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This research attempts to implement the concepts of Personal Software Process (PSP) with Model View Controller (MVC) software construction in an undergraduate software engineering course. Exercises were redesigned to support the MVC framework based on the traditional PSP exercises. The findings proposed are a guide for instructors to improving both personal and team performance in MVC software construction.

Project management is a well understood management method, widely adopted today, in order to give predictable results to complex problems. It is based on the assumption that unique undertakings require flexible organizational structures and different skill sets, in order to be implemented successfully. It is evident that matching the required, by each project, skills with the skills offered from the available human capital, is not a trivial process. This need of building high performing, effective teams with the appropriate skill set, is quite important since it is a prerequisite for successful project completion. Furthermore the recent shift to agile project management, together with the fact that projects today do not only require technical skills but also behavioral and contextual skills increases the importance of project team selection. In this paper, we present the ONSOCIAL system, a system that attempts to capitalize knowledge accumulated over social networks and to support the project team selection process. For achieving this objective, the ONSOCIAL system is using information stored in social network systems, analyses the stored profiles and offers recommendations for candidate team members.

In this chapter, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is applied to evaluate the relative efficiency of software development projects of a leading software company in India. Further, the projects are categorized as per their efficiency scores into highly efficient, moderately efficient and less efficient companies through a process called Tier Analysis. The chapter also includes an Improvement Path for the projects with low efficiencies. Furthermore, through the application of Kruskal Wallis test, the software development project efficiency is compared with team size to determine whether efficiency vary across various team size categories i.e. small, medium, large and extra large.

This chapter is designed as the introduction to the book. It provides the motivation for studying software project management as a response to the increasing variety of software development methodologies. The chapter characterizes software projects and presents ten knowledge areas in software project management. This body of knowledge is described in the software edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). The chapters of the book are classified in terms of their contribution to these knowledge areas.

One of the pillars for sound Software Project Management is reliable effort estimation. Therefore it is important to fully identify what are the fundamental factors that affect an effort estimate for a new project and how these factors are inter-related. This paper describes a case study where a Knowledge Management technique was employed to build an expert-based effort estimation model to estimate effort for healthcare software projects. This model was built with the participation of seven project managers, and was validated using data from 22 past finished projects. The model led to numerous changes in process and also in business. The company adapted their existing effort estimation process to be in line with the model that was created, and the use of a mathematically-based model also led to an increase in the number of projects being delegated to this company by other company branches worldwide.

Managing the quality of artifacts created during the development process is an integral part of software project management. Software quality models capture the knowledge and experience regarding the quality characteristics of interest, the measurement data that can help to reason about them, and the mechanisms to use for characterizing and assessing software quality. They are the foundation for managing software quality in projects in an evidence-based manner. Nowadays, coming up with suitable quality models for an organization is still a challenging endeavor. This chapter deals with the definition and usage of software quality models for managing software development projects and discusses different challenges and solutions in this area. The challenges are: (1) There is no universal model that can be applied in every environment because quality is heavily dependent on the application context. In practice and research, a variety of different quality models exists. Finding the “right” model requires a clear picture of the goals that should be obtained from using the model. (2) Quality models need to be tailored to company specifics and supported by corresponding tools. Existing standards (such as the ISO/IEC 25000 series) are often too generic and hard to fully implement in an organization. (3) Practitioners require a comprehensive set of techniques, methods, and tools for systematically specifying, adapting, and applying quality models in practice. (4) In order to create sustainable quality models, their contribution to the organizational goals must be clarified, and the models need to be integrated into the development and decision-making processes.

