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Part 3: Gaming for Cybersecurity Training; International audience; Agile software development is practiced in most software development projects around the world. To explicitly consider and include security requirements as part of agile software development is referred to as ‘secure agile’. To include security will naturally require additional time and effort, with potentially reduced agility as a consequence. To maintain agility, it is important to have efficient methods to include security in the development process. In this study, we describe enhancements to Threat Poker, which is a game designed for the software development team to deal with security threats identified during the agile development project. Games can be valuable educational tools for actively engaging students and practitioners alike. An experiment with students indicates that playing Threat Poker increases security awareness and that it is a fun and simple way to discuss identified security threats and how to remove security vulnerabilities during the software development process.

The reengineering of systems into a microservice-based architecture can be seen as an implementation of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). However, the deployment of SOA into an enterprise is a challenging task, as it may involve the modernization of mission-critical systems with high technical debt and high maintenance costs. To this end, a process is required to provide an appropriate set of steps and techniques that minimize risks and at the same time ensure the quality of the systems during the migration process. Thus, this work presents the Service-oriented Process for Reengineering and DevOps—SPReaD, an instantiation of the mainstream SOA methodology focusing on the reengineering of legacy systems integrating DevOps aspects for developing microservices systems. This process has been defined during a real software reengineering project of legacy systems from a Brazilian State Department of Taxation. The results obtained include a substantial improvement in the quality of the main taxation system used by the state, including not only code-related metrics but also performance improvements of the services offered, and a change in the methodology adopted by the software development team.

Education is crucial for the growth of society, and the usage of effective learning methods is key to transmit knowledge to young students. Some initiatives present Virtual Reality technologies as a promising medium to provide active, effective, and innovative teaching. In turn, the use of this technology seems to be very attractive to students, making it possible to acquire knowledge through it. On the other hand, agile methodologies have taken an essential role within information technologies and they are key in Software Engineering education. This paper combines both areas and presents prior research about Virtual Reality experiences with educational purposes and introduces a serious VR video game that aims to promote the learning of agile methodologies in Software Engineering education, specifically the Scrum methodology. This application tries to bring students closer to their first days of work within a software development team that uses the Scrum methodology. Two evaluation processes performed with university teachers and students indicate that the developed video game meets the proposed objectives and looks promising.

Knowledge is the primary asset of the software industry which increases the complexity of the software development activities. Knowledge Management (KM) is an important practice that offers processes namely KM cycles and addressed to knowledge capture, creation, storage, dissemination, sharing, and use. Thereby, understanding different means to consolidate individual’s knowledge within the software industry is relevant to software development practitioners and researchers. Therefore, this article discusses how Scrum activities support KM cycle to convert the individual’s knowledge into common knowledge within software development teams. Our analysis points out that KM cycle combined with Scrum practices is a potential tool to disseminate individual knowledge across software development team members.

Context: User involvement is generally considered to contributing to user satisfaction and project success and is central to Agile software development. In theory, the expectations about user involvement, such as the PO's, are quite demanding in this Agile way of working. But what are the expectations seen in practice, and are the expectations of user involvement aligned among the development team and users? Any misalignment could contribute to conflict and miscommunication among stakeholders that may result in ineffective user involvement. Objective: Our aim is to compare and contrast the expectations of two stakeholder groups (software development team, and software users) about user involvement in order to understand the expectations and assess their alignment. Method: We have conducted an exploratory case study of expectations about user involvement in an Agile software development. Qualitative data was collected through interviews to design a novel method for the assessing the alignment of expectations about user involvement by applying Repertory Grids (RG). Results: By aggregating the results from the interviews and RGs, varying degrees of expectation alignments were observed between the development team and user representatives. Conclusion: Alignment of expectations can be assessed in practice using the proposed RG instrument and can reveal misalignment between user roles and activities they participate in Agile software development projects. Although we used RG instrument retrospectively in this study, we posit that it could also be applied from the start of a project, or proactively as a diagnostic tool throughout a project to assess and ensure that expectations are aligned., Conference paper, 10 pages, 1 figure, 7 tables

The mass shift to working at home during the COVID-19 pandemic radically changed the way many software development teams collaborate and communicate. To investigate how team culture and team productivity may also have been affected, we conducted two surveys at a large software company. The first, an exploratory survey during the early months of the pandemic with 2,265 developer responses, revealed that many developers faced challenges reaching milestones and that their team productivity had changed. We also found through qualitative analysis that important team culture factors such as communication and social connection had been affected. For example, the simple phrase "How was your weekend?" had become a subtle way to show peer support. In our second survey, we conducted a quantitative analysis of the team cultural factors that emerged from our first survey to understand the prevalence of the reported changes. From 608 developer responses, we found that 74% of these respondents missed social interactions with colleagues and 51% reported a decrease in their communication ease with colleagues. We used data from the second survey to build a regression model to identify important team culture factors for modeling team productivity. We found that the ability to brainstorm with colleagues, difficulty communicating with colleagues, and satisfaction with interactions from social activities are important factors that are associated with how developers report their software development team's productivity. Our findings inform how managers and leaders in large software companies can support sustained team productivity during times of crisis and beyond., 13 pages. Final version of the paper accepted at ICSE 2021

