Towards an Agile Approach to Software Process Improvement: Addressing the Changing Needs of Software Products

This paper highlights the need for greater agility and flexibility in the process improvement activity. The ideas presented here relate to aspects that have arisen from a case study of a global software product organisation. A model of how software process improvement can be agile in nature is proposed. This model is intended as indicative of the issues that need consideration by IS management. The model highlights the need to learn to improve through situated practice within an organisational framework that supports the needs of the business

Learning to Improve Software Processes: Making Sense of Practice

Software Process Improvement (SPI) programs are frequently considered to be planned in nature. However, there is recent evidence to suggest that SPI can be understood as a form of learning. Drawing on the organizational learning literature, this paper proposes an active learning perspective of improvements in processes. This view recognizes the various actors in the project to be reflective in their actions, making sense of the current context and thus designing their use of the process to best suit their needs at the time. The changes in the processes emerge through ongoing adjustments, experimentation and improvisation as developers and managers seek to improve their product development

Privacy through security: policy and practice in a small-medium enterprise.

The chapter discusses how one small business planned for, and implemented, the security of its data in a new enterprise-wide system. The companys data was perceived as sensitive, and any breach of privacy as commercially critical. From this perspective, the chapter outlines the organizational and technical facets of the policies and practices evidenced. Lessons for other businesses can be drawn from the case by recognizing the need for investments to be made that will address threats in business critical areas. By highlighting the need for organizations to understand the nature of the risk and the probability of an event occurring, the security approaches highlight the need to address both the threats and actions in the event of an incident to reduce the risk to privacy

ODYSSEY: Software development life cycle ontology

With the omnipresence of softwares in our Society from Information Technology (IT) services to autonomous agents, their systematic and efficient development is crucial for software developers. Hence, in this paper, we present an approach to assist intelligent agents (IA), whatever human beings or artificial systems, in theirs task to develop and configure softwares. The proposed method is an ontological, developer-centred approach aiding a software developer in decision making and interoperable information sharing through the use of the ODYSSEY ontology we developed for the software development life cycle (SDLC) domain. This ODYSSEY ontology has been designed following the Enterprise Ontology (EO) methodology and coded in Descriptive Logic (DL). Its implementation in OWL has been evaluated for case studies, showing promising results

Software process improvement as emergent change: a structurational analysis

This thesis differs from the technological perspective of SPI by identifying and analysing the organisational features of process improvement. A theoretical understanding is developed of how and why software process improvements occur and what are the consequences of the change process within a specific case. A packaged information systems organisation forms the basis for a substantive case study. Adding to the growing body of qualitative research, the study takes a critical hermeneutic perspective. In doing so it overcomes some of the criticisms of the interpretive studies especially the need for the research to be reflexive in nature. By looking at SPI as an emergent rather than deterministic activity, the design and action of the change process are shown to