Process simulation has been introduced as a tool in support of software project management more than 25 years ago. Since then, it has been considered an approach with high potential for making software project managers’ work more effective and successful. Unfortunately, despite high expectations and many reports on prototypical process simulation applications in industrial contexts, little evidence exists that process simulation has become an accepted and regularly used tool of software project managers. This chapter investigates the reasons for lacking impact of process simulation in the software industry. This is done with the help of an in-depth description of a software process simulation application example. The application example focuses on the effects of various workforce allocation strategies on project performance, expressed in terms of project duration, effort consumption, and product quality. With the help of the application example and based on existing literature, the gap between the current state of the art of software process simulation and the actual state of practice is described and its root-causes are discussed. The chapter concludes with a list of issues that need to be addressed in order to close the gap between the state of the art and the state of practice. Most of the issues relate to the difficulty of demonstrating a positive cost-benefit ratio when applying process simulation as a tool in support of software project management tasks.

Free software has gained importance over the last few years, and can be found in almost any sphere in which ‘software processes’ are important. However, even when universities and higher education establishments include subjects concerning free programming and technologies in their curriculums, their graduates tend to attain limited technological, organisational and philosophical knowledge that limits them as regards their participation in, management and development of free software projects. This gap in skills and knowledge has recently led to a series of post-graduate studies whose objective is to offer students the possibility of acquiring competencies that will allow them to become experts in free software. This paper presents a study concerning the offers for post-graduate studies in free software that currently exist, with the intention of creating similar post-graduate studies in Ecuador.

In a progressively competitive global market, software development companies, under the pressure for conquering new market shares, subject themselves to business demands where the inherent risks to these operations are diversified and of exposure not always calculated. Given that a minority of such companies adopt risk management into their business processes, such exposure may affect the participation and success of these projects. To assure the quality of the software risk analysis and risk assessments are required. Among the uncertainties of software design, some risk factors should be treated: timeline, estimated costs and compliance to business requirements, among others, can be mentioned. Through a bibliographical review it was possible to produce a risk roadmap to provide to the professional in the field the understanding of risks process in a friendly way. To contribute to these software projects, this work presents the activities of a risk management process, in order to insert the culture and capacity of professionals who work in such projects, can objectively target to the mitigation of risks into which such projects are exposed. In addition, the adopted approach is in accordance to ISO 31000 standard.

Planning a Global Software Development project is a challenging task, as it involves balancing both technical and business related issues. On the other hand, the selected software architecture also influences the distributed development, making the separate development of components either easier or more difficult. This kind of planning problem with multiple variables is difficult to solve using deterministic methods. In this work, we propose an approach based on genetic algorithms for planning global software projects.

Software Process Improvement (SPI) is always included as a necessary activity in IT organizations that give importance to the process, as it has been proven from its application in many organizations that good process will likely bring good product and project performance. While performing under SPI, knowledge usually occurs from different sources, in different formats and from different activities. Therefore, managing knowledge is a challenging issue for software organizations. This paper presents an Extended Knowledge Management Capability Model (EKMCM) for SPI, focusing on the Supplier Agreement Management (SAM) Process Area of CMMI. The proposed EKMCM is a set of defined processes classified into five levels integrating three aspects: the knowledge management process, human resource development and the use of IT to support the process. The proposed EKMCM model can be applied in other CMMI processes. Organizations may choose to perform at any knowledge management level according to their readiness.

The current trends in most software-intensive product development organizations are in striving for high performance. Overall, software product creation has become more and more value-driven. However, from the customer and user satisfaction points of view “software” itself has no value until it is executed in some target machine (including embedded systems) producing certain results. Those outcomes (e.g., web services) bring benefits and even delight which are valued by the customers in terms of quality. In order to address those considerations, this paper proposes a software team-oriented performance analysis and improvement framework supported by provisional instrumentation. The aim is to gauge Lean software teams and organizations to advance their thinking towards the total quality perspective. The industrial cases demonstrate, how it is able to catalyst such team performance drivers and quality aims of software development under different circumstances.

