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This special issue comprises a selected set of high quality and extended articles of the 27th Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement (EuroSPI) Conference, held in 2020 in Düsseldorf, Germany (Figure 1). Automotive software is a relatively new, but important research field [[14]] and these two papers are directing two different but crucial challenges: SPI Implementation practices and the integration of security in the automotive software development lifecycle. EuroSPI is an initiative with the following major action lines http://www.eurospi.net: Establishing an annual EuroSPI conference supported by software process improvement networks from different EU countries. [Extracted from the article]

Traditional Systems Engineering artifacts and terminology have a negative connotation in some companies and industries that use Agile development. This paper aims to show that the terms and concepts typically associated with traditional systems engineering are not scary for Agile software development. They can, and should, be tailored and utilized during the Agile development process. Many times, terminology and lack of understanding lead to Agile practitioners shying away from what are considered traditional Systems Engineering artifacts such as requirements, architectures designs, documented interfaces, verification, gate reviews, etc. Agile actually already employs many of these artifacts and concepts but simply uses a different terminology when referring to them. This paper helps advance the mindset that traditional Systems Engineering terms, concepts, and artifacts are not something to avoid in Agile by providing alternative ways to describe and think about them in an Agile setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile methodologies are sometimes adopted, with the assumption that benefits can be attained by only using a set of best practices, which can sometimes work to a degree. In this paper, a case is discussed where a software‐producing organization of seven teams achieved significant improvements. The goal of the research was to answer two questions: how an already agile organization could improve its performance further and what is the impact of promoting quality aspects? The questions were answered by implementing interventions based on prior literature and data emerging from semi‐structured interviews. The context was an established business with a complex revenue stream structure, meaning the mix of various project/service/product based work rendered the adoption of agile methods a challenge. Action research comprising three rounds of interventions was conducted to improve the organization and its quality culture while enforcing code review practices. Interventions resulted in a significant improvement in quality, as measured by reported defects. Therefore, it is suggested that agile methods are not sufficient on their own to take software business forward unless a quality‐focused culture is simultaneously achieved through a mindset change and organizational structures to enforce quality practices. The paper contributes to research on the managerial practices of software business and agile transformation by providing empirical support to introducing formal quality improvement to the agile mix as a method for practitioners to improve organizations with complex business models and multiple teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights from the article: An initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the knowledge integration project (http://kiglobalhealth.org) aims to improve global child health by promoting and supporting knowledge sharing among researchers. 7 Anderson C, Checkley W, Xiao L. Using data from multiple studies to develop a child growth correlation matrix.

The volume at hand presents the special issue of the 12th International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) 2019, which was held in Montreal, Canada, from May 25 to 26, 2019. ICSSP 2019 is the latest in a series of conferences that have been organized by the International Software and Systems Process Association. In our evolving landscape, many companies are making efforts to move towards new technologies and tools, agile principles, and continuous integration and delivery. In doing so, they find opportunity, flexibility, and strength in evolving towards hybrid processes, which are neither purely traditional nor can count as textbook agile. This special issue focuses on hybrid processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile software development has reached wide adoption in various countries including Turkey, even though from which its original cultural backgrounds differ. In Turkey, many organizations have started to adopt Agile approaches more and more in their software development processes. This interest in the country's software development is parallel to what the academic literature on Agile in the country exhibits. However, despite the prevalence of Agile in Turkey, there is a lack of sufficient secondary research and comprehensive review on Agile in Turkey, which poses a significant necessity for further investigation. Considering this gap, we performed a quantitative bibliometric analysis of Agile software development publications produced by Turkish organizations in a holistic and broad approach both for scholars and practitioners. We provide a summary of relevant academic studies that emerged in Agile research in Turkey by focusing on many aspects including bibliometric properties of papers, researchers, affiliations, venues, and thematic contents that are separated into 15 sub‐research questions. After delivering results based on the questions, we discuss the results and findings of our study and present implications regarding the findings. The main contributions of our work are twofold. First, the paper may help the readers to have a quick idea, understand the subject, and gain insight from a large volume of scientific data. Second, the paper can help readers to use these analyses to form future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the emergence and advancement of agile processes like test-driven development (TDD), as of June 2018. Topics discussed include some benefits of TDD in software design that facilitate the work of software engineers, the need to conduct more research on TDD tests, and the importance of teaching agile processes to general software engineering students.

