Examining perceptions of agility in software development practice

This is the post-print version of the final published article that is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 ACM.Organizations undertaking software development are often reminded that successful practice depends on a number of non-technical issues that are managerial, cultural and organizational in nature. These issues cover aspects from appropriate corporate structure, through software process development and standardization to effective collaborative practice. Since the articulation of the 'software crisis' in the late-1960s, significant effort has been put into addressing problems related to the cost, time and quality of software development via the application of systematic processes and management practices for software engineering. Early efforts resulted in prescriptive structured methods, which have evolved and expanded over time to embrace consortia/ company-led initiatives such as the Unified Modeling Language and the Unified Process alongside formal process improvement frameworks such as the International Standards Organization's 9000 series, the Capability Maturity Model and SPICE. More recently, the philosophy behind traditional plan-based initiatives has been questioned by the agile movement, which seeks to emphasize the human and craft aspects of software development over and above the engineering aspects. Agile practice is strongly collaborative in its outlook, favoring individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan (see Sidebar 1). Early experience reports on the use of agile practice suggest some success in dealing with the problems of the software crisis, and suggest that plan-based and agile practice are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, flexibility may arise from this unlikely marriage in an aim to strike a balance between the rigor of traditional plan-based approaches and the need for adaptation of those to suit particular development situations. With this in mind, this article surveys the current practice in software engineering alongside perceptions of senior development managers in relation to agile practice in order to understand the principles of agility that may be practiced implicitly and their effects on plan-based approach

Unsolved Tricky Issues on COTS Selection and Evaluation

Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE) approach is based on the idea to develop software systems by selecting appropriate components and then to assemble them with a well-defined software architecture. (CBSE) offers developers the twin benefits of reduced software life cycles, shorter development times , saving cost and less effort as compare to build own component. However the success of the component based paradigm depends on the quality of the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components purchased and integrated into the existing software systems. It is need of the time to present a quality model that can be used by software programmer to evaluate the quality of software components before integrating them into legacy systems. The evaluation and selection of the COTS components are the most critical process. These evaluation and selection method cannot be resolved by the IT professionals itself. In this study the author tried to compare the twenty three available systematic methods for best evaluation and selection of COTS components

Usability Inspection in Model-Driven Web Development: Empirical Validation in WebML

