An approach to reconcile the agile and CMMI contexts in product line development

Software product line approaches produce reusable platforms and architectures for products set developed by specific companies. These approaches are strategic in nature requiring coordination, discipline, commonality and communication. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) contains important guidelines for process improvement, and specifies "what" we must have into account to achieve the disciplined processes (among others things). On the other hand, the agile context is playing an increasingly important role in current software engineering practices, specifying "how" the software practices must be addressed to obtain agile processes. In this paper, we carry out a preliminary analysis for reconciling agility and maturity models in software product line domain, taking advantage of both.Postprint (published version

Process capability assessments in small development firms

[Abstract}: Assessment-based Software Process Improvement (SPI) programs such as the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), Bootstrap, and SPICE (ISO/IEC 15504) are based on formal frameworks and promote the use of systematic processes and management practices for software development. These approaches identify best practices for the management of software development and when applied, enable organizations to understand, control and improve development processes. The purpose of a SPI assessment is to compare the current processes used in an organization with a list of recommended or ‘best’ practices. This research investigates the adoption of SPI initiatives by four small software development firms. These four firms participated in a process improvement program which was sponsored by Software Engineering Australia (SEA) (Queensland). The assessment method was based on SPICE (ISO/IEC 15504) and included an initial assessment, recommendations, and a follow-up meeting. For each firm, before and after snapshots are provided of the capability as assessed on eight processes. The discussion which follows summarizes the improvements realized and considers the critical success factors relating to SPI adoption for small firms

A Process Framework for Semantics-aware Tourism Information Systems

The growing sophistication of user requirements in tourism due to the advent of new technologies such as the Semantic Web and mobile computing has imposed new possibilities for improved intelligence in Tourism Information Systems (TIS). Traditional software engineering and web engineering approaches cannot suffice, hence the need to find new product development approaches that would sufficiently enable the next generation of TIS. The next generation of TIS are expected among other things to: enable semantics-based information processing, exhibit natural language capabilities, facilitate inter-organization exchange of information in a seamless way, and evolve proactively in tandem with dynamic user requirements. In this paper, a product development approach called Product Line for Ontology-based Semantics-Aware Tourism Information Systems (PLOSATIS) which is a novel hybridization of software product line engineering, and Semantic Web engineering concepts is proposed. PLOSATIS is presented as potentially effective, predictable and amenable to software process improvement initiatives

Customer Agility Capabilities at EuroBank: The Role of ICT and Organizational Routines

Knowledge management (KM) plays a prominent role in IT and software development companies. It is often introduced as part of larger organizational change processes that aim at improving their software development processes. Process improvement in the IT sector has led to the establishment of the software process improvement (SPI) discipline. We present the conceptual basis for investigating how software companies can ground their improvement activities on knowledge management through a study of the KM and SPI literature. We identify two archetypes of knowledge organizations which we label exemplary and situational and two approaches to process improvement, which we call normative and reflective. Our analysis of the relationship between KM and SPI leads to a proposal for a balanced theory of KM in SPI and provides valuable insights into how meaningful KM can be conducted for process improvements in IT and software organizations

UK construction processes and IT adoptability: Learning form other industries

Process improvement has been identified as a mechanism of achieving the desired performance improvements of the UK construction industry. During the recent past, researches within UK construction process improvement research paradigm have been influenced by the initiatives of other industries like manufacturing and software. Despite the success stories within such industries, the unique characteristics of the construction industry demand a careful consideration of the applicability of these approaches within a construction environment. Based on a literature review carried out by the authors, this paper discusses the nature of this applicability issue further. In addition to the above applicability issue, construction industry has suffered from a slow information technology (IT) adoptability issue, while IT has been considered as an effective enabler for process improvement in other industries. This has hindered the potential synergetic benefits of using IT within construction process improvement strategies. As such, it is important to understand the reasons behind this slow IT adoptability in order to ensure successful deployment of process improvement initiatives within the UK construction industry. This paper discusses this issue, by reviewing the literature to compare IT adoptability issues of the UK construction industry and other industries, with the aim of learning lessons from those to improve the UK construction industry

Mining for Process Improvements: Analyzing Software Repositories in Agile Retrospectives

Software Repositories contain knowledge on how software engineering teams work, communicate, and collaborate. It can be used to develop a data-informed view of a team's development process, which in turn can be employed for process improvement initiatives. In modern, Agile development methods, process improvement takes place in Retrospective meetings, in which the last development iteration is discussed. However, previously proposed activities that take place in these meetings often do not rely on project data, instead depending solely on the perceptions of team members. We propose new Retrospective activities, based on mining the software repositories of individual teams, to complement existing approaches with more objective, data-informed process views.Comment: In IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops (ICSEW'20

Software Process Dynamics: Modeling, Simulation and Improvement

The aim of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the dynamics of the software process, the ways to represent and formalize it, and how it can be integrated with other techniques to facilitate, among other things, process improvement. In order to achieve this goal, different approaches of software process modeling and simulation will be introduced, analyzing their pros and cons. Then, continuous modeling will be used as the modeling approach to build software process models that work in the qualitative and quantitative fields, assessing the decision-making process and the software process improvement arena. The integration of this approach with current process assessment models (such as CMM), static and algorithmic models (such as traditional models used in the estimation process) and the design of a metrics collection program which is triggered by the actual process of model building will also be described in the chapter.Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT) TIN2004-06689-C03-0