The COVID‐19 pandemic has undoubtedly affected every corner of the world in 2020. It has also emphasized the importance of managing supply chain risk and developing an agile supply chain. Supply chain management instructors will likely want to introduce risk management concepts and strategies into their courses to raise their students' sensitivity to the impact of supply chain disruptions. Unfortunately there is currently a dearth of coverage of supply chain disruptions and risk management in the major supply chain management text books as well as in the broader library of supply chain management pedagogical research publications. To help to close this gap in the literature for instructors, we have developed a reading and set of related discussion questions and exercises that detail the causes of the shortage in toilet paper during the pandemic and short‐ and long‐term strategies to make the supply chain more resilient in the future. By focusing on a disruption students likely experienced first‐hand, they can develop a more nuanced understanding of the complexity and interconnectedness of supply chain functions in providing products and services to customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The software industry is a dynamic and ever‐changing environment where knowledge dissemination and ongoing learning is an open challenge, especially in agile organizations where continuous learning is essential. Organizational training covers the set of activities that drive this learning process and is one of the process areas of process improvement models like CMMI. In this paper, we discuss how the organizational training activity has been carried out at agile organizations under the lens of CMMI V2.0. In other words, we use the CMMI‐DEV V2.0 Organizational Training practices to provide an overview of how agile organizations plan, perform, and assess their training activities as part of their continuous learning process. Existing literature primarily discusses the techniques used to train and retrain employees. However, there is little evidence on how to plan training, how to assure alignment with the organization's strategic and tactical goals, and how to evaluate the effectiveness of training, which are very important challenges in the organizational training process. The paper concludes by presenting eight valuable insights identified by this research and matching them up with the CMMI‐DEV V2.0 Organizational Training practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile methods have been widely adopted by the industry and its teaching has seen a surge, particularly in the software development field. However, these methods have a number of limitations which affect product outcomes, such as the fact that many software development companies now use Scrum to get developers to work without interruption between iterations, rather than to maintain a sustainable rhythm. Agile experts have stated the importance of incorporating creativity into Scrum, and although there are several agile resources that help with the learning process, it seems essential to approach such learning from a practical point of view. Furthermore, none of these resources introduce creativity. In this paper, we present an educational resource in the form of a serious game that allows you to acquire all the key concepts of agile and creative methods. The game is based on the use of LEGO pieces to simulate a real project, applying the key concepts of the Scrum and Design Thinking frameworks in a gamified way. It was assessed in a professional training centre of computer science by using surveys through which participants evaluated their previous knowledge of agile and creativity methods. We analysed the improvement of these competences, as well as the general level of satisfaction with the game. After the game, the results showed that the participants' knowledge of the Scrum and Design Thinking frameworks had improved and that they were very satisfied with the whole experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the software development projects have traditionally been faced with severe problems in terms of quality, cost, and time. Researchers and practitioners have focused on agile software development methods (ASDMs) as an alternative to overcome these problems. Agile methods employ iterative development cycles, interspersed by user feedback. Agile methods were basically developed for small development teams. Scaling agile methods is a big issue from different perspectives. De‐motivators play a key role in project management as it allows early identification and prompt management of threats that may arise during project execution. The objective of this paper is to identify the de‐motivators while scaling agile at large, from management perspectives. We have adapted SLR and applied contrived search criteria derived from the research questions, followed by selecting the required research papers, data extraction, and data synthesis, which resulted in 15 de‐motivators from 58 relevant papers. Some of the identified de‐motivators are 'traditional organizational culture', 'lack of agile experts', 'reluctance to adopt', and 'lack of management and commitment support'. The identified factors have been compared from various perspectives, such as continents, digital libraries, organization size, and so forth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A myriad of industries is investigating and applying new technologies, approaches, and software to improve the systems engineering life cycle status quo, by reducing the time duration and lowering the cost incurred in the systems engineering process. One effort undertaken, and described herein, is pairing an Agile‐Lean framework with models‐based systems engineering (MBSE) to achieve time saving and cost efficiencies quickly within systems engineering concepts to production systems phases. This is being done by the Agile Processes and technologies (APT) team who are tasked to deliver a weapon prototype in three years. For this purpose, APT has adopted practices currently used in industry to speed up the conventional processes and practices within Los Alamos National Laboratory and partners, particularly by implementing Agile‐Lean within MBSE. APT has demonstrated agility by implementing changes at the organizational scale; given that most of the work done at the facilities is heavily based on design and hardware performance. In addition, MBSE is used to support verification and validation activities to drive acquisition of necessary evidence to establish traceability and compliance needed for qualification and certification, as per stakeholders' requirements. This paper describes the current efforts towards implementing MBSE in an Agile‐lean framework to represent a complex system —weapon prototype—, in a rapidly moving and changing environment to enable informed decisions through the identification and capture of useful decision criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The best practices of agile software development have had a significant positive impact on the quality of software and time‐to‐delivery. As a result, many leading software companies employ some form of agile software development practices. Some of the most important best practices of agile software development, which have received significant attention in recent years, are automated unit testing (AUT) and test‐driven development (TDD). Both of these practices work in