Software development encompasses many collaborative tasks in which usually several persons are involved. Close collaboration and the synchronization of different members of the development team require effective communication. One established communication channel are meetings which are, however, often not as effective as expected. Several approaches already focused on the analysis of meetings to determine the reasons for inefficiency and dissatisfying meeting outcomes. In addition to meetings, text-based communication channels such as chats and e-mails are frequently used in development teams. Communication via these channels requires a similar appropriate behavior as in meetings to achieve a satisfying and expedient collaboration. However, these channels have not yet been extensively examined in research. In this paper, we present an approach for analyzing interpersonal behavior in text-based communication concerning the conversational tone, the familiarity of sender and receiver, the sender's emotionality, and the appropriateness of the used language. We evaluate our approach in an industrial case study based on 1947 messages sent in a group chat in Zulip over 5.5 months. Using our approach, it was possible to automatically classify written sentences as positive, neutral, or negative with an average accuracy of 62.97% compared to human ratings. Despite this coarse-grained classification, it is possible to gain an overall picture of the adequacy of the textual communication and tendencies in the group mood., Published in the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Human-Centered Software Engineering

Part 1: Session 1; International audience; Software platforms offer a foundation for digital innovation and have the potential to take advantage of and leverage the knowledge and skills of distributed and diverse software organizations as ‘complementors’. Due to their location far away from platform owners, scarce resources, and limited capacity to hire and retain skilled human resources, organizations in developing countries typically face barriers for participating in digital innovation. This paper aims to improve our understanding of how these organizations can take part in digital innovation. The basis for our research is a case study of software organizations located in different developing countries and their role as complementors related to the DHIS2 software platform, a platform made for the public health sector in developing countries. We contribute by exploring and showing how these organizations differ along multiple dimensions, for instance, the maturity of their software development team, their relation to the platform owners, and their access to resources. Further, we identify and develop a taxonomy consisting of six different forms of digital innovation unfolding in the fringes of a software platform ecosystem and identify contextual factors influencing these different forms.

As digital transformation affects more and more industries, the increased role of software and the skills required to develop software trigger a ripple effect. Entire industries, where regulations and government standards play an important role (e.g. health care, avionics, etc.), have used long development cycles that relied on detailed up-front planning before advancing to any detailed decision. In contrast to this mindset, agile software development has proven to deliver results that satisfy customers needs faster than traditional waterfall methodologies. The lack of detailed upfront planning and fast delivery cycles have led to situations where the use of agile became synonymous with lack of documentation and poor quality, and hence the perception that the approach is not suitable for regulated systems. In this experience paper we describe the implementation of a service that integrates medical device software compliance specific activities such as architectural design and limited risk management into the daily agile practices of a software development team.

Even though a lot of projects fail due to social issues or personality conflicts, only a small number of empirical studies have been conducted to quantitatively assess the impact of individual personality attributes on the software being developed and the team developing that software. The goal of this paper is to quantify the abstract notion of team homogeneity and to measure its impact on software quality and team productivity. A metric called team homogeneity index (THI) is proposed for this purpose. The six-step process of calculating the THI of a software development team is described and illustrated with the help of an example. Finally, the utility of THI is assessed by conducting a controlled experiment in two different phases of the software development life cycle (SDLC), i.e., implementation and testing. The results reveal that, during the implementation phase, teams with greater THI values were noticeably more productive and produced better quality code. Similarly, during the testing phase, teams with higher values of THI tested more features and wrote better quality test cases. Therefore, the evidence obtained so far suggests that the newly proposed metric, THI, appears to be useful in predicting the quality of software and the productivity of software development teams. Future work includes determining the weights of the five traits using input from the software industry and replication of this empirical study on different phases of SDLC with software practitioners to validate our findings.

Software development projects continue to deliver results that fall short on organization’s expectations. The present research was carried out at InfoPortugal, a technological company specialized in Geographic Information Systems and Tourism and Leisure Solutions, where project management practices were underuse. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to describe the proposals and their implementation to enable the improvement of project management practices in a software development team. Guidelines are provided by a matrix with key areas to be improved and related proposed improvement initiatives. The definition and application of a hybrid project management methodology was the most important improvement initiative to address some of the key problems identified in case under study. Traditional plan-oriented methodologies do not have the flexibility to dynamically adjust to the software development process. While, agile methodologies combine iterative and incremental approaches to adapt to high levels of change, with early and continuous delivery., (undefined)

Context: DevOps is considered important in the ability to frequently and reliably update a system in operational state. DevOps presumes cross-functional collaboration and automation between software development and operations. DevOps adoption and implementation in companies is non-trivial due to required changes in technical, organisational and cultural aspects. Objectives: This exploratory study presents detailed descriptions of how DevOps is implemented in practice. The context of our empirical investigation is web application and service development in small and medium sized companies. Method: A multiple-case study was conducted in five different development contexts with successful DevOps implementations since its benefits, such as quick releases and minimum deployment errors, were achieved. Data was mainly collected through interviews with 26 practitioners and observations made at the companies. Data was analysed by first coding each case individually using a set of predefined themes and thereafter perform a cross-case synthesis. Results: Our analysis yielded some of the following results: (i) software development team attaining ownership and responsibility to deploy software changes in production is crucial in DevOps. (ii) toolchain usage and support in deployment pipeline activities accelerates the delivery of software changes, bug fixes and handling of production incidents. (ii) the delivery speed to production is affected by context factors, such as manual approvals by the product owner (iii) steep learning curve for new skills is experienced by both software developers and operations staff, who also have to cope with working under pressure. Conclusion: Our findings contributes to the overall understanding of DevOps concept, practices and its perceived impacts, particularly in small and medium sized companies. We discuss two practical implications of the results.