Inspect and adapt is essential to succeed with agile software development. Our objective was to understand the challenges of software process improvement in agile software development teams. We designed a multiple case study consisting of five projects in three software product companies that applied Scrum. We collected data in semi-structured interviews. We found that long-term quality was often in conflict with short-term progress, specialization hinders self-management, process related problems are difficult to solve and there are major organizational barriers to self-management. The main conclusion drawn from this work is that software process improvement challenges in agile software development are the problems of increasing redundancy to create conditions for the team to self-manage, to learn how to learn, and to improving agile software development as a large long-term organizational change project.

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is an approach for software reuse. It concerns to produce customized software products as atomic or composite services to be reused in SOA-based applications. A common set of artifacts is used to build these services in a planned and managed way. The main purpose of SPLE is to explore commonalities and variabilities. The SPLE approach provides a strategic software reuse that can produce quality Software as a Service (SaaS) while cutting cost and reducing time-to-market. This paper proposes a process to construct services as Software Product Lines by using Model Driven techniques. The process combines the use of maps, visual techniques for SPL modeling, especially features diagrams and MD techniques. In addition to the process, we have developed a tool to support map, feature, and class diagrams modeling.

Since the arising of software engineering many efforts have been devoted to improve the software development process. More recently, software quality has received attention from researchers due to the importance that software has gained in supporting all levels of the organizations. New methods, techniques, and tools were created to increase the quality and productivity of the software development process. Approaches based on the practitioners' experience, for example, or on the analysis of the data generated during the development process, have been adopted. This paper follows the second path by applying data mining procedures to figure out variables from the development process that most affect the software quality. The premise is that the quality of decision making in management of software projects is closely related to information gathered during the development process. A case study is presented in which some regression models were built to explore this idea during the phases of testing, approval, and production. The results can be applied, mainly, to help the development managers in focusing those variables to improve the quality of the software as a final product.

Most formal assessment and evaluation techniques and standards assume that software can be analysed like any physical item. In safety-critical systems, software is an important component providing functionality. Often it is also the most difficult component to assess. Balanced use of process assessment and product evaluation methods is needed, because lack of transparency in software must be compensated with a more formal development process. Safety case is an effective approach to demonstrate safety, and then both process and product are necessary evidence types. Safety is also a likely candidate to be approached as a process quality characteristic. Here we present a tentative set of process quality attributes that support achievement of safety requirements of a software product.

Increasingly, software producing organizations and their partners are organizing around extendable platforms, forming software ecosystems, a topic that is receiving increasing attention at the moment. Unfortunately, inadequate modeling guidelines exist currently for creating theoretical and visual models of software ecosystems, hampering advancements in this area. Even though, many different tools are available, these do not provide pointers and guidelines for performing correct and insightful modeling of software ecosystems. The aim of this PhD project is to create a modeling framework, consisting of tools, guidelines, and foundations for modeling software ecosystems. With such a framework, software ecosystem researchers, policy makers, and strategic managers of software producing organizations will gain insight into their ecosystems quicker and with higher fidelity.

Nowadays software companies are facing a fierce competition to deliver better products but offering a higher value to the customer. In this context, software product value has becoming a major concern in software industry, leading for improving the knowledge and better understanding about how to estimate the software value in early development phases. Other way, software companies encounter problems such as releasing products that were developed with high expectations, but they gradually fall into the category of a mediocre product when they are released to the market. These high expectations are tightly related to the expected and offered software value to the customer. This paper presents an approach for estimating the software product value, focusing on the development phases. We propose a value indicators approach to quantify the real value of the development products. The aim is early identifying potential deviations in the real software value, by comparing the estimated versus the expected. We present an internal validation to show the feasibility of this approach to produce benefits in industry projects.

