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Technical debt (TD) expresses the lack of internal quality directly affecting software evolution. Therefore, it has gained the attention of software researchers and practitioners recently. Software researchers have performed empirical studies to observe the perspective of TD in different software cultures and organizations. However, it is important to replicate such studies in more places and with more practitioners to strengthen the perception of TD. In this paper, we present the results of a set of new research questions from an evolved survey design of a survey replication in the Uruguayan software industry to characterize how the software industry professionals understand, perceive, and adopt TD management (TDM) activities. The results allow us to observe that different participant contexts (startups, government, job roles) show different levels of awareness and perception of TD. Details in the form of the adoption of each TDM activity were presented. We could observe some difficulties in conducting some TDM activities that the practitioners consider very important, especially in TDM and monitoring. Differences in specific organizational contexts like startups and government could indicate the need for research efforts in other software engineering communities that meet their specific TD challenges and needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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As a practice, software design seeks to contribute to developing quality software. During this software development stage, the requirements are translated into a representation of the software (also known as design), whose quality can be evaluated and improved. For undergraduate students, the design is difficult to understand and make. In fact, building a good design seems to require a certain level of cognitive development that few students achieve. The aim of this study is to know the effort dedicated to software detailed design and the effect on software quality when graduating students use templates to represent their design. We conducted a controlled experiment where students develop eight projects following a defined process and recording data from its execution in a software tool. We found that the use of design templates did not improve the quality of the code, measured as the defect density in the unit test phase. Also, the use of templates did not reduce the number of code smells in the analyzed code. Regarding the effort, students who use templates dedicated greater development effort to designing than to coding. Meanwhile, students who did not use templates dedicated four times less effort to designing than to coding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software testing is an important activity in the software development life cycle. Several previous studies reported the results of surveys on software testing practices among practitioners from different countries. In this paper, we analyze these surveys aiming to get their main questions, and replicate a survey with practitioners from Brazil and Uruguay, two emerging South American software development scenarios. This survey was previously conducted in Manaus/Brazil in 2006 and Buenos Aires/Argentina in 2013. The replication's scope includes three regions (Northern Brazil, Southern Brazil, and Uruguay). A total of 150 software testing practitioners responded to the survey. Its results are compared with the previous executions and other software testing surveys identified in the technical literature, strengthening previous findings. The Brazilian and Uruguayan participants indicate that: (1) documentation of test artifacts (plan, cases, procedures, results) are useful and important for software testing practitioners; (2) system and regression testing are the two test types deemed most useful and important; (3) tools for monitoring and management of test process tasks and bug reports are considered useful and important; (4) it is usual for software companies to have a definition of a testing process and to have a dedicated testing team; (5) there is a lack of measurement of test tasks and coverage in the industry; and (6) tools to support automation of test case generation and execution or code coverage are still poorly used in their organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade we have witnessed a growth in outsourcing and outshoring development. Following the promise of reducing costs and round-the-clock development, software organizations have grown from local to global enterprises. In the same decade, agile software development methodologies have emerged as a viable alternative to produce software. There is a myriad of agile processes and methodologies now available for any software development organization to choose from. These agile processes follow the values signed in the Agile Manifesto that preaches the exaltation of the individual programmer, high feedback, customer interaction and just enough planning and documentation. But how does global distribution affect these values? Can agile software development be implemented under the global software development context? This paper presents a systematic literature review aimed at identifying factors that affect the adoption of agile factors in global distributed teams. Our findings show that the literature is still in its initial case study publication stage. But most notably, we have found that only a few of the factors found are related to the agile values. Even though more research is clearly needed, this can be a signal that the factors affecting team distribution has more impact on software development than the values and practices preached by the agile processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]