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Context-Agile software development (ASD) promotes minimal documentation and often prioritizes functional requirements over quality requirements (QRs). The minimal documentation emphasis may be beneficial in reducing time-to-market for software. However, it can also be a concern, especially with QRs, since they are challenging to specify and document and are crucial for software success. Therefore, understanding how practitioners perceive the importance of QR documentation is valuable because it can provide insight into how they approach this task. It also helps in developing models and guidelines that support the documentation of QRs in ASD, which is a research gap. Objective: We aim to understand practitioners' perceptions of QR documentation and factors influencing this task to derive a model that supports optimal QR documentation in ASD. Method: We conducted a multiple case study involving 12 participants from three cases that apply ASD. Please refer to the document to read the full version of the abstract., Comment: 25 pages, pre-print of accepted version of the paper in the journal of systems and software

In this industry abstract, we describe the challenges and benefits of collecting feedback from customers and systems to support development cycles. In Softeam, we have performed such collection and support in four iterations by means of a software analytics platform. We describe the encountered challenges and the effects of suggested recommendations to improve the software quality of our systems on the metrics of interest.

Software analytics play an important role in developing systems today. They can provide continuous and valuable insights into areas of interest throughout the life cycle of a system, guiding the engineers to the areas that need to be worked on to create timely and robust software. An important requirement is to have a low-effort way of producing them, without largely affecting current work patterns. This work presents the integration of the Hawk model indexing framework into the MEASURE metrics platform, allowing for the efficient production of model metrics over large collections of models managed by teams of developers. We evaluate this integration by monitoring a real-world model with hundreds of changes over its lifetime and producing relevant metrics over this period of time. This evaluation has demonstrated the ability to produce complex metrics and evaluate them over the entire history of a model.

Agile software development (ASD) promotes minimal documentation and often prioritizes functional requirements over quality requirements (QRs). This may be beneficial in reducing the time to market of software. When considering QRs in ASD, the minimal documentation practice may be seen as a concern since QRs determine the success of software projects and are as well not easy to specify and document. Nevertheless, what do practitioners think of the necessity of documenting QRs in ASD? How do they perceive factors that may affect documentation of QRs in ASD? We conducted a multiple case study of three cases applying ASD, involving 12 participants. ASD practitioners identify that it is important to document QRs, and perceive that it contributes to ensuring quality, clarifying QRs, and helping in decision making. Time constraint, QR awareness and communication gaps on QRs influence the documentation of QRs in ASD. ASD teams may align their documentation practices to fit the sprint duration. The influence of QR awareness on documentation was dependent on project context and roles. Communication gaps can create confusion on QRs. Missing and outdated QR documentation may result in accruing technical debt, and lack of common understanding on QRs. The study synthesizes empirical evidence on the significance of documenting QRs in ASD and provides an insight into factors affecting documentation of QRs in ASD.

Quality requirements (QRs) are a key artifact needed to ensure the quality and success of a software system. Despite their importance, QRs rarely get the same degree of attention as their functional counterpart in agile software development (ASD) projects. Moreover, crucial information that can be obtained from software development repositories (e.g., JIRA, GitHub) is not fully exploited, or is even neglected, in QR elicitation activities. In this work, we present a data-driven tooled approach for the semi-automatic generation and documentation of QRs in the context of ASD. The approach is based on the declaration of thresholds over quality-related issues, whose violation triggers user-defined alerts. These alerts are used to browse a catalog of QR patterns that are presented to the ASD team by means of a dashboard that implements several analysis techniques. Once selected, the patterns generate the QRs, which are documented and stored in the product backlog. The full approach is implemented via a configurable platform. Over the course of 1 year, four companies differing in size and profile followed this approach and deployed the platform in their premises to semi-automatically generate QRs in several projects. We used standardized measurement instruments to elicit the perception of 22 practitioners regarding their use of the tool. The quantitative and qualitative analyses yielded positive results; i.e., the practitioners’ perception with regard to the tool’s understandability, reliability, usefulness, and relevance was positive. We conclude that the results show potential for future adoption of data-driven elicitation of QRs in agile companies and encourage other practitioners to use the presented tool and adopt it in their companies. This work is a result of the Q-Rapids project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement no. 732253.

Quality Requirements (QRs) are a key artifact to ensure the quality and success of a software system. Despite its importance, QRs have not reached the same degree of attention as its functional counterparts, especially in the context of trending software development methodologies like Agile Software Development (ASD). Moreover, crucial information that can be obtained from data sources of a project under development (e.g. JIRA, github,…) are not fully exploited, or even neglected, in QR elicitation activities. In this work, we present a data-driven approach to semi-automatically generate and document QRs in the context of ASD. We define an architecture focusing on the process and the artefacts involved. We validate and iterate on such architecture by conducting workshops in four companies of different size and profile. Finally, we present the implementation of such architecture, considering the feedback and outcomes of the conducted workshops.

SOFTEAM is a French middle-sized company that provides the Modelio modelling tool. Modelio is an enterprise-level open source modelling solution delivering functionality for business, software and infrastructure architects.

Softeam has over 20 years of experience providing UML-based modelling solutions, such as its Modelio modelling tool, and its Constellation enterprise model management and collaboration environment. Due to the increasing number and size of the models used by Softeam's clients, Softeam joined the MONDO FP7 EU research project, which worked on solutions for these scalability challenges and produced the Hawk model indexer among other results. This paper presents the technical details and several case studies on the integration of Hawk into Softeam's toolset. The first case study measured the performance of Hawk's Modelio support using varying amounts of memory for the Neo4j backend. In another case study, Hawk was integrated into Constellation to provide scalable global querying of model repositories. Finally, the combination of Hawk and the Epsilon Generation Language was compared against Modelio for document generation: for the largest model, Hawk was two orders of magnitude faster.

The advent of cloud computing is an opportunity to companies offering client-server services to migrate to a Software as a Service (SaaS) kind of business model. This kind of business model is based on having companies offering services on the cloud accessible by means of web interfaces and protocols. This comes in opposition to the traditional (client-server) model in which software packages need to be downloaded, installed and maintained directly by clients. Therefore, the SaaS could allow the definition of high level services, removing the burden of configuring and managing servers from clients. In the point of view of the service providers, this transition is not easy. Concerns such as vendor neutral design, scalability, (self-)adaptation and monitoring of running applications need to be dealt with. The MODAClouds FP7 EU project proposes to deal with all these challenges and it is going to use ModelioSaaS as a use case. ModelioSaaS is a software as a service product to be offered by SOFTEAM by means of the migration of its existing client-server based products. The main contributions of this paper are therefore providing an account, from the industrial point of view, of the context surrounding this migration and the constraints it needs to comply to. These constraints will be presented in the form of functional and non-functional requirements along with their rationale. This paper presents our current view of the architecture of ModelioSaaS that will enable this move and the gaps that we intend to fill be means of the MODAClouds platform.