There are currently a number of holistic approaches available in relation to software process improvement. The search for new ideas and innovations to improve software development productivity and system quality continues to be a key focus of industrial and academic research. The CMM is a software process maturity model, which well known and most widely used model for Software Process Improvement (SPI). The SEI is continuing to evolve the CMM concepts, primarily in its current work on CMM integration, which addresses software, systems engineering, and integrated process and product development. This model attempts to quantify a software organization’s capability to consistently and predictably produce high-quality software products by involving process modeling, assessment, metrication, and technology transfer/ implementation to a greater or lesser extent. This paper provides a synthesis of prescriptions for successful software process improvement found from an extensive review of the quality management, organizational learning, and software process assessment process.

Organization Standard Software Process models are based on the assumption of similarity between projects - either cross or within a given business section. The research describes a validated reference metamodel, based on an empirical study on the commonality of different projects from various business areas. Based on the metamodel, we suggest a tailoring approach and tools for design and generation of the specific project process model.

There is presently insufficient data regarding the relationship between software process improvement (SPI) and business success, a fact which may reduce process prioritisation in software development in practice. To assist future studies examining the relationship between SPI and business success, we developed a new two-phased approach to examining business success. The first phase involves the elicitation of business objectives for the forthcoming year, with the second phase determining the extent of achievement of the recorded objectives. At EuroSPI 2011, we described the two-phased approach in detail and reported on the findings from deploying the first phase of the examination to software developing small- and medium-sized enterprises (software SMEs). In this follow-up paper, we report on the findings from the second phase of the investigation in the participating software SMEs, formulating an additional important new recommendation for future studies.

The development of key processes software systems in special domain, such as medication or insurance, becomes complexity. The biggest problem is how to share knowledge among end users, developers and managers. In order to upgrade quality of software development, this paper aims to present a novel operational process model that assist to share or reuse the knowledge through different stage of software engineering. The operational process model is the knowledge transformation and computing model and it will prompt the automation of software design; also enhance the standardization of knowledge representation.

Software Process Improvement (SPI) has become more and more important during the past ten years, since competition is increasingly determined by the proportion of software products and services. Over the years, many different SPI approaches have been developed; most of them are either best-practice-oriented approaches or continuous improvement approaches, which require an accurate assessment process as a basis from which to begin the improvement. Usually, almost all research is focused on a questionnaire-based approach for process’ assessment. However, without the organizational commitment it is too difficult obtain realistic and accurate results. The main achievement of this paper, lies in the development of an integrated mechanism for assessing software processes, using a hybrid mechanism that incorporates modeling-based assessment. This mechanism was evaluated using the EvalProSoft framework and descriptive concepts, to facilitate establishing SPI initiatives in a small Mexican software company.

Collaboration is important for productivity, quality, and knowledge sharing in software development. In this context, the use of social networks analysis can help to track the level of collaboration in a development project. In this work, an exploratory study was conducted, in the context of free/open source software, using EvolTrack-SocialNetwork tool, to investigate collaboration in software teams. The preliminary results indicate a potential to increase one's ability to understand the course that the collaboration is taking.

A cornerstone of software project management is effort estimation, the process by which effort is forecasted and used as basis to predict costs and allocate resources effectively, so enabling projects to be delivered on time and within budget. Effort estimation is a very complex domain where the relationship between factors is non-deterministic and has an inherently uncertain nature, and where corresponding decisions and predictions require reasoning with uncertainty. Most studies in this field, however, have to date investigated ways to improve software effort estimation by proposing and comparing techniques to build effort prediction models where such models are built solely from data on past software projects - data-driven models. The drawback with such approach is threefold: first, it ignores the explicit inclusion of uncertainty, which is inherent to the effort estimation domain, into such models; second, it ignores the explicit representation of causal relationships between factors; third, it relies solely on the variables being part of the dataset used for model building, under the assumption that those variables represent the fundamental factors within the context of software effort prediction. Recently, as part of a New Zealand and later on Brazilian government-funded projects, we investigated the use of an expert-centred approach in combination with a technique that enables the explicit inclusion of uncertainty and causal relationships as means to improve software effort estimation. This paper will first provide an overview of the effort estimation process, followed by the discussion of how an expert-centred approach to improving such process can be advantageous to software companies. In addition, we also detail our experience building and validating six different expert-based effort estimation models for ICT companies in New Zealand and Brazil. Post-mortem interviews with the participating companies showed that they found the entire process extremely beneficial and worthwhile, and that all the models created remained in use by those companies. Finally, the methodology focus of this paper, which focuses on expert knowledge elicitation and participation, can be employed not only to improve a software effort estimation process, but also to improve other project management-related activities.