As software organizations try to mitigate operational and technical risk that occurs when using software, there is need to develop a knowledge intensive system to assist team members in mitigating both operational and technical risk. Knowledge mapping in risk mitigation context is in its infancy and has the potential to address both operational and technical risk faced by software organizations. However, as the amount and depth of organizational knowledge increases, it poses some challenges to software organizations. The key challenges for knowledge intensive organizations are how to identify, assimilate, disseminate, and apply these risk knowledge; particularly between different team members in same software development project. Thus this paper proposes a knowledge mapping process model to assist in mitigating risk (operational and technical) that occurs in software organizations. Knowledge mapping is the field within Knowledge Management (KM) that aims to optimize the efficient and effective use of the organization’s knowledge. The mapping process model can support software management teams in measuring and treating risk, thus aiding decision making in software management. Data was collected using semi-structured interview through case study. The interview transcripts were coded and categorized using Nvivo software. Keywords: Knowledge Map, Knowledge Mapping Technique, Risk Mitigation, Software Management, Nvivo

Software development is a set of activities which time, budget, and effort of the human resource. Over the years, the software development process has matured to enable the adaptation and integration of commercially available components. The availability of commercially-off-the-shelf and modifiable-off-the-shelf components has transferred the complexity from development and design phases to the integration phase and we can observe large- application development by integrating the available components. Often, due to the limitation of technological and other resources, developing a software application in-house may be less beneficial. In such circumstances, development firms opt to either buy software or outsource the development. In this paper, we identify the factors that govern the decision of making software applications in-house, outsourcing them, or buying them from the market. Since the concept of component integration is more common in large scale applications, in this paper we consider this case.

Software process improvement and business process reengineering are concomitant for software companies that struggle to mature their processes to reduce software project failures. Process gap analysis is an indispensable activity of both the initiatives. It is the identification of deviations in any process from a standard well-defined process. To identify deviations, an as-is process (descriptive/current process) and its corresponding to-be process (prescriptive/standard) are required. However, there is a lack of reengineering tools that support automated gap analysis. Companies rely on manual identification of deviations. The literature discusses various graph matching algorithms/techniques that determine similarities and differences between two graphs. They can be used in software industry as well to achieve multiple objectives, such as process improvement. As these techniques present certain limitations, such as insufficient element coverage for process gap analysis, they cannot deal with process gap analysis per se. However, they establish a ground for a much sophisticated solution. This paper presents an improved gap analysis algorithm to identify deviations in processes. The proposed algorithm is formally verified and also evaluated using an example process model.

Negotiation is best accomplished in collocated settings, and negotiation in geographically distributed settings is prone to failure with a risk of conflicts. Investigating distributed software development, we were surprised to discover that a software development team, located in different parts of Brazil, was able to negotiate successfully and reach an agreement to change from ticket-oriented processes towards release-oriented processes for bug fixing activities using only chat technology. In this paper, we explore how the chat technology allowed the distributed software team (including both vendor and client team members) to successfully negotiate and reach agreement about adopting and implementing a new collaborative workflow in the governmental IT-project. Our research method is based upon an ethnographically informed empirical study of the software development involved in a Brazilian software company. Thus, the data collected shows that the chat technology provided a platform for the team to engage informally in important discussions across locations. The chat technology allowed participants to navigate both within and across diverse subgroups (collocated client-developers; distributed clientdeveloper, and distributed developers-developers), which supported successful subgroup dynamics avoiding the risk of conflicts emerging from faultlines.

Software development methodologies become increasingly more people and team-oriented. However, many software projects fail due to conflicts of team members. Formation of an effective software development team may be particularly challenging given the differences inherent across an individual’s personality. This paper explores personality traits of agile software development teams by using a context-specific interactive assessment. Concerning the assessment, we have conducted a questionnaire with 110 participants from a large-scale software development company. We have visualized personality traits with team radar charts showing the personality traits of 18 project teams and analyzed the results by validation interviews. Our preliminary results indicate that higher introversion is observed most commonly in isolated teams that has less contact with customers. Moreover, high levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness personality traits are observed in most of the agile software development teams.

In 2001 the “McCracken group”, through a multi-institutional study, concluded that many students finishing their introductory programming courses could not program due to a lack of problem solving skills. In 2004 Lister established that students have a fragile grasp of skills to read and interpret code. Humphrey suggests that educators must shift their focus from the programs that the students create to the data of the processes the students use. This paper addresses the problem of poor performing students through an investigation of their quality appraisal techniques (QATs) and development processes. Firstly, a survey was conducted to determine the current software development practices used by a group of undergraduate Computer Science students. Numeric data collected revealed that the current practices used by the majority of students would not be sufficient to produce quality programs. Secondly, a case study was conducted to gain a deeper understanding of the various factors that are likely to influence students’ intention to use QATs. Analysis of numeric data collected through a survey revealed that students’ intentions to use QATs are driven by ease of use, compatibility, usefulness, result demonstrability, subjective norm and career consequences. Thirdly, an experiment was conducted to determine students’ perceptions on the use of process measurement data to improve their current software development practices. Analysis of numeric and narrative data revealed that performance measurement data could provide students with useful information to adopt proper development practices.

