A case study on variability management in software product lines: identifying why real-life projects fail

Economies of scale can be seen as some kind of “holy grail” in state of the art literature on the development of sets of related software systems. Software product line methods are often mentioned in this context, due to the variability management aspects they propose, in order to deal with sets of related software systems. They realize the sought-after reusability. Both variability management and software product lines already have a strong presence in theoretical research, but in real-life software product line projects trying to obtain economies of scale still tend to fall short of target. The objective of this paper is to study this gap between theory and reality through a case study in order to see why such gap exists, and to find a way to bridge this gap. Through analysis of the causes of failure identified by the stakeholders in the case study, the underlying problem, which is found to be located in the requirements engineering phase, is crystallized. The identification of a framework describing the problems will provide practitioners with a better focus for future endeavors in the field of software product lines, so that economies of scale can be achieved

Implementing Success Management in an IT project

Given the high importance and complexity of the evaluation of Information Technology (IT) projects, it is essential that companies define and implement systematic processes for managing success aiming to improve project management and deliverables performance. This article presents the first stage of the implementation of a success management process in an IT project of a large multi-national company. Preliminary results show that, with a small increase of the management effort, this enables a precise definition of what really means success in the context of a project, a better understanding of the different perspectives of the participating stakeholders, a greater focus in what is most important for achieving the project success, the unbiased identification and definition of criteria for evaluating success, and the definition of milestones to carry out the evaluation.(undefined

Success management as a PM knowledge area – work-in-progress

It is a fact that an organization's success is closely linked with its projects’ success. Although there are many studies in literature that focus on different aspects of project success like, for instance, the success factors or the criteria for success assessment, there are only few studies that mention the processes required for success evaluation. Guides and standards, such as the PMBOK 5 or ISO 21500:2012, are not exceptions to this reality. Given the high importance and complexity of the evaluation of the projects’ success, in this work-in-progress the Success Management is proposed as a new knowledge area of project management, as well as a set of processes to be carried out in its scop

Sustainability assessment of contaminated site remediation with emphasis on valuation.

Although the integration of the principles of sustainability in the selection of site remediation alternatives has become an important issue, most attention is still paid to the direct costs of the soil remediation and the environmental and health impacts of the soil contamination. Less tangible social and economic aspects, such as non-monetary costs and benefits, are only marginally addressed, although they are essential to make a more balanced decision. The present study will first focus on a critical analysis of existing methods (decision support tools) that can be used to include the costs and benefits of soil remediation projects in the decision process. In a second part, the possibilities to express the secondary effects (environmental and health impacts) of site remediation in monetary terms will be assessed, assuming a life-cycle perspective. Potential overall assessment indicators, relevant to the context of site remediation, will then be evaluated with the input of the stakeholders within the sector and a set of basic indicators will be commended. Finally, the last section of the study will be dedicated to the definition and calculation of economic efficiency of soil remediation projects. The methodologies described above (monetization methods, economic indicators, etc.) will be applied and validated throughout the study on a number of well-established and well documented case studies. Experts from the soil remediation industry and policy makers will be involved during the project, in order to take into account their experiences and concerns.status: publishe

Variability in requirements engineering for software assets.

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Critical review of decision support tools for sustainability assessment of site remediation options

