1 research outputs found
Onboarding in Software Product Lines: ConceptMaps as Welcome Guides
With a volatile labour and technological market, onboarding is becoming
increasingly important. The process of incorporating a new developer, a.k.a.
the newcomer, into a software development team is reckoned to be lengthy,
frustrating and expensive. Newcomers face personal, interpersonal, process and
technical barriers during their incorporation, which, in turn, affects the
overall productivity of the whole team. This problem exacerbates for Software
Product Lines (SPLs), where their size and variability combine to make
onboarding even more challenging, even more so for developers that are
transferred from the Application Engineering team into the Domain Engineering
team, who will be our target newcomers. This work presents concept maps on the
role of sensemaking scaffolds to help to introduce these newcomers into the SPL
domain. Concept maps, used as knowledge visualisation tools, have been proven
to be helpful for meaningful learning. Our main insight is to capture concepts
of the SPL domain and their interrelationships in a concept map, and then,
present them incrementally, helping newcomers grasp the SPL and aiding them in
exploring it in a guided manner while avoiding information overload. This
work's contributions are four-fold. First, concept maps are proposed as a
representation to introduce newcomers into the SPL domain. Second, concept maps
are presented as the means for a guided exploration of the SPL core assets.
Third, a feature-driven concept map construction process is introduced. Last,
the usefulness of concept maps as guides for SPL onboarding is tested through a
formative evaluation.
Link to the online demo: url="https://rebrand.ly/wacline-cmap