Digital Government Systems: Tackling The Legacy Problem Through A Game-Based Approach To Business Requirements Analysis

Government agency reliance on legacy systems is problematic: they are costly to maintain, difficult to integrate with and they hinder innovation. However, the replacement of legacy systems is not a straightforward endeavor, and it often results in technology substitution that is not accompanied by business process change. The focus of this dissertation is on the phenomenon of legacy system replication wherein the requirements for applications replacing outdated technologies mimic legacy features and reflect status quo operational processes that have been historically shaped by the legacy system itself. This problem is referred to throughout the dissertation as the “legacy problem.” The dissertation investigates its roots and proposes an approach to overcome it. Specifically, a mixed method research approach is taken, including a survey of public sector practitioners to explore the extent of the legacy problem, and a series of semi-structured interviews with government information technology and management professionals to delve into the dynamics of legacy system replacement projects. Findings indicate that the legacy problem often stems from a lack of critical analysis of business requirements and the desire to minimize the risks associated with organizational change, which often result in missed opportunities for digital government innovation. As a consequence, the dissertation proposes a candidate approach to deal with the legacy problem in the development of a requirements game (RE-PROVO) which supports requirements discussions structured around the themes of legacy (or heritage) preservation and innovation. The game is evaluated by local government practitioners through several iterations and their feedback is analysed to gauge the potential utility of the approach. The results indicate that with a streamlined user interface and accentuated game elements RE-PROVO can be a valuable and effective tool for requirements analysis in legacy system replacement projects

Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming: 18th International Conference, XP 2017, Cologne, Germany, May 22-26, 2017, Proceedings

agile software development; lean development; scrum; project management; software developmen

ICSEA 2022: the seventeenth international conference on software engineering advances

The Seventeenth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances (ICSEA 2022), held between October 16th and October 20th, 2022, continued a series of events covering a broad spectrum of software-related topics. The conference covered fundamentals on designing, implementing, testing, validating and maintaining various kinds of software. Several tracks were proposed to treat the topics from theory to practice, in terms of methodologies, design, implementation, testing, use cases, tools, and lessons learned. The conference topics covered classical and advanced methodologies, open source, agile software, as well as software deployment and software economics and education. Other advanced aspects are related to on-time practical aspects, such as run-time vulnerability checking, rejuvenation process, updates partial or temporary feature deprecation, software deployment and configuration, and on-line software updates. These aspects trigger implications related to patenting, licensing, engineering education, new ways for software adoption and improvement, and ultimately, to software knowledge management. There are many advanced applications requiring robust, safe, and secure software: disaster recovery applications, vehicular systems, biomedical-related software, biometrics related software, mission critical software, E-health related software, crisis-situation software. These applications require appropriate software engineering techniques, metrics and formalisms, such as, software reuse, appropriate software quality metrics, composition and integration, consistency checking, model checking, provers and reasoning. The nature of research in software varies slightly with the specific discipline researchers work in, yet there is much common ground and room for a sharing of best practice, frameworks, tools, languages and methodologies. Despite the number of experts we have available, little work is done at the meta level, that is examining how we go about our research, and how this process can be improved. There are questions related to the choice of programming language, IDEs and documentation styles and standard. Reuse can be of great benefit to research projects yet reuse of prior research projects introduces special problems that need to be mitigated. The research environment is a mix of creativity and systematic approach which leads to a creative tension that needs to be managed or at least monitored. Much of the coding in any university is undertaken by research students or young researchers. Issues of skills training, development and quality control can have significant effects on an entire department. In an industrial research setting, the environment is not quite that of industry as a whole, nor does it follow the pattern set by the university. The unique approaches and issues of industrial research may hold lessons for researchers in other domains. We take here the opportunity to warmly thank all the members of the ICSEA 2022 technical program committee, as well as all the reviewers. The creation of such a high-quality conference program would not have been possible without their involvement. We also kindly thank all the authors who dedicated much of their time and effort to contribute to ICSEA 2022. We truly believe that, thanks to all these efforts, the final conference program consisted of top-quality contributions. We also thank the members of the ICSEA 2022 organizing committee for their help in handling the logistics of this event. We hope that ICSEA 2022 was a successful international forum for the exchange of ideas and results between academia and industry and for the promotion of progress in software engineering advances

Supporting multiple stakeholders in agile development

Agile software development practices require several stakeholders with different kinds of expertise to collaborate while specifying requirements, designing, and modelling software, and verifying whether developers have implemented requirements correctly. We studied 112 requirements engineering (RE) tools from academia and the features of 13 actively maintained behavior-driven development (BDD) tools, which support various stakeholders in specifying and verifying the application behavior. Overall, we found that there is a growing tool specialization targeted towards a specific type of stakeholders. Particularly with BDD tools, we found no adequate support for non-technical stakeholders-- they are required to use an integrated development environment (IDE)-- which is not adapted to suit their expertise. We argue that employing separate tools for requirements specification, modelling, implementation, and verification is counterproductive for agile development. Such an approach makes it difficult to manage associated artifacts and support rapid implementation and feedback loops. To avoid dispersion of requirements and other software-related artifacts among separate tools, establish traceability between requirements and the application source code, and streamline a collaborative software development workflow, we propose to adapt an IDE as an agile development platform. With our approach, we provide in-IDE graphical interfaces to support non-technical stakeholders in creating and maintaining requirements concurrently with the implementation. With such graphical interfaces, we also guide non-technical stakeholders through the object-oriented design process and support them in verifying the modelled behavior. This approach has two advantages: (i) compared with employing separate tools, creating, and maintaining requirements directly within a development platform eliminates the necessity to recover trace links, and (ii) various natively created artifacts can be composed into stakeholder-specific interactive live in-IDE documentation. These advantages have a direct impact on how various stakeholders collaborate with each other, and allow for rapid feedback, which is much desired in agile practices. We exemplify our approach using the Glamorous Toolkit IDE. Moreover, the discussed building blocks can be implemented in any IDE with a rich-enough graphical engine and reflective capabilities