There is a lack of empirically validated usability evaluation methods that can be applied to models in model-driven Web development. Evaluation of these models allows an early detection of usability problems perceived by the end-user. This motivated us to propose WUEP, a usability inspection method which can be integrated into different model-driven Web development processes. We previously demonstrated how WUEP can effectively be used when following the Object-Oriented Hypermedia method. In order to provide evidences about WUEP’s generalizability, this paper presents the operationalization and empirical validation of WUEP into another well-known method: WebML. The effectiveness, efficiency, perceived ease of use, and satisfaction of WUEP were evaluated in comparison to Heuristic Evaluation (HE) from the viewpoint of novice inspectors. The results show that WUEP was more effective and efficient than HE when detecting usability problems on models. Also, inspectors were satisfied when applying WUEP, and found it easier to use than HE.Fernández Martínez, A.; Abrahao Gonzales, SM.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE.; Matera, M. (2013). Usability Inspection in Model-Driven Web Development: Empirical Validation in WebML. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 8107:740-756. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-41533-3_457407568107Abrahão, S., Iborra, E., Vanderdonckt, J.: Usability Evaluation of User Interfaces Generated with a Model-Driven Architecture Tool. In: Maturing Usability: Quality in Software, Interaction and Value, pp. 3–32. Springer (2007)Atterer, R., Schmidt, A.: Adding Usability to Web Engineering Models and Tools. In: Lowe, D.G., Gaedke, M. (eds.) ICWE 2005. LNCS, vol. 3579, pp. 36–41. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)Basili, V., Rombach, H.: The TAME Project: Towards Improvement-Oriented Software Environments. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 14(6), 758–773 (1988)Briand, L., Labiche, Y., Di Penta, M., Yan-Bondoc, H.: An experimental investigation of formality in UML-based development. IEEE TSE 31(10), 833–849 (2005)Carifio, J., Perla, R.: Ten Common Misunderstandings, Misconceptions, Persistent Myths and Urban Legends about Likert Scales and Likert Response Formats and their Antidotes. Journal of Social Sciences 3(3), 106–116 (2007)Ceri, S., Fraternali, P., Bongio, A.: Web modeling language (WebML): a modeling language for designing Web sites. In: 9th International World Wide Web Conference, pp. 137–157 (2000)Ceri, S., Fraternali, P., Acerbis, R., Bongio, A., Butti, S., Ciapessoni, F., Conserva, C., Elli, R., Greppi, C., Tagliasacchi, M., Toffetti, G.: Architectural issues and solutions in the development of data-intensive Web applications. In: Proceedings of the 1st Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, Asilomar, CA (2003)Conte, T., Massollar, J., Mendes, E., Travassos, G.H.: Usability Evaluation Based on Web Design Perspectives. In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2007), pp. 146–155 (2007)Fernandez, A., Insfran, E., Abrahão, S.: Usability evaluation methods for the Web: a systematic mapping study. Information and Software Technology 53, 789–817 (2011)Fernandez, A., Abrahão, S., Insfran, E.: A Web usability evaluation process for model-driven Web development. In: Mouratidis, H., Rolland, C. (eds.) CAiSE 2011. LNCS, vol. 6741, pp. 108–122. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)Fernandez, A., Abrahão, S., Insfran, E., Matera, M.: Further Analysis on the Validation of a Usability Inspection Method for Model-Driven Web Development. In: 6th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2012), pp. 153–156 (2012)Fernandez, A., Abrahão, S., Insfran, E.: Empirical Validation of a Usability Inspection Method for Model-Driven Web Development. Journal of Systems and Software 86, 161–186 (2013)Fraternali, P., Matera, M., Maurino, A.: WQA: an XSL Framework for Analyzing the Quality of Web Applications. In: Proceedings of IWWOST 2002 - ECOOP 2002 Workshop, Malaga, Spain (2002)Hornbæk, K.: Dogmas in the assessment of usability evaluation methods. Behaviour & Information Technology 29(1), 97–111 (2010)Hwang, W., Salvendy, G.: Number of people required for usability evaluation: the 10±2 rule. Communications of the ACM 53(5), 130–113 (2010)International Organization for Standardization: ISO/IEC 25000, Software Engineering – Software Product Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE) – Guide to SQuaRE (2005)Juristo, N., Moreno, A.M.: Basics of Software Engineering Experimentation. Kluwer Academic Publishers (2001)Juristo, N., Moreno, A., Sanchez-Segura, M.I.: Guidelines for eliciting usability functionalities. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 33(11), 744–758 (2007)Matera, M., Costabile, M.F., Garzotto, F., Paolini, P.: SUE inspection: an effective method for systematic usability evaluation of hypermedia. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A 32(1), 93–103 (2002)Matera, M., Rizzo, F., Carughi, G.: Web Usability: Principles and Evaluation Methods. In: Web Engineering, pp. 143–180. Springer (2006)Maxwell, K.: Applied Statistics for Software Managers. Software Quality Institute Series. Prentice Hall (2002)Molina, F., Toval, A.: Integrating usability requirements that can be evaluated in design time into Model Driven Engineering of Web Information Systems. Advances in Engineering Software 40(12), 1306–1317 (2009)Moreno, N., Vallecillo, A.: Towards interoperable Web engineering methods. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technolog 59(7), 1073–1092 (2008)Neuwirth, C.M., Regli, S.H.: IEEE Internet Computing Special Issue on Usability and the Web 6(2) (2002)Nielsen, J.: Heuristic evaluation. In: Usability Inspection Methods. John Wiley & Sons, NY (1994)Offutt, J.: Quality attributes of Web software applications. IEEE Software: Special Issue on Software Engineering of Internet Software, 25–32 (2002)Panach, I., Condori, N., Valverde, F., Aquino, N., Pastor, O.: Understandability measurement in an early usability evaluation for MDD. In: International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ESEM 2008), pp. 354–356 (2008)Webratio. Success stories, Online article, http://www.webratio.com/portal/content/en/success-storiesWohlin, C., Runeson, P., Host, M., Ohlsson, M.C., Regnell, B., Weslen, A.: Experimentation in Software Engineering - An Introduction. Kluwer (2000

