Moving on from the software engineers' gambit: an approach to support the defense of software effort estimates

Pressure for higher productivity and faster delivery is increasingly pervading software organizations. This can lead software engineers to act like chess players playing a gambit -- making sacrifices of their technically sound estimates, thus submitting their teams to time pressure. In turn, time pressure can have varied detrimental effects, such as poor product quality and emotional distress, decreasing productivity, which leads to more time pressure and delays: a hard-to-stop vicious cycle. This reveals a need for moving on from the more passive strategy of yielding to pressure to a more active one of defending software estimates. Therefore, we propose an approach to support software estimators in acquiring knowledge on how to carry out such defense, by introducing negotiation principles encapsulated in a set of defense lenses, presented through a digital simulation. We evaluated the proposed approach through a controlled experiment with software practitioners from different companies. We collected data on participants' attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and intentions to perform the defense of their estimates in light of the Theory of Planned Behavior. We employed a frequentist and a bayesian approach to data analysis. Results show improved scores among experimental group participants after engaging with the digital simulation and learning about the lenses. They were also more inclined to choose a defense action when facing pressure scenarios than a control group exposed to questions to reflect on the reasons and outcomes of pressure over estimates. Qualitative evidence reveals that practitioners perceived the set of lenses as useful in their current work environments. Collectively, these results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach and its perceived relevance for the industry, despite the low amount of time required to engage with it.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

Meetings and Mood-Related or Not? Insights from Student Software Projects

[Background:] Teamwork, coordination, and communication are a prerequisite for the timely completion of a software project. Meetings as a facilitator for coordination and communication are an established medium for information exchange. Analyses of meetings in software projects have shown that certain interactions in these meetings, such as proactive statements followed by supportive ones, influence the mood and motivation of a team, which in turn affects its productivity. So far, however, research has focused only on certain interactions at a detailed level, requiring a complex and fine-grained analysis of a meeting itself. [Aim:] In this paper, we investigate meetings from a more abstract perspective, focusing on the polarity of the statements, i.e., whether they appear to be positive, negative, or neutral. [Method:] We analyze the relationship between the polarity of statements in meetings and different social aspects, including conflicts as well as the mood before and after a meeting. [Results:] Our results emerge from 21 student software project meetings and show some interesting insights: (1) Positive mood before a meeting is both related to the amount of positive statements in the beginning, as well as throughout the whole meeting, (2) negative mood before the meeting only influences the amount of negative statements in the first quarter of the meeting, but not the whole meeting, and (3) the amount of positive and negative statements during the meeting has no influence on the mood afterwards. [Conclusions:] We conclude that the behaviour in meetings might rather influence short-term emotional states (feelings) than long-term emotional states (mood), which are more important for the project

Towards Successful Software Process Improvement Initiatives: Experiences from the Battlefield

Over the past years Brazil has done significant investments in software process improvement. Among them, the long term MPS.BR program focuses on improving the software process quality of Brazilian companies. This paper describes the successful software process improvement (SPI) initiative that is being developed in Brazil, called the MPS.BR program, including its software process improvement reference model (MR-MPS-SW) and the most important results accomplished to date. Our results include the analysis of the iMPS family of surveys, and lessons learned that are valuable to the SPI community. The results and benefits presented can be useful to researchers, practitioners and decision makers in Government, University, and Industry interested in SPI and software industry competitiveness. Moreover, the benefits presented can motivate organizations to engage on MPS model SPI initiatives as a mean to improve the quality of their software

ProAut: Um Processo para Apoio de Projetos de Interface de Produtos de Software para Crianças Autista

As principais características de uma criança autista são o atraso na comunicação e a dificuldade de interação social que podem limitar seu desenvolvimento pessoal e educacional. Quanto mais cedo uma criança autista receber intervenção, maiores serão suas chances de diminuir as dificuldades citadas. Dentre as intervenções usadas com crianças autistas existe o uso de ferramentas tecnológicas que contemplam produtos como: softwares, ambientes, aplicativos e robôs. No entanto, equipes de desenvolvimento desse tipo de produtos, podem enfrentar diversas dificuldades ao tentar incluir crianças autistas dentro do processo de desenvolvimento. Nesse contexto, este artigo visa apresentar a proposta de um processo para apoiar projetos de interfaces destinados a crianças autistas. Este processo, denominado ProAut, se baseia nos princípios das abordagens do Design Participativo e Design Centrado no Usuário, com o intuito de facilitar a identificação das necessidades destes usuários. Além disso, o ProAut sugere o uso de um conjunto de diretrizes iniciais para auxiliar equipes de desenvolvimento com baixa experiência na criação desse tipo de interfaces.

Evaluating Software Engineers' Acceptance of a Technique and Tool for Web Usability Inspection

Abstract-Usability is related to software quality, improving its ability to be understood, operated and attractive to users. We proposed the Design Usability Evaluation (DUE) technologies to allow identifying usability problems earlier in the development of Web applications, through the inspection of mockups. While we found that the DUE technique and tool were effective and efficient in the identification of usability problems, we saw the need to investigate their acceptance in practitioners' work environment. This paper reports the results from a study evaluating the acceptance of the DUE technologies from the point of view of software engineers. We asked questions based on the indicators from the Technology Acceptance Model and identified that a majority of the software engineers who participated in the study: (a) found the DUE technologies useful and easy to use for supporting the usability inspection process; and (b) would regularly use the DUE technologies for future inspections in their job. Nevertheless, the practitioners indicated that the technique should be refined in order to reduce the ambiguity and repetition of some of its items, while the tool should become more intuitive

On the Experimental Process in Evaluations of Brazilian Conversational Agents in Education

Conversational agents represent applications that interact in a natural language with humans. Due to their ability to process the human language, they have been explored in diverse areas, e.g., e-commerce, health, entertainment, and education. Particularly in the education field, they have been used as mechanisms that support the teaching of a second language, that recommend educational resources, and that resolve students’ doubts, as a learning partner. Brazil is particularly interested in the educational technology community studying such software systems. Despite the strong interests in their development, few studies have addressed the impact such systems exert when they are used by students. Experimental studies have enabled a better understanding of the impact of technology on education based on evidence. This article presents an overview of empirical research on conversational agents in education through a mapping of the Brazilian community, identifying the way researchers systematically evaluate such agents produced in their research work. The results show a lack of experimental methodologies and taxonomies that support the planning, development, and reporting of experimental studies. However, a set of variables commonly employed has been recognized. An initial set of guidelines has been developed towards guiding experiments in this context and supporting the systematization of studies on experimental evaluations of pedagogical conversational agents

Preface to the CIbSE 2018 Special Issue

This special issue of the CLEIej consists of extended and revised versions of Selected Papers presented at the XXI Ibero-American Conference on Software Engineering (CIbSE 2018), hold in Bogotá, Colombia, in April 2018