The evaluation of software is always the software corporation’s concern. The paper focuses on software projects and makes the classification for projects. For different software types, we set up the different project stages in which we propose and define the evaluation projects and combine “Red, Yellow, Green” light system with the score scheme instead of only using “Red, Yellow, Green” light system. The paper proposes and establishes the visualized and effective quantitative evaluation method and achieves the effective management and evaluation for software projects.

In the last decades the complexity of software development projects had a significant increase. This complexity emerges from the higher degree of sophistication in the contexts they aim to serve and from the evolution of the functionalities implemented by the applications However, many software corporations have a reduced dimension (micro, small or medium) which imposes a considerable constraint to the number of individuals that might be involved in each project. This limitation has obvious consequences to the individual’s efficiency and effectiveness. In this paper we describe a Rational Unified Process (RUP) tailoring to simplify the number of RUP roles. With this tailoring we obtain one set of RUP roles that, without neglecting any critical role of the software development process, may easily be adopted by a small or medium software development team. In this paper, we present and justify a complete set of mapping rules between RUP roles and one possible configuration for small software development teams.

Nowadays, software companies have to mange different software development processes based on different time, cost, and number of staff sequentially, which is a very complex task and supports project planning and tracking. Software time, cost and manpower estimation for separate projects is one of the critical and crucial tasks for project managers. Accurate software estimation at an early stage of project planning is counted as a great challenge in software project management, in the last decade, as it allows considering project financial, controlling, and strategic planning. Software effort estimation refers to the estimations of the likely amount of cost, schedule, and manpower required to develop software. This paper proposes a novel artificial neural network prediction model incorporating Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO). The new model uses the desirable features of artificial neural networks such as learning ability, while maintaining the merits of the COCOMO model. This model deals efficiently with uncertainty of software metrics to improve the accuracy of estimates. The experimental results show that using the proposed model improves the accuracy of the estimates, 8.36% improvement, when the obtained result compared to the COCOMO model.

BACKGROUND: Model-Driven Engineering claims a positive impact on software productivity and satisfaction. However, few efforts have been made to collect evidences that assess its true benefits and limitations. OBJECTIVE: To compare the productivity and satisfaction of junior Web developers during the development of the business layer of a Web 2.0 Application when using either a code-centric, a model-based (UML) or a Model-Driven Engineering approach (OOH4RIA). RESEARCH METHOD: We designed a full factorial, intra-subject experiment in which 26 subjects, divided into five groups, were asked to develop the same three modules of a Web application, each one using a different method. We measured their productivity and satisfaction with each approach. RESULTS: The use of Model-Driven Engineering practices seems to significantly increase both productivity and satisfaction of junior Web developers, regardless of the particular application. However, modeling activities that are not accompanied by a strong generation environment make productivity and satisfaction decrease below code-centric practices. Further experimentation is needed to be able to generalize the results to a different population, different languages and tools, different domains and different application sizes.

Nowadays becoming competitive is a critical challenge for organizations and software process improvement is an obvious and logical way to address this increasing need in the software industry, unfortunately not all software process improvements have the expected results, because of the lack of knowledge on how to do it and the lack of support available for organizations specially SMEs. This paper presents a state of art of research focused on software tools which help organizations in performing a successful implementation of software process improvements initiatives.

