Understanding requirements engineering process: a challenge for practice and education

Reviews of the state of the professional practice in Requirements Engineering (RE) stress that the RE process is both complex and hard to describe, and suggest there is a significant difference between competent and "approved" practice. "Approved" practice is reflected by (in all likelihood, in fact, has its genesis in) RE education, so that the knowledge and skills taught to students do not match the knowledge and skills required and applied by competent practitioners. A new understanding of the RE process has emerged from our recent study. RE is revealed as inherently creative, involving cycles of building and major reconstruction of the models developed, significantly different from the systematic and smoothly incremental process generally described in the literature. The process is better characterised as highly creative, opportunistic and insight driven. This mismatch between approved and actual practice provides a challenge to RE education - RE requires insight and creativity as well as technical knowledge. Traditional learning models applied to RE focus, however, on notation and prescribed processes acquired through repetition. We argue that traditional learning models fail to support the learning required for RE and propose both a new model based on cognitive flexibility and a framework for RE education to support this model

Learning requirements engineering within an engineering ethos

An interest in educating software developers within an engineering ethos may not align well with the characteristics of the discipline, nor address the underlying concerns of software practitioners. Education for software development needs to focus on creativity, adaptability and the ability to transfer knowledge. A change in the way learning is undertaken in a core Software Engineering unit within a university's engineering program demonstrates one attempt to provide students with a solid foundation in subject matter while at the same time exposing them to these real-world characteristics. It provides students with a process to deal with problems within a metacognitive-rich framework that makes complexity apparent and lets students deal with it adaptively. The results indicate that, while the approach is appropriate, student-learning characteristics need to be investigated further, so that the two aspects of learning may be aligned more closely

Towards a Theory of Software Development Expertise

Software development includes diverse tasks such as implementing new features, analyzing requirements, and fixing bugs. Being an expert in those tasks requires a certain set of skills, knowledge, and experience. Several studies investigated individual aspects of software development expertise, but what is missing is a comprehensive theory. We present a first conceptual theory of software development expertise that is grounded in data from a mixed-methods survey with 335 software developers and in literature on expertise and expert performance. Our theory currently focuses on programming, but already provides valuable insights for researchers, developers, and employers. The theory describes important properties of software development expertise and which factors foster or hinder its formation, including how developers' performance may decline over time. Moreover, our quantitative results show that developers' expertise self-assessments are context-dependent and that experience is not necessarily related to expertise.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2018), ACM, 201

Cost Model for Global Software Development

Recent business trends have been characterized by global competition. Furthermore, the severe shortages and increasing costs of Information Technology professionals are forcing software development companies to explore global system development strategies. A conceptual framework representing factors affecting global software development decision and selection of development center locations is developed. Drawing from the literature in economics, global manufacturing and global R & D, this paper presents an economic cost model to support global software development decision and help select appropriate locations. The model considers economic, political, managerial, and technical environment in home and host country

Exploring the Relationships Between Knowledge Management and Information Systems: No Decomissioning

In recent years the discipline of Knowledge Management (KM) has emerged as a supposedly useful approach to leveraging organisational assets in order to obtain a variety of business benefits. However, this is easier said than done. For KM to be effective organisations must reflect on three key issues - infrastructure, culture and technology. While some may chose to emphasise the socio-cultural issues over the technology issues, more recent research (Gallagher & Hazlett, 2000) has pursued a path of normalization in relation to these three key aspects. Regardless of where KM has originated from it is clear that Information Systems (IS) and associated Information Technology (IT) can and will play an important role, if only as an enabler. This paper concentrates on the difficulties associated with implementing and evaluating KM in practice. It explicitly advocates the use of IS/IT and associated models as a response to the problems faced. The results of an exploratory interview study indicate that (a) many firms are relying heavily on IS/IT to support their KM strategies and (b) IS techniques offer a useful response to some of the problems encountered

The Impact of Cognitive and Socio-Demographics factors at meetings during Software Development Process.

Most of the important decisions are taken at team meetings during software development process (SDP) and the way of thinking of project leader plays an important role in achieving quality objectives at these team meetings. Considering this important issue, this paper investigates the impact of cognitive and socio-demographic factors on manager's simple thinking style towards improving the quality of team meetings in SDP.We have performed experimentations among Information and Communication Technologies' (ICT) senior professionals and managers from government and private sector organizations for this purpose. The hypotheses have been developed under different empirical categories and then statistical analysis techniques have been used to draw inferences. The results indicate that "type of team meetings", "project leader's cognitive characteristics" and "adoption of a cognitive model at team meetings" have statistically significant impact on manager's simple thinking in terms of improving productivity and contribution of team meetings

Understanding the Role of Knowledge Co-Production between Users and Developers in ISD Project: An Intellectual Capital Perspective

Information system development (ISD) has long been treated as that process that system developers craft an artifact to support business operation based on their special expertise. However, a significant portion of projects still have failed because the developed outcome cannot fit users’ needs. An emerging internal service concept indicates that, by treating ISD as one type of service, the requirement definition can be viewed as a co-production process in which users and developers integrate their own knowledge. By incorporating this concept into research design and taking intellectual capital perspective into account, this study proposed a model to examine the antecedents and consequences of knowledge co-production between users and developers. Data collected from 267 developers confirmed our hypotheses that knowledge co-production can benefit ISD outcomes, and common knowledge, relational capital and participative decision-making between these two parties increase the effectiveness of knowledge co-production effectively. Lastly, the implications toward academic and practitioner are also provided