conjunction to provide numerous benefits. AUT leads to reduced time to test, discover bugs, fix bugs, and implement new features; wider and measurable test coverage; reproducibility, reusability, consistency, and reliability of tests; improved accuracy, regression testing, parallel testing, faster feedback cycle, reduced cost, and higher team morale. The benefits of TDD include flexible and adaptive program design, cleaner interfaces, higher code quality, maintainability, extensibility, reliability, detailed evolving specification, reduced time on bug fixes and feature implementation, reliable refactoring, and code changes, reduced cost, reduced development time, and increased programmer productivity. Unfortunately, students in introductory programming courses are generally not introduced to AUT and TDD. This leads to the development of bad programming habits and practices which become harder to change later on. By introducing the students earlier to these industry‐standard best practices, not only the motivation and interest of students in this area can be increased but also their academic success and job marketability can be enhanced. This paper presents the detailed design and efficacy study of an introductory C++ programming course designed using the principles of AUT and TDD. The paper presents the pedagogical techniques employed to build industry‐proven agile software development practices in the students. As part of the paper, all the course material including the source code for the labs and the automated unit tests are being made available to encourage people to incorporate these best practices into their curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP) provides a leading forum for the exchange of research outcomes and industrial best practices in process development from software and systems disciplines. ICSSP 2018 was held in Gothenburg, Sweden, May 26 to 27, 2018, colocated with the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). The theme of ICSSP 2018 was studying "Demands on Processes, Processes on Demand" by recognizing the demands on processes that include the need for both well‐developed plans and incremental deliveries (agile and hybrid processes), utilization of increased automation (model‐based engineering and DevOps), higher degrees of customer collaboration, comprehensive analysis of existing products for reuse (open source and COTS), and performance requirements of enterprise‐level architectures. This special issue includes the revised and extended versions of the five highest ranked full research papers and industry experience papers of ICSSP 2018, including the two award‐winning papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the number of journals that publish articles without considering their scientific merit, but simply because the author has paid a fee, has expanded dramatically. Because non-predatory journals are unable or unwilling to accept more than a small fraction of the vast numbers of research papers being written, the predatory journal industry has a guaranteed supply of willing authors. Reputable journals could, at least in principle, refuse to process articles that cite predatory journals. [Extracted from the article]

This editorial serves two purposes: It provides a general introduction to storytelling from an organizational and IS perspective. While such impoverished versions of storytelling are normally not included in the storytelling research discourse, there are other researchers who use the full richness of stories to engage with users in the software development process and thus contribute to and benefit from the storytelling scientific discourse. Recent hype around storytelling has made clear that the appeal, effectiveness, and potential of storytelling in IS is widely recognized. Storytelling in organizations: Why storytelling is transforming 21st century organizations and management. [Extracted from the article]

The combination of Agile methods and distributed software development via remote teams represents an emerging approach to address the challenges such as late feedback, slow project timelines, and high cost, typically associated with software development projects. However, when projects are implemented using an Agile model with distributed human resources, there are a number of challenges that need to be considered and mitigated. The objectives of our work are multifold. First, we would like to understand the reasons and conditions that lead to the adoption of distributed Agile software engineering (DASE) practices. Second, we would like to investigate and find out the most important risks that threaten a DASE approach and what mitigation strategies exist to address them. Finally, we would like to highlight which of the available approaches among the existing Agile methodologies has been successfully adopted by the community. We intend to solidify our findings by exploring the strength of the evidence that has been reported in the literature. We carried out a systematic literature review of DASE techniques and approaches. This systematic literature review found time zone difference, knowledge of resources, lack of infrastructure, missing roles, and responsibilities as being the primary challenges that needed to be addressed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprise architecture is a growing trend that aims to help deal with the complexity of socio‐technical systems such as human organizations, as well as their information technology and systems areas. Nevertheless, the contribution of enterprise architecture to the field of software engineering remains unclear. The purpose of this systematic literature review is to see how enterprise architecture is used in software development and maintenance practice. To this end, we first carried out a search in the SCOPUS database and then organized the papers according to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge to determine what areas of software engineering are covered by each research study. To understand how enterprise architecture is used, we established a classification based on ISO 42010 and TOGAF. From the systematic literature review, we noticed that the early stages of development are the most impacted by the enterprise architecture. On the other hand, we observed that enterprise architecture is of assistance in the areas of engineering management, engineering processes, and engineering models and methods; these tasks are carried out by teams or managers using different, often agile, development methods or standards. In turn, we found that the most common categories are architecture descriptions; these are often used to facilitate communication and information‐sharing between different stakeholders, in addition to frameworks, which will help to establish common practices in the organization related to the joint use of enterprise architecture and software development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, the economic crisis is putting enormous pressure on most organizations. It evolves in a crucial competitive environment with a multiplication of production cycles and implementation on the market. Due to this dynamism, organizations must be scalable and agile by adopting an approach that aims to make the process model of a given organization reusable. Indeed, according to the new paradigm which is called "Design by reuse" the models of configurable processes, gain recently in importance since these models have the