Partnering effects on user-developer conflict and role ambiguity in information system projects

Context

Information system development (ISD) has been plagued with high failure rates. This is partially due to the activities being a combination of both a technical and social processes involving stakeholders with conflicting interests.

Objective

Existing software risk management theories and frameworks offer limited suggestions for actions that can be taken to reduce the chance of failure of ISD projects. Our objective is to examine the connections among some of the more important user related risks in order to shed light on how specific strategies enhance the chance of project success.

Method

We conducted a sample of information systems project managers to test a multivariate model to explain the impact of pursuing a partnership with users on the conflicts that arise between users and developers, role ambiguity, and subsequent impact on project performance.

Results

The proposed model was supported, suggesting that user-developer conflict and role ambiguity have a negative impact on performance estimation difficulty, which negatively affects project performance.

Conclusion

Pursuit of project partnering yields a number of significant relationships in the model indicating an organization can implement practices that reduce risks associated with role ambiguity and conflict in system development projects.     

A systematic review of software architecture evolution research

Context

Software evolvability describes a software system’s ability to easily accommodate future changes. It is a fundamental characteristic for making strategic decisions, and increasing economic value of software. For long-lived systems, there is a need to address evolvability explicitly during the entire software lifecycle in order to prolong the productive lifetime of software systems. For this reason, many research studies have been proposed in this area both by researchers and industry practitioners. These studies comprise a spectrum of particular techniques and practices, covering various activities in software lifecycle. However, no systematic review has been conducted previously to provide an extensive overview of software architecture evolvability research.

Objective

In this work, we present such a systematic review of architecting for software evolvability. The objective of this review is to obtain an overview of the existing approaches in analyzing and improving software evolvability at architectural level, and investigate impacts on research and practice.

Method

The identification of the primary studies in this review was based on a pre-defined search strategy and a multi-step selection process.

Results

Based on research topics in these studies, we have identified five main categories of themes: (i) techniques supporting quality consideration during software architecture design, (ii) architectural quality evaluation, (iii) economic valuation, (iv) architectural knowledge management, and (v) modeling techniques. A comprehensive overview of these categories and related studies is presented.

Conclusion

The findings of this review also reveal suggestions for further research and practice, such as (i) it is necessary to establish a theoretical foundation for software evolution research due to the fact that the expertise in this area is still built on the basis of case studies instead of generalized knowledge; (ii) it is necessary to combine appropriate techniques to address the multifaceted perspectives of software evolvability due to the fact that each technique has its specific focus and context for which it is appropriate in the entire software lifecycle.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Formal model for assigning human resources to teams in software projects

Context

Human resources play a critical role in software project success. However, people are still the least formalized factor in today’s process models. Generally, people are assigned to roles and project teams are formed on the basis of project leaders’ experience of people, constraints (e.g. availability) and skill requirements. Yet this process has to take multiple factors into account. Few works in the literature model this process. Most of these are informal proposals focusing on the individual assignment of people to project tasks and do not consider other aspects like team formation as a whole.

Objective

In this paper we formulate a formal model for assigning human resources to software project teams. Additionally, we describe the key results of the knowledge management process enacted to output the elements of the model.

Method

The model elements were identified using the Delphi expert consultation method and applying psychological tests. The proposed model was implemented in a software tool and validated on two software development organization assignment scenarios.

Results

We built a formal model for the process of assigning human resources to software project teams. This model takes into account as many factors as possible and aids the assignment of individuals to project roles, as well as the formation of the team as a whole.We found that the rules that were identified to form software development project teams are useful. From the tests we found that model implementation was feasible (all the executions of the implemented problem-solving algorithms output feasible solutions in response times that can be considered as acceptable).

Conclusion

Using the Delphi method we were able to propose software project roles and competences. Psychological tests and data mining tools identified useful rules for forming software project teams. These were used to build a formal model. This model was built into a tool that returns role assignments in acceptable response times. This decision support tool helps managers assign people to roles and to form teams. Using the tool, project leaders can flexibly evaluate different team make-ups, taking into account several factors, as well as different constraints and objectives.     

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.     

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.     

IDD Info: A software to manage surveillance data of Iodine Deficiency Disorders

Objectives

IDD info, a new software for managing survey data of Iodine Deficiency Disorders (IDD), is presented in this paper. IDD Info aims to create IDD project databases, process, analyze various national or regional surveillance data and form final report. It has series measures of choosing database from existing ones, revising it, choosing indicators from pool to establish database and adding indicators to pool. It also provides simple tools to scan one database and compare two databases, to set IDD standard parameters, to analyze data by single indicator and multi-indicators, and finally to form typeset report with content customized.

