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Editor-in-chief Forrest Shull talks about the practical application of software analytics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A new generation of development environments takes a radical approach to communication and coordination by fusing social networking functionality with flexible, distributed version control. Through these transparent work environments, people, repositories, development activities, and their histories are immediately and easily visible to all users. Developers quickly acquire the skill to interpret this rich information to find useful resources, connect with people, solve technical problems, and enhance their learning opportunities. This article presents the results of a qualitative study of users of one such environment, GitHub. It describes how transparency helps developers on GitHub manage their projects, handle dependencies more effectively, reduce communication needs, and figure out what requires their attention. Although transparency is not a silver bullet, the approach shows great promise for enhancing collaboration and coordination. The Web extra at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM is a video of Joel Spolsky discussing the structure, software, technology, and culture of Stack Exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Oracle's Clive King and Chris Beal talk about hidden software on which we completely depend—the OS. Although OSs are highly reliable, no OS is perfect. So, when things go wrong in the OS running on modern systems, the needle-in-the-haystack analogy hardly begins to scratch the surface of the needed detective work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The primary sources of project risks and product problems are poor, missing, or changing requirements. Often, the underlying root cause is insufficient collaboration between business partners. This article provides insight into how to effectively collaborate in requirements engineering. We describe the Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF) standard and technologies for seamless requirements development and management. I look forward to hearing from both readers and prospective column authors about this and the technologies and tools you want to know more about. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Proponents of various processes and methods in the agile and lean communities have made many bold claims about usefulness, but those claims are rarely supported by empirical investigations. Data gathered from more than 12,000 work items collected over two years sheds light on Kanban versus Scrum.To acquire more knowledge about the performance of different agile or lean methods, scholars should conduct similar studies in different organizations in different application domains and with people of different cultures and competences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although the discipline of software product management plays an important role in the development of successful products, each company adopts its practices in its own way. Regardless of variations, companies face common problems. This article identifies five problems that lean principles to software product management can help organizations avoid or solve. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Lean practices use the principle of Little's law to improve the flow of value to the end user by eliminating sources of waste from a software development process. Little's law defines throughput as a ratio of work in process and cycle time. Increasing throughput (or productivity) requires continuously improving (that is, decreasing) cycle time while ensuring that the work-in-process limit doesn't exceed the capacity available to process the work. This article shares experiences regarding the role architecture plays in lean software management practices. Release plans that give as much emphasis to architecturally significant tasks as to feature-based high-priority functionality can achieve better outcomes by avoiding conditions that lead to wasted time and effort. The application of lean software development practices can improve with better practical guidance on how to manage architecture flow as well as feature flow. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Owing to strong market growth for medical devices deployed in critical-care facilities, development organizations in medical engineering must continually look for opportunities to drive engineering efficiency and cost effectiveness. Furthermore, cycle time must decrease, the alignment of clinical workflow is breaking down departmental barriers, and an increased amount of product functionality is being realized in software. To help meet such challenges, adequate requirements engineering is necessary. Toward that end, Syngo (a business unit of the Imaging and Therapy division of Siemens) introduced Feature-Oriented Requirements Engineering (FORE) and developed a business case for using it in the context of a lean engineering program. FORE integrates with other engineering disciplines such as project management, software architecture, and test management. There was an error in the biographical information for Tobias Stenzel. Stenzel's biography should have indicated that he has an MS in industrial engineering and management from the University of Technology Karlsruhe, Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]