexibility. Specifically, horizontal relationships are positively associated with both business and technology flexibility. Vertical relationships are positively associated with business flexibility and market relationships technology flexibility. ISD managers should establish robust relationships with its high-ups, other lateral units, and third parties outside in the market. They also need to be more adaptive to the increasingly volatile socio-technical environment, and proactively search, exploit, upgrade, and integrate resources that are essential to the development of system development team flexibility.     

Simplifying effort estimation based on Use Case Points

Context

The Use Case Points (UCP) method can be used to estimate software development effort based on a use-case model and two sets of adjustment factors relating to the environmental and technical complexity of a project. The question arises whether all of these components are important from the effort estimation point of view.

Objective

This paper investigates the construction of UCP in order to find possible ways of simplifying it.

Method

The cross-validation procedure was used to compare the accuracy of the different variants of UCP (with and without the investigated simplifications). The analysis was based on data derived from a set of 14 projects for which effort ranged from 277 to 3593 man-hours. In addition, the factor analysis was performed to investigate the possibility of reducing the number of adjustment factors.

Results

The two variants of UCP - with and without unadjusted actor weights (UAW) provided similar prediction accuracy. In addition, a minor influence of the adjustment factors on the accuracy of UCP was observed. The results of the factor analysis indicated that the number of adjustment factors could be reduced from 21 to 6 (2 environmental factors and 4 technical complexity factors). Another observation was made that the variants of UCP calculated based on steps were slightly more accurate than the variants calculated based on transactions. Finally, a recently proposed use-case-based size metric TTPoints provided better accuracy than any of the investigated variants of UCP.

Conclusion

The observation in this study was that the UCP method could be simplified by rejecting UAW; calculating UCP based on steps instead of transactions; or just counting the total number of steps in use cases. Moreover, two recently proposed use-case-based size metrics Transactions and TTPoints could be used as an alternative to UCP to estimate effort at the early stages of software development.     

The impact of inadequate customer collaboration on self-organizing Agile teams

Context

Customer collaboration is a vital feature of Agile software development.

Objective

This article addresses the importance of adequate customer involvement on Agile projects, and the impact of different levels of customer involvement on real-life Agile projects.

Method

We conducted a Grounded Theory study involving 30 Agile practitioners from 16 software development organizations in New Zealand and India, over a period of 3 years.

Results

We discovered that Lack of Customer Involvement was one of the biggest challenges faced by Agile teams. Customers were not as involved on these Agile projects as Agile methods demand. We describe the causes of inadequate customer collaboration, its adverse consequences on self-organizing Agile teams, and Agile Undercover — a set of strategies used by the teams to practice Agile despite insufficient or ineffective customer involvement.

Conclusion

Customer involvement is important on Agile projects. Inadequate customer involvement causes adverse problems for Agile teams. The Agile Undercover strategies we’ve identified can assist Agile teams facing similar lack of customer involvement.     

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.     

Discriminative effect of user influence and user responsibility on information system development processes and project management

Context

User participation in information system (IS) development has received much research attention. However, prior empirical research regarding the effect of user participation on IS success is inconclusive. This might be because previous studies overlook the effect of the particular components of user participation and other possible mediating factors.

Objective

The objective of this study is to empirically examine how user influence and user responsibility affect IS project performance. We inspect whether user influence and user responsibility improve the quality of the IS development process and in turn leads to project success, or if they have a direct positive influence on project success.

Method

We conducted a survey of 151 IS project managers in order to understand the impact of user influence and user responsibility on IS project performance. Regression analysis was conducted to assess the relationship among user influence, user responsibility, organizational technology learning, project control, user-developer interaction, and IS project management performance.

Results

This study shows that user responsibility and user influence have a positive effect on project performance through the promotion of IS development processes as mediators, including organizational technology learning, project control, and user-IS interaction.

Conclusion

Our results suggest that user responsibility and user influence respectively play an important role in indirectly and directly impacting project management performance. Results of the analysis imply that organizations and project managers should use both user participation and user influence to improve processes performance, and in turn, increase project success.     

Software engineering projects may fail before they are started: Post-mortem analysis of five cancelled projects

Context

Software project cancellations are often caused by mistakes made during the project, and such cancellations make a strong economic impact. We analyzed five cancelled software engineering projects. One case was an internal product development project of a company that sells products to its customers. The other four cases were different software engineering projects, and outcomes of these projects were planned to be delivered to external customers.

Objective

This study reports a post-mortem analysis of five software engineering projects with the aim of providing more knowledge about the reasons for cancellation decisions and the causes behind those reasons.