Methods

IDD Info was developed using Chinese national IDD surveillance data of 2005. Its validity was evaluated by comparing with survey report given by China CDC.

Results

The IDD Info is a professional analysis tool, which succeeds in speeding IDD data analysis up to about 14.28% with respect to standard reference routines. It consequently enhances analysis performance and user compliance.

Conclusions

IDD Info is a practical and accurate means of managing the multifarious IDD surveillance data that can be widely used by non-statisticians in national and regional IDD surveillance.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Research synthesis in software engineering: A tertiary study

Context

Comparing and contrasting evidence from multiple studies is necessary to build knowledge and reach conclusions about the empirical support for a phenomenon. Therefore, research synthesis is at the center of the scientific enterprise in the software engineering discipline.

Objective

The objective of this article is to contribute to a better understanding of the challenges in synthesizing software engineering research and their implications for the progress of research and practice.

Method

A tertiary study of journal articles and full proceedings papers from the inception of evidence-based software engineering was performed to assess the types and methods of research synthesis in systematic reviews in software engineering.

Results

As many as half of the 49 reviews included in the study did not contain any synthesis. Of the studies that did contain synthesis, two thirds performed a narrative or a thematic synthesis. Only a few studies adequately demonstrated a robust, academic approach to research synthesis.

Conclusion

We concluded that, despite the focus on systematic reviews, there is limited attention paid to research synthesis in software engineering. This trend needs to change and a repertoire of synthesis methods needs to be an integral part of systematic reviews to increase their significance and utility for research and practice.     

Modeling process-related RBAC models with extended UML activity models

Context

Business processes are an important source for the engineering of customized software systems and are constantly gaining attention in the area of software engineering as well as in the area of information and system security. While the need to integrate processes and role-based access control (RBAC) models has been repeatedly identified in research and practice, standard process modeling languages do not provide corresponding language elements.

Objective

In this paper, we are concerned with the definition of an integrated approach for modeling processes and process-related RBAC models - including roles, role hierarchies, statically and dynamically mutual exclusive tasks, as well as binding of duty constraints on tasks.

Method

We specify a formal metamodel for process-related RBAC models. Based on this formal model, we define a domain-specific extension for a standard modeling language.

Results

Our formal metamodel is generic and can be used to extend arbitrary process modeling languages. To demonstrate our approach, we present a corresponding extension for UML2 activity models. The name of our extension is Business Activities. Moreover, we implemented a library and runtime engine that can manage Business Activity runtime models and enforce the different policies and constraints in a software system.

Conclusion

The definition of process-related RBAC models at the modeling-level is an important prerequisite for the thorough implementation and enforcement of corresponding policies and constraints in a software system. We identified the need for modeling support of process-related RBAC models from our experience in real-world role engineering projects and case studies. The Business Activities approach presented in this paper is successfully applied in role engineering projects.     

MC Sandbox: Devising a tool for method-user-centered method configuration

Context

Method engineering approaches are often based on the assumption that method users are able to explicitly express their situational method requirements. Similar to systems requirements, method requirements are often vague and hard to explicate. In this paper we address the issue of involving method users early in method configuration. This is done through borrowing ideas from user-centered design and prototyping, and implementing them on the method engineering layer.

Objective

We design a computerized tool, MC Sandbox, to capture method requirements through the use of method-user-centered method configuration, hence bridging the gap between systems developers’ and method engineers’ understanding of and expectations on a situational method.

Method

The research method adopted can be characterized as multi-grounded action research. Our implementation of multi-grounded action research follows the traditional ‘canonical’ action research method, which has cycles of diagnosing, action planning, action taking, evaluating, and specifying learning. The research project comprised three such action research cycles where 10 action cases were performed.

Results

MC Sandbox has proven useful in eliciting and negotiating method requirements in a continuously ongoing dialog between the method users and the method engineers during configuration workshops. The results also show that the method engineer role rotated among the systems developers and that they were indeed committed to the negotiated methods during the systems development projects.

Conclusion

It is possible for method users to actively participate and construct suitable situational methods if they are provided with appropriate high-level modelling concepts, such as method components, configuration packages and configuration templates. This way, the project members’ understanding of the current development practice develops incrementally, both in terms of understanding the needs and available method support. In addition, both method requirements and commitments are made explicit, which are important aspects when working with method configuration from a collaboration point of view.     

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.     

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.