5,443 research outputs found
Tailoring the Scrum Development Process to Address Agile Product Line Engineering
Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is becoming widely used due to the improvement it means when developing software products of the same family. However, SPLE demands long-term investment on a product-line platform that might not be profitable due to rapid changing business settings. Since Agile Software Development (ASD) approaches are being successfully applied in volatile markets, several companies have suggested the idea of integrating SPLE and ASD when a family product has to be developed. Agile Product Line Engineering (APLE) advocates the integration of SPLE and ASD to address their lacks when they are individually applied to software development. A previous literature re-view of experiences and practices on APLE revealed important challenges about how to fully put APLE into practice. Our contribution address several of these challenges by tailoring the agile method Scrum by means of three concepts that we have defined: plastic partial components, working PL-architectures, and reactive reuse
An Empirical Study on Decision making for Quality Requirements
[Context] Quality requirements are important for product success yet often
handled poorly. The problems with scope decision lead to delayed handling and
an unbalanced scope. [Objective] This study characterizes the scope decision
process to understand influencing factors and properties affecting the scope
decision of quality requirements. [Method] We studied one company's scope
decision process over a period of five years. We analyzed the decisions
artifacts and interviewed experienced engineers involved in the scope decision
process. [Results] Features addressing quality aspects explicitly are a minor
part (4.41%) of all features handled. The phase of the product line seems to
influence the prevalence and acceptance rate of quality features. Lastly,
relying on external stakeholders and upfront analysis seems to lead to long
lead-times and an insufficient quality requirements scope. [Conclusions] There
is a need to make quality mode explicit in the scope decision process. We
propose a scope decision process at a strategic level and a tactical level. The
former to address long-term planning and the latter to cater for a speedy
process. Furthermore, we believe it is key to balance the stakeholder input
with feedback from usage and market in a more direct way than through a long
plan-driven process
A Framework for Seamless Variant Management and Incremental Migration to a Software Product-Line
Context: Software systems often need to exist in many variants in order to satisfy varying customer requirements and operate under varying software and hardware environments. These variant-rich systems are most commonly realized using cloning, a convenient approach to create new variants by reusing existing ones. Cloning is readily available, however, the non-systematic reuse leads to difficult maintenance. An alternative strategy is adopting platform-oriented development approaches, such as Software Product-Line Engineering (SPLE). SPLE offers systematic reuse, and provides centralized control, and thus, easier maintenance. However, adopting SPLE is a risky and expensive endeavor, often relying on significant developer intervention. Researchers have attempted to devise strategies to synchronize variants (change propagation) and migrate from clone&own to an SPL, however, they are limited in accuracy and applicability. Additionally, the process models for SPLE in literature, as we will discuss, are obsolete, and only partially reflect how adoption is approached in industry. Despite many agile practices prescribing feature-oriented software development, features are still rarely documented and incorporated during actual development, making SPL-migration risky and error-prone.Objective: The overarching goal of this PhD is to bridge the gap between clone&own and software product-line engineering in a risk-free, smooth, and accurate manner. Consequently, in the first part of the PhD, we focus on the conceptualization, formalization, and implementation of a framework for migrating from a lean architecture to a platform-based one.Method: Our objectives are met by means of (i) understanding the literature relevant to variant-management and product-line migration and determining the research gaps (ii) surveying the dominant process models for SPLE and comparing them against the contemporary industrial practices, (iii) devising a framework for incremental SPL adoption, and (iv) investigating the benefit of using features beyond PL migration; facilitating model comprehension.Results: Four main results emerge from this thesis. First, we present a qualitative analysis of the state-of-the-art frameworks for change propagation and product-line migration. Second, we compare the contemporary industrial practices with the ones prescribed in the process models for SPL adoption, and provide an updated process model that unifies the two to accurately reflect the real practices and guide future practitioners. Third, we devise a framework for incremental migration of variants into a fully integrated platform by exploiting explicitly recorded metadata pertaining to clone and feature-to-asset traceability. Last, we investigate the impact of using different variability mechanisms on the comprehensibility of various model-related tasks.Future work: As ongoing and future work, we aim to integrate our framework with existing IDEs and conduct a developer study to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of using our framework. We also aim to incorporate safe-evolution in our operators
Variability Management in an unaware software product line company: An experience report
Software product line adoption is a challenging task in software
development organisations. There are some reports in
the literature of how software product line engineering has
been adopted in several companies using di erent variabil-ity
management techniques and patterns. However, to the best
of our knowledge, there are no empirical reports on how
variability management is handled in companies that do not
know about software product line methods and tools. In this
paper we present an experience report observing variability
management practices in a software development company
that was unaware of software product line approaches. We
brie
y report how variability management is performed in
di erent areas ranging from business architecture to software
assets management. From the observation we report some
open research opportunities for the future and foster further
similar and more structured empirical studies on unaware
software product line companies.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2012-32273Junta de Andalucía TIC-5906Junta de Andalucía P12-TIC-186
Measuring and Analyzing agility of an Enterprise through DMAIC Six Sigma
Assessment of organizational Agility creates a problem due to inexact boundaries by which Agility is defined, and the variation depending on type of enterprise. This paper proposes how Six Sigma DMAIC approach may be utilized to address this gap. The agility assessment framework curve developed for information development systems used in this research has synergies with DMAIC phases of Six Sigma. This logic forms the basis of forming metrics to measure and analyze agility of an enterprise through DMAIC Six Sigma
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