User Experience (UX) Professionals often face the problem that their role and their contribution to software development projects are misunderstood. They are confronted with new challenges when they join agile or lean project teams. Over the following pages I will explain how UX professionals can make design tangible. I will describe how they can guide software development projects, how they can create a common understanding of the targeted User Experience and how they can involve others in the shaping of the design. After outlining the current challenges, I will explain how activities such as Design Studios, Sketching and Prototyping can be used to foster an understanding of the design rationale, and how artifacts like Product Vision Statements, Design Tenets, Personas, User Scenarios, Wireframes and UI Flows help to frame the design problem and document the design solution. Using these activities and artifacts will lead to smoother project operations and better results.

Agile/Lean software development teams are by definition striving for high performance. However, it is not straightforward to recognize and cultivate those high-performing teams. Sometimes the team members perceive their internal performance differently than their externally observed outcomes really are. This paper addresses those issues by proposing an instrument for self-monitoring and analyzing software development team performance. The key goal is that practicing teams can use it even on a daily basis to indicate and steer their own performance excellence. This is supported by certain principal performance analysis guidelines. A prototype implementation of the instrument is demonstrated with some empirical cases. The cases indicate that the instrument can indicate noticeable differences in the perceived performance of individual team members and the team external outcomes. It helps detecting potential performance problems and impediments as well as improving even high-performers, and explaining team performance differences.

non-peer-reviewed Developing software for the manufacture of medical devices is a sensitive operation from many perspectives, such as: safety and regulatory compliance. Medical Device companies are required to have a well defined development process in place, which includes software development, and be able to demonstrate that they have followed it through the complete life-cycle of the device. With the increasing complexity of Medical Devices, and more detailed software development regulations among some of the influencing factors, we take a look at how some of these factors have impacted the software development process within a medical device manufacturing plant. We find that tying down your process across the board can have unwanted consequences. As process flexibility is required, we have investigated the usefulness of Lean Software Development

It seems that in IT sector we are all aware that for the development of non-trivial software the use of software methods is very important. They provides as with knowledge and guidance for the development process which otherwise might become too chaotic and out of control. It has been empirically proven that software development companies which have successfully established their software processes are more efficient, produce software of higher quality and have shorter time-to-market period; specifically if they are able to adapt their ways of working to specifics of a particular project.

Software processes support the work of software development and software process improvement (SPI) is concerned with improving the operation of the software process. One of the primary reasons for conducting SPI is to increase the success of a software development company [1], [2]. While evidence of the benefits of SPI exists, project/senior managers report that their motivation for conducting SPI would be strengthened by the provision of further evidence of the positive impact of SPI on business success [3]. This paper proposes a new approach that utilises the Holistic Scorecard (HSC) [4] to systematically examine business success in software development companies. Furthermore, we relate the experience of applying this new approach to software small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). This novel approach to examining success in software development companies provides a suitable mechanism for SPI researchers and practitioners seeking to establish evidence of the business benefits of SPI.

Software handover is a de facto process in all software organizations. It is one of the most business critical and complex processes. It is also one of the most diverse processes, and thereby, one of the most difficult processes to define. Despite this, software handover is not well recognized within the academia. Right now, there are no software handover process models whatsoever although software organizations desperately need guidelines for how to perform this important and critical task. To aid them in defining their handover process models, we are in the process of creating Evolution and Maintenance Management Model (EM 3 ): Software Handover focusing on handover (alias transition) of a software system from developer to maintainer. In this paper, we evaluate one of the EM 3 components, Management and Administration (MA), addressing activities for planning and controlling the transition process, its schedule, budget and resources. We do it within 29 organizations. Our primary goal is to find out whether the component is realistic and whether it meets the needs and requirements of the software industry today. Using the feedback from the industry, we tackle process diversity using the C ontext- D riven P rocess Orchestration M ethod (CoDPOM). QC 20120223

Process maturity reference frameworks such as ISO/IEC 15504 and the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI) seek to assist software process improvement (SPI) efforts by prescribing a roadmap for improving the capability of the development process. However, such frameworks are not widely adopted in the practice [1], [2], especially in smaller software development organisations where the development process is often modified based on business events [3]. Such modification of the development process represents an attempt to harmonise the process with the changing needs of the business, which is a dynamic capability. Dynamic capabilities refer to the ability of businesses to adapt to changing circumstances and according to the evolutionary theory of the firm [4], organisations that possess greater dynamic capability are more successful. This paper introduces dynamic SPI capability - the ability to adapt the software process relative to changing situational circumstances – as a method for evaluating software process adaptation.