Supporting Multiple Stakeholders in Agile Development

Agile software development practices require several stakeholders with different kinds of expertise to collaborate while specifying requirements, designing and modeling software, and verifying whether developers have implemented requirements correctly. We studied 112 requirements engineering (RE) tools from academia and the features of 13 actively maintained behavior-driven development (BDD) tools, which support various stakeholders in specifying and verifying the application behavior. Overall, we found that there is a growing tool specialization targeted towards a specific type of stakeholders. Particularly with BDD tools, we found no adequate support for non-technical stakeholders —- they are required to use an integrated development environment (IDE) —- which is not adapted to suit their expertise. We argue that employing separate tools for requirements specification, modeling, implementation, and verification is counter-productive for agile development. Such an approach makes it difficult to manage associated artifacts and support rapid implementation and feedback loops. To avoid dispersion of requirements and other software-related artifacts among separate tools, establish traceability between requirements and the application source code, and streamline a collaborative software development workflow, we propose to adapt an IDE as an agile development platform. With our approach, we provide in-IDE graphical interfaces to support non-technical stakeholders in creating and maintaining requirements concurrently with the implementation. With such graphical interfaces, we also guide non-technical stakeholders through the object-oriented design process and support them in verifying the modeled behavior. This approach has two advantages: (i) compared with employing separate tools, creating and maintaining requirements directly within a development platform eliminates the necessity to recover trace links, and (ii) various natively created artifacts can be composed into stakeholder-specific interactive live in-IDE documentation. These advantages have a direct impact on how various stakeholders collaborate with each other, and allow for rapid feedback, which is much desired in agile practices. We exemplify our approach using the Glamorous Toolkit IDE. Moreover, the discussed building blocks can be implemented in any IDE with a rich-enough graphical engine and reflective capabilities

Mining software repositories: measuring effectiveness and affectiveness in software systems.

Software Engineering field has many goals, among them we can certainly deal with monitoring and controlling the development process in order to meet the business requirements of the released software artifact. Software engineers need to have empirical evidence that the development process and the overall quality of software artifacts is converging to the required features. Improving the development process's Effectiveness leads to higher productivity, meaning shorter time to market, but understanding or even measuring the software de- velopment process is an hard challenge. Modern software is the result of a complex process involving many stakeholders such as product owners, quality assurance teams, project manager and, above all, developers. All these stake- holders use complex software systems for managing development process, issue tracking, code versioning, release scheduling and many other aspect concerning software development. Tools for project management and issues/bugs tracking are becoming useful for governing the development process of Open Source soft- ware. Such tools simplify the communications process among developers and ensure the scalability of a project. The more information developers are able to exchange, the clearer are the goals, and the higher is the number of developers keen on joining and actively collaborating on a project. By analyzing data stored in such systems, researchers are able to study and address questions such as: Which are the factors able to impact the software productivity? Is it possible to improve software productivity shortening the time to market?. The present work addresses two major aspect of software development pro- cess: Effectiveness and Affectiveness. By analyzing data stored in project man- agement and in issue tracking system of Open Source Communities, we mea- sured the Effectiveness as the time required to resolve an issue and analyzed factors able to impact it

Mining software repositories: measuring effectiveness and affectiveness in software systems.

Software Engineering field has many goals, among them we can certainly deal with monitoring and controlling the development process in order to meet the business requirements of the released software artifact. Software engineers need to have empirical evidence that the development process and the overall quality of software artifacts is converging to the required features. Improving the development process's Effectiveness leads to higher productivity, meaning shorter time to market, but understanding or even measuring the software de- velopment process is an hard challenge. Modern software is the result of a complex process involving many stakeholders such as product owners, quality assurance teams, project manager and, above all, developers. All these stake- holders use complex software systems for managing development process, issue tracking, code versioning, release scheduling and many other aspect concerning software development. Tools for project management and issues/bugs tracking are becoming useful for governing the development process of Open Source soft- ware. Such tools simplify the communications process among developers and ensure the scalability of a project. The more information developers are able to exchange, the clearer are the goals, and the higher is the number of developers keen on joining and actively collaborating on a project. By analyzing data stored in such systems, researchers are able to study and address questions such as: Which are the factors able to impact the software productivity? Is it possible to improve software productivity shortening the time to market?. The present work addresses two major aspect of software development pro- cess: Effectiveness and Affectiveness. By analyzing data stored in project man- agement and in issue tracking system of Open Source Communities, we mea- sured the Effectiveness as the time required to resolve an issue and analyzed factors able to impact it