Software development projects in government institutions have certain characteristics that can negatively impact the management process of these projects. However, the negative impact of these characteristics can be decreased by using the appropriate software development project lifecycle model, because it ensures more comprehensive and effective project management. The methodology for selecting the most appropriate model for software development projects in government institutions, where outsourcing is used, is elaborated. The impact of the characteristics of software development projects in government institutions on project execution and management process is analysed. The methodology is elaborated taking into account these characteristics and ensures that the appropriate model is selected.

1. IntroductionThis study identifies the impact of hardware product characteristics on the embedded software development outsourcing.Software development separates modules and processes to a great degree, and codification is considered a simple matter. Therefore, software development outsourcing is a general phenomenon (Bruce, Leverick, Littler, & Wilson, 1995; Eppinger & Chitkara, 2006). Outsourced projects often end in failure due to delayed deliveries and budget overruns. It has been noted that the company that undertakes outsourced work must acquire knowledge of a customer's business processes and project management (Bruce et al., 1995). However, existing research implicitly assumes application software development, thereby overlooking the impact of hardware product characteristics on embedded software development (Rottman, 2006).Rottman (2006) highlighted that in the case of embedded software development, software development depends on hardware characteristics, and requires time to train engineers because they must acquire complex knowledge of business processes and products. He offered some suggestions for skillfully managing overseas outsourcing projects for embedded software, stating that the outsourcer should 1) utilize multiple companies and create a competitive environment that maintains low cost and high quality; 2) maintain a stable pool of personnel for knowledge retention and transfer; 3) increase opportunities for face-to-face communication; 4) internally communicate the purpose for the outsourcing strategy in a clear fashion; and 5) invite engineers of the company to which the work is outsourced and let them observe the development team as part of their training. While very few studies focus on embedded software development outsourcing, they suggest that for this type of software development, the type of knowledge required for engineers will vary according to the hardware characteristics.According to Umezawa (2007), Japanese companies have been slow to adopt software development outsourcing compared with their U.S. counterparts, with international outsourcing intensely beginning around 2001, primarily with China. There has thus been a gradual increase in literature depicting the development of regional software firms in China that focus on work with Japan and descriptions of development projects with Japanese companies (Kobayashi, 2014a, 2014b; Tanzawa, 2014; Umezawa, 2007). While some studies deal with embedded software development outsourcing among Japanese companies (Kobayashi, 2013), most of these focus on the impact of differences in local characteristics, and very few systematically examine hardware characteristics.1The product characteristics that are outsourced influence the selection of locations and partners (Graf & Mudambi, 2005; Hatonen, 2009). Traditional research has applied the characteristics of embedded software and explained that the creation of embedded software varies depending on the hardware, rather than the application software. However, it goes no further than to suggest that the time it requires to train engineers is longer due to the acquisition of knowledge regarding hardware (Rottman, 2006). In other words, the most critical point-the impact of hardware characteristics in embedded software development on companies to which the work is outsourced-remains unclear.This study is organized as follows: Section 2 explains the research design; Section 3 employs the data from an interview-based survey to primarily explain the theme of the study; Section 4 presents the conclusion.2. Research DesignThis study is based on interviews conducted in July and August 2013 among three Japanese companies in Dalian and Fuzhou, China, and two Chinese companies in Dalian (Table 1).The Japanese companies specialize in information systems (J1), automobile components (J2), and office automation equipment (J3) industries, whereas the local companies (C2 and C3)2 specialize in software development. …

Early detection of software defects is very important to decrease the software cost and subsequently increase the software quality. Success of software industries not only depends on gaining knowledge about software defects, but largely reflects from the manner in which information about defect is collected and used. In software industries, individuals at different levels from customers to engineers apply diverse mechanisms to detect the allocation of defects to a particular class. Categorizing bugs based on their characteristics helps the Software Development team take appropriate actions to reduce similar defects that might get reported in future releases. Classification, if performed manually, will consume more time and effort. Human resource having expert testing skills & domain knowledge will be required for labeling the data. Therefore, the need of automatic classification of software defect is high.This work attempts to categorize defects by proposing an algorithm called Software Defect CLustering (SDCL). It aims at mining the existing online bug repositories like Eclipse, Bugzilla and JIRA for analyzing the defect description and its categorization. The proposed algorithm is designed by using text clustering and works with three major modules to find out the class to which the defect should be assigned. Software bug repositories hold software defect data with attributes like defect description, status, defect open and close date. Defect extraction module extracts the defect description from various bug repositories and converts it into unified format for further processing. Unnecessary and irrelevant texts are removed from defect data using data preprocessing module. Finally grouping of defect data into clusters of similar defect is done using clustering technique. The algorithm provides classification accuracy more than 80% in all of the three above mentioned repositories.