Software engineering management demands the measurement, evaluation and improvement of the software processes and products. However, the utilization of measurement and analysis in software engineering is not very straightforward. It requires knowledge on the concepts of measurement, process management, and statistics as well as on their practical applications. We developed a systematic approach to evaluate the suitability of a software process and its measures for quantitative analysis, and have applied the approach in several industrial contexts. This paper explains the experience of evaluating a task management process and related measures of a government research agency. The agency had not defined the task management and measurement processes, and the performance data were gathered from a change management tool. We spent six person-days performing the assessment and analyzing data from 92 process executions. We observed that as systematic approaches have become available, software organizations are able to readily apply quantitative techniques.

In software development projects, large gaps between planned development process and actual development exist. A planned process is often gradually transformed into complicated processes including a base process and many process fragments. Therefore, we propose a metric of process complexity based on process fragments. Process fragments mean additional and piecemeal processes that are added on the way of a project. The process complexity depends on three elements; the number of group of developers, the number of simultaneous process, and ratio of an executing period for a period of the whole project. The process complexity was applied to six industrial projects. As a result, changes of process complexities in the six projects were clarified. In addition, we propose a procedure of making a PCPQ (Process Complexity-Product quality) model that can predict post-release product quality on the way of a project. As a result of making a PCPQ model using the six projects, a post-release product quality was able to be predicted.

We present a framework for small-scale software architecture comparison (SScAC). Although a considerable chunk of software architectures are developed in small teams, not much related work exists on this topic. The proposed framework introduces a method to formalize these comparisons and aims to be simple enough to be used in small-scale projects at the same time. Still we believe it is of sufficient complexity to support comparisons that take into account different aspects of solved problem. The main purpose of the framework is to ease certain architectural choices by giving the designer a reasoned recommendation based on previously specified requirements on system's qualities. It can also help validate the suitability of chosen design patterns. We show the practical use of the framework on case study solving architectural decision for Key Word In Context.

The influence of software team dynamics on well-organized software development knowledge process could prevent software development organizations from suffering from the knowledge atrophy problem. To explore this, we have studied several team dynamics factors that influence the Knowledge Management Processes (KMP) in Very Small Entities (VSEs) [1]. A survey was conducted in a variety of VSEs and through statistical and qualitative content analysis for the research data, results indicate that small teams, informal team process and structure have an important influence on the level of team dynamics in the software development process.

Traditionally more effort has been devoted to technical and process aspects of software quality and productivity. However, in an activity like software development so intensive in workforce and so dependent on professionals' performance, it is strange that human and social factors affecting development teams have been attracted little attention. This paper is aimed at analyzing contributions in this area as well as providing empirical data from specific initiatives to know more about real practices and situation in software organizations.

This paper investigates the evolution of software project support for teaching and research projects in higher education. It therefore analyses the results of two surveys conducted with students of the department of computer science of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hannover in February 2009 and November 2010. The surveys focused on examining the experiences and requirements of the students. Beneath mere technical requirements the surveys also investigate the acceptance of social software elements in project support. Since containing a core of equal questions the answers to the two surveys allow to deduce trends. These trends towards more sophisticated supportive software tools and environments are further investigated not only to allow a better support for projects, but also to make projects more visible and valuable, preserving their achievements and making them accessible for others.

