38,883 research outputs found
Technical Debt Prioritization: State of the Art. A Systematic Literature Review
Background. Software companies need to manage and refactor Technical Debt
issues. Therefore, it is necessary to understand if and when refactoring
Technical Debt should be prioritized with respect to developing features or
fixing bugs. Objective. The goal of this study is to investigate the existing
body of knowledge in software engineering to understand what Technical Debt
prioritization approaches have been proposed in research and industry. Method.
We conducted a Systematic Literature Review among 384 unique papers published
until 2018, following a consolidated methodology applied in Software
Engineering. We included 38 primary studies. Results. Different approaches have
been proposed for Technical Debt prioritization, all having different goals and
optimizing on different criteria. The proposed measures capture only a small
part of the plethora of factors used to prioritize Technical Debt qualitatively
in practice. We report an impact map of such factors. However, there is a lack
of empirical and validated set of tools. Conclusion. We observed that technical
Debt prioritization research is preliminary and there is no consensus on what
are the important factors and how to measure them. Consequently, we cannot
consider current research conclusive and in this paper, we outline different
directions for necessary future investigations
Disinvestment in healthcare: An overview of HTA agencies and organizations activities at European level
Background: In an era of a growing economic pressure for all health systems, the interest for "disinvestment" in healthcare increased. In this context, evidence based approaches such as Health Technology Assessment (HTA) are needed both to invest and to disinvest in health technologies. In order to investigate the extent of application of HTA in this field, methodological projects/frameworks, case studies, dissemination initiatives on disinvestment released by HTA agencies and organizations located in Europe were searched. Methods: In July 2015, the websites of HTA agencies and organizations belonging to the European network for HTA (EUnetHTA) and the International Network of Agencies for HTA (INAHTA) were accessed and searched through the use of the term "disinvestment". Retrieved deliverables were considered eligible if they reported methodological projects/frameworks, case studies and dissemination initiatives focused on disinvestment in healthcare. Results: 62 HTA agencies/organizations were accessed and eight methodological projects/frameworks, one case study and one dissemination initiative were found starting from 2007. With respect to methodological projects/frameworks, two were delivered in Austria, one in Italy, two in Spain and three in U.K. As for the case study and the dissemination initiative, both came from U.K. The majority of deliverables were aimed at making an overview of existing disinvestment approaches and at identifying challenges in their introduction. Conclusions: Today, in a healthcare context characterized by resource scarcity and increasing service demand, "disinvestment" from low-value services and reinvestment in high-value ones is a key strategy that may be supported by HTA. The lack of evaluation of technologies in use, in particular at the end of their lifecycle, may be due to the scant availability of frameworks and guidelines for identification and assessment of obsolete technologies that was shown by our work. Although several projects were carried out in different countries, most remain constrained to the field of research. Disinvestment is a relatively new concept in HTA that could pose challenges also from a methodological point of view. To tackle these challenges, it is necessary to construct experiences at international level with the aim to develop new methodological approaches to produce and grow evidence on disinvestment policies and practices
Requirements Prioritization Based on Benefit and Cost Prediction: An Agenda for Future Research
In early phases of the software cycle, requirements
prioritization necessarily relies on the specified
requirements and on predictions of benefit and cost of
individual requirements. This paper presents results of
a systematic review of literature, which investigates
how existing methods approach the problem of
requirements prioritization based on benefit and cost.
From this review, it derives a set of under-researched
issues which warrant future efforts and sketches an
agenda for future research in this area
How Do Real Options Concepts Fit in Agile Requirements Engineering?
Agile requirements engineering is driven by creating business value for the client and heavily involves the client in decision-making under uncertainty. Real option thinking seems to be suitable in supporting the clientâs decision making process at inter-iteration time. This paper investigates the fit between real option thinking and agile requirements engineering. We first look into previously published experiences in the agile software engineering literature to identify (i) âexperience clustersâ suggesting the ways in which real option concepts fit into the agile requirements process and (ii) âexperience gapsâ and under-researched agile requirements decision-making topics which require further empirical studies. Furthermore, we conducted a cross-case study in eight agile development organizations and interviewed 11 practitioners about their decision-making process. The results suggest that options are almost always identified, reasoned about and acted upon. They are not expressed in quantitative terms, however, they are instead explicitly or implicitly taken\ud
into account during the decision-making process at interiteration time
Local Government planning: from data to action
Decentralisation is built on the assu
mption that decentralized governme
nts are more knowledgeable about
and responsive to the needs of the poor. This article ex
amines the role of local governments in Kenya and the
ways in which they make their decisions about the allocation of resources to deliver water and sanitation
services. Two major challenges are identified: i) lack of
data that accurately reveal
which areas are most in
need; and ii) inadequate instruments for planning, monitoring and evaluation. In tackling previous
shortcomings, this study i) adopts a new specific appr
oach for data collection at community level, and ii)
exploits these data through simple composite indicator
s as policy tools that assist local government with
decision-making. It concludes that accurate and compre
hensive data are the basis of effective targeting and
prioritization, which are fundamental to sector planning.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
- âŠ