Ineffective software team composition has become recognized as a prominent aspect of software project failures. Reports from results extracted from different theoretical personality models have produced contradicting fits, validity challenges, and missing guidance during software development personnel selection. It is also believed that the technique/s used while developing a model can impact the overall results. Thus, this study aims to: 1) discover an effective classification technique to solve the problem, and 2) develop a model for composition of the software development team. The model developed was composed of three predictors: team role, personality types, and gender variables; it also contained one outcome: team performance variable. The techniques used for model development were logistic regression, decision tree, and Rough Sets Theory (RST). Higher prediction accuracy and reduced pattern complexity were the two parameters for selecting the effective technique. Based on the results, the Johnson Algorithm (JA) of RST appeared to be an effective technique for a team composition model. The study has proposed a set of 24 decision rules for finding effective team members. These rules involve gender classification to highlight the appropriate personality profile for software developers. In the end, this study concludes that selecting an appropriate classification technique is one of the most important factors in developing effective models., 12 pages

Software producing organizations have the ability to address the energy impact of their ICT solutions during the development process. However, while industry is convinced of the energy impact of hardware, the role of software has mostly been acknowledged by researchers in software engineering. Strengthened by the limited practical knowledge to reduce the energy consumption, organizations have less control over the energy impact of their products and lose the contribution of software towards energy related strategies. Consequently, industry risks not being able to meet customer requirements or even fulfillcorporate sustainability goals. In this paper we perform an exploratory case study on how to create and maintain awareness on an energy consumption perspective for software among stakeholders involved with the development of software products. During the study, we followed the development process of two commercial software products and provided direct feedback to the stakeholders on the effects of their development efforts, specifically concerning energy consumption and performance, using an energy dashboard. Multiple awareness measurements allowed us to keep track of changes over time on specific aspects affecting software development. Our results show that, despite a mixed sentiment towards the dashboard, changed awareness has triggered discussion on the energy consumption of software.

Many universities are now offering software engineering an undergraduate level emphasizing knowledge point. However, some enterprise managers reflected that education ignore hands-on ability training, and claimed that there is the isolation between teaching and practice. This paper presents the design of a Software Engineering course (sixth semester in network engineering) at University of Jinan for undergraduate Software Engineering students that uses virtualization technology to teach them project-driven learning-by-doing software development process. We present our motivation, challenges encountered, pedagogical goals and approaches, findings (both positive experiences and negative lessons). Our motivation was to teach project-driven Software Engineering using virtualization technology. The course also aims to develop entrepreneurial skills needed for software engineering graduates to better prepare them for the software industry. Billing models of virtualization help pupils and instructors find the cost of the experiment. In pay-as-you-go manner, two labs and three step-by-step projects (single project, pair project, and team project) are designed to help the students to complete the assignment excitedly. We conduct some detailed surveys and present the results of student responses. The assessment process designed for this course is illustrated. The paper also shows that learning-by-doing method correlates with the characteristics of different projects, which has resulted in a successful experience as reported by students in an end of a semester survey.

Success in software development is not simply “a person” or “a team” succeeding in development, but rather the execution of a smooth “shift to the next-generation” of developers, who continuously upgrade a single software product over a long span of time. In this case, different generations of developers share the source code. This paper analyzes this process using “Denshin 8 go,” Japanese free software as one example. Initially, the original creator, Ishioka developed Denshin 8 go single-handed as closed source software and succeeded in motivating users through frequent upgrades. Several years after the initial release of Denshin 8 go Ishioka lagged behind in much needed upgrades, but one user group continued to use Denshin 8 go and was eager to improve the software. He disclosed the source code to the group, which in turn carried forward the process of development. As this case shows, the viewpoint that alternate generation of developers outside of a single company is caused by success in software development is known as “open source” software development. However, the reverse is not necessarily true. That is, simply becoming open source does not guarantee successful development.

Software vendors typically release updates and upgrades of their software once or twice a year. Users are then faced with the question of whether the upgrade is worth the price and the trouble. The software industry doesn't provide much evidence that it's worthwhile to upgrade to new releases. The authors propose the use of process mining to prove that upgrading to the next release provides quantifiable benefits to the end user. Process mining capitalizes on the fact that event logs capture information about processes. These events can be used to make processes visible and show the benefits of using a software product's next release. Three groups benefits from this process: end users, software suppliers, and researchers. The authors applied process mining to a medical software product and captured empirical data from 1,400 cases. The data shows that the new version was 11 percent more efficient than the old release.

The Authors have proposed a model that first captures the fundamentals of software metrics in the phase 1 consisting of three primitive primary software engineering metrics; they are person-months (PM), function-points (FP), and lines of code (LOC). The phase 2 consists of the proposed function point which is obtained by grouping the adjustment factors to simplify the process of adjustment and to ensure more consistency in the adjustments. In the proposed method fuzzy logic is used for quantifying the quality of requirements and is added as one of the adjustment factor, thus a fuzzy based approach for the Enhanced General System Characteristics to Estimate Effort of the Software Projects using productivity has been obtained. The phase 3 takes the calculated function point from our work and is given as input to the static single variable model (i.e. to the Intermediate COCOMO and COCOMO II) for cost estimation. The Authors have tailored the cost factors in intermediate COCOMO and both; cost and scale factors are tailored in COCOMO II to suite to the individual development environment, which is very important for the accuracy of the cost estimates. The software performance indicators are project duration, schedule predictability, requirements completion ratio and post-release defect density, are also measured for the software projects in my work. A comparative study for effort, performance measurement and cost estimation of the software project is done between the existing model and the authors proposed work. Thus our work analyzes the interaction¬al process through which the estimation tasks were collectively accomplished.

An extension for software process metamodels to support software process lines.We present two concepts partitioned software process and variability operation.We present insights into the practical application and evidence of applicability.We present the practical implementation in the German V-Modell XT standard. Process flexibility and adaptability is a frequently discussed topic in literature, and several approaches propose techniques to improve and optimize software processes for a given organization- or project context. A software process line (SPrL) is an instrument to systematically construct and manage variable software processes, by combining pre-defined and standardized process assets that can be reused, modified, and extended using a well-defined customization approach. Hence, process engineers can ground context-specific process variants in a standardized or domain-specific reference model that can be adapted to the respective context. In this article, we present an approach to construct flexible software process lines and show its practical application in the German V-ModellźXT. The presented approach emerges from a 10-year research endeavor and was used to enhance the metamodel of the V-ModellźXT and to allow for improved process variability and lifecycle management. Practical dissemination and complementing empirical research show the suitability of the concept. We therefore contribute a proven approach that is presented as metamodel fragment for reuse and implementation in further process modeling approaches.

Context: The need to accelerate software delivery, supporting faster time-to-market and frequent community developer/user feedback are issues that have led to relevant changes in software development practices. One example is the adoption of Rapid Release (RR) by several Open Source Software projects (OSS). This raises the need to know how these projects deal with software release approaches. Goal: Identify the main characteristics of software release initiatives in OSS projects, the motivations behind their adoption, strategies applied, as well as advantages and difficulties found. Method: We conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to reach the stated goal. Results: The SLR includes 33 publications from January 2006 to July 2016 and reveals nine advantages that characterize software release approaches in OSS projects; four challenge issues; three possibilities of implementation and two main motivations towards the adoption of RR; and finally four main strategies to implement it. Conclusion: This study provides an up-to-date and structured understanding of the software release approaches in the context of OSS projects based on findings systematically collected from a list of relevant references in the last decade. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

These days, with the increasingly widespread employment of sensors, particularly those attached to vehicles, the collection of spatial data is becoming easier and more accurate. As a result, many relevant areas, such as spatial crowdsourcing, are gaining ever more attention. A typical spatial crowdsourcing scenario involves an employer publishing a task and some workers helping to accomplish it. However, most of previous studies have only considered the spatial information of workers and tasks, while ignoring individual variations among workers. In this paper, we consider the Software Development Team Formation (SDTF) problem, which aims to assemble a team of workers whose abilities satisfy the requirements of the task. After showing that the problem is NP-hard, we propose three greedy algorithms and a multiple-phase algorithm to approximately solve the problem. Extensive experiments are conducted on synthetic and real datasets, and the results verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithms.

Empirical findings from ten software teams from two large-scale software development projects in Ericsson and ABB demonstrated that teams receive and share their knowledge with a large number of contacts, including other team members, experts, administrative roles, and support roles.Along with human and organizational capital, social capital and networking are also necessary for participation in large-scale software development, both for novice teams and for mature teams working on complex, unfamiliar, or interdependent tasks.Social capital has the potential to compensate for gaps in human capital (i.e., an individual's knowledge and skills).The team network size and networking behavior depend on the following factors: company experience, employee turnover, team culture, need for networking, and organizational support.Along with investments in training programs, software companies should also cultivate a networking culture to strengthen their social capital and achieve better performance. ContextLarge software development projects involve multiple interconnected teams, often spread around the world, developing complex products for a growing number of customers and users. Succeeding with large-scale software development requires access to an enormous amount of knowledge and skills. Since neither individuals nor teams can possibly possess all the needed expertise, the resource availability in a team's knowledge network, also known as social capital, and effective knowledge coordination become paramount. ObjectiveIn this paper, we explore the role of social capital in terms of knowledge networks and networking behavior in large-scale software development projects. MethodWe conducted a multi-case study in two organizations, Ericsson and ABB, with software development teams as embedded units of analysis. We organized focus groups with ten software teams and surveyed 61 members from these teams to characterize and visualize the teams knowledge networks. To complement the team perspective, we conducted individual interviews with representatives of supporting and coordination roles. Based on survey data, data obtained from focus groups, and individual interviews, we compared the different network characteristics and mechanisms that support knowledge networks. We used social network analysis to construct the team networks, thematic coding to identify network characteristics and context factors, and tabular summaries to identify the trends. ResultsOur findings indicate that social capital and networking are essential for both novice and mature teams when solving complex, unfamiliar, or interdependent tasks. Network size and networking behavior depend on company experience, employee turnover, team culture, need for networking, and organizational support. A number of mechanisms can support the development of knowledge networks and social capital, for example, introduction of formal technical experts, facilitation of communities of practice and adequate communication infrastructure. ConclusionsOur study emphasizes the importance of social capital and knowledge networks. Therefore, we suggest that, along with investments into training programs, software companies should also cultivate a networking culture to strengthen their social capital, a known driver of better performance.

Requirements identification, specification and management are key activities in the software development process. In the last years, many approaches to these activities have emerged, based on the exploitation of huge amounts of data gathered from software repositories and system usage. The Q-Rapids project proposes the collection and analysis of such data and its consolidation into a set of strategic indicators as product quality, time to market and team productivity. These indicators are visualized through a dashboard designed to support decision-makers. In this paper, we present the ongoing research undertaken in this project. We use the concept of blocking situation to exemplify the Q-Rapids approach.

Financial corporations and especially banking institutions have important needs concerning to the development of software around their business core. The software, that traditionally had been developed in house by the IT departments, is now usually outsourced to IT firms. These firms work under the software factories model. An important feature within this sector is that usually the financial groups keep the ownership of these firms because the strategic value of the software for the core business. These firms work almost exclusively for the owner financial group developing their software, but they have to demonstrate that they are so profitable and competitive like any other firm. The organizational structure of these firms has some differential features. Top level tasks (software design and project management) are usually performed by the IT firm but the development is usually subcontracted to other software companies. Although financial corporations have always paid a special interest to investing in management and organizational policies to improve their efficiency, there have being always an important lack regarding to the control and monitoring of the software projects. They do not have suitable tools for monitoring actual process effectiveness. Adapting scorecards to this environment could be a useful tool for monitoring and improvement the process. Scorecard could here be used both as a tool for internal effectiveness measurement as well as externally, presenting sustainabilityindicators for the shareholders, the financial institutions. This paper aims to identify and define a collection of Key Performance Indicators which permit effectiveness to be improved under this context, focusing in the specific supplychain model given by owner (financial group), software factory and software developers (subcontracted).

