96,234 research outputs found
On Integrating Student Empirical Software Engineering Studies with Research and Teaching Goals
Background: Many empirical software engineering studies use students as subjects and are conducted as part of university courses. Aim: We aim at reporting our experiences with using guidelines for integrating empirical studies with our research and teaching goals. Method: We document our experience from conducting three studies with graduate students in two software architecture courses. Results: Our results show some problems that we faced when following the guidelines and deviations we made from the original guidelines. Conclusions: Based on our results we propose recommendations for empirical software engineering studies that are integrated in university courses.
Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years
In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first
Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish
and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous
traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate
a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document
some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers,
representing current work in the community organized across four process axes
of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing,
Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of
Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups
focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within
the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of
tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community
are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope
is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade
of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of
Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the
engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a
trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for
empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at
increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active
community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward
into the next decade of research
Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years
In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first
Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish
and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous
traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate
a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document
some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers,
representing current work in the community organized across four process axes
of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing,
Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of
Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups
focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within
the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of
tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community
are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope
is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade
of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of
Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the
engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a
trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for
empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at
increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active
community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward
into the next decade of research
Effective Systems Engineering Training
The need for systems engineering training is steadily increasing, as both the defense and commercial markets take on more complex "systems of systems" work. A variety of universities and commercial training vendors have assembled courses of various lengths, format, and content to meet this need. This presentation looks at the requirements for systems engineering training, and discusses techniques for increasing its effectiveness. Several format and content options for meeting these requirements are compared and contrasted, and an experience-based curriculum is shown
A human factors methodology for real-time support applications
A general approach to the human factors (HF) analysis of new or existing projects at NASA/Goddard is delineated. Because the methodology evolved from HF evaluations of the Mission Planning Terminal (MPT) and the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite Mission Operations Room (ERBS MOR), it is directed specifically to the HF analysis of real-time support applications. Major topics included for discussion are the process of establishing a working relationship between the Human Factors Group (HFG) and the project, orientation of HF analysts to the project, human factors analysis and review, and coordination with major cycles of system development. Sub-topics include specific areas for analysis and appropriate HF tools. Management support functions are outlined. References provide a guide to sources of further information
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
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