Information technology service management: an experimental approach towards IT service prediction

Dissertation presented to obtain a Masters degree in Computer ScienceSoftware development and software quality improvement have been strong topics for discussion in the last decades. Software Engineering has always been concerned with theories and best practices to develop software for large-scale usage. However, most times those theories are not validated in real live environments. Therefore, the need for experiments is immense. The incidents database can be an important asset for software engineering teams. If they learn from past experience in service management, then they will be able to shift from a reactive approach to a more proactive one. The main goal of this dissertation is shedding some light on the influential factors that affect incidents lifecycle, from creation to its closure, and also to investigate to what accuracy the ARIMA models are a valid approach to model and predict not only the ITIL incident management process, but also other ITIL processes and services in general. The dissertation presented herein is on the crossroads of Empirical Software Engineering and of the emerging area of Services Science. It describes an experiment conducted upon a sample of incident reports, recorded during the operation of several hundred commercial software products, over a period of three years (2005-2007), on six countries in Europe and Latin America. The incidents were reported by customers of a large independent software vendor. The primary goal of an Incident Management process is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimize the adverse impact on business operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained. As a result of this, a software company can make use of a good incident management process to improve several areas of their business, particularly product development, product support, the relation with its customers and their positioning in the marketplace. The underlying research questions refer to the validation of which are the influencing factors affecting the incidents management lifecycle, and also aims at finding the existence of patterns and/or trends in incident creation and resolution based on a time series approach. Additionally, it presents the estimation, evaluation and validation of several ARIMA models created with the purpose of forecasting upon incident resolution based on incident creation historic data. Understanding causal-relationships and patterns on incident management can help software development organizations on optimizing their support processes and in allocating the adequate resources; people and budget

Contribuição da gestão ágil para projectos de software: um estudo empírico em portais de notícias do Brasil

ProjectoMuito se tem discutido, nos últimos anos, no âmbito das abordagens ágeis de gestão de projectos de desenvolvimento de software. Estas abordagens vêm conquistando mais praticantes, mas escasseiam as evidências sobre a contribuição real das mesmas para o sucesso dos projectos. Esta dissertação teve como intuito corroborar a existência de factores ágeis contribuintes para o sucesso de projectos de software, por meio de um estudo de campo, de natureza descritiva e quantitativa, com teste de hipóteses. Foi aplicado um questionário aos profissionais de TI dos portais de notícias do Brasil mais visitados. Optou-se por este domínio devido ao facto de o mesmo ser caracterizado por uma grande mutação e agilidade nos projectos. Foram obtidas 63 respostas oriundas de 8 organizações, localizadas nas cidades de São Paulo-SP, Rio de Janeiro-RJ e Porto Alegre-RS. Os resultados obtidos permitiram comprovar a existência de três factores ágeis: i) Estratégias de Entregas; ii) Capacitação e Comprometimento da Equipa; e iii) Envolvimento do Cliente que foram contribuintes para o sucesso dos projectos de software. Esses factores foram determinados por análise de componentes principais, tendo como base um grande número de práticas ágeis identificadas na literatura. Foi possível construir, por meio de regressão logística, um modelo de estimação do sucesso dos projectos baseado nos supracitados factores.Much has been discussed, in the past few years, in the context of agile management approaches for software development projects. These approaches have gained more practitioners, but there is scarce evidence on their real contribution to projects success. This dissertation aims at corroborating the existence of agile factors contributing to the success of software projects by means of a field study, of descriptive and quantitative nature, with hypotheses testing. A questionnaire was administered to IT professionals working in the most visited news portals of Brazil. We chose this area due to the fact that it is characterized by a large mutation and agility in projects. We gathered 63 answers originated from 8 organizations, located in the cities of São Paulo-SP, Rio de Janeiro-RJ and Porto Alegre-RS. The results obtained prove the existence of three agile factors: i) Delivery Strategy; ii) Team Capability and Commitment; and iii) Customer Involvement that contributed to the success of agile software projects. These factors were determined by principal component analysis, based on a large number of agile practices identified in the literature. It was possible to construct, using logistic regression, a model for estimating the success of projects based on the aforementioned factors