SyProLei - A systematic product development process to exploit lightweight potentials while considering costs and CO2 emissions

In lightweight design, developers are used to face the conflicting objectives of functional fulfillment, economic performance, and sustainability. Against this background, however, a clearly structured approach for the satisfied use of specific lightweight engineering methods within the product development is still missing. Thus, this contribution deals with the fundamental conception and first implementation of a systematic development methodology covering the disciplines of mechanics, electrics/electronics and software just like the focus on an integrated view on product, production and material aspects. To ensure an application-specific manifestation of the product development process for three exemplary use cases from small and medium-sized enterprises but also large corporations in the area of prosthetics, bike construction and plant engineering, the individually developed methods and tools are first generalized in order to make them adaptable to a wide variety of industries. As a result, one lightweight-specific method or tool (e.g., function mass analysis, “PPM solution correlator“ or “2D layout & weight drafting”) is introduced in more detail for all stages of the technically extended RFL(T)P approach derived from model-based systems engineering (MBSE)

Industrialising Software Development in Systems Integration

Compared to other disciplines, software engineering as of today is still dependent on craftsmanship of highly-skilled workers. However, with constantly increasing complexity and efforts, existing software engineering approaches appear more and more inefficient. A paradigm shift towards industrial production methods seems inevitable. Recent advances in academia and practice have lead to the availability of industrial key principles in software development as well. Specialization is represented in software product lines, standardization and systematic reuse are available with component-based development, and automation has become accessible through model-driven engineering. While each of the above is well researched in theory, only few cases of successful implementation in the industry are known. This becomes even more evident in specialized areas of software engineering such as systems integration. Today’s IT systems need to quickly adapt to new business requirements due to mergers and acquisitions and cooperations between enterprises. This certainly leads to integration efforts, i.e. joining different subsystems into a cohesive whole in order to provide new functionality. In such an environment. the application of industrial methods for software development seems even more important. Unfortunately, software development in this field is a highly complex and heterogeneous undertaking, as IT environments differ from customer to customer. In such settings, existing industrialization concepts would never break even due to one-time projects and thus insufficient economies of scale and scope. This present thesis, therefore, describes a novel approach for a more efficient implementation of prior key principles while considering the characteristics of software development for systems integration. After identifying the characteristics of the field and their affects on currently-known industrialization concepts, an organizational model for industrialized systems integration has thus been developed. It takes software product lines and adapts them in a way feasible for a systems integrator active in several business domains. The result is a three-tiered model consolidating recurring activities and reducing the efforts for individual product lines. For the implementation of component-based development, the present thesis assesses current component approaches and applies an integration metamodel to the most suitable one. This ensures a common understanding of systems integration across different product lines and thus alleviates component reuse, even across product line boundaries. The approach is furthermore aligned with the organizational model to depict in which way component-based development may be applied in industrialized systems integration. Automating software development in systems integration with model-driven engineering was found to be insufficient in its current state. The reason herefore lies in insufficient tool chains and a lack of modelling standards. As an alternative, an XML-based configuration of products within a software product line has been developed. It models a product line and its products with the help of a domain-specific language and utilizes stylesheet transformations to generate compliable artefacts. The approach has been tested for its feasibility within an exemplarily implementation following a real-world scenario. As not all aspects of industrialized systems integration could be simulated in a laboratory environment, the concept was furthermore validated during several expert interviews with industry representatives. Here, it was also possible to assess cultural and economic aspects. The thesis concludes with a detailed summary of the contributions to the field and suggests further areas of research in the context of industrialized systems integration

