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Organizações de software que desenvolvem produtos digitais já trabalham em sua maioria com a utilização de metodologia ágeis na gestão de seus projetos. Entretanto, a maioria delas não estende, na prática, os seus princípios para outras etapas do projeto, aplicando-os mais na fase de desenvolvimento e não muito na fase de planejamento e concepção do projeto. O objetivo deste artigo é aprimorar o conhecimento sobre a metodologia Dual-Track e compreender empiricamente como ela pode contribuir para superar as limitações na gestão de projetos de produtos digitais. Foi adotada uma metodologia de pesquisa qualitativa do tipo estudo de caso com enfoque exploratório. A coleta de dados foi dividida em três etapas: aplicação de um questionário com perguntas abertas e fechadas; entrevistas semiestruturadas; e observação participante. A análise dos resultados indica que a execução contínua e concorrente de ciclos ágeis, tanto no desenvolvimento quanto no planejamento, propostas pelo Dual-Track, podem contribuir para a superação das deficiências encontradas nas demais metodologias ágeis de gestão em produtos digitais. Conclui-se que a metodologia ágil Dual-Track pode auxiliar a aumentar a flexibilidade das organizações em corrigir problemas e realizar ajustes na estratégia, nos objetivos e no escopo do projeto. Como contribuição, este estudo é relevante por analisar e propor adequações às metodologias ágeis mais usadas, principalmente no planejamento, o que pode ser decisivo para determinar o sucesso de um produto digital. Software organizations that develop digital products already use, most of the time, agile methodologies in the management of their projects. However, most of them do not, in practice, extend their principles to other stages of the project, applying them more in the development phase and not so much in the planning and design phase of the project. The present study aims to enhance knowledge about the Dual-Track methodology and empirically showcase how it can contribute in overcoming these limitations in digital products management. A qualitative study case approach was carried out with an exploratory focus to achieve the proposed objectives. Data collection was divided into three stages: a questionnaire application, with open and closed questions; semi-structured interviews; and participant observation. The results analysis indicates that the continuous and concurrent execution of agile cycles, both in the development and in the planning stages, as proposed by Dual-Track, can contribute to overcome deficiencies found in other agile management methodologies in the digital products area. Thereby, it is possible to conclude that the Dual-Track agile methodology can help increase the flexibility of organizations in correcting problems and adjusting the strategy, objectives, and scope of the project. The relevance of this study lies in the analysis and proposition of adjustments to the most used agile methodologies, especially concerning planning, which can be decisive to determine if a digital product will achieve success or not.

Around the world, the importance of Very Small Entities (VSEs), organisations having up to 25 people, has been constantly increasing. Worldwide, VSEs represent over 92% of the software industry. Therefore, two main needs can be highlighted: a) providing VSEs with resources to produce high‐quality software, and b) training software engineering undergraduates in proven practices to produce high‐quality software within the given schedule and budget. A logical way to meet these needs is transfering proven practices provided by software engineering standards. However, transferring the knowledge of software engineering standards is not always an easy task. The ISO/IEC 29110 is a series of international standards and guides that provide codified knowledge related to the software development process. The series was specifically developed to be used by VSEs. This study presents an exploratory analysis, conducted in 12 Mexican VSEs, which implemented the software Basic profile of the ISO/IEC 29110, to identify the pace at which they can adopt this standard to their environment. Besides, the benefits and difficulties encountered are provided. The results can be relevant for other VSEs interested in implementing this standard. Even if the exploratory analysis was performed in the VSEs of Mexico, this analysis can be of interest in other countries. The results obtained can help other VSEs that are interested in the adoption of this international standard to reduce the barriers to a successful implementation.

Plan, manage and share your software.Use this checklist to improve your software management and sharing practices. This work is part of theBuilding New Tools for Data Sharing and Re-use through a Transnational Investigation of the Socioeconomic Impacts of Protected Areas (PARSEC)project with fundingprovided by the Belmont Forum through the National Science Foundation, NSF, Grant1929464, (US), Agence Nationale de la Recherche,ANR (France), Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo,FAPESP (Brazil), and Japan Science and Technology Agency,JST (Japan). Version 2 includes an updated citation to the document.

Transcriptomic reconstructions without reference (i.e., de novo) are common for data samples derived from non-model biological systems. These assemblies involve massive parallel short read sequence reconstructions from experiments, but they usually employ ad-hoc bioinformatic workflows that exhibit limited standardization and customization. The increasing number of transcriptome assembly software continues to provide little room for standardization which is exacerbated by the lack of studies on modularity that compare the effects of assembler synergy. We developed a customizable management workflow for de novo transcriptomics that includes modular units for short read cleaning, assembly, validation, annotation, and expression analysis by connecting twenty-five individual bioinformatic tools. With our software tool, we were able to compare the assessment scores based on 129 distinct single-, bi- and tri-assembler combinations with diverse k-mer size selections. Our results demonstrate a drastic increase in the quality of transcriptome assemblies with bi- and tri- assembler combinations. We aim for our software to improve de novo transcriptome reconstructions for the ever-growing landscape of RNA-seq data derived from non-model systems. We offer guidance to ensure the most complete transcriptomic reconstructions via the inclusion of modular multi-assembly software controlled from a single master console.

