Are Delayed Issues Harder to Resolve? Revisiting Cost-to-Fix of Defects throughout the Lifecycle

Many practitioners and academics believe in a delayed issue effect (DIE); i.e. the longer an issue lingers in the system, the more effort it requires to resolve. This belief is often used to justify major investments in new development processes that promise to retire more issues sooner. This paper tests for the delayed issue effect in 171 software projects conducted around the world in the period from 2006--2014. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest study yet published on this effect. We found no evidence for the delayed issue effect; i.e. the effort to resolve issues in a later phase was not consistently or substantially greater than when issues were resolved soon after their introduction. This paper documents the above study and explores reasons for this mismatch between this common rule of thumb and empirical data. In summary, DIE is not some constant across all projects. Rather, DIE might be an historical relic that occurs intermittently only in certain kinds of projects. This is a significant result since it predicts that new development processes that promise to faster retire more issues will not have a guaranteed return on investment (depending on the context where applied), and that a long-held truth in software engineering should not be considered a global truism.Comment: 31 pages. Accepted with minor revisions to Journal of Empirical Software Engineering. Keywords: software economics, phase delay, cost to fi

Report on the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2)

This technical report records and discusses the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2). The report includes a description of the alternative, experimental submission and review process, two workshop keynote presentations, a series of lightning talks, a discussion on sustainability, and five discussions from the topic areas of exploring sustainability; software development experiences; credit & incentives; reproducibility & reuse & sharing; and code testing & code review. For each topic, the report includes a list of tangible actions that were proposed and that would lead to potential change. The workshop recognized that reliance on scientific software is pervasive in all areas of world-leading research today. The workshop participants then proceeded to explore different perspectives on the concept of sustainability. Key enablers and barriers of sustainable scientific software were identified from their experiences. In addition, recommendations with new requirements such as software credit files and software prize frameworks were outlined for improving practices in sustainable software engineering. There was also broad consensus that formal training in software development or engineering was rare among the practitioners. Significant strides need to be made in building a sense of community via training in software and technical practices, on increasing their size and scope, and on better integrating them directly into graduate education programs. Finally, journals can define and publish policies to improve reproducibility, whereas reviewers can insist that authors provide sufficient information and access to data and software to allow them reproduce the results in the paper. Hence a list of criteria is compiled for journals to provide to reviewers so as to make it easier to review software submitted for publication as a “Software Paper.

Can using Fagan Inspections improve the quality of specification in 2011? A Case Study

In this paper, we explore why Fagan Inspections have become obsolete in the software industry, given the body of evidence which supports their use to improve the quality of software artefacts and the software development process. Since the late 1970’s, much has been written about how Fagan Inspections improve the quality of both processes and outputs of the software development process. The literature indicates that the Fagan Inspection technique can improve quality of software (or other software development artefacts) by a reduction in defects of 60 – 90%. However, recent literature suggests that inspection techniques in general and Fagan Inspections in particular, are no longer used. A study in 1998 found that respondents used inspections either irregularly or not at all. Teams often review artefacts informally, but believe that they are performing an inspection or formal review. The lack of rigour in the review process results in reduced benefits and more defects in the artefacts. To explore this situation, we conducted a case study with a local enterprise and we report on the early findings. These suggest that the introduction of Fagan Inspections may have a number of benefits before they have even been introduced fully, including recognition of flaws in the current development process, development of technical knowledge relating to the software process domain, and improved team relations and a ‘quality’ culture. In addition, the personnel using Fagan Inspection gain experience in the production of ‘quality’ artefacts

Measuring Software Process: A Systematic Mapping Study

Context: Measurement is essential to reach predictable performance and high capability processes. It provides support for better understanding, evaluation, management, and control of the development process and project, as well as the resulting product. It also enables organizations to improve and predict its process’s performance, which places organizations in better positions to make appropriate decisions. Objective: This study aims to understand the measurement of the software development process, to identify studies, create a classification scheme based on the identified studies, and then to map such studies into the scheme to answer the research questions. Method: Systematic mapping is the selected research methodology for this study. Results: A total of 462 studies are included and classified into four topics with respect to their focus and into three groups based on the publishing date. Five abstractions and 64 attributes were identified, 25 methods/models and 17 contexts were distinguished. Conclusion: capability and performance were the most measured process attributes, while effort and performance were the most measured project attributes. Goal Question Metric and Capability Maturity Model Integration were the main methods and models used in the studies, whereas agile/lean development and small/medium-size enterprise were the most frequently identified research contexts.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2- RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

Inspection report: Cumbria Institute of the Arts

Dates of inspection: 22–26 March 200

Myths and Realities about Online Forums in Open Source Software Development: An Empirical Study

The use of free and open source software (OSS) is gaining momentum due to the ever increasing availability and use of the Internet. Organizations are also now adopting open source software, despite some reservations, in particular regarding the provision and availability of support. Some of the biggest concerns about free and open source software are post release software defects and their rectification, management of dynamic requirements and support to the users. A common belief is that there is no appropriate support available for this class of software. A contradictory argument is that due to the active involvement of Internet users in online forums, there is in fact a large resource available that communicates and manages the provision of support. The research model of this empirical investigation examines the evidence available to assess whether this commonly held belief is based on facts given the current developments in OSS or simply a myth, which has developed around OSS development. We analyzed a dataset consisting of 1880 open source software projects covering a broad range of categories in this investigation. The results show that online forums play a significant role in managing software defects, implementation of new requirements and providing support to the users in open source software and have become a major source of assistance in maintenance of the open source projects