Quality of Web Mashups: A Systematic Mapping Study

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04244-2_8Web mashups are a new generation of applications based on the composition of ready-to-use, heterogeneous components. They are gaining momentum thanks to their lightweight composition approach, which represents a new opportunity for companies to leverage on past investments in SOA, Web services, and public APIs. Although several studies are emerging in order to address mashup development, no systematic mapping studies have been reported on how quality issues are being addressed. This paper reports a systematic mapping study on which and how the quality of Web mashups has been addressed and how the product quality-aware approaches have been defined and validated. The aim of this study is to provide a background in which to appropriately develop future research activities. A total of 38 research papers have been included from an initial set of 187 papers. Our results provided some findings regarding how the most relevant product quality characteristics have been addressed in different artifacts and stages of the development process. They have also been useful to detect some research gaps, such as the need of more controlled experiments and more quality-aware mashup development proposals for other characteristics which being important for the Web domain have been neglected such as Usability and ReliabilityThis work is funded by the MULTIPLE project (TIN2009-13838), the Senescyt program (scholarships 2011), and the Erasmus Mundus Programme of the European Commission under the Transatlantic Partnership for Excellence in Engineering - TEE Project.Cedillo Orellana, IP.; Fernández Martínez, A.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE.; Abrahao Gonzales, SM. (2013). Quality of Web Mashups: A Systematic Mapping Study. En Current Trends in Web Engineering. Springer. 66-78. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04244-2_8S6678Alkhalifa, E.: The Future of Enterprise Mashups. Business Insights. E-Strategies for Resource Management Systems (2009)Beemer, B., Gregg, D.: Mashups: A Literature Review and Classification Framework. Future Internet 1, 59–87 (2009)Cappiello, C., Daniel, F., Matera, M.: A Quality Model for Mashup Components. In: Gaedke, M., Grossniklaus, M., Díaz, O. (eds.) ICWE 2009. LNCS, vol. 5648, pp. 236–250. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)Cappiello, C., Daniel, F., Matera, M., Pautasso, C.: Information Quality in Mashups. IEEE Internet Computing 14(4), 32–40 (2010)Cappiello, C., Matera, M., Picozzi, M., Daniel, F., Fernandez, A.: Quality-Aware Mashup Composition: Issues, Techniques and Tools. In: 8th International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology (QUATIC 2012), pp. 10–19 (2012)Fenton, N.E., Pfleeger, S.L.: Software Metrics: A Rigorous and Practical Approach, 2nd edn. International Thompson 1996, pp. I–XII, 1–638 (1996) ISBN 978-1-85032-275-7Fernandez, A., Insfran, E., Abrahão, S.: Usability evaluation methods for the web: A systematic mapping study. Information and Software Technology 53(8), 789–817 (2011)Garousi, V., Mesbah, A., Betin-Can, A., Mirshokraie, S.: A systematic mapping study of web application testing. Information and Software Technology 55(8), 1374–1396 (2013)Grammel, L., Storey, M.-A.: A survey of mashup development environments. In: Chignell, M., Cordy, J., Ng, J., Yesha, Y. (eds.) The Smart Internet. LNCS, vol. 6400, pp. 137–151. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Hoyer, V., Fischer, M.: Market Overview of Enterprise Mashup Tools. In: Bouguettaya, A., Krueger, I., Margaria, T. (eds.) ICSOC 2008. LNCS, vol. 5364, pp. 708–721. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)ISO/IEC: ISO/IEC 25010 Systems and software engineering. Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE). System and software quality models (2011)Kitchenham, B., Charters, S.: Guidelines for performing Systematic Literature Reviews in Software Engineering. Version 2.3, ESBE Technical Report, Keele University, UK (2007)Mendes, E.: A systematic review on the Web engineering research. In: International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE 2005), pp. 498–507 (2005)OrangeLabs: State of the Art in Mashup tools, SocEDA project, pp. 1–59 (2011)Petersen, K., Feldt, R., Mujtaba, S., Mattsson, M.: Systematic mapping studies in software engineering. In: 12th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE), pp. 68–77 (2008)Raza, M., Hussain, F.K., Chang, E.: A methodology for quality-based mashup of data sources. In: 10th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services (iiWAS 2008), pp. 528–533 (2008)Saeed, A.: A Quality-based Framework for Leveraging the Process of Mashup Component Selection (2009), https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/21953Sharma, A., Hellmann, T.D., Maurer, F.: Testing of Web Services - A Systematic Mapping. In: 8th World Congress on Services (SERVICES 2012), pp. 346–352 (2012