The processes involved in requirements engineering are some of the most, if not the most, important steps in systems development. The need for well-defined requirements remains a critical issue for the development of any system. Describing the structure and behavior of a system could be proven vague, leading to uncertainties, restrictions, or improper functioning of the system that would be hard to fix later. In this context, this article proposes SENSE, a framework based on standardized expressions of natural language with well-defined semantics, called boilerplates, that support a flow-down procedure for requirement management. This framework integrates sets of boilerplates and proposes the most appropriate of them, depending, among other considerations, on the type of requirement and the developing system, while providing validity and completeness verification checks using the minimum consistent set of formalities and languages. SENSE is a consistent and easily understood framework that allows engineers to use formal languages and semantics rather than the traditional natural languages and machine learning techniques, optimizing the requirement development. The main aim of SENSE is to provide a complete process of the production and standardization of the requirements by using semantics, ontologies, and appropriate NLP techniques. Furthermore, SENSE performs the necessary verifications by using SPARQL (SPIN) queries to support requirement management.

Presentation given by Marta Teperek at Carpentry Connect Conference in Manchester on 26 June 2019.

A critical point that is missing is the academic promotion of open research and open researcher, as a way to promote a more rigorous and sound research process and tackle the reproducibility crisis. What should the incentives be? How to make sure that the next generation of academics genuinely value openness and transparency as a foundation of rigorous research?

Gentoo is a GNU/Linux metadistribution designed to maximize and simplify user control of the software environment. All determinants of a Gentoo environment are recorded in a small number of plain-text configuration files, from which the software make-up of the system can be reconstructed entirely. As such, Gentoo constitutes a replicable and transparent software infrastructure - as mandated by research valuing reproducibility. Of equal scientific interest is the flexibility of Gentoo's package management. All software is distributed in a rolling-release fashion, giving the user full control over which versions (including live versions and branches/tags from version control) of which programs to install, and with which compilation options. All of the above is accompanied by automatic, version-aware dependency resolution, which also tracks static library linking and prompts for rebuilds as necessary. We believe Gentoo is excellently suited to address many of the challenges in neuroscience software management; including: system replicability, system documentation, data analysis reproducibility, fine-grained dependency management, easy control over compilation options, and seamless access to cutting-edge software releases. We have made a substantial set of neuroimaging and data analysis packages - including their entire dependency stacks - available for any system using Gentoo's Package Management Standard. Neuroscientific software now usable under Gentoo includes but is not limited to: Dipy (Garyfallidis et al. 2014) FSL (Jenkinson et al. 2012) Nipype (Gorgolewski et al. 2016) Nilearn (Abraham et al. 2014) PsychoPy (Peirce 2008) Herein we describe the implementation and current capabilities of this environment, as well as its ability to accelerate and improve research.

ResumenEl desarrollo de software utilizando métodos ágiles está en crecimiento debido a la productividad asociada a estas metodologías, además de la flexibilidad demostrada para equipos pequeños. Sin embargo, estas metodologías cuentan con debilidades claras de estimación y gestión de costos de desarrollo, al igual que los administradores de proyectos no cuentan con las suficientes evidencias para la comprobación del gasto del presupuesto en un proyecto debido a la poca documentación generada y por la falta de seguimiento en el gasto de los recursos. Se presenta una propuesta de estimación y control de costos en métodos agiles para resolver estas carencias. En este sentido, se realizó un caso de estudio en una empresa de desarrollo de software ágil utilizando la propuesta en proyectos de software de servicio (SaaS) y aplicaciones Web. En los resultados se encontró que la propuesta genera un alto grado de evidencias para los administradores de proyectos, pero presenta carencias en la administración de las evidencias para el control y toma de decisiones, lo cual dio origen a una definición de un proceso de toma de decisiones para ser aunado a la propuesta de medición.AbstractThe development of software (SW) using agile methods is growing due to the productivity associated with these methodologies, in addition to the flexibility shown in small teams. However, these methods have clear weaknesses of software development in cost estimation and management, as well as the fact that project managers do not have enough evidence to verify the budget spending on a project due to the poor documentation generated and the lack of monitoring of resource spending. A proposal estimation and cost control in agile methods to solve these shortcomings. To this end, a case study was conducted in an agile software development company using the proposal for Software as a Service (SaaS) and Web application projects. The results found were that the proposal generates a high degree of evidence for project managers, but it has shortcomings in the administration of the evidence for the control and decision making, which led to a definition of a decision making process to be coupled with the measurement proposal.

Effective requirements management and enabling tools are critical for successfully developing and maintaining services and products. The identification and selection of an appropriate requirements management tool can be a costly, time-consuming, and error-prone undertaking especially in the context of software product line requirements management, requiring the tools to support both product and platform development activities that often involve geographically distributed, collaborating, and competing stakeholders. Criteria lists have been developed to facilitate the selection. This research (1) creates an evaluation framework to review the applicability of the lists for the selection of requirements management tools supporting distributed collaboration and software product line requirements management and (2) leverages the framework to perform the evaluation. The lists are found to provide little support for evaluating the tools from the viewpoints of distributed collaboration and software product line requirements management. Future research is needed to create a more comprehensive list addressing these viewpoints. peerReviewed

International audience; Microservices is an architectural style inspired by service-oriented computing that has recently started gaining popularity. Before presenting the current state-of-the-art in the field, this chapter reviews the history of software architecture, the reasons that led to the diffusion of objects and services first, and microservices later. Finally, open problems and future challenges are introduced. This survey primarily addresses newcomers to the discipline, while offering an academic viewpoint on the topic. In addition, we investigate some practical issues and point out some potential solutions.

During the last decade the structure of the consumer electronics industry has been changing profoundly. Current consumer electronics products are built using components from a large variety of specialized firms, whereas previously each product was developed by a single, vertically integrated company. Taking a software development perspective, we analyze the transition in the consumer electronics industry using case studies from digital televisions and mobile phones. We introduce a model consisting of five industry structure types and describe the forces that govern the transition between types and we describe the consequences for software architectures.We conclude that, at this point in time, software supply chains are the dominant industry structure for developing consumer electronics products. This is because the modularization of the architecture is limited, due to the lack of industry-wide standards and because resource constrained devices require variants of supplied software that are optimized for different hardware configurations. Due to these characteristics open ecosystems have not been widely adopted. The model and forces can serve the decision making process for individual companies that consider the transition to a different type of industry structure as well as provide a framework for researchers studying the software-intensive industries. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Knowledge management is used as the underlying theory to develop a set of key process areas for a supplement to the CMM in small or medium-sized enterprises (SME) that develop software. These processes involve a focus on managing knowledge capability rather than traditional project management. A longitudinal case study provides evidence that current practices have already established the feasibility of these key process areas.

Software effort estimation is a critical part of software engineering. Although many techniques and algorithmic models have been developed and implemented by practitioners, accurate software effort prediction is still a challenging endeavor. In order to address this issue, a novel soft computing framework was developed by previous researchers. Our study utilizes this novel framework to describe an approach combining the neuro-fuzzy technique and the System Evaluation and Estimation of Resource Software Estimation Model (SEER-SEM) effort estimation algorithm. By introducing the neuro-fuzzy technique, this proposed model utilizes positive characteristics such as learning ability, decreased sensitivity, effective generalization, and knowledge integration. Moreover, our study assesses the performance of the proposed model by designing and conducting evaluation with published project and industrial data. After analyzing the performance of our model in comparison to the SEER-SEM effort estimation algorithm alone, the proposed model demonstrates the ability of improving the estimation accuracy, especially in its ability to reduce the large Magnitude of Relative Error (MRE). Furthermore, the results of this research also indicate that the general neuro-fuzzy framework can function with various algorithmic models for improving the performance of software effort estimation.

Comprehensive mapping and quantification of neuronal projections in the central nervous system requires high-throughput imaging of large volumes with microscopic resolution. To this end, we have developed a confocal light-sheet microscope that has been optimized for three-dimensional (3-D) imaging of structurally intact clarified whole-mount mouse brains. We describe the optical and electromechanical arrangement of the microscope and give details on the organization of the microscope management software. The software orchestrates all components of the microscope, coordinates critical timing and synchronization, and has been written in a versatile and modular structure using the LabVIEW language. It can easily be adapted and integrated to other microscope systems and has been made freely available to the light-sheet community. The tremendous amount of data routinely generated by light-sheet microscopy further requires novel strategies for data handling and storage. To complete the full imaging pipeline of our high-throughput microscope, we further elaborate on big data management from streaming of raw images up to stitching of 3-D datasets. The mesoscale neuroanatomy imaged at micron-scale resolution in those datasets allows characterization and quantification of neuronal projections in unsectioned mouse brains. (C) The Authors.

In this dissertation we explore the use of service level agreements (SLAs) to improve the quality and management of software intensive systems. SLAs are typically used in outsourcing contracts for post-production support. We propose that SLAs be used in software acquisition to support quality and process control throughout the lifecycle (requirements engineering through post-production support) of a software-intensive system. The hypothesis was tested using two methodologies. The first method explained how SLAs could be used throughout a system's lifecycle to improve software quality. This concept was validated by a survey of IT professionals. The results of the survey indicated that practitioners in the IT field felt that SLAs could be used to improve overall quality in the development effort and in the end product. The second approach was to develop actual SLAs for a specific lifecycle phase (post-production) to illustrate the concepts of SLAs and to demonstrate their value as a quality control and management tool. http://archive.org/details/improvingsoftwar1094510040 Commander, United States Navy Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.