The software development industry is dominated by a myriad of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The main goal of this chapter is to provide a characterization of SMEs based on previous studies. It also includes an overview of a number of software process models and software process improvement (SPI) models, which are aimed at assisting SMEs in improving the way they develop software. Furthermore, this chapter discusses the extent of SPI approaches published in the literature as a way to understand the particular context and some of the major challenges faced. From there, we propose an approach to integrate software process practices. This proposal is based on the results of our study on this topic carried out in small software companies. It is focused on what small organizations could actually do, more than on what they are currently practicing.

Project success is one of the most important objectives and concerns of managers and people involved in a project. It also unifies the efforts of the project team. Success of the government construction projects aims to reduce cost and time, and increase quality and satisfaction of the society and government as the main customers. Many factors affect success of the construction projects. Identifying these factors contributes to successful implementation of the projects. The project management team is one of these important factors. The present study aimed to evaluate factors affecting success of the management team in the form of members’ characteristics. To this aim, library and field research methods were used. The population consisted of 30 managers and professionals of the government successful projects as employer, consultant, and contractor. Data were collected through a questionnaire with 15 questions. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the collected data. The results concerning the importance of team in organizing project showed that the most prominent features of the management team in Iran include team work skills and related ethics, the belief in customer satisfaction, and the absolute loyalty of the team to the project management and the company where they work. Taking into account these features leads to the construction projects success. Keywords: construction projects; management team; project success; management team features

Context: Face-to-Face (F2F) interaction is a strong means to foster social relationships and effective knowledge sharing within a team. However, communication in Global Software Development (GSD) teams is usually restricted to computer-mediated conversation that is perceived to be less effective and inter- personal. Temporary collocation of dispersed members of a software development team is a well-known practice in GSD. Despite broad realization of the benefits of visits, there is lack of empirical evidence that explores how temporary F2F interactions are organized in practice and how they can impact knowledge sharing between sites.Objective: This study aimed at empirically investigating activities that take place during temporary col- location of dispersed members and analyzing the outcomes of the visit for supporting and improving knowledge sharing.Method: We report a longitudinal case study of a GSD team distributed between Denmark and Pakistan. We have explored a particular visit organized for a group of offshore team members visiting onshore site for two weeks. Our findings are based on a systematic and rigorous analysis of the calendar entries of the visitors during the studied visit, several observations of a selected set of the team members’ activities during the visit and 13 semi-structured interviews.Results: Looking through the lens of knowledge-based theory of the firm, we have found that social and professional activities organized during the visit, facilitated knowledge sharing between team members from both sites. The findings are expected to contribute to building a common knowledge and under- standing about the role and usefulness of the site visits for supporting and improving knowledge sharing in GSD teams by establishing and sustaining social and professional ties.

For decades, Software Process Improvement (SPI) programs have been implemented, inter alia, to improve quality and speed of software development. To set up, guide, and carry out SPI projects, and to measure SPI state, impact, and success, a multitude of different SPI approaches and considerable experience are available. SPI addresses many aspects ranging from individual developer skills to entire organizations. It comprises for instance the optimization of specific activities in the software lifecycle as well as the creation of organization awareness and project culture. In the course of conducting a systematic mapping study on the state-of-the-art in SPI from a general perspective, we observed Global Software Engineering (GSE) becoming a topic of interest in recent years. Therefore, in this paper, we provide a detailed investigation of those papers from the overall systematic mapping study that were classified as addressing SPI in the context of GSE. From the main study’s result set, a set of 30 papers dealing with GSE was selected for an in-depth analysis using the systematic review instrument to study the contributions and to develop an initial picture of how GSE is considered from the perspective of SPI. Our findings show the analyzed papers delivering a substantial discussion of cultural models and how such models can be used to better address and align SPI programs with multi-national environments. Furthermore, experience is shared discussing how agile approaches can be implemented in companies working at the global scale. Finally, success factors and barriers are studied to help companies implementing SPI in a GSE context.

In June 2015 a group of experts in Software Process Improvement (SPI) and Education from all over the world gathered at the 1st International Workshop on Software Process Education, Training and Professionalism held in connection with 15th International Conference Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination. Discussions with key players in the relevant professional and personal certification fields, as well as experienced educators led to a consensus that it is time for the industry to rise to the new challenges and set out in a manifesto a common vision for educators and trainers together with a set of recommendations to address the challenges faced. At the workshop 14 “experts” from education and industry presented and discussed their “wisdom and experience” of the challenges faced for software process education, training and professionalism, especially with the background of the new modes of learning and teaching in higher education. Based on the presentations, 32 workshop participants brainstormed core values and principles specifically addressing the needs of software process education, training and professionalism. Via affinity analysis and group thinking exercises we identified an initial manifesto, consisting of 10 values and 4 principles. It is expected that this draft manifest will give expression to state-of-the-art knowledge on software process education, training and professionalism. It is based on hundreds of person-years of practice and experience from educators and industry professionals globally. Further work is currently being undertaken to extend and validate this draft manifesto with a view to publishing in its entirety by 2016.

