Metrics for agile requirements definition and management

“You Can't Manage What You Don't Measure” (Origin unknown) was the starting point for this research. The goal of this research was to define metrics to support and monitor the requirements defi-nition and management in the Alusta P2P Invoice automation and Procurement product de-velopment in the target organization. The research was conducted as a constructive research including document analysis, inter-views and facilitated workshop and it was done during June 2016-December 2016. Theory around agile software development, agile requirements definition and management and metrics was gathered to support the construct. First the research defined the requirements definition and management process for the target organization to mirror the metrics against it. The most important measure found during the research was whether the feature is validated with users and enhanced accordingly before implementation or not. With this metric or gate keeper it would be possible to use the customer acceptance as the key measure and in-crease the validated learning about customers as lean movement suggests. Minimum mar-ketable feature sets could be validated with users too. In the target organization it would be important to deploy the new design process well in use. To monitor the success, completing the steps on feature level could be measured to view the trend of improvement and it’s impact to the feature quality and efficiency. Enhancing the data analytics of the service production data would improve both the RDM process and the product quality and cost-efficiency. Through following the feature quality, it would be possible to explore and find the lean, waste-less way to do the discovery of the requirements via comparing the used RDM techniques and completed process phases to the quality of the outcome of the feature. Defining the RDM specific objectives against the current KPI’s could help to achieve better results with them. Evaluating business value and measuring organizational learning were left as areas of future research.“Et voi johtaa sitä mitä et mittaa” (Alkuperä tuntematon) oli tämän tutkimuksen lähtökohta. Tutkimuksen tavoite oli määritellä mittareita tukemaan ja tarkkailemaan vaatimusmäärittelyä ja vaatimusten hallingaa Alusta P2P Laskuautomaation ja Hankintojen hallinnan tuotekehityksessä kohdeorganisaatiossa. Tutkimus on konstruktiivinen ja se on toteutetttu dokumenttianalyysien, haastattelujen ja fasilitoidun työpajan avulla. Tutkimus on tehty Kesäkuun 2016 ja Joulukuun 2016 välillä. Teoriaa konstruktia tukemaan on kerätty ketterän sovelluskehityksen, ketterän vaatimusmäärittelyn ja vaatimusten hallinnan ja mittareiden alueelta. Aluksi tutkimus määritti vaatimusmäärittelyn ja -hallinnan prosessin kohdeyritykselle, jotta mittareita olisi helppo peilata sitä vasten. Tärkein tutkimuksen aikana löydetty mittari on onko toiminto vahvistettu käyttäjien kanssa ja tarvittavat korjaukset tehty ennen kehittämisen aloitusta. Tällä mittarilla tai portinvartijalla voidaan saavutaa asiakashyväksyntä tärkeimpänä mittarina ja lisätä leanin ehdottamaa vahvistettua asiakkaista oppimista. Pienimmät markkinotavat toimintokokonaisuudet (Minimum marketable feature) voitaisiin myös vahvistaa käyttäjien kanssa. Kohdeorganisaatiossa tärkeä kehityskohde olisi jalkauttaa uusi prosessi hyvin. Prosessin vaiheiden toteutumista voitaisiin seurata toimintokokonaisuuksien tasolla ja seurata kehitysvaiheiden suoritustason vaikutusta toimintojen laatuun ja tekemisen tehokkuuteen. Palvelun käyttödatan analysoinnin kehittäminen parantaisis vaatimuusmäärityksen ja vaatimsuten hallinnan prosessia ja tuotteen laatua ja tekemisen tehokkutta. Toimintokokoonaisuuksien laadun seuraamisen avulla olisi mahdollista etsiä ja löytää lean, hukaton tapa tehdä vaatimusten löytämisvaihetta vertaamalla käytettyjä vaatimusmäärittelyn ja -hallinnan tekniikoita saavutettuun tuloksen laatuun. Vaatimusmäärittelyn ja hallinnan päämäärät voitaisiin määrittää tarkemmin nykyisiä KPI:tä vastaan ja näin saavuttaa mittareiden parempi laatu. Liiketoiminnan tuottaman arvon määrittäminen ja organisatorisen oppimisen mittaaminen on jätetty jatkotutkimuksen aiheiksi

Trust engineering framework for software services

La presente tesis presenta un marco de trabajo que abarca distintas fases del ciclo de vida de los servicios software y que permite a ingenieros de requisitos, diseñadores y desarrolladores la integración en dichos servicios de modelos de confianza y reputación. En la fase de planificación, proponemos una metodología para evaluar la confianza en proveedores de Cloud antes de decidir si el sistema, o parte de él, se traslada al mismo. En la fase de análisis, ofrecemos una notación para la captura y representación de requisitos de confianza y reputación. Asimismo en esta misma fase, desarrollamos una metodología que permite detectar amenazas internas en un sistema a través de análisis de relaciones de confianza. Para la fase de diseño, proponemos un perfil UML que permite la especificación de modelos de confianza y reputación, lo cual facilita la siguiente fase de implementación, para la que desarrollamos un marco de trabajo que los desarrolladores pueden usar para implementar una amplia variedad de modelos de confianza y reputación. Finalmente, para la fase de verificación en tiempo de ejecución, presentamos un marco de trabajo desarrollado sobre una plataforma de sistemas auto-adaptativos que implementa el paradigma de modelos en tiempo de ejecución. Con dicho marco de trabajo, hacemos posible que los desarrolladores puedan implementar modelos de confianza y reputación, y que puedan usar la información proporcionada por dichos modelos para especificar políticas de reconfiguración en tiempo de ejecución. Esto permite que el sistema se adapte de forma que se mantengan niveles tolerables de confianza y reputación en los componentes de los que consiste. Todo los trabajos anteriores se apoyan sobre un marco conceptual que captura y relaciona entre sí las nociones más relevantes en los dominios de la confianza y la reputación

