Towards an ontology for strategic decision making: The case of quality in rapid software development projects

Strategic decision making is the process of selecting a logical and informed choice from the alternative options based on key strategic indicators determining the success of a specific organization strategy. To support this process and provide a common underlying language, in this work, we present an empirically-grounded ontology to support different strategic decision-making processes and extend the ontology to cover the context of managing quality in Rapid Software Development projects. We illustrate the complete ontology with an example.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Rapid Releases and Testing Problems at the industry: A survey

Rapid releases and continuous software development are established practices in modern agile projects. The advantages of them are widely known across the software development community, but there are some studies which mention that there are still challenges to face. According to them, there are different open issues which are affecting the implementation of an adequate testing process. With the aim of validating if these problems are present in real projects, in this paper we present the results of a survey whose goal was to validate whether the industry is experiencing similar issues and their causes. The findings demonstrate that both the industry and academic side are aligned, and that there is still a need for processes and tools regarding the testing process in continuous development.XVI Workshop Ingeniería de Software.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informátic

Rapid Releases and Testing Problems at the industry: A survey

Rapid releases and continuous software development are established practices in modern agile projects. The advantages of them are widely known across the software development community, but there are some studies which mention that there are still challenges to face. According to them, there are different open issues which are affecting the implementation of an adequate testing process. With the aim of validating if these problems are present in real projects, in this paper we present the results of a survey whose goal was to validate whether the industry is experiencing similar issues and their causes. The findings demonstrate that both the industry and academic side are aligned, and that there is still a need for processes and tools regarding the testing process in continuous development.XVI Workshop Ingeniería de Software.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informátic

Rapid Releases and Testing Problems at the industry: A survey

Rapid releases and continuous software development are established practices in modern agile projects. The advantages of them are widely known across the software development community, but there are some studies which mention that there are still challenges to face. According to them, there are different open issues which are affecting the implementation of an adequate testing process. With the aim of validating if these problems are present in real projects, in this paper we present the results of a survey whose goal was to validate whether the industry is experiencing similar issues and their causes. The findings demonstrate that both the industry and academic side are aligned, and that there is still a need for processes and tools regarding the testing process in continuous development.XVI Workshop Ingeniería de Software.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informátic

On the impact of product quality attributes on open source project evolution

Several Open Source Software (OSS) projects have adopted frequent releases as a strategy to deliver both new features and fixed bugs on time. This cycle begins with express requests from the project’s community, registered as issues in bug repositories by active users and developers. Each OSS project has its own priorities established by their respective communities. A a still open question is the set of criteria and priorities that influence the decisions of which issues should be analyzed, implemented/solved and delivered in next releases. In this paper, we present an exploratory study whose goal is to investigate the influence of target product quality attributes in software evolution practices of OSS projects. The goal is to search for evidence of relationships between these target attributes, priorities assigned to the registered issues and the ways they are delivered by product releases. To this end, we asked six participants of an exploratory study to identify these attributes through the data analysis of repositories of three well-known OSS projects: Libre Office, Eclipse and Mozilla Firefox. Evidence indicated by the participants suggest that OSS community developers use criteria/priorities driven by specific software product quality attributes, to plan and integrate software releases.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Assessing test artifact quality -- A tertiary study

Context: Modern software development increasingly relies on software testing for an ever more frequent delivery of high quality software. This puts high demands on the quality of the central artifacts in software testing, test suites and test cases. Objective: We aim to develop a comprehensive model for capturing the dimensions of test case/suite quality, which are relevant for a variety of perspectives. Method: We have carried out a systematic literature review to identify and analyze existing secondary studies on quality aspects of software testing artifacts. Results: We identified 49 relevant secondary studies. Of these 49 studies, less than half did some form of quality appraisal of the included primary studies and only 3 took into account the quality of the primary study when synthesizing the results. We present an aggregation of the context dimensions and factors that can be used to characterize the environment in which the test case/suite quality is investigated. We also provide a comprehensive model of test case/suite quality with definitions for the quality attributes and measurements based on findings in the literature and ISO/IEC 25010:2011. Conclusion: The test artifact quality model presented in the paper can be used to support test artifact quality assessment and improvement initiatives in practice. Furtherm Information and Software Technology 139 (2021): 106620ore, the model can also be used as a framework for documenting context characteristics to make research results more accessible for research and practice

Towards a More Representative Definition of Cyber Security

In recent years, ‘Cyber Security’ has emerged as a widely-used term with increased adoption by practitioners and politicians alike. However, as with many fashionable jargon, there seems to be very little understanding of what the term really entails. Although this is may not be an issue when the term is used in an informal context, it can potentially cause considerable problems in context of organizational strategy, business objectives, or international agreements. In this work, we study the existing literature to identify the main definitions provided for the term ‘Cyber Security’ by authoritative sources. We then conduct various lexical and semantic analysis techniques in an attempt to better understand the scope and context of these definitions, along with their relevance. Finally, based on the analysis conducted, we propose a new improved definition that we then demonstrate to be a more representative definition using the same lexical and semantic analysis techniques

Assessing Practitioner Beliefs about Software Defect Prediction

Just because software developers say they believe in "X", that does not necessarily mean that "X" is true. As shown here, there exist numerous beliefs listed in the recent Software Engineering literature which are only supported by small portions of the available data. Hence we ask what is the source of this disconnect between beliefs and evidence?. To answer this question we look for evidence for ten beliefs within 300,000+ changes seen in dozens of open-source projects. Some of those beliefs had strong support across all the projects; specifically, "A commit that involves more added and removed lines is more bug-prone" and "Files with fewer lines contributed by their owners (who contribute most changes) are bug-prone". Most of the widely-held beliefs studied are only sporadically supported in the data; i.e. large effects can appear in project data and then disappear in subsequent releases. Such sporadic support explains why developers believe things that were relevant to their prior work, but not necessarily their current work. Our conclusion will be that we need to change the nature of the debate with Software Engineering. Specifically, while it is important to report the effects that hold right now, it is also important to report on what effects change over time.Comment: 9 pages, 3 Figures, 4 Tables, ICSE SEIP 202