Software Qualimetry at Schneider Electric: a field background

International audienceThis paper presents the Source Code Quality Indicators (SCQI) project led by the Strategy & Innovation corporate team to deploy Software Qualimetry within a large-scale multinational organization such as Schneider Electric (SE) 1. The related method (SCQI) was designed from a list of relevant use cases and relies on the main concepts of the SQALE [1] evaluation method. To support this method, SE has selected the SQuORE [2] platform thanks to its capability to allow large-scale deployment together with high versatility and adaptability to local needs. Feedback and lessons learned from initial deployments are now used to speed up the qualimetry process institutionalization within the whole company

Using Bug Reports as a Software Quality Measure

Bugzilla is an online software bug reporting system. It is widely used by both open-source software projects and commercial software companies and has become a major source to study software evolution, software project management, and software quality control. In some research studies, the number of bug reports has been used as an indicator of software quality. This paper examines this representation. We investigate whether the number of bug reports of a specific version of a software product is correlated with its quality. Our study is performed on six branches of three open-source software systems. Our results do not support using the number of bug reports as a quality indicator of a specific version of an evolving software product. Instead, the study reveals that the number of bug reports is in some ways correlated with the time duration between product releases. Finally, the paper suggests using accumulated bug reports as a means to represent the quality of a software branch

Improving practices in a medium french company: First step

Legacy systems are old software that still does useful tasks. In industrial software companies, legacy systems are often crucial for the company business model and represent a long-term business investment. Legacy systems are known to be hard to maintain. This is the case in a french company whose main product is twenty years old software written in PowerBuilder. Our long-term goal is to help it re-engineer this system. But how to validate our intervention? Little data is available on the system and specifically, past versions of the source code are not easy to recover. This constrained us on the metrics we could use. In this paper, we present a lightweight model to characterize the situation of the system and allow us to monitor it in the future

A Microstructural Approach to Self-Organizing:The Emergence of Attention Networks

A recent line of inquiry investigates new forms of organizing as bundles of novel solutions to universal problems of resource allocation and coordination: how to allocate organizational problems to organizational participants and how to integrate participants' resulting efforts. We contribute to this line of inquiry by reframing organizational attention as the outcome of a concatenation of self-organizing, microstructural mechanisms linking multiple participants to multiple problems, thus giving rise to an emergent attention network. We argue that, when managerial hierarchies are absent and authority is decentralized, observable acts of attention allocation produce interpretable signals that help participants to direct their attention and share information on how to coordinate and integrate their individual efforts. We theorize that the observed structure of an organizational attention network is generated by the concatenation of four interdependent micromechanisms: focusing, reinforcing, mixing, and clustering. In a statistical analysis of organizational problem solving within a large opensource software project, we find support for our hypotheses about the self-organizing dynamics of the observed attention network connecting organizational problems (software bugs) to organizational participants (volunteer contributors). We discuss the implications of attention networks for theory and practice by emphasizing the self-organizing character of organizational problem solving. We discuss the generalizability of our theory to a wider set of organizations in which participants can freely allocate their attention to problems and the outcomes of their allocation are publicly observable without cost.</p

Methods, Techniques and Tools to Support Software Project Management in High Maturity

High maturity in software development is associated to statistical control of critical subprocesses performance and the use of gained predictability to manage projects with better planning precision and monitoring control. Although maturity models such as CMMI mention some statistical and other quantitative approaches, methods and techniques that can support project management in high maturity, they do not provide details about them neither present their available types. Therefore, there is a lack of knowledge on how to support software process improvement initiatives to choose and use statistical and other quantitative approaches, methods and techniques on such context. The objective of this study is to identify different approaches, methods and techniques that can assist on managing projects in high maturity. By conducting a systematic literature mapping on major data sources, we identified 75 papers describing 101 contributions. We briefly describe identified approaches, methods and techniques grouped by similar types and provide some analysis regarding technological maturity stage and evaluation method, and supported development methods and characteristics and process/indicator area in which they were applied. We hope this information can fill some of the statistical and quantitative knowledge gap about the actual types of approaches, methods and techniques being proposed, evaluated, experimented and adopted by organizations to assist on quantitative project management in high maturity

Monitoring software quality evolution for defects

Quality control charts, especially c-charts, can help monitor software quality evolution for defects over time. c-charts of the Eclipse and Gnome systems showed that for systems experiencing active maintenance and updates, quality evolution is complicated and dynamic. The authors identify six quality evolution patterns and describe their implications. Quality assurance teams can use c-charts and patterns to monitor quality evolution and prioritize their efforts. © 2006 IEEE