Uncovering the Hidden Co-Evolution in the Work History of Software Projects

The monitoring of project-oriented business processes is difficult because their state is fragmented and represented by the progress of different documents and artifacts being worked on. This observation holds in particular for software development projects in which various developers work on different parts of the software concurrently. Prior contributions in this area have proposed a plethora of techniques to analyze and visualize the current state of the software artifact as a product. It is surprising that these techniques are missing to provide insights into what types of work are conducted at different stages of the project and how they are dependent upon another. In this paper, we address this research gap and present a technique for mining the software process including dependencies between artifacts. Our evaluation of various open-source projects demonstrates the applicability of our technique

Mining Projects from Structured and Unstructured Data

Companies working on safety-critical projects must adhere to strict rules imposed by the domain, especially when human safety is involved. These projects need to be compliant to standard norms and regulations. Thus, all the process steps must be clearly documented in order to be verifiable for compliance in a later stage by an auditor. Nevertheless, documentation often comes in the form of manually written textual documents in different formats. Moreover, the project members use diverse proprietary tools. This makes it difficult for auditors to understand how the actual project was conducted. My research addresses the project mining problem by exploiting logs from project-generated artifacts, which come from software repositories used by the project team

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

A network theoretic perspective of decision processes in complex construction projects

This paper proposes an approach to modelling and visualising decision processes in large complex construction projects by incorporating a network perspective. Computer modelling and visualisation of decision processes as social and task-entity networks makes possible the identification of key participants, critical tasks, latent networks, vulnerabilities and dynamics that impact upon complex decision situations. New advances in network theory can help reveal the ways in which social, organisational, political and technological relationships shape decision outcomes. By conceiving decision processes as a complex system and modelling this system using network-theoretic principles, it is possible to include a tremendous amount of information that has remained untapped by conventional qualitative, game-theoretic, and statistical approaches. This research contributes to the understanding of the strategic implications of decision processes as complex systems of interacting actors and problem tasks, and provides the technological means for supporting them. The approach has been verified through the development of an experimental network-theoretic system