capacity to represent explicitly the common parts and variables of identical processes in a customizable model. These configurable process which group several execution choices through a variation point called configurable connector will present an uncertainty related to the execution (or not) of the conditional tasks in a process model. In this paper, we propose a measure based on Shannon's entropy in order to model the uncertainty of the process at design time to guide configurable business process designers and analysts in developing and improving processes to be more predictable, less complex, and more understandable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We discuss the genesis of the paper for which the 2018 Forrester Award has been given. We then summarize its findings and put it into the context of the research streams in which it is embedded. We also describe the effects of the award paper on subsequent research. We then briefly discuss how laboratory experiment, field, and modeling work can complement each other in social systems research. Finally, we present some thoughts for leveraging the expertise of researchers and audiences from outside domains to the field of system dynamics, based on lessons from our work together as co‐authors and our mutual experience in project management, particularly in agile software development techniques. © 2019 System Dynamics Society [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Software developing organizations strive to achieve flexibility to maintain a competitive advantage. There is no common understanding of what characterize flexibility for a software organization beyond the scope of the software product. Without a common understanding, it is difficult to evaluate the degrees of flexibility of software development approaches. The aim of this literature review is to collect attributes that characterize flexibility. The collected attributes are consolidated into a flexibility framework with 3 main attributes: properties of change, flexibility perspectives, and flexibility enablers. The resulting flexibility framework is then used to evaluate Agile and Lean practices. The evaluation shows that Agile and Lean practices address many flexibility attributes. However, some attributes are not addressed, such as infrastructure flexibility and strategic flexibility. On the basis of our evaluation, the classifications of flexibility attributes that we present in this paper could be used to aid software organization flexibility evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The importance of the team, its internal dynamics, and its performance are widely recognized within the software engineering community. While popular frameworks identify wholeness, stability over time, and smallness as important factors, they offer little guidance on how to form teams that achieve these three characteristics. The objective of this study is to investigate how these team characteristics interact in large‐scale software development contexts, particularly focusing on the impact of stable and dynamic teaming approaches. This was done through a multivocal study of literature, followed by individual semi‐structured interviews with 19 engineers from two companies and validation workshops with an additional two companies from unrelated industry segments. The study results show that the question of stable versus dynamic approaches to forming software engineering teams is largely unaddressed in industry, with stable teams representing a habitual default option. Meanwhile, both stable and dynamic teams clearly have respective strengths and weaknesses, calling for careful consideration of the most suitable approach in any given situation. To support such consideration, this paper presents a model of how team stability, wholeness, and smallness interact. This model is found relevant, accurate, generalizable, and useful by practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the traditional radar emitter recognition task, the number of emitter category tags is fixed and relatively small. We input the pulse characteristic parameters into the machine learning model to model the radar emitter. The radar emitters with agile waveform involves four different waveform categories. The number of specific emitter categories contained in different waveform categories is extremely unbalanced. Their parameters vary widely, so only using the same model or strategy to model each waveform category cannot effectively extract the core features of the radar emitters with agile waveform. The above is the main reason for the low recognition accuracy of the recognition task of radar emitters with agile waveform. In this paper, a deep reinforcement learning framework is designed to be used in the intelligent recognition task of radar emitters with agile waveform. The task is regarded as a two‐step decision game. We use CNN and Bi‐LSTM to model the radar emitter, and calculate the initial state and transition state of the game. At the same time, we design the penalty function in reinforcement learning and increase the penalty for the wrong decision in the first step to deal with the imbalance of the number of emitters between different waveform categories. Finally, the Q‐Learning algorithm with approximate values is used to learn the control strategy of the game, that is, the modeling and recognition strategy adopted for emitters of different waveform categories. The simulation experiment results show that the deep reinforcement learning framework constructed in the article can improve the recognition accuracy of 1.2% compared with the state‐of‐the‐art method in the intelligent recognition task of radar emitters with agile waveform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Over the last decade, the use of agile methods has grown dramatically for software development. Agile methods guarantee to accelerate the delivery of remarkable software with increased user satisfaction and reduced cost. However, in recent years, due to the emergence of green software engineering, software developers are compelled to focus more on green and sustainable aspects of software. Green software engineering aims to design, develop, and use the software with confined energy and computing resources. Recently, software engineers in global software development have adapted agile methods for quick, interactive, and environment‐friendly software development. In this study, we have identified 16 success factors, through systematic literature review (SLR) and applied contrived search criteria derived from the research questions; 80 relevant papers were identified and reviewed. Findings of the SLR study were then empirically validated through questionnaire survey in global software development industry, in which 106 experts from 25 different countries participated. The findings of our industrial survey are mostly in coherence with the SLR findings. However, there is a difference in ranks of the various success factors across the 2 data sets (SLR and industrial survey). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Change has been recognized as the distinguishing feature that makes software different from any other human-produced artifacts. Initial reflections on the urgent and unavoidable need to master change date back to the 1970s. However, despite the continuous progress that characterized software technology since, in practice, software change is still often handled as an afterthought, in an ad hoc and unprincipled manner. Agile development methods have been proposed and are now widely adopted to accommodate change during development. Recent extensions to also include operation-known as DevOps-are increasingly and successfully adopted by industry. Still, principled and rigorous foundations that can be taught, practiced, and replicated systematically are lacking. This paper argues that change has to become a first-class concept and that the development tools used by engineers and the runtime environment supporting software execution should be structured in a way that naturally accommodates change. It also provides a perspective along which several research approaches that were investigated by the community in the past decade might be integrated and extended to make this vision become true. Two main change categories are identified-evolution and adaptation-along with the forces that drive them. The paper discusses when and how the developed software can be designed in a way that it can self-adapt. It also discusses how the software itself can cooperate with humans in-the-loop to help them in their design and development efforts. Finally, it outlines a roadmap of future work needed to progress in the direction of supporting and automating software change that would lead to dependable adaptation and evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Starting from the documentation of high sprint velocity fluctuations in a Scrum project, this paper presents a thorough approach to identify the sources of issues arising in the context of Scrum implementation. Given that Scrum provides guidance on identifying process issues but not their root causes, various approaches are explored. This is of great relevance because Scrum defines project schedules relying heavily on sprint velocity and because it is the most widely used agile methodology. The findings provide a new approach to evaluate such fluctuations and establish a more realistic project assessment than what is currently defined by Scrum. In this respect, this paper contributes to improve the understanding of the software development process using this agile framework. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover landed in Gale crater in August of 2012 on its mission to explore Mt. Sharp as the first planetary rover to collect and analyze rock and regolith samples. On this new mission, sampling operations were conceived to be executed serially and in situ, on a "sample chain" along which sample would be collected, then processed, then delivered to sample analysis instruments, analyzed there, and then discarded so the chain could be repeated. This paper describes the evolution of this relatively simple chain into a richer sampling network, responding to science and engineering desires that came into focus only as the mission matured, scientific discoveries were made, and anomalies were encountered. The rover flight and ground system architectures retained significant heritage from past missions, while extending capabilities in anticipation of the need for adaptation. As evolution occurred, the architecture permitted nimble extension of sampling behavior without time‐consuming flight software updates or significant impact to daily operations. This paper presents the major components of this architecture and discusses some of the results of successful adaptation across thousands of Sols of Mars operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we show how to achieve a sustainable software testing process in a very complex scientific project, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio observatory. The project currently involves 13 countries, 16 agile development teams of about 150 individuals, governed through the Scalable Agile Framework (SAFe) framework; the software that is being built ranges from user interfaces to control systems, from transactional applications to high performance parallel scientific processing code. The paper illustrates the testing challenges we have to tackle; it also defines what a "sustainable testing process" is and how that constitutes the foundation of an incremental adoption plan rooted on systems thinking. The plan is then described, highlighting the principles we adhered to for synthesising a sequence of 9 basic testing goals that are currently being rolled out. We are confident that similar decisions can be made on many large scientific projects that are developed with agile methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades, agile software development (ASD) has garnered much attention in both research and practice. Several ASD methods and techniques have been developed and studied. In particular, researchers have provided several theoretical perspectives on ASD and contributed rich insights to the ASD practice. Still, despite calls for a more unified theoretical understanding of ASD, a theoretical core of ASD has not been identified. This paper offers a theoretical core of ASD research, clarifying what is essential and what is less essential for IS agility, hoping to spark a scholarly discussion, and provides implications of such a core for understanding method tailoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a global pandemic, COVID‐19 impacts work‐related processes, placing strain upon many employees in project teams. Identifying process variables and potential organizational resources can play an important role in addressing employee mental health, both for the current pandemic and future crises. Based on an extension of the job demands–resources model, this paper introduces COVID‐19 demands as distal job demands, examining their influence on emotional exhaustion through proximal unfinished tasks. Furthermore, we suggest that agile project management acts as a buffering job resource in this relationship. In two studies, we drew samples from Germany (N = 168) and the USA (N = 292). Across studies, COVID‐19 demands had an indirect effect on emotional exhaustion, mediated by unfinished tasks. Furthermore, agile project management acts as a buffering job resource for individuals in Germany, attenuating the relationship between COVID‐19 demands, unfinished tasks and subsequent feelings of emotional exhaustion. In contrast, findings from Study 2 revealed that COVID‐19 demands were more strongly related to unfinished tasks and subsequent feelings of emotional exhaustion in the USA when individuals reported higher levels of agile project management. Taken together, our results indicate that project work under COVID‐19 fosters feelings of emotional exhaustion through the accumulation of unfinished tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systems engineering enabled the development of some of the greatest engineering marvels of the 20th century. With the advent of the information age and software‐centric systems, which drove a dramatic increase in system complexity, the practice of systems engineering has encountered growing pains. As organizations developing these software‐centric systems work to adopt agile software development methods, the rigor of systems engineering work has been compromised. The linguistic relativity hypothesis suggests that the cognitive ability to engineer effective systems is developed and enhanced by the "language" of systems engineering. An improved understanding of what constitutes model‐based systems engineering (MBSE) as opposed to systems modeling can improve MBSE outcomes. We put forth here that agile