Incremental software process improvement deals with the challenges of step-wise process improvement in a time where resources are scarce and many organizations are struggling with the challenges of effective management of software products. Effective knowledge sharing and incremental approaches are essential for improving the success rate of process improvement efforts. Recently, the authors' have worked on the development of a knowledge management system, the Online Method Engine, that enables incremental, situational process improvement in the field of software product management. This has resulted in an initial system design. The authors describe the findings from seven exploratory case studies on incremental process improvement. The lessons learned during these case studies are used to refine the design of the Online Method Engine. Copyright © 2012, IGI Global.

Constant emphasis and close attention paid to Quality Assurance in the production of Open Distance Learning (ODL) course materials at Wawasan Open University (WOU) had necessitated that the whole process of course materials development be clearly defined and tracked systematically. Although a Standard Operating Procedure already exists, yet its implementation by way of manual tracking could not always guarantee that the work delivery timelines are diligently tracked and crucial inputs from all key stakeholders in the course development team are received in a timely manner. There was also a need to ensure that Schools and their academics (course coordinators), the Registry, Educational Technology and Publishing Unit, IT Services and Learning and Library Services could track the developmental stages of any named course at any specific time. A new software application had been developed in-house at WOU which enables all the key stakeholders to keep track of all stages of the course development chain from start to end. The application, built on the Microsoft .NET framework using a centralized MS SQL Server database, serves as a central repository of all the information relevant to the course development cycle and manages the archiving of all the documents. The application can generate (i) course development status reports for ongoing development, (ii) the complete course development report for the courses which have been completed and (iii) summary reports of the progress of any on-going or completed course development for management purposes by the Deans and Directors of the relevant academic support units. A pilot study was conducted involving participation of a small group of selected key stakeholders. It provided valuable feedback which had helped the software development team to further fine-tune the application before the system gets deployed in July 2010. This paper describes the development process and the workings of the Course Development Tracking System (CDTS). It discusses the implications of implementing the system in a real-world environment

This research uses configuration theory and data collected from a major IT vendor organization to examine primary configurations of distributed teams in a global off-shoring context. The study indicates that off-shoring vendor organizations typically deploy three different types of configurations, which the authors term as thin-at-client, thick-at-client, and hybrid. These configurations differ in terms of the size of the sub-teams in the different distributed locations and the nature of the ISD-related tasks performed by the distributed team members. In addition, the different configurations were compared on their inherent process-related and resource-related flexibilities. The thick-at-client configuration emerged as the one that offers superior flexibility (in all dimensions).However, additional analysis also revealed contingencies apart from flexibility that may influence the appropriateness of the distributed ISD team configuration, including the volatility of the client organization’s environment and the extent to which the ISD tasks can be effortlessly moved to the vendor’s home location.

This paper presents an architecture which applies document similarity measures to the documentation produced during the phases of software development in order to generate recommendations of process and people metrics for similar projects. The application makes a judgment of similarity of the Service Provision Offer (SPO) document of a new proposed project to a collection of Project History Documents (PHD), stored in a repository of unstructured texts. The process is carried out in three stages: firstly, clustering of the Offer document with the set of PHDs which are most similar to it; this provides the initial indication of whether similar previous projects exist, and signifies similarity. Secondly, determination of which PHD in the set is most comparable with the Offer document, based on various parameters: project effort, project duration (time), project resources (members/size of team), costs, and sector(s) involved, indicating comparability of projects. The comparable parameters are extracted using the GATE Natural Language Processing architecture. Lastly, a recommendation of metrics for the new project is made, which is based on the transferability of the metrics of the most similar and comparable PHD extracted, here referred to as recommendation. This work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism, and Commerce under the project SONAR (TSI-340000-2007-212), GODO2 (TSI- 020100-2008-564) and SONAR2 (TSI-020100-2008- 665) and the MID-CBR project of the Spanish Committee of Education & Science (TIN2006-15140- C03-02). Publicado

This paper describes a technique for embedding document metadata, and potentially other semantic references inline in word processing documents, which the authors have implemented with the help of a software development team. Several assumptions underly the approach; It must be available across computing platforms and work with both Microsoft Word (because of its user base) and OpenOffice.org (because of its free availability). Further the application needs to be acceptable to and usable by users, so the initial implementation covers only small number of features, which will only be extended after user-testing. Within these constraints the system provides a mechanism for encoding not only simple metadata, but for inferring hierarchical relationships between metadata elements from a ‘flat’ word processing file.The paper includes links to open source code implementing the techniques as part of a broader suite of tools for academic writing. This addresses tools and software, semantic web and data curation, integrating curation into research workflows and will provide a platform for integrating work on ontologies, vocabularies and folksonomies into word processing tools.

We present the results of an extensive and substantial case study on pair programming, which was carried out in courses for software development at the University of Dortmund, Germany. Thirteen software development teams with about 100 students took part in the experiments. The groups were divided into two sets with different working conditions. In one set, the group members worked on their projects in pairs. Even though the paired teams could only use half of the workstations the teams of individual workers could use, the paired teams produced nearly as much code as the teams of individual workers at the same time. In addition, the code produced by the paired teams was easier to read and to understand. This facilitates finding errors and maintenance.