A Systematic and Lightweight Method to Identify Dependencies between User Stories

The order in which user stories are implemented can have a significant influence on the overall development cost. The total cost of developing a system is non commutative because of dependencies between user stories. This paper presents a systematic and lightweight method to identify dependencies between user stories, aiding in the reduction of their impact on the overall project cost. Initial architecture models of the software product are suggested to identify dependencies. Using the method proposed does not add extra load to the project and reinforces the value of the architecture, facilitates the planning and improves the response to changes

Safety-Critical Systems and Agile Development: A Mapping Study

In the last decades, agile methods had a huge impact on how software is developed. In many cases, this has led to significant benefits, such as quality and speed of software deliveries to customers. However, safety-critical systems have widely been dismissed from benefiting from agile methods. Products that include safety critical aspects are therefore faced with a situation in which the development of safety-critical parts can significantly limit the potential speed-up through agile methods, for the full product, but also in the non-safety critical parts. For such products, the ability to develop safety-critical software in an agile way will generate a competitive advantage. In order to enable future research in this important area, we present in this paper a mapping of the current state of practice based on {a mixed method approach}. Starting from a workshop with experts from six large Swedish product development companies we develop a lens for our analysis. We then present a systematic mapping study on safety-critical systems and agile development through this lens in order to map potential benefits, challenges, and solution candidates for guiding future research.Comment: Accepted at Euromicro Conf. on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications 2018, Prague, Czech Republi

Boundary Objects and their Use in Agile Systems Engineering

Agile methods are increasingly introduced in automotive companies in the attempt to become more efficient and flexible in the system development. The adoption of agile practices influences communication between stakeholders, but also makes companies rethink the management of artifacts and documentation like requirements, safety compliance documents, and architecture models. Practitioners aim to reduce irrelevant documentation, but face a lack of guidance to determine what artifacts are needed and how they should be managed. This paper presents artifacts, challenges, guidelines, and practices for the continuous management of systems engineering artifacts in automotive based on a theoretical and empirical understanding of the topic. In collaboration with 53 practitioners from six automotive companies, we conducted a design-science study involving interviews, a questionnaire, focus groups, and practical data analysis of a systems engineering tool. The guidelines suggest the distinction between artifacts that are shared among different actors in a company (boundary objects) and those that are used within a team (locally relevant artifacts). We propose an analysis approach to identify boundary objects and three practices to manage systems engineering artifacts in industry

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Exploring Impact of Requirements Engineering on Other IT Project Areas – Case Study

Requirements Engineering (RE) is recognized as one of the most important (yet difficult) areas of software engineering that has a significant impact on other areas of IT projects and their final outcomes. Empirical studies investigating this impact are hard to conduct, mainly due to the great effort required. It is thus difficult for both researchers and industry practitioners to make evidence-based evaluations about how decisions about RE practices translate into requirement quality and influence other project areas. We propose an idea of a lightweight approach utilizing widely-used tools to enable such an evaluation without extensive effort. This is illustrated with a pilot study where the data from six industrial projects from a single organization were analyzed and three metrics regarding the requirement quality, rework effort, and testing were used to demonstrate the impact of different RE techniques. We also discuss the factors that are important for enabling the broader adoption of the proposed approach

Requirements Engineering for Globally Distributed Teams using Scaled Agile Framework

As large organizations are striving to deliver software at a faster pace and to keep up with the latest trends, they are in a transformation stage of adopting to Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). SAFe is a framework for implementing agile practices at enterprise level and it provides a roadmap for portfolios, programs and teams. Large organizations adopting to SAFe are facing challenges in coordinating, planning and managing requirements, as they work with globally distributed teams. The goal of this thesis was to improve the Requirements Engineering (RE) process using Scaled Agile Framework in globally distributed teams. The main research method used in this thesis was action research, an iterative approach which combines theory and practice. The empirical study was conducted in a large project that used SAFe and had eight globally distributed teams. In order to investigate the challenges faced by globally distributed teams, analysis of the existing literature and RE process flow in SAFe was important. It served as a good input to understand which good RE practices can be applied in the empirical study. The results of the study show that visually representing requirements as models and sharing domain and system knowledge through Community of Practice (CoP) reduced ambiguity in requirements. The good RE practice applied in SAFe, of working and improving collaboratively with the globally distributed teams helped in better coordination and managing of requirements. In addition to this, it was also essential to have SAFe training to develop clear and shared understanding of the framework and RE process. The lessons learned from the empirical study indicate that a well-organized PI planning is the key RE practice of SAFe in providing the big picture of requirements to all members in distributed teams. In addition, Community of Practice (CoP) can be a key RE practice of SAFe in sharing knowledge such as business domain, system knowledge, skills and techniques, and experiences