A framework to assist in the assessment and tailoring of agile software development methods

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.The innovative well-known agile methods offer many powerful agile software development practices and have received considerable attention from both practitioners as well as the research community. While many organizations are interested in adopting agile methods suitable to their local circumstances, there is little guidance available on how to do so. Organizations, especially on the large-scale, currently lack systematic support for adopting agile methods in their complex software development settings. To address this important issue, this research proposes an agile software solution framework (ASSF) to both assistance in the assessment of the capability of the organization or team and tailoring of agile method in order to support the systematic adoption and improvement of agility in both agile and, incidentally, non-agile software development environments - especially formal and large environments. The ASSF has been incrementally developed by the iterative application of build, review and adjust research activities, which is called here a “qualitative empirical” research method. The ASSF is intended for use by agile coaches and consultants as a comprehensive information guide. The ASSF has two main components: framework characteristics and lifecycle management. The framework characteristics component incorporates 10 main elements or attributes to describe the agile-hybrid software development methodologies: (1) people (2) process, (3) product, (4) tools, (5) agility, (6) abstraction, (7) business value, (8) policy (9) rules and (10) legal. The framework lifecycle management component specifies the stages, practices and resources in order to support the systematic adoption and improvement of agility. The framework stages refer to an agility adoption and improvement lifecycle, its practices refer to an agility adoption and improvement process, and its resources refer to models, templates and toolkit that can be used during the agility adoption and improvement process such as the contextual analysis model, a key agility indicators index, an agility adoption and improvement model, an agility adoption and improvement scorecard, and an agile toolkit. The components of this framework have been empirically analysed and reviewed by experts from industry as well as the research community, and updated based on the feedback received. The results of this research indicated that the proposed ASSF framework may be considered reasonable for a gradual successful transition or adoption of agile practices in formal and large software development environments

Recommender systems in model-driven engineering: A systematic mapping review

Recommender systems are information filtering systems used in many online applications like music and video broadcasting and e-commerce platforms. They are also increasingly being applied to facilitate software engineering activities. Following this trend, we are witnessing a growing research interest on recommendation approaches that assist with modelling tasks and model-based development processes. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping review (based on the analysis of 66 papers) that classifies the existing research work on recommender systems for model-driven engineering (MDE). This study aims to serve as a guide for tool builders and researchers in understanding the MDE tasks that might be subject to recommendations, the applicable recommendation techniques and evaluation methods, and the open challenges and opportunities in this field of researchThis work has been funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 813884 (Lowcomote [134]), by the Spanish Ministry of Science (projects MASSIVE, RTI2018-095255-B-I00, and FIT, PID2019-108965GB-I00) and by the R&D programme of Madrid (Project FORTE, P2018/TCS-431

Lean requirements traceability automation enabled by model-driven engineering

Background: The benefits of requirements traceability, such as improvements in software product and process quality, early testing, and software maintenance, are widely described in the literature. Requirements traceability is a critical, widely accepted practice. However, very often it is not applied for fear of the additional costs associated with manual efforts or the use of additional tools. Methods: This article presents a “low-cost” mechanism for automating requirements traceability based on the model-driven paradigm and formalized by a metamodel for the creation and monitoring of traces and an integration process for traceability management. This approach can also be useful for information fusion in industry insofar that it facilitates data traceability. Results: This article extends an existing model-driven development methodology to incorporate traceability as part of its development tool. The tool has been used successfully by several companies in real software development projects, helping developers to manage ongoing changes in functional requirements. One of those projects is cited as an example in the paper. The authors’ current work leads them to conclude that a model-driven engineering approach, traditionally used only for the automatic generation of code in a software development process, can also be used to successfully automate and integrate traceability management without additional costs. The systematic evaluation of traceability management in industrial projects constitutes a promising area for future work.Junta de Andalucía AT17-5904-USEJunta de Andalucía US-1251532Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades PID2019-105455GB-C3