Methods

The research method is case study. A method for a document-based post-mortem analysis was developed and post-mortem analysis was performed. All project documentation was available for analysis.

Results

The reasons for the cancellation decisions were well-known ones. In four cases of five, the outcome of the project was to be delivered to an external customer, but in these cases the causes of the cancellation reasons were not found from the normal project documentation. In these cases the cause of the cancellation originated in a phase before the start of the project and therefore the project was doomed before it was started.

Conclusion

It is reasonable to suggest that a remarkable portion of project cancellations are due to mistakes made before the project is started in the case of contract-based software engineering projects.     

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.     

Field study on requirements engineering: Investigation of artefacts, project parameters, and execution strategies

Context

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a critical discipline mostly driven by uncertainty, since it is influenced by the customer domain or by the development process model used. Volatile project environments restrict the choice of methods and the decision about which artefacts to produce in RE.

Objective

We aim to investigate RE processes in successful project environments to discover characteristics and strategies that allow us to elaborate RE tailoring approaches in the future.

Method

We perform a field study on a set of projects at one company. First, we investigate by content analysis which RE artefacts were produced in each project and to what extent they were produced. Second, we perform qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews to discover project parameters that relate to the produced artefacts. Third, we use cluster analysis to infer artefact patterns and probable RE execution strategies, which are the responses to specific project parameters. Fourth, we investigate by statistical tests the effort spent in each strategy in relation to the effort spent in change requests to evaluate the efficiency of execution strategies.

Results

We identified three artefact patterns and corresponding execution strategies. Each strategy covers different project parameters that impact the creation of certain artefacts. The effort analysis shows that the strategies have no significant differences in their effort and efficiency.

Conclusions

In contrast to our initial assumption that an increased effort in requirements engineering lowers the probability of change requests or project failures in general, our results show no statistically significant difference between the efficiency of the strategies. In addition, it turned out that many parameters considered as the main causes for project failures can be successfully handled. Hence, practitioners can apply the artefact patterns and related project parameters to tailor the RE process according to individual project characteristics.     

A method for assessing confidence in requirements analysis

Context

During development managers, analysts and designers often need to know whether enough requirements analysis work has been done and whether or not it is safe to proceed to the design stage.

Objective

This paper describes a new, simple and practical method for assessing our confidence in a set of requirements.

Method

We identified four confidence factors and used a goal oriented framework with a simple ordinal scale to develop a method for assessing confidence. We illustrate the method and show how it has been applied to a real systems development project.

Results

We show how assessing confidence in the requirements could have revealed problems in this project earlier and so saved both time and money.

Conclusion

Our meta-level assessment of requirements provides a practical and pragmatic method that can prove useful to managers, analysts and designers who need to know when sufficient requirements analysis has been performed.     

The relationship between organizational culture and the deployment of agile methods

Context

Systems development normally takes place in a specific organizational context, including organizational culture. Previous research has identified organizational culture as a factor that potentially affects the deployment systems development methods.

Objective

The purpose is to analyze the relationship between organizational culture and the post-adoption deployment of agile methods.

Method

This study is a theory development exercise. Based on the Competing Values Model of organizational culture, the paper proposes a number of hypotheses about the relationship between organizational culture and the deployment of agile methods.

Results

Inspired by the agile methods thirteen new hypotheses are introduced and discussed. They have interesting implications, when contrasted with ad hoc development and with traditional systems development methods.

Conclusion

Because of the conceptual richness of organizational culture and the ambiguity of the concept of agility the relationship between organizational culture and the deployment of agile systems development forms a rich and interesting research topic. Recognizing that the Competing Values Model represents just one view of organizational culture, the paper introduces a number of alternative conceptions and identifies several interesting paths for future research into the relationship between organizational culture and agile methods deployment.     

The longitudinal, chronological case study research strategy: A definition, and an example from IBM Hursley Park

Context

There is surprisingly little empirical software engineering research (ESER) that has analysed and reported the rich, fine-grained behaviour of phenomena over time using qualitative and quantitative data. The ESER community also increasingly recognises the need to develop theories of software engineering phenomena e.g. theories of the actual behaviour of software projects at the level of the project and over time.

Objective

To examine the use of the longitudinal, chronological case study (LCCS) as a research strategy for investigating the rich, fine-grained behaviour of phenomena over time using qualitative and quantitative data.

Method

Review the methodological literature on longitudinal case study. Define the LCCS and demonstrate the development and application of the LCCS research strategy to the investigation of Project C, a software development project at IBM Hursley Park. Use the study to consider prospects for LCCSs, and to make progress on a theory of software project behaviour.