A Design-Science-Research Approach

Neue Organisationsformen, wie evolutionäre Organisationen, bilden in vielen Kooperationsszenarien sozio-technische Konstrukte mit modernen CSCW Anwendungen aus. Daher erfordern Veränderungen dieser sozialen Systeme eine kontinuierliche Anpassung der technischen Tools an die neuen sozialen Konfigurationen. Diese Dissertation ist als Design Science Research (DSR) Projekt konzipiert und addressiert die folgende Forschungsfrage (RQ): “Wie können soziotechnische, evolutionäre Organisationen die Herausforderungen der joint optimization und des organizational choice während ihrer autopoietischen Veränderungsprozesse addressieren?” Die Fallstudie Viva con Agua de St. Pauli e.V. wurde mittels qualitativer und ethnographischer Methoden im Rahmen der entsprechenden DSR Zyklen untersucht. Das Forschungsprojekt fokussiert die Entwicklung von Artefakten indem sowohl eine technische, als auch eine soziale Perspektive eingenommen wird. Aus der technische Perspektive wird die RQ durch eine Microservice-Plattform adressiert. Die Architektur dient der Verteilung von Verantwortlichkeit für die Software in einem heterogenen Netzwerk von Entwickler:innen. Dabei müssen diverse neue Herausforderungen beachtet werden, wie etwa die Verteilung des User Interface. Durch die Betrachtung der RQ aus der sozialen Perspektive wird der USMU Workshop entwickelt. Dieses Artefakt dient der Verbindung der Charakteristika evolutionärer Organisationen mit agiler Software Entwicklung und mit Methoden des partizipativen Designs. Die Studien zeigen, dass beide Artefakte die RQ adressieren. Zudem konnte ich für beide Artefakte wertvolle Verbesserungsmöglichkeiten aufzeigen. Somit motivieren die Ergebnisse den nächsten Schritt des Projekts und die vorliegende Thesis wird Bestandteil des zyklischen Ablaufs eines DSR Projekts.The emergence of new types of organizational structures, such as evolutionary-teal organizations, almost always leads to the development of socio-technical constructs when it comes to working in collaboration with modern CSCW applications. A consequence of this is that the social system’s autopoietic change processes create challenges that compel one to adjust the implementation of the technical tool to the social system’s new configuration. This thesis is structured according to the design science research (DSR) approach and focuses on the research question (RQ): “How can socio-technical evolutionary-teal organizations address the challenges of joint optimization and organizational choice during their autopoietic processes?” For this purpose, the case study Viva con Agua de St. Pauli e.V. is investigated using a qualitative ethnographical approach during the DSR cycles. Addressing the RQ, two artifacts are designed from a technical as well as a social perspective. While the technical perspective primarily investigates the adjustments of technology, the social perspective focuses on the management of change in socio-technical evolutionary-teal organizations. I propose a microservice platform as an artifact that addresses the RQ from a technical perspective. The microservice architecture aims at spreading the responsibility for the software through a heterogeneous ecosystem of developers. The newly designed USMU workshop is addressing the RQ from the social perspective. It strives to intertwine the characteristics of evolutionary-teal organizations with agile software development and participatory design methods. In my studies, I examine the fact that both artifacts can be used to address the RQ. Additionally, I was able to identify valuable improvements for both of my artifacts. Hence, the project follows the lifecycle of a DSR project by reasoning through the results presented here for its next iteration