software product lines in value based software engineering

Objective: Evaluate the value of a product line in terms of maintainability, extensibility and configurability with refer to the interested stakeholders: customers, maintainers, producers. Rationale: There are values that customers constantly require in a modern software application. Some of these values are supported by product lines. Nevertheless, in the industrial and scientific communities the conjecture that customer values clash with those of producers/maintainers is diffused. Design of Study: we have designed and carried out a case study in an industrial context on an ongoing project to verify the validity of a product line in creating value for stakeholders. So data was collected as the project was being executed along a nine month period. Then, descriptive statistics and hypothesis testing were carried out. Results: experience acquired during the execution of an industrial project has allowed the authors to point out the differences between program families and software product lines. Also, the case study has shown how product lines contribute to stakeholder value proposition elicitation and reconciliation. Conclusions: This study has represented a first step towards analyzing the value that product lines represent for various stakeholders

The role of stakeholder understanding in aligning IT with business objectives

This article reports a study of senior management experience and their opinions on the issues of effective stakeholder communication and the evolving understanding between business and IT. In particular, we explore the impact of modern business context and practices, the issues of trust, nomenclature and the main barriers to the mutual stakeholder understanding. We find that a lack of communication and a lack of understanding between stakeholders impacts negatively on good alignment as manifested by scope creep, the desire to outsource and a lack of trus

Designing Dynamic Decision Support for Electronic Requirements Negotiations

Decision support in software development is particularly important for requirements negotiations to help assessing requirements and their different implementation alternatives. Changes related to requirements are likely, which impede decision making. To keep an overview of the assessment of requirements and to keep this assessment up-to-date throughout a software development project, flexible decision support processes are needed. In this paper, we design interactive dynamic decision support, which can handle changes related to requirements dynamically. The designed support component is compared to two state-of-the-art approaches for decision support in requirements negotiations

Values and value in design

Relatively little is known about how concepts of human values and value interact during the construction design process. Whilst researchers of value management have expounded in this context upon the complexity of the design process, problem-solving and sense-making, little is said about the alignment and reconciliation of multiple-stakeholder values and value judgements. An abductive reasoning and a grounded theory approach was adopted that iterated between literature and empirical observation to obtain new insights. The initial phase created a values and value framework and Value in Design (VALiD) approach through seven unstructured interviews, a design workshop, four Schwartz Values Surveys (with 545 participants) and 55 semi-structured interviews. The values and value parts were then separately implemented, developed and validated through action research on five live education capital projects, involving over 250 participants. Subsequently, a middle-range theory of values and value is proposed through theoretical triangulation. This draws on seven related theories to provide greater explanatory pluralism, uncover hidden phenomena and enable convergence. The research findings are significant in focusing soft value management on underlying stakeholder values and subjective value judgements. A more nuanced and intertwined relationship between stakeholder values, attitudes, behaviours and qualities during the design process is offered that promotes compromise and sense-making

Towards reducing communication gaps in multicultural and global requirements elicitation

This paper focuses on the collaborative aspects of requirements elicitation, in the context of software, systems and service development. The aim is to identify and understand challenges of requirements elicitation in general and in distributed environments. We focus on human, social, and cultural factors that have an impact on communication in the requirements elicitation process. More specifically we aim to i) unfold potential cultural impediments that hamper the requirements elicitation process; ii) highlight cultural factors that should be taken into account in the requirements elicitation process in order to avoid incomplete and inconsistent requirements; and iii) make recommendations for alleviating the problems. In this paper our first step is to report on the findings of a review of the literature regarding culture in RE. The results suggest that the cultural studies in the field of RE are insufficient and thus more empirical studies are required. Secondly, we look at current solutions that are being adopted to assist in improving the cultural aspect of the requirements elicitation process. In the following step we map the identified communication gaps to the SPI Manifesto Values revealing the manifestations of the problems and finally we prescribe a set of recommendations that could be exercised and fulfilled by actors in the requirements elicitation process in order for them to improve cultural considerations in the RE process. These recommendations address the shortcomings that were identified in the literature review and mapped the Values of the SPI Manifesto. The proposals regard technologies, platforms, methods, and frameworks that are readily available. A requirements elicitation process that adopts one or a number of these proposals can help alleviate the challenges invoked by stakeholders’ cultural diversity in the RE process, thus leading to systems development and deployment that much better reflects the requirements/needs of diverse stakeholders and users

