Looking for Reasons behind Success in Dealing with Requirements Change

During development, requirements of software systems are subject to change. Unfortunately, managing changing requirements can take a lot of time and effort. Yet some companies show a better management of changes in requirements than others. Why? What is it that makes some projects deal with changing requirements better than others? We pursue the long term goal of understanding the mechanisms used to successfully deal with change in requirements. In this paper we gather knowledge about the state-of-the-art and the state-of-practice. We studied eight software development projects in four different companies --large and small, inclined toward structured and toward agile principles of development--, interviewing their project managers and analyzing their answers. Our findings include a list of practical (rather than theoretical) factors affecting the ability to cope with small changes in requirements. Results suggest a central role of size as a factor determining the flexibility showed either by the organization or by the software development team. We report the research method used and validate our results via expert interviews, who could relate to our findings

Process of designing robust, dependable, safe and secure software for medical devices: Point of care testing device as a case study

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Copyright © 2013 Sivanesan Tulasidas et al. This paper presents a holistic methodology for the design of medical device software, which encompasses of a new way of eliciting requirements, system design process, security design guideline, cloud architecture design, combinatorial testing process and agile project management. The paper uses point of care diagnostics as a case study where the software and hardware must be robust, reliable to provide accurate diagnosis of diseases. As software and software intensive systems are becoming increasingly complex, the impact of failures can lead to significant property damage, or damage to the environment. Within the medical diagnostic device software domain such failures can result in misdiagnosis leading to clinical complications and in some cases death. Software faults can arise due to the interaction among the software, the hardware, third party software and the operating environment. Unanticipated environmental changes and latent coding errors lead to operation faults despite of the fact that usually a significant effort has been expended in the design, verification and validation of the software system. It is becoming increasingly more apparent that one needs to adopt different approaches, which will guarantee that a complex software system meets all safety, security, and reliability requirements, in addition to complying with standards such as IEC 62304. There are many initiatives taken to develop safety and security critical systems, at different development phases and in different contexts, ranging from infrastructure design to device design. Different approaches are implemented to design error free software for safety critical systems. By adopting the strategies and processes presented in this paper one can overcome the challenges in developing error free software for medical devices (or safety critical systems).Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund

An Empirical Study on the Role of Requirement Engineering in Agile Method and Its Impact on Quality

Agile Methods are characterized as flexible and easily adaptable. The need to keep up with multiple high-priority projects and shorter time-to-market demands could explain their increasing popularity. It also raises concerns of whether or not use of these methods jeopardizes quality. Since Agile methods allow for changes throughout the process, they also create probabilities to impact software quality at any time. This thesis examines the process of requirement engineering as performed with Agile method in terms of its similarities and differences to requirement engineering as performed with the more traditional Waterfall method. It compares both approaches from a software quality perspective using a case study of 16 software projects. The main contribution of this work is to bring empirical evidence from real life cases that illustrate how Agile methods significantly impacts software quality, including the potential for a larger number of defects due to poor non-functional requirements elicitation

COMPANIES ECONOMY IN CONTEXT OF THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

In this article I try to express components of the market economy which may affect an organization of the companies into a period whith decline and resignation reign in human activities. The economic crisis that is the a current world is the climax of financial turmoil which make integral part a normal legislative and the economic calculation which configures a demand and supply of goods.organizational arrangements; company; contracts; legislation; demand; supply; Microeconomics; economic calculation

Creating business value through agile project management and information systems development: the perceived impact of scrum

Value creation through information systems (IS) and information technology (IT) is a major IS research topic. However there still exists an ambiguity and fuzziness of the \u27IS business value\u27 concept and a lack of clarity surrounding the value creation process. This also true for organizations that develop IS/IT and for development technologies like information systems development and project management methods that are applied in the production of IS/IT. The agile method Scrum is one such technology. In the research presented here we studied productivity, quality and employee satisfaction as supported by Scrum as value creating measures. Our positive assessment is built upon subjective perceptions and goes beyond hard measures and indicators. It provides insights into individual and organisational impacts and sheds light on the value generation process. The measures we present thus deal with some of the deficiencies in current IS business value research and contribute to filling existing gaps in an IS business value research agenda