systems engineering, enabled by MBSE, is the bridge that will allow the principles and processes that have been developed through decades of research and experience to be applied to benefit modern systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the main output of the EU‐funded H2020 AGILE 4.0 project: the AGILE 4.0 MBSE‐MDAO Development Framework. The framework aims at connecting upstream Model‐Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) activities to downstream Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization (MDAO) activities, applied to the development of complex aeronautical systems. Upstream activities include the definition of stakeholders, needs, semantic requirements, and modeling the system architecture design space. Downstream activities include defining, implementing, and executing cross‐organizational and collaborative MDAO workflows to support system synthesis. The development framework is implemented in an Operational Collaborative Environment (OCE), a web‐based platform for project data and modeling tool access. A business jet family design application case demonstrates the use of the development framework and OCE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost all companies struggle with software systems that are getting increasingly complex. Therefore, in particular large companies often use software product lines, which provide an efficient way to manage software reuse as well as the high complexity. However, software product lines seem to be too slow to react to changes. Agile development approaches promise to meet this demand. At the same time, integrating an agile approach is not always easy. Consequently, there is a need for a transformation model that supports the agile transformation without harming the benefits of software product lines. In this paper, we present the results of a literature review regarding agile transformation in large software companies. Our results summarize the insights from 85 papers and present a list of 20 tasks and tasks that are recommended by several researchers to be considered during the transformation. On the basis of these results, we create an agile transformation model—the so‐called "agile hamburger"—that contains these tasks and preserves software product lines. Since the model is rather coarse grained and generic, we also support the adaption to different teams by presenting an assessment model tailored to the demands of the automotive domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary objective of this paper is to report on the successful implementation of forensic facial approximation in a real case in the forensic context. A three‐dimensional (3D) facial approximation protocol of the skull was performed with free software, applying techniques in a virtual environment that have already been consolidated in the literature. The skull was scanned with the photogrammetry technique, the digital replica was imported in the Blender software (Blender Foundation, Amsterdam) and individualized model sketches of the face were traced with the MakeHuman software (MakeHuman Org) according to the anthropological profile of the victim. The face created was imported in Blender, where it was adapted, modeled, and sculpted on the 3D skull and its soft tissue markers, using an American open‐source application of the technique in the digital environment. The face created in a virtual environment was recognized and legal identification procedures were started, resulting in the more agile delivery of the disappeared body to its next of kin. It is therefore concluded that facial approximation may not be a primary method of human identification, but it can be satisfactorily applied in the forensic field as an individual recognition resource. It has great value in narrowing the search, reducing the number of alleged victims, and leading to identification tests, therefore significantly reducing the number of genetic DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) tests—which are considered costly for the State or Federation—and consequently reducing the waiting time before delivery of the body to its family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infrastructure must be resilient to both known and unknown disturbances. In the past, resilient infrastructure design efforts have tended to focus on principles of robustness and recovery against projected failures. This framing has developed independently from resilience principles in biological and ecological systems. As such, there are open questions as to whether the approaches of natural systems that lead to adaptation and transformation are relevant to engineered systems. To improve engineered system resilience, infrastructure managers may benefit from considering and applying a set of "Life's Principles"—design principles and patterns drawn from the field of biomimicry. Nature has long withstood disturbances within and beyond previous experience. Infrastructure resilience theory and practice are assessed against Life's Principles identifying alignments, contradictions, contentions, and gaps. Resilient infrastructure theory, which emphasizes a need for flexible and agile infrastructure, aligns well with Life's Principles, addressing each principle and most sub‐principles (excluding "breakdown products into benign components" and "do chemistry in water"). Meanwhile, resilient infrastructure practice only occasionally aligns with Life's Principles and contradicts five out of six principles. As resilience theory advances, Life's Principles offer support in broadening how infrastructure managers approach resilience, and by using biomimicry, infrastructure managers can be better equipped to deploy resilience for complexity and uncertainty. Plain Language Summary: In today's rapidly evolving climate, and amid unprecedented technological disruptions, engineers and designers seek infrastructure solutions that are resilient to both known and unknown future conditions. This paper uses biomimicry to provide examples and guidance for resilient infrastructure systems, spanning theory and practice. We evaluate opportunities for improving design, prompted through consideration of Life's Principles—six principles that are associated with the emergence of resilience in natural systems. We conclude that resilient infrastructure theory generally accords with Life's Principles (aligning with all but two unaddressed sub‐principles). However, resilient infrastructure practice only occasionally aligns with Life's Principles, and it contradicts five out of six Life's Principles with the sixth ("use life friendly chemistry") being unaddressed. We recommend several pragmatic opportunities for infrastructure managers to improve infrastructure resilience going forward through incorporating Life's Principles within the design process. Key Points: Emerging resilient infrastructure theory addresses all Life's Principles and most sub‐principlesMeanwhile, resilient infrastructure practice largely ignores and, occasionally, contradicts Life's Principles and sub‐principlesBiomimicry provides examples of system resilience in a complex and uncertain world and offers guidance to infrastructure managers [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presents in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including use of Bayesian networks for assisting continuous improvement of Scrum projects, portfolio management and adoption level of scaled agile development.

