Recommended approach to sofware development

A set of guideline for an organized, disciplined approach to software development, based on data collected and studied for 46 flight dynamics software development projects. Methods and practices for each phase of a software development life cycle that starts with requirements analysis and ends with acceptance testing are described; maintenance and operation is not addressed. For each defined life cycle phase, guidelines for the development process and its management, and the products produced and their reviews are presented

Software Design Criteria for Maintainability

One of the current issues in the software engineering community is related to problems of software maintenance. It is a common belief that these problems are caused by bad software design and poor maintenance practices. The first of these is the concern of this paper. We argue that the existing software design methodologies are not properly developed based on criteria for easy software maintenance at later stages. Therefore, with a set of software design criteria for maintainability, software is believed to be more maintainable. In this paper we shall identify those criteria followed by assessment of several software design methodologies

The Working Lifeworld of Situated Subjects and the World System of Software Maintenance: Destabilizing a Distinction

This is a theory of the ways post-sale software maintenance processes relate with local contexts ofsoftware usage. The larger topic addressed by the theory is the relationship between situated subjectslife world and social theories and the possibility to definite situations in contemporary analysesof global phenomena. The narrower topic concerns the covariance of local usage practices withsoftware maintenance processes within and across public sector organizations. The theory buildsupon fieldwork conducted since 2006 in a number of Italian public sector organizations. Three differentapproaches to software maintenance with their relation with local software usage practiceshave been devised: in house providing, contract work and internal maintenance. In this position paperI will present some evidence only from the case of the in-house providing model

Agile Software Development Documentation and Maintainability

This research seeks to identify or create best documentation and maintenance practices for agile software development. Many organizations are attempting to use agile but problems persist with documentations and maintenance. This is a critical research issue since organizations spend, on average, 70 - 80% of the money in the software development life-cycle on maintenance (Jones 2000, Jones and Bonsignour 2011). This research is multi-method using qualitative interviews combined with qualitative surveys (Lee, 1991) to try and determine the documentation and maintainability of agile projects. The theoretical basis of this research is traditional software engineering, knowledge and expertise, and symbolism and semantics and it is being performed by a consortium of universities in the United State, Germany, and Brazil

Reuse and maintenance practices among divergent forks in three software ecosystems

With the rise of social coding platforms that rely on distributed version control systems, software reuse is also on the rise. Many software developers leverage this reuse by creating variants through forking, to account for different customer needs, markets, or environments. Forked variants then form a so-called software family; they share a common code base and are maintained in parallel by same or different developers. As such, software families can easily arise within software ecosystems, which are large collections of interdependent software components maintained by communities of collaborating contributors. However, little is known about the existence and characteristics of such families within ecosystems, especially about their maintenance practices. Improving our empirical understanding of such families will help build better tools for maintaining and evolving such families. We empirically explore maintenance practices in such fork-based software families within ecosystems of open-source software. Our focus is on three of the largest software ecosystems existence today: Android,.NET, and JavaScript. We identify and analyze software families that are maintained together and that exist both on the official distribution platform (Google play, nuget, and npm) as well as on GitHub , allowing us to analyze reuse practices in depth. We mine and identify 38 software families, 526 software families, and 8,837 software families from the ecosystems of Android,.NET, and JavaScript, to study their characteristics and code-propagation practices. We provide scripts for analyzing code integration within our families. Interestingly, our results show that there is little code integration across the studied software families from the three ecosystems. Our studied families also show that techniques of direct integration using git outside of GitHub is more commonly used than GitHub pull requests. Overall, we hope to raise awareness about the existence of software families within larger ecosystems of software, calling for further research and better tools support to effectively maintain and evolve them

Towards guidelines for building a business case and gathering evidence of software reference architectures in industry

Background: Software reference architectures are becoming widely adopted by organizations that need to support the design and maintenance of software applications of a shared domain. For organizations that plan to adopt this architecture-centric approach, it becomes fundamental to know the return on investment and to understand how software reference architectures are designed, maintained, and used. Unfortunately, there is little evidence-based support to help organizations with these challenges. Methods: We have conducted action research in an industry-academia collaboration between the GESSI research group and everis, a multinational IT consulting firm based in Spain. Results: The results from such collaboration are being packaged in order to create guidelines that could be used in similar contexts as the one of everis. The main result of this paper is the construction of empirically-grounded guidelines that support organizations to decide on the adoption of software reference architectures and to gather evidence to improve RA-related practices. Conclusions: The created guidelines could be used by other organizations outside of our industry-academia collaboration. With this goal in mind, we describe the guidelines in detail for their use.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A Cultural and Technical Study of Wastewater Treatment Plant Maintenance in a Small Community in Peru

Management of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) has been found to be especially challenging in small, rural communities of the developing world. This study examined maintenance of two small WWTPs in Leymebamba and Palmira, Peru through interviews with local authorities, observation of maintenance practices, wastewater measurements, and prediction of effects from maintenance with modeling using a wastewater process simulation software, BioWin. Challenges and motivations related to maintenance were investigated with semi-structured interviews, and maintenance practices were recorded during observations. It was found that outside supervision was a key motivating factor, and the existence of an operator who is supported by the administration was important as well. The maintenance practices in Leymebamba and Palmira were graded with a quantitative scale and were given 35% and 22% of the possible points, respectively. Measurements of influent and effluent biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and total suspended solids (TSS) were taken at the plants, and the removals were estimated using the measurements. A BioWin model was developed based on the Leymebamba WWTP, and its performance was compared to that of the actual plant. The BioWin model performed over one standard deviation below the mean with respect to the plant’s average BOD removal, and it performed within one standard deviation of the mean with respect to the plant’s average TSS removal. The effects of maintenance were simulated in BioWin, and it was found that the performance was not significantly impacted by the alternate maintenance scenarios. However, maintenance is still recommended to prevent undesirable environmental problems and keep the WWTPs in working condition. The BioWin software was found to have limitations when modeling Imhoff tank systems with low maintenance, and future work is needed to further explore maintenance scenarios described in this study

Summary of the First Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE1)

Challenges related to development, deployment, and maintenance of reusable software for science are becoming a growing concern. Many scientists’ research increasingly depends on the quality and availability of software upon which their works are built. To highlight some of these issues and share experiences, the First Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE1) was held in November 2013 in conjunction with the SC13 Conference. The workshop featured keynote presentations and a large number (54) of solicited extended abstracts that were grouped into three themes and presented via panels. A set of collaborative notes of the presentations and discussion was taken during the workshop. Unique perspectives were captured about issues such as comprehensive documentation, development and deployment practices, software licenses and career paths for developers. Attribution systems that account for evidence of software contribution and impact were also discussed. These include mechanisms such as Digital Object Identifiers, publication of “software papers”, and the use of online systems, for example source code repositories like GitHub. This paper summarizes the issues and shared experiences that were discussed, including cross-cutting issues and use cases. It joins a nascent literature seeking to understand what drives software work in science, and how it is impacted by the reward systems of science. These incentives can determine the extent to which developers are motivated to build software for the long-term, for the use of others, and whether to work collaboratively or separately. It also explores community building, leadership, and dynamics in relation to successful scientific software