Results

LCCSs appear to provide insights that are hard to achieve using existing research strategies, such as the survey study. The LCCS strategy has basic requirements that data is time-indexed, relatively fine-grained and collected contemporaneous to the events to which the data refer. Preliminary progress is made on a theory of software project behaviour.

Conclusion

LCCS appears well suited to analysing and reporting rich, fine-grained behaviour of phenomena over time.     

Path dependent stochastic models to detect planned and actual technology use: A case study of OpenOffice

Context

Adopting IT innovation in organizations is a complex decision process driven by technical, social and economic issues. Thus, those organizations that decide to adopt innovation take a decision of uncertain success of implementation, as the actual use of a new technology might not be the one expected. The misalignment between planned and effective use of innovation is called assimilation gap.

Objective

This research aims at defining a quantitative instrument for measuring the assimilation gap and applying it to the case of the adoption of OSS.

Method

In this paper, we use the theory of path dependence and increasing returns of Arthur. In particular, we model the use of software applications (planned or actual) by stochastic processes defined by the daily amounts of files created with the applications. We quantify the assimilation gap by comparing the resulting models by measures of proximity.

Results

We apply and validate our method to a real case study of introduction of OpenOffice. We have found a gap between the planned and the effective use despite well-defined directives to use the new OS technology. These findings suggest a need of strategy re-calibration that takes into account environmental factors and individual attitudes.

Conclusions

The theory of path dependence is a valid instrument to model the assimilation gap provided information on strategy toward innovation and quantitative data on actual use are available.     

Testing in Service Oriented Architectures with dynamic binding: A mapping study

Context

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) have emerged as a new paradigm to develop interoperable and highly dynamic applications.

Objective

This paper aims to identify the state of the art in the research on testing in Service Oriented Architectures with dynamic binding.

Method

A mapping study has been performed employing both manual and automatic search in journals, conference/workshop proceedings and electronic databases.

Results

A total of 33 studies have been reviewed in order to extract relevant information regarding a previously defined set of research questions. The detection of faults and the decision making based on the information gathered from the tests have been identified as the main objectives of these studies. To achieve these goals, monitoring and test case generation are the most proposed techniques testing both functional and non-functional properties. Furthermore, different stakeholders have been identified as participants in the tests, which are performed in specific points in time during the life cycle of the services. Finally, it has been observed that a relevant group of studies have not validated their approach yet.

Conclusions

Although we have only found 33 studies that address the testing of SOA where the discovery and binding of the services are performed at runtime, this number can be considered significant due to the specific nature of the reviewed topic. The results of this study have contributed to provide a body of knowledge that allows identifying current gaps in improving the quality of the dynamic binding in SOA using testing approaches.     

Hybrid methodology for data warehouse conceptual design by UML schemas

Context

Data warehouse conceptual design is based on the metaphor of the cube, which can be derived from either requirement-driven or data-driven methodologies. Each methodology has its own advantages. The first allows designers to obtain a conceptual schema very close to the user needs but it may be not supported by the effective data availability. On the contrary, the second ensures a perfect traceability and consistence with the data sources—in fact, it guarantees the presence of data to be used in analytical processing—but does not preserve from missing business user needs. To face this issue, the necessity emerged in the last years to define hybrid methodologies for conceptual design.

Objective

The objective of the paper is to use a hybrid methodology based on different multidimensional models in order to gather all advantages of each of them.

Method

The proposed methodology integrates the requirement-driven strategy with the data-driven one, in that order, possibly performing alterations of functional dependencies on UML multidimensional schemas reconciled with data sources.

Results

As case study, we illustrate how our methodology can be applied to the university environment. Furthermore, we evaluate quantitatively the benefits of this methodology by comparing it with some popular and conventional methodologies.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we highlight how the hybrid methodology improves the conceptual schema quality. Finally, we outline our present work devoted to introduce automatic design techniques in the methodology on the basis of the logical programming.     

Data warehouse testing: A prototype-based methodology

Context

Testing is an essential part of the development life-cycle of any software product. While most phases of data warehouse design have received considerable attention in the literature, not much has been written about data warehouse testing.

Objective

In this paper we propose a comprehensive approach to testing data warehouse systems. Its main features are earliness with respect to the life-cycle, modularity, tight coupling with design, scalability, and measurability through proper metrics.

Method

We introduce a number of specific testing activities, we classify them in terms of what is tested and how it is tested, and we show how they can be framed within a prototype-based methodology. We apply our approach to a real case study for a large retail company.