Designing for Incentives: Better Information Sharing for Better Software Engineering

Software-reliant systems permeate all aspects of modern society. The resulting interconnectedness and associated com- plexity has resulted in a proliferation of diverse stakeholders with conflicting goals. Thus, contemporary software engi- neering is plagued by incentive conflicts, in settling on design features, allocating resources during the development of products, and allocating computational resources at run- time. In this position paper, we describe some of these problems and outline a research agenda in bridging to the economic theory of mechanism design, which seeks to align incentives in multi-agent systems with private information and conflicting goals. The ultimate goal is to advance a principled methodology for the design of incentive-compatible approaches to manage the dynamic processes of software engineering.Engineering and Applied Science

Observational models of requirements evolution

Requirements Evolution is one of the main issues that affect development activities as well as system features (e.g., system dependability). Although researchers and practitioners recognise the importance of requirements evolution, research results and experience are still patchy. This points out a lack of methodologies that address requirements evolution. This thesis investigates the current understanding of requirements evolution and explores new directions in requirements evolution research. The empirical analysis of industrial case studies highlights software requirements evolution as an important issue. Unfortunately, traditional requirements engineering methodologies provide limited support to capture requirements evolution. Heterogeneous engineering provides a comprehensive account of system requirements. Heterogeneous engineering stresses a holistic viewpoint that allows us to understand the underlying mechanisms of evolution of socio-technical systems. Requirements, as mappings between socio-technical solutions and problems, represent an account of the history of socio-technical issues arising and being solved within industrial settings. The formal extension of a heterogeneous account of requirements provides a framework to model and capture requirements evolution. The application of the proposed framework provides further evidence that it is possible to capture and model evolutionary information about requirements. The discussion of scenarios of use stresses practical necessities for methodologies addressing requirements evolution. Finally, the identification of a broad spectrum of evolutions in socio-technical systems points out strong contingencies between system evolution and dependability. This thesis argues that the better our understanding of socio-techn..

Exploring perceptions of advertising ethics: an informant-derived approach

Whilst considerable research exists on determining consumer responses to pre-determined statements within numerous ad ethics contexts, our understanding of consumer thoughts regarding ad ethics in general remains lacking. The purpose of our study therefore is to provide a first illustration of an emic and informant-based derivation of perceived ad ethics. The authors use multi-dimensional scaling as an approach enabling the emic, or locally derived deconstruction of perceived ad ethics. Given recent calls to develop our understanding of ad ethics in different cultural contexts, and in particular within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, we use Lebanon—the most ethically charged advertising environment within MENA—as an illustrative context for our study. Results confirm the multi-faceted and pluralistic nature of ad ethics as comprising a number of dimensional themes already salient in the existing literature but in addition, we also find evidence for a bipolar relationship between individual themes. The specific pattern of inductively derived relationships is culturally bound. Implications of the findings are discussed, followed by limitations of the study and recommendations for further research

Aligning Perspectives and Methods for Value-Driven Design

Recent years have seen a push to use explicit consideration of “value” in order to drive design. This paper conveys the need to explicitly align perspectives on “value” with the method used to quantify “value.” Various concepts of value are introduced in the context of its evolution within economics in order to propose a holistic definition of value. Operationalization of value is discussed, including possible assumption violations in the aerospace domain. A series of prominent Value-Centric Design Methodologies for valuation are introduced, including Net Present Value, Multi-Attribute Utility Theory, and Cost-Benefit Analysis. These methods are compared in terms of the assumptions they make with regard to operationalizing value. It is shown that no method is fully complete in capturing the definition of value, but selecting the most appropriate one involves matching the particular system application being valued with acceptable assumptions for valuation. Two case studies, a telecommunications mission and a deep-space observation mission, are used to illustrate application of the three prior mentioned valuation methods. The results of the studies show that depending on method used for valuation, very different conclusions and insights will be derived, therefore an explicit consideration of the appropriate definition of value is necessary in order to align a chosen method with desired valuation insights.Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiativ