Search

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]

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]

Software development is a fast-paced environment where developers need constant update to ever-changing technologies. Furthermore, process improvement initiatives have been proven useful in increasing the productivity of a software organization. As such, these organizations need to decide where to invest their training budget. As a result, training in technological update to their workforce or training in process conformance with its productive processes become conflicting alternatives. This paper presents a system dynamics simulation of a software factory product line. The objective of this simulation is to understand the changes in behavior when selecting either one of the above-training alternatives. The system dynamics model was validated with an expert panel, and the simulation results have been empirically validated-using statistical process control-against the performance baseline of a real software development organization. With the simulation under statistical control and performing like the baseline, the independent variables representing process conformance (process training) and technology skills (skills training) were modified to study their impact on product defects and process stability. Our results show that while both variables have positive impact on defects and process stability, investment in process training results in a process with less variation and with fewer defects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]