Proceeding of: OTM 2011 Workshops: Confederated InternationalWorkshops and Posters: EI2N+NSF ICE, ICSP+INBAST, ISDE, ORM, OTMA, SWWS+MONET+SeDeS, and VADER 2011, Hersonissos, Crete, Greece, October 17-21, 2011 Software Quality Management (SQM) is a set of processes and procedures designed to assure the quality of software artifacts along with their development process. In an environment in which software development is evolving to a globalization, SQM is seen as one of its challenges. Global Software Development is a way to develop software across nations, continents, cultures and time zones. The aim of this paper is to detect if mentoring, one of the lead personnel development tools, can improve SQM of projects developed under GSD. The results obtained in the study reveal that the influence of mentoring on SQM is just temperate.

In the face of growing competition software projects have to deliver software products faster and with better quality - thus leaving little room for unnecessary activities or non-optimal capacity. To achieve the desired high speed of the projects and the optimal capacity,bottlenecks existing in the projects have to be monitored and effectively removed. The objective of this research is to show experiences from a mature software development organization working according to Lean and Agile software development principles. By conducting a formal case study at Ericsson we were able to elicit and automate measures required to monitor bottlenecks in software development workflow, evaluated in one of the projects. The project developed software for one of the telecom products and consisted of over 80 developers. The results of the case study include a measurement system with a number of measures/indicators which can indicate existence of bottlenecks in the flow of work in the project and a number of good practices helping other organizations to start monitoring bottlenecks in an effective way - in particular what to focus on when designing such a measurement system.

Agile software development addresses software process improvement within teams. Process improvement, although a central concept in agile development, is still hard to achieve. This paper argues for the use of diagnosis and action planning to improve teamwork in agile software development. Diagnosis and action planning is illustrated in a small and immature team and in a large and more mature team. The action planning focused on improving shared leadership, team orientation and learning. The improvement project provided most new insight for the mature team.

Software development organisations are under heavy pressure to complete projects on time, within budget and with the appropriate level of quality, and many questions are asked when a project fails to meet any or all of these requirements. Over the years, much research effort has been spent to find ways to mitigate these failures, the reasons of which come from both within and outside the organisation's control. One possible risk of failure lies in human resource management and, since humans are the main asset of software organisations, getting the right team to do the job is critical. This paper proposes a procedure for software project managers to support their project scheduling and team staffing activities - two areas where human resources directly impact software development projects and management decisions - by adopting a genetic algorithm approach as an optimisation technique to help solve software project scheduling and team staffing problems.

The software development team is a key factor in software projects, however, achieving and maintaining positive team dynamics in software development project especially when the software companies have fewer resources in term of people, money and time is a remarkable challenge. This paper explores the dynamics of software development teams (structure, process, communication, learning and sharing) and its impact on Software Process Improvement (SPI) in very small software organization, in order to understand the impact between these two variables. We undertook a series of interviews and focus groups with very small software companies and our results show that very small companies have a high level of team dynamics although their SPI initiatives are conducted on a small scale and in an informal and indirect manner. The results also indicated that this situation occurs due to the working and social relationship, willingness to share, having a good interpersonal skill and work closely each others.

Performance measurement of software development teams is an elusive and complex issue. Many IT organizations have tried evolving their own measures without focus on reliability and validity. There is yet no widely accepted scale for measuring software development team performance (SDTP). An examination of available measurement models of team performance/team effectiveness throws up gaps that call for identification and synchronization of dimensions. Based on expert surveys, this paper attempts to identify and short-list a set of content-validated dimensions of SDTP. First, SPSS Text Analysis package was used to content-analyze 94 industry experts’ textual responses to an open-ended qualitative survey questionnaire, which led to extraction, categorization and short-listing of 34 measures of SDTP. Then followed another round of expert survey (N=30) that led to a distilled set of 20 content-validated measures of SDTP, based on Content Validity Ratios. This list of measures should help future research for SDTP scale development.