Results

The case study we faced, based on an iterative prototype-based medium-size project, confirmed the validity of our approach. In particular, the main benefits were obtained in terms of project transparency, coordination of the development team, and organization of design activities.

Conclusion

Though some general-purpose testing techniques can be applied to data warehouse projects, the effectiveness of testing can be largely improved by applying specifically-devised techniques and metrics.     

An effective sequential statistical test for probabilistic monitoring

Context

A monitor checks if a system behaves according to a specified property at runtime. This is required for quality assurance purposes. Currently several approaches exist to monitor standard and real-time properties. However, a current challenge is to provide a comprehensive approach for monitoring probabilistic properties, as they are used to formulate quality of service requirements like performance, reliability, safety, and availability. The main problem of these probabilistic properties is that there is no binary acceptance condition.

Objective

To overcome this problem, this article presents an improved and generic statistical decision procedure based on acceptance sampling and sequential hypothesis testing.

Method

The developed decision procedure is validated using several experiments that determine the operating characteristic, runtime overhead as well as the expected sample sizes.

Results and conclusion

The experimental validation provides evidence that the developed testing procedure reduces the runtime overhead and improves the accuracy of classification. Thus, the statistical decision procedure is superior to the existing statistical tests currently used in probabilistic monitoring.     

Conceptual scheduling model and optimized release scheduling for agile environments

Context

Release scheduling deals with the selection and assignment of deliverable features to a sequence of consecutive product deliveries while several constraints are fulfilled. Although agile software development represents a major approach to software engineering, there is no well-established conceptual definition and sound methodological support of agile release scheduling.

Objective

To propose a solution, we present, (1) a conceptual model for agile scheduling, and (2) a novel multiple knapsack-based optimization model with (3) a branch-and-bound optimization algorithm for agile release scheduling.

Method

To evaluate our model simulations were carried out seven real life and several generated data sets.

Results

The developed algorithm strives to prevent resource overload and resource underload, and mitigates risks of delivery slippage.

Conclusion

The results of the experiment suggest that this approach can provide optimized semi-automatic release schedule generations and more informed and established decisions utilizing what-if-analysis on the fly to tailor the best schedule for the specific project context.     

Determinants of software quality in offshore development - An empirical study of an Indian vendor

Context

Cost advantage has been one of the primary drivers of successful offshoring engagements of Indian software and services companies. However, the emphasis has shifted to the ability of the vendors to provide high quality over cost advantage in delivering software products and services. Meeting high quality requirements of the clients is a challenge due to the very nature of development and delivery of software through offshoring.

Objective

The objective of this research paper is to identify and evaluate the key determinants of quality in the case of software projects delivered through offshoring model.

Method

A detailed survey was conducted among project managers/project leaders (leads) of a leading midsize Indian IT services company to evaluate the relationship of the determinants on the attributes of quality.

Results

Out of six determinants, our research reveals requirements uncertainty has significant association with all the attributes of quality. While process maturity and trained personnel have moderate association, communication and control, knowledge transfer and integration and technical infrastructure have relatively low association on software quality attributes in the case of offshoring.

Conclusion

It is concluded that the complexities in offshoring necessitates proper capturing of requirements. In addition high level of process maturity and availability of trained personnel to the project will help vendors to achieve software quality. The paper provides a set of implications for practice and directions for further research.     

Analogy-based software effort estimation using Fuzzy numbers

Background

Early stage software effort estimation is a crucial task for project bedding and feasibility studies. Since collected data during the early stages of a software development lifecycle is always imprecise and uncertain, it is very hard to deliver accurate estimates. Analogy-based estimation, which is one of the popular estimation methods, is rarely used during the early stage of a project because of uncertainty associated with attribute measurement and data availability.

Aims

We have integrated analogy-based estimation with Fuzzy numbers in order to improve the performance of software project effort estimation during the early stages of a software development lifecycle, using all available early data. Particularly, this paper proposes a new software project similarity measure and a new adaptation technique based on Fuzzy numbers.

Method

Empirical evaluations with Jack-knifing procedure have been carried out using five benchmark data sets of software projects, namely, ISBSG, Desharnais, Kemerer, Albrecht and COCOMO, and results are reported. The results are compared to those obtained by methods employed in the literature using case-based reasoning and stepwise regression.

Results

In all data sets the empirical evaluations have shown that the proposed similarity measure and adaptation techniques method were able to significantly improve the performance of analogy-based estimation during the early stages of software development. The results have also shown that the proposed method outperforms some well know estimation techniques such as case-based reasoning and stepwise regression.

Conclusions

It is concluded that the proposed estimation model could form a useful approach for early stage estimation especially when data is almost uncertain.