Traditional portfolio management tools and methods are challenging for software companies that use agile and lean approaches, because of the complex pre-planning activities required. In this paper, traditional portfolio management tools and methods that have been conventionally used in industry and presented in literature are reviewed. Findings concerning their use in agile and lean software companies are investigated, on the basis of the literature review and semi-structured interviews conducted in 7 agile and lean software companies in Finland. The findings indicate that the studied companies do not use traditional portfolio management tools and methods in their entirety. The software companies adapted suitable components from traditional portfolio management tools and methods into their practices. They also apply new tools and methods to manage their portfolios of offerings, to cope with the dynamics required by agile and lean methods. The companies' emphasis is on using tools to facilitate immediate feedback from customers, to assess the value of offerings in their portfolio. The results showed a growing interest in using Kanban at the portfolio level to provide a visual overview of offerings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations are introducing agile and lean software development techniques in operations to increase the pace of their software development process and to improve the quality of their software. They use the term DevOps, a portmanteau of development and operations, as an umbrella term to describe their efforts. In this paper, we describe the ways in which organizations implement DevOps and the outcomes they experience. We first summarize the results of a systematic literature review that we performed to discover what researchers have written about DevOps. We then describe the results of an exploratory interview-based study involving 6 organizations of various sizes that are active in various industries. As part of our findings, we observed that all organizations were positive about their experiences and only minor problems were encountered while adopting DevOps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The federal government has long had a need for highly secure communications. The National Security Agency (NSA) is responsible for the wide range of technologies to secure these communications. They realized, recently, that the development times for government encryption technology was not keeping pace with the rapid evolution of commercial mobile technologies; together with a realization that commercial technologies exist to meet the requirements for the federal government. Specifically, NSA has published specifications on their website to operationalize these capabilities. Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC), the NSA term for commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) secure communications, coupled with published capability packages allows a developer to field a secure communications solution rapidly built entirely on COTS technology. The architecture, proposed in this paper, will address the rapidly evolving commercial mobile security market and will address fully leveraging commercial technologies to field the latest technologies in the shortest amount of time and at the lowest cost. With the NSA move to commercial technologies and the commercial market moving to enhanced security for 'standard commercial users,' there is an emerging convergence of these two approaches. The initial work has revealed effective architectural constructs to support the wide range of emerging applications of this promising approach from NSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The layered architecture of AUTOSAR while making it highly modular, also makes it complex to debug when the software is tested directly on the hardware. This leads to iterations in the development process which sometimes can trace back to changes in the system architecture resulting in overheads and delays in the software development process. This paper discusses how test‐driven development (TDD) methodology can be adopted for AUTOSAR compliant software in enterprises which can reduce the iterations in the development process. This also makes it well suited for Agile workflow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile software development in construction projects – a report summarizing the DigitalTWIN research project Project management in the construction sector is characterized by manifold and numerous interdependencies, high project volumes with variable constraints and long project durations. It requires structured and defined planning principles as well as flexibility, as criteria, assessments, and opinions change or only become clear during the course of a project. Digital tools for project management are consequently an important focus in the DigitalTWIN research project. The implementation of agile software development in the project course of grid shell structures and cable net facades show the advantages of a close collaboration between project stakeholders and specialists in data science and software engineering. Real project progress can be evaluated faster and more precisely, process designs can be developed based on data, and proven workflows can be adjusted to specific situations without losing the relation to a growing database. The paper gives an introduction to management methods and shows how knowledge and recommended actions for construction projects can be obtained faster from relevant data using individual software development. The required cloud infrastructures, platform technologies and methods are developed step by step in demonstrators and provide an outlook how collaboration can be structured, fast, comprehensive, digital and trustworthy using distributed IT systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Akari Software offers a family of software products supporting curriculum management in higher education. The work started with one specific commission, but within 4 years, a small product suite had been developed, with ten organisations using customised variants of those products. In effect, a product family had been created but without the underlying structure and processes needed to ensure the efficient creation and maintenance of variants. This is a common issue faced by software companies as their product range expands. In 2010, Akari began making internal changes to develop a product range infrastructure that was suitable both for its existing products and its plans for future growth. The purpose of this paper is to describe the product line transition that occurred, both to share the experience involved and to identify a number of general lessons learned. The work was supported by a FUSION project, funded by InterTradeIreland, undertaken in collaboration with the University of Ulster. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Medical device software development organizations are bound by regulatory requirements and constraints to ensure that developed medical devices will not harm patients. Medical devices have to be treated as complete systems and be evaluated in this manner. Instead of manufacturers having to ensure compliance to various regulatory standards individually, the authors previously developed a medical device software process assessment framework called MDevSPICE® that integrates the regulatory requirements from all the relevant medical device software standards. The MDevSPICE® was developed in a manner that suits plan‐driven software development. To improve the usability of MDevSPICE® in agile settings, we extended the assessment approach. The hybrid assessment approach described here combines the MDevSPICE®‐based process assessment method with steps for prioritization of improvement needs through value stream mapping and enabling process improvement through the use of KATA technique. This approach integrates agile methods into the medical device software development process while adhering to the requirements of the regulatory standards. This paper describes the implementation of the approach within 4 organizations that develop software in line with medical device regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fifth generation (5G) era, the radio internet protocol capacity is expected to reach 20 Gb/s per sector, and ultralarge content traffic will travel across a faster wireless/wireline access network and packet core network. Moreover, the massive and mission‐critical Internet of Things is the main differentiator of 5G services. These types of real‐time and large‐bandwidth‐consuming services require a radio latency of less than 1 ms and an end‐to‐end latency of less than a few milliseconds. By distributing 5G core nodes closer to cell sites, the backhaul traffic volume and latency can be significantly reduced by having mobile devices download content immediately from a closer content server. In this paper, we propose a novel solution based on software‐defined network and network function virtualization technologies in order to achieve agile management of 5G core network functionalities with a proof‐of‐concept implementation targeted for the PyeongChang Winter Olympics and describe the results of interoperability testing experiences between two core networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the applicability of agile methods to aircraft embedded software development. It presents the main results of an experiment that combines agile practices from Scrum with model-based development and distributed development. The experiment consists of the development of an aircraft cockpit display system divided in five distributed teams. Three features are analysed and quantified, using the output artefacts of each team: the artefacts' quality, the adherence to agile methods, and the adherence to standard DO-178C. The main conclusion of the experiment is that there is a high correlation between the adherence to agile methods and the artefacts' quality, motivating the use of agile methods in aircraft industry. Also, the experiment evinced that agile methods does not specifically address the integration of distributed teams and the hardware/software integration. This lacuna affects the artefacts' quality. The results of the experiment emphasize the importance of concentrating future work in the proposal of specific agile practices for these activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, the growth of medical devices and mobile medical applications is increasing enormously, thanks to the efficiency and enhancement of new technology. When it comes to mobile medical apps, developers need to understand what is required when a mobile application fulfils the definition of a medical device. Such applications have to be developed in compliance with medical device regulations. This can be a challenge for mobile medical application developers, as medical device software is normally developed in a manner that will also ensure the production of regulatory documentation that is essential to market such devices. In this paper, we identify the need for a mobile medical application development framework, the key criteria for such a framework, and describe how the results were collected through performing a Medical Device Software Development workshop. Furthermore, we describe how MDevSPICE together with an agile software development approach can be tailored to support a mobile medical applications development framework. We detail one of the key criteria for mobile medical application development framework-traceability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From its earliest days, software development has been beset with challenges in relation to timely delivery, appropriateness of features, and quality of deliverables. Many advances in software development processes have helped to address these concerns. For example, agile software development has helped to deliver working software more frequently, and capability maturity frameworks have brought about improved consistency in quality levels. However, the age-old challenge of better, cheaper, faster software has continued to beguile developers. In this paper, we discuss an emerging approach to software development, continuous software engineering (CSE), wherein software of operational quality may be delivered on a very frequent basis, up to many times in a given day. This approach uses a complex set of independent tools that together reduce the lead time in delivering commercial-grade software. Having examined the situational context of one industrial organization applying CSE, we conclude that the approach may not presently be appropriate to all manners of software development. Nonetheless, the authors are of the view that CSE represents a significant progression in software engineering and that software development settings of all types stand to gain from aspects of the CSE approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scrum is a simple process to understand, but hard to adopt. Therefore, there is a need for resources to assist on its adoption. In this paper, we present the process followed to build a Bayesian network to assist on the assessment of the quality of the software process in the context of Scrum projects. The model provides data to help Scrum Masters lead the improvement of business value delivery of Scrum teams. The process is divided into 2 phases. In the first phase, we built the Bayesian network based on expert knowledge extracted from the literature and experts. We used a top-down approach and reasoning to define the key metrics necessary to build the models and their relationships. In the second phase, we updated the Bayesian network based on limitations of the first version. We validated the Bayesian network inferences with 10 simulated scenarios. Comparing both versions, for all scenarios, we improved the accuracy of the inferences. Therefore, we concluded that the Bayesian networks adequately represent Scrum projects from the viewpoint of the Scrum Master. Finally, the model built is in conformance with agile methods tailoring and can be adapted to any Scrum team. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]