Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering: A Design for a Global Family of Surveys and First Results from Germany

For many years, we have observed industry struggling in defining a high quality requirements engineering (RE) and researchers trying to understand industrial expectations and problems. Although we are investigating the discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, they still do not allow for empirical generalisations. To lay an empirical and externally valid foundation about the state of the practice in RE, we aim at a series of open and reproducible surveys that allow us to steer future research in a problem-driven manner. We designed a globally distributed family of surveys in joint collaborations with different researchers and completed the first run in Germany. The instrument is based on a theory in the form of a set of hypotheses inferred from our experiences and available studies. We test each hypothesis in our theory and identify further candidates to extend the theory by correlation and Grounded Theory analysis. In this article, we report on the design of the family of surveys, its underlying theory, and the full results obtained from Germany with participants from 58 companies. The results reveal, for example, a tendency to improve RE via internally defined qualitative methods rather than relying on normative approaches like CMMI. We also discovered various RE problems that are statistically significant in practice. For instance, we could corroborate communication flaws or moving targets as problems in practice. Our results are not yet fully representative but already give first insights into current practices and problems in RE, and they allow us to draw lessons learnt for future replications. Our results obtained from this first run in Germany make us confident that the survey design and instrument are well-suited to be replicated and, thereby, to create a generalisable empirical basis of RE in practice

Social Media Capabilities In Academic Libraries: Influence on librarians’ agility and relationship quality (librarian-user)

This study explores the impact of social media on academic libraries, focusing on librarians’ agility and relationship quality. It collected quantitative data from 30 librarians at Tun Abdul Razak Library using an online survey. The study’s objectives included measuring social media capability, assessing its influence on librarian’s agility and relationship quality, and examining how library policies moderate the relationship librarians’ agility and relationship quality with users. The findings indicate that respondents had a high level of social media capability, which positively influenced both librarians’ agility and relationship quality with users

Adopting agile methodologies in distributed software development

From the second half of the '90s, some software engineering practitioners introduced a new group of software development methodologies called Agile Methodologies (Ams): they have been developed to overcome the limits of the traditional approaches in the software development. FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) has been proposed as possible different solution to the software crisis that is afflicting the ICT worldwide business. If the AMs improve the quality code and allow to respond quickly to requirement changes, FLOSS approach decreases the development costs and increases the spreading of competences about the software products. A debate is shaping about the compatibility of these two approaches. Software development teams have been spreading around the world, with users in Europe, management in the USA and programmers in the USA and India. The scattering of team members and functions around the world introduces barriers to productivity, cultural and languages differences can lead to misunderstanding of requirements, time zone differences can delay project schedules. Agile methods can provide a competitive advantage by delivering early, simplifying communication and allowing the business to respond more quickly to the market by changing the software. Trying to distribute a development project in an agile way isn't easy and will involve compromises. The goal of this thesis is to determine the application of the AMs in several contexts so to define which of these can be used effectively in non traditional software projects as the distributed development

Adopting agile methodologies in distributed software development

From the second half of the '90s, some software engineering practitioners introduced a new group of software development methodologies called Agile Methodologies (Ams): they have been developed to overcome the limits of the traditional approaches in the software development. FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) has been proposed as possible different solution to the software crisis that is afflicting the ICT worldwide business. If the AMs improve the quality code and allow to respond quickly to requirement changes, FLOSS approach decreases the development costs and increases the spreading of competences about the software products. A debate is shaping about the compatibility of these two approaches. Software development teams have been spreading around the world, with users in Europe, management in the USA and programmers in the USA and India. The scattering of team members and functions around the world introduces barriers to productivity, cultural and languages differences can lead to misunderstanding of requirements, time zone differences can delay project schedules. Agile methods can provide a competitive advantage by delivering early, simplifying communication and allowing the business to respond more quickly to the market by changing the software. Trying to distribute a development project in an agile way isn't easy and will involve compromises. The goal of this thesis is to determine the application of the AMs in several contexts so to define which of these can be used effectively in non traditional software projects as the distributed development

Migrations to Microservices-Based Architectures - a Tale of Technical and Organizational Change

As software systems evolve and scale faster than the foundations on which they are structured on, software architecture migrations to modern, cutting edge paradigms of development are becoming common. An example of such a paradigm is Microservices-based Architectures (MSAs). With MSAs, organizations can manage the complexity of their software and deploy individual pieces autonomously and independently.\ua0However, migrating towards microservices entails a lot of complexity. The evolution of the structures that a migration predisposes is multifaceted, with a socio-technical nature.Therefore, this thesis aims to first of all understand the process in which decisions are made by engineers to migrate their software architecture towards microservices. In addition, this thesis targets to aggregate the migration journey of organizations that change their software architecture to microservices. Finally, it is demonstrated how an organization\u27s operations implement different processes for software architecture migrations and development methodologies

A Comparison between Agile and Traditional Software Development Methodologies

Agile and Traditional software development methodologies, both are being used in different projects of software development industry. Agile software development technology is an incremental software development process. On the other hand, Traditional software development methodologies or plan-driven software can be explained as a more formal approach to software development. These methodologies come with a fully completed set of systems requirements followed by an architectural and high leveldesign development and inspiration. This research focuses on the software development life cycle, role and responsibilities of agile and traditional software development methodologies and their technical practices. It performs a comparison between both the software development methodologies. Here a questionnaire is used to collect data from the various experts of different IT related organizations of Bangladesh. In the questionnaire, there are three sections to bring out the individual knowledge from different organization, methodology knowledge of the respondents and software development experience of the respondents. The respondents are mainly software engineer, system analyst, software developer etc. A comparison is also performed between this survey result and a survey done by Ambler

A comparison of processing techniques for producing prototype injection moulding inserts.

This project involves the investigation of processing techniques for producing low-cost moulding inserts used in the particulate injection moulding (PIM) process. Prototype moulds were made from both additive and subtractive processes as well as a combination of the two. The general motivation for this was to reduce the entry cost of users when considering PIM. PIM cavity inserts were first made by conventional machining from a polymer block using the pocket NC desktop mill. PIM cavity inserts were also made by fused filament deposition modelling using the Tiertime UP plus 3D printer. The injection moulding trials manifested in surface finish and part removal defects. The feedstock was a titanium metal blend which is brittle in comparison to commodity polymers. That in combination with the mesoscale features, small cross-sections and complex geometries were considered the main problems. For both processing methods, fixes were identified and made to test the theory. These consisted of a blended approach that saw a combination of both the additive and subtractive processes being used. The parts produced from the three processing methods are investigated and their respective merits and issues are discussed

Reducing risk in pre-production investigations through undergraduate engineering projects.

This poster is the culmination of final year Bachelor of Engineering Technology (B.Eng.Tech) student projects in 2017 and 2018. The B.Eng.Tech is a level seven qualification that aligns with the Sydney accord for a three-year engineering degree and hence is internationally benchmarked. The enabling mechanism of these projects is the industry connectivity that creates real-world projects and highlights the benefits of the investigation of process at the technologist level. The methodologies we use are basic and transparent, with enough depth of technical knowledge to ensure the industry partners gain from the collaboration process. The process we use minimizes the disconnect between the student and the industry supervisor while maintaining the academic freedom of the student and the commercial sensitivities of the supervisor. The general motivation for this approach is the reduction of the entry cost of the industry to enable consideration of new technologies and thereby reducing risk to core business and shareholder profits. The poster presents several images and interpretive dialogue to explain the positive and negative aspects of the student process