Estimating the development cost of custom software

In this paper an approach for the estimation of software development costs is presented. The method is based on the characterization of the software to be developed in terms of project and environment attributes and comparison with some similar completed project(s) recovered from a historical database. A case study is also presented, focusing on the calibration and application of the method on 59 information systems implementing supply chain functions in industry. Various strategies are explored, the best of which predicted effort quite effectively, with a mean estimation error of 24% with respect to the actual effort.     

Comments on "More success and failure factors in software reuse"

For original paper see ibid., p. 474. This is a clear example of how research in software engineering can progress when empirical methods are applied. Menzies and Di Stefano apply a number of data mining tools to the data set. While, inmost cases, their results are in agreement with ours, in some cases they are not. Our first and main observation is that our interpretation of the data set is based not only on the data set itself but also on the knowledge gathered during the interviews with project members. The main problem with the data set is its size: 23 data points. Although this data set is the largest one available about reuse projects, it is too limited to base analysis only on data mining techniques; data mining is usually applied to data sets with thousands if not millions of data points.     

Success and failure factors in software reuse

This paper aims at identifying some of the key factors in adopting or running a company-wide software reuse program. Key factors are derived from empirical evidence of reuse practices, as emerged from a survey of projects for the introduction of reuse in European companies: 24 such projects performed from 1994 to 1997 were analyzed using structured interviews. The projects were undertaken in both large and small companies, working in a variety of business domains, and using both object-oriented and procedural development approaches. Most of them produce software with high commonality between applications, and have at least reasonably mature processes. Despite that apparent potential for success, around one-third of the projects failed. Three main causes of failure were not introducing reuse-specific processes, not modifying nonreuse processes, and not considering human factors. The root cause was a lack of commitment by top management, or nonawareness of the importance of those factors, often coupled with the belief that using the object-oriented approach or setting up a repository seamlessly is all that is necessary to achieve success in reuse. Conversely, successes were achieved when, given a potential for reuse because of commonality among applications, management committed to introducing reuse processes, modifying nonreuse processes, and addressing human factors     

Development with Off-the-Shelf Components: 10 Facts

Several empirical studies have been conducted on issues related to the development of systems using commercial off-the-shelf and open source software components. The results demonstrate a discrepancy between academic theory and industrial practices regarding the use of components. One reason is that researchers have empirically evaluated only a few theoretical methods; so, industrial practitioners have no reason to adopt them. Another reason might be that researchers have specified the application contexts of only a small number of theories in sufficient detail to avoid misleading users. Academic researchers often hold false assumptions about industry. For example, research on requirement negotiations often assumes that a client will be interested in, and be capable of, discussing a project's technical details. However, in practice this is usually not true. In addition, the quality of a component in the final system is often attributed solely to component quality before integration, ignoring quality improvements by integrators during component integration.     

A systematic literature review of Linked Data‐based recommender systems

Recommender systems (RS) are software tools that use analytic technologies to suggest different items of interest to an end user. Linked Data is a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. This paper presents a systematic literature review to summarize the state of the art in RS that use structured data published as Linked Data for providing recommendations of items from diverse domains. It considers the most relevant research problems addressed and classifies RS according to how Linked Data have been used to provide recommendations. Furthermore, it analyzes contributions, limitations, application domains, evaluation techniques, and directions proposed for future research. We found that there are still many open challenges with regard to RS based on Linked Data in order to be efficient for real applications. The main ones are personalization of recommendations, use of more datasets considering the heterogeneity introduced, creation of new hybrid RS for adding information, definition of more advanced similarity measures that take into account the large amount of data in Linked Data datasets, and implementation of testbeds to study evaluation techniques and to assess the accuracy scalability and computational complexity of RS. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the effectiveness of the test-first approach to programming

Test-driven development (TDD) is based on formalizing a piece of functionality as a test, implementing the functionality such that the test passes, and iterating the process. This paper describes a controlled experiment for evaluating an important aspect of TDD: in TDD, programmers write functional tests before the corresponding implementation code. The experiment was conducted with undergraduate students. While the experiment group applied a test-first strategy, the control group applied a more conventional development technique, writing tests after the implementation. Both groups followed an incremental process, adding new features one at a time and regression testing them. We found that test-first students on average wrote more tests and, in turn, students who wrote more tests tended to be more productive. We also observed that the minimum quality increased linearly with the number of programmer tests, independent of the development strategy employed.     

Synthesizing Service Composition Models on the Basis of Temporal Business Rules

Transformational approaches to generating design and implementation models from requirements can bring effectiveness and quality to software development. In this paper we present a framework and associated techniques to generate the process model of a service composition from a set of temporal business rules. Dedicated techniques including path-finding,branching structure identification and parallel structure identification are used for semi-automatically synthesizing the process model from the semantics-equivalent Finite State Automata of the rules. These process models naturally satisfy the prescribed behavioral constraints of the rules. With the domain knowledge encoded in the temporal business rules,an executable service composition program,e.g.,a BPEL program,can be further generated from the process models. A running example in the e-business domain is used for illustrating our approach throughout this paper.     

Diversity in reuse processes

Examines the impact of software process diversity in one specific area: software reuse, which means that the work products developed elsewhere (in another project, group or company) are used again. To learn how to achieve reuse, we initiated a two-year study in 1997 of roughly two dozen European companies that were establishing reuse programmes in the context of process improvement experiments. We discovered that, despite diversity in business context, technical and managerial traditions and company size, companies can indeed achieve reuse, using diverse processes. From that study, we present four companies (Sodalia, Thomson-CSF, Eliop and Chase Information Technology Services) as case histories, selected for the variety and effectiveness of their approaches. These four European companies successfully achieved software reuse despite pursuing radically different processes and technologies. The authors explore the reasons behind the companies' success and present guidelines for others wanting to establish reuse programmes     

Applying the PSP in industry

The Personal Software Process is designed for engineers working in isolated settings. The author describes a case study where he introduced the PSP in an industrial environment and that effort raised the issues of: training form and duration, resistance to change, independence and dependence between the single programmer and his or her team, overhead in data collection and tool support, and sustainability of measure. We addressed these problems by considerably modifying the PSP for that environment. One year after its introduction, only part of the PSP is still in use. The PSP proved to be more useful as a model to inspire a process improvement effort than as an off-the-shelf process to be reused without modification. Although the modifications cannot be generalized, the experience gained can