A comparison of the relationship management methodology and the extended business rules diagram method

This research is a comparative study of the Relationship Management Methodology and the extended Business Rules Diagram method, when applied to the development of a Web-based hypermedia system. The RMM method focuses almost exclusively on the design phase of Web-based hypermedia systems with insufficient emphasis placed on the requirement\u27s analysis phase. The extended BRD method has been proposed to address this issue and attempts to cover more fully the development life cycle of Web based hypermedia systems. A comparison of the main concepts, the phases of steps, as well as the modelling technique, notation and graphical representation is made between the two methods

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

The Impact of Interventional Change Techniques on an Internet Banking Cross-functional Team.

This study investigates the team aspects of a process improvement project situated in an Internet banking system maintenance and modification phase. To investigate how team processes could be improved in this context, four interventional change techniques were introduced and implemented during an action research study in which the researcher was included as one of the team members and participated during group meetings and discussions. Internet banking is an important Internet-delivered service which is expected to provide benefits for both commercial banks and bank customers. Internet banking allows bank customers to have the freedom to perform their financial activities at their convenience. Developing, maintaining, and improving Internet banking systems requires large amounts of investment to maintain high levels of Internet banking service quality, and the maintenance and modification phase of the overall lifecycle cost is a considerable part of this investment. Therefore, in order to ensure high levels of usability, reliability, and quality for these Internet banking services, commercial banks need to make significant investments in the maintenance and modification phases of their Internet banking systems' lifecycle. The four interventional change techniques used in this study were: departmental participation, equal participation, holistic scenario, and management support. The four techniques were found to be influential in developing process improvements in the maintenance and modification phase of Internet banking systems. These techniques generated several significant improvements which directly affected the way team members managed their work. The significant contributions of these interventional change techniques were: the creation of cross-functional multilevel teams, development of effective departmental participation and communication techniques, extended scope and knowledge by the team members of Internet banking systems, an increase in team learning and understanding, techniques to change problem structure, and an end to end problem-solving approach. ii These contributions also directly improved the performance of the Internet banking systems maintenance team, and there was a significant improvement in the outcomes of the Internet banking systems maintenance and modification phase

Assessing Comment Quality in Object-Oriented Languages

Previous studies have shown that high-quality code comments support developers in software maintenance and program comprehension tasks. However, the semi-structured nature of comments, several conventions to write comments, and the lack of quality assessment tools for all aspects of comments make comment evaluation and maintenance a non-trivial problem. To understand the specification of high-quality comments to build effective assessment tools, our thesis emphasizes acquiring a multi-perspective view of the comments, which can be approached by analyzing (1) the academic support for comment quality assessment, (2) developer commenting practices across languages, and (3) developer concerns about comments. Our findings regarding the academic support for assessing comment quality showed that researchers primarily focus on Java in the last decade even though the trend of using polyglot environments in software projects is increasing. Similarly, the trend of analyzing specific types of code comments (method comments, or inline comments) is increasing, but the studies rarely analyze class comments. We found 21 quality attributes that researchers consider to assess comment quality, and manual assessment is still the most commonly used technique to assess various quality attributes. Our analysis of developer commenting practices showed that developers embed a mixed level of details in class comments, ranging from high-level class overviews to low-level implementation details across programming languages. They follow style guidelines regarding what information to write in class comments but violate the structure and syntax guidelines. They primarily face problems locating relevant guidelines to write consistent and informative comments, verifying the adherence of their comments to the guidelines, and evaluating the overall state of comment quality. To help researchers and developers in building comment quality assessment tools, we contribute: (i) a systematic literature review (SLR) of ten years (2010–2020) of research on assessing comment quality, (ii) a taxonomy of quality attributes used to assess comment quality, (iii) an empirically validated taxonomy of class comment information types from three programming languages, (iv) a multi-programming-language approach to automatically identify the comment information types, (v) an empirically validated taxonomy of comment convention-related questions and recommendation from various Q&A forums, and (vi) a tool to gather discussions from multiple developer sources, such as Stack Overflow, and mailing lists. Our contributions provide various kinds of empirical evidence of the developer’s interest in reducing efforts in the software documentation process, of the limited support developers get in automatically assessing comment quality, and of the challenges they face in writing high-quality comments. This work lays the foundation for future effective comment quality assessment tools and techniques

An evaluation of the challenges of Multilingualism in Data Warehouse development

In this paper we discuss Business Intelligence and define what is meant by support for Multilingualism in a Business Intelligence reporting context. We identify support for Multilingualism as a challenging issue which has implications for data warehouse design and reporting performance. Data warehouses are a core component of most Business Intelligence systems and the star schema is the approach most widely used to develop data warehouses and dimensional Data Marts. We discuss the way in which Multilingualism can be supported in the Star Schema and identify that current approaches have serious limitations which include data redundancy and data manipulation, performance and maintenance issues. We propose a new approach to enable the optimal application of multilingualism in Business Intelligence. The proposed approach was found to produce satisfactory results when used in a proof-of-concept environment. Future work will include testing the approach in an enterprise environmen