In Europe alone, there are more than 2,5 million potentially contaminated sites of which 14% are expected to require remediation. Contaminated soil and groundwater can cause damage to human health as well as to valuable ecosystems. Globally more attention has been paid to this problem of soil contamination in the past decades. For example, more than 58 000 sites have been remediated in Europe between 2006 and 2011. Together with this increase in remediation projects there has been a surge in the development of new remediation technologies and decision support tools to be able to match every site and its specific characteristics to the best possible remediation alternative. In the past years the development of decision support tools (DST) has evolved in a more sustainable direction. Several DSTs added the claim not only to denote effective or technologically and economically feasible remediation alternatives but also to point out the more or most sustainable remediation alternatives. These trends in the evaluation of site remediation options left users with a confusing clew of possibly applicable tools to assist them in decision making for contaminated site remediation. This review provides a structured overview on the extent decision support tools for contaminated site remediation, that claim to assist in choosing the most sustainable remediation alternative, actually include the different elements of sustainability proposed in our assessment framework. The review contains an in-depth analysis of thirteen tools specifically developed to assess the sustainability of site remediation alternatives. This analysis is based on six criteria derived from the definition of sustainable development of the Brundtland report. The six criteria were concretized by using the three pillars of sustainability, applied to site remediation according to the SuRF-UK framework, two criteria derived from Life Cycle Assessment and Cost-Benefit Analysis, and an 'User friendly' criterion. These elements come together in a framework, drafted for this study, containing six criteria covering the environmental, economic, social, time, uncertainty aspects and user friendliness of a sustainable site remediation. The main remarks uncovered by this review are the imbalance of used indicators still expressing a strong preference for the environmental aspect at the expense of the economic and social aspects of sustainability, the lack of consistency in the terminology used within the field and the failure in adapting released tools to recent legislation or scientific advancements.publisher: Elsevier articletitle: Critical review of decision support tools for sustainability assessment of site remediation options journaltitle: Journal of Environmental Management articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2017.03.002 content_type: article copyright: © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.status: publishe

Variability in software engineering paradigms

The concept of variability is not new in software engineering, but current research mostly remains vague about the overall variability concept when it comes to giving a clear overview of the dimensions of variability. In this paper we evaluate the core variability concept by proposing an overview of the set of definitions concerning variability related concepts and by setting up dimensions of variability. These dimensions represent different possible views on variability for all types of stakeholders. Through an analysis of the gaps in the current state-of-the-art literature, we identify challenges for the current state-of-the-art and we propose an extension to current variability related paradigms to fill in these gaps.nrpages: 9status: publishe

Monetization coupled with Life Cycle Assessment compared to Cost Benefit Analysis: a site remediation case study

Site contamination is a global concern because of the potential risks for human health and ecosystem quality. In Europe alone there are 340 000 potentially contaminated sites and this number is forecasted to increase even more by 2025. The huge amount of contaminated sites that will have to be remediated in the coming years has increased the attention for the secondary environmental impacts (i.e. the environmental impacts caused by the site remediation activities themselves) of the remediation. These secondary environmental impacts are also an aspect of the more holistic ‘sustainable remediation’ framework. Every contaminated site has its own specific characteristics and the large range of potential contaminants, as well as the recent focus on sustainable remediation, resulted in new developments, and stimulated technological innovations. The increased availability and efficiency of techniques makes the final choice of remediation alternative increasingly complicated. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) can support site owners and remediation companies in the choice between remediation alternatives, taking into account their secondary environmental impacts. LCA as such has also been used on several case studies to compare the secondary environmental impact of different alternatives but has been critiqued for being too complicated, time consuming, and data demanding. This paper shows how, by following the ISO 14 000, 14 040 and 14 044 guidelines initially drafted for the development of a consequential LCA, an attributional study of the environmental impacts of a site remediation case study can be done more efficiently. The case study used for this purpose entails the soil and groundwater remediation of a tar, poly-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and cyanide contamination of a school ground by a former gas plant. The remediation alternative chosen in this case study, after a cost and preliminary soil analysis, is excavation with off-site thermal treatment of the contaminated soil. The attributional LCIA is based on the data from the site remediation project, , and modeled by using the Ecoinvent 3 database in SimaPro 8.2.0.0. Secondly a societal Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is performed on the same case study using the same data sources. The outcome of this ‘traditional’ CBA is critically compared to the outcome of different monetization methods, namely Stepwise 2006, Eco-cost, Ecovalue and Benefit transfer method which use the outcome of an LCA to calculate the monetary value of the environmental impact. This comparison uncovers and evaluates those elements that are not covered in the monetization methods but are essential for a monetary valuation. The usefulness of the different valuation methods in the context of site remediation is also assessed in order to come to an improved method for the monetization of environmental and health effects of site remediation.status: publishe