The Communicational Side of Open Source Communities

Communication is a fundamental value of software development teams, especially in Open Source(OP) communities, in fact, is a quite complex network of individuals having different roles and responsibilities, who can be looked upon as volunteers who spend their time creating and improving software. These people taking part in OS Software development use to share knowledge among themselves, exchange information and creative a collaborative environment. To coordinate and improve communication of these teams dis-located all over the world and use to work at different times and ways, it is necessary to predispose and utilize specific tools. This research study was born with the proposal to individuate and evaluate communication among members of OS communities analysing different development teams. The starting point is an academic software development project: Metodologie Agili Distribuite (Agile Distribuite Metodologies, MAD) project. This case study, performed at University of Cagliari, was made up of two well defined software development phases. The first one performed within an almost pure XP co-located environment, the second one involving a 20-programmers distributed team. The main goal of this experience was to show how a pure XP approach evolves while passing from a co-located to a distribute team

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

Detecting Coordination Problems in Collaborative Software Development Environments

Software development is rarely an individual effort and generally involves teams of developers collaborating to generate good reliable code. Among the software code there exist technical dependencies that arise from software components using services from other components. The different ways of assigning the design, development, and testing of these software modules to people can cause various coordination problems among them. We claim\ud that the collaboration of the developers, designers and testers must be related to and governed by the technical task structure. These collaboration practices are handled in what we call Socio-Technical Patterns.\ud The TESNA project (Technical Social Network Analysis) we report on in this paper addresses this issue. We propose a method and a tool that a project manager can use in order to detect the socio-technical coordination problems. We test the method and tool in a case study of a small and innovative software product company

Bridging the gap between research and agile practice: an evolutionary model

There is wide acceptance in the software engineering field that industry and research can gain significantly from each other and there have been several initiatives to encourage collaboration between the two. However there are some often-quoted challenges in this kind of collaboration. For example, that the timescales of research and practice are incompatible, that research is not seen as relevant for practice, and that research demands a different kind of rigour than practice supports. These are complex challenges that are not always easy to overcome. Since the beginning of 2013 we have been using an approach designed to address some of these challenges and to bridge the gap between research and practice, specifically in the agile software development arena. So far we have collaborated successfully with three partners and have investigated three practitioner-driven challenges with agile. The model of collaboration that we adopted has evolved with the lessons learned in the first two collaborations and been modified for the third. In this paper we introduce the collaboration model, discuss how it addresses the collaboration challenges between research and practice and how it has evolved, and describe the lessons learned from our experience