Why does site visit matter in global software development: A knowledge-based perspective

Abstract not availableMansooreh Zahedi, Muhammad Ali Baba

A systematic review of knowledge sharing challenges and practices in global software development

Abstract not availableMansooreh Zahedia, Mojtaba Shahinb, Muhammad Ali Baba

An Empirical Study of Security Issues Posted in Open Source Projects

When developers gain thorough understanding and knowledge of software security, they can produce more secure software. This study aims at empirically identifying and understanding the security issues posted on a random sample of GitHub repositories. We tried to understand the presence of security issues and their key themes and topics. We applied a mixed-methods approach, combining topic modeling techniques and qualitative analysis. Our findings have revealed that a) the rate of security-related issues was rather small (approx. 3% of all issues), b) the majority of the security issues were related to identity management and cryptography topics. We present 7 high-level themes of problems that developers face in implementing security features

Collaborative Application Security Testing for DevSecOps: An Empirical Analysis of Challenges, Best Practices and Tool Support

DevSecOps is a software development paradigm that places a high emphasis on the culture of collaboration between developers (Dev), security (Sec) and operations (Ops) teams to deliver secure software continuously and rapidly. Adopting this paradigm effectively, therefore, requires an understanding of the challenges, best practices and available solutions for collaboration among these functional teams. However, collaborative aspects related to these teams have received very little empirical attention in the DevSecOps literature. Hence, we present a study focusing on a key security activity, Application Security Testing (AST), in which practitioners face difficulties performing collaborative work in a DevSecOps environment. Our study made novel use of 48 systematically selected webinars, technical talks and panel discussions as a data source to qualitatively analyse software practitioner discussions on the most recent trends and emerging solutions in this highly evolving field. We find that the lack of features that facilitate collaboration built into the AST tools themselves is a key tool-related challenge in DevSecOps. In addition, the lack of clarity related to role definitions, shared goals, and ownership also hinders Collaborative AST (CoAST). We also captured a range of best practices for collaboration (e.g., Shift-left security), emerging communication methods (e.g., ChatOps), and new team structures (e.g., hybrid teams) for CoAST. Finally, our study identified several requirements for new tool features and specific gap areas for future research to provide better support for CoAST in DevSecOps.Comment: Submitted to the Empirical Software Engineering journal_v

An empirical study of architecting for continuous delivery and deployment

Recently, many software organizations have been adopting Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment (CD) practices to develop and deliver quality software more frequently and reliably. Whilst an increasing amount of the literature covers different aspects of CD, little is known about the role of software architecture in CD and how an application should be (re-) architected to enable and support CD. We have conducted a mixed-methods empirical study that collected data through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 21 industrial practitioners from 19 organizations, and a survey of 91 professional software practitioners. Based on a systematic and rigorous analysis of the gathered qualitative and quantitative data, we present a conceptual framework to support the process of (re-) architecting for CD. We provide evidence-based insights about practicing CD within monolithic systems and characterize the principle of "small and independent deployment units" as an alternative to the monoliths. Our framework supplements the architecting process in a CD context through introducing the quality attributes (e.g., resilience) that require more attention and demonstrating the strategies (e.g., prioritizing operations concerns) to design operations-friendly architectures. We discuss the key insights (e.g., monoliths and CD are not intrinsically oxymoronic) gained from our study and draw implications for research and practice.Comment: To appear in Empirical Software Engineerin