Investigating Modern Release Engineering Practices

Modern release engineering has moved from longer release cycles and separate development and release teams to a continuous and integrated process. However, release engineering practices include not only integration, build and test execution but also a better management of features. The goal of this research is to investigate the modern release engineering practices which cover four milestones in the field of release engineering, i. understanding rapid release by measuring the time and effort involved in release cycles, ii. feature management based on feature toggles iii. the impact of toggles on the system architecture, and iv. the quality of builds that contain ignored failing and flaky tests. This thesis is organized as a “manuscript” thesis whereby each milestone constitutes an accepted or submitted paper. First, we investigate the rapid release model for two major open source software projects. We quantify the time and effort which is involved in both the development and stabilization phases of a release cycle where, we found that despite using the rapid release process, both the Chrome Browser and the Linux Kernel have a period where developers rush changes to catch the current release. Second, we examine feature management based on feature toggles which is a widely used technique in software companies to manage features by turning them on/off during development as well as release periods. Developers typically isolate unrelated/unreleased changes on branches. However, large companies, such as Google and Facebook do their development on single branch. They isolate unfinished features using feature toggles that allow them to disable unstable code. Third, feature toggles provide not only a better management of features but also keep modules isolated and feature oriented which makes the architecture underneath the source code readable and iiieasily extractable. As the project grows, modules keep accepting features and features cross-cut into the modules. We found that the architecture can be easily extracted based on feature toggles and provides a different view compared to the traditional modular representations of software architecture. Fourth, we investigate the impact of failing tests on the quality of builds where we consider browser-crash as a quality factor. In this study we found that ignoring failing and flaky tests leads to dramatically more crashes than builds with all tests passing

What are Hybrid Development Methods Made Of? An Evidence-Based Characterization

Among the multitude of software development processes available, hardly any is used by the book. Regardless of company size or industry sector, a majority of project teams and companies use customized processes that combine different development methods— so-called hybrid development methods. Even though such hybrid development methods are highly individualized, a common understanding of how to systematically construct synergetic practices is missing. In this paper, we make a first step towards devising such guidelines. Grounded in 1,467 data points from a large-scale online survey among practitioners, we study the current state of practice in process use to answer the question: What are hybrid development methods made of? Our findings reveal that only eight methods and few practices build the core of modern software development. This small set allows for statistically constructing hybrid development methods. Using an 85% agreement level in the participants’ selections, we provide two examples illustrating how hybrid development methods are characterized by the practices they are made of. Our evidence-based analysis approach lays the foundation for devising hybrid development methods

Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World

This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World". The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps. The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations

Keeping Continuous Deliveries Safe

Allowing swift release cycles, Continuous Delivery has become popular in application software development and is starting to be applied in safety-critical domains such as the automotive industry. These domains require thorough analysis regarding safety constraints, which can be achieved by formal verification and the execution of safety tests resulting from a safety analysis on the product. With continuous delivery in place, such tests need to be executed with every build to ensure the latest software still fulfills all safety requirements. Even more though, the safety analysis has to be updated with every change to ensure the safety test suite is still up-to-date. We thus propose that a safety analysis should be treated no differently from other deliverables such as source-code and dependencies, formulate guidelines on how to achieve this and advert areas where future research is needed.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Walking Through the Method Zoo: Does Higher Education Really Meet Software Industry Demands?

Software engineering educators are continually challenged by rapidly evolving concepts, technologies, and industry demands. Due to the omnipresence of software in a digitalized society, higher education institutions (HEIs) have to educate the students such that they learn how to learn, and that they are equipped with a profound basic knowledge and with latest knowledge about modern software and system development. Since industry demands change constantly, HEIs are challenged in meeting such current and future demands in a timely manner. This paper analyzes the current state of practice in software engineering education. Specifically, we want to compare contemporary education with industrial practice to understand if frameworks, methods and practices for software and system development taught at HEIs reflect industrial practice. For this, we conducted an online survey and collected information about 67 software engineering courses. Our findings show that development approaches taught at HEIs quite closely reflect industrial practice. We also found that the choice of what process to teach is sometimes driven by the wish to make a course successful. Especially when this happens for project courses, it could be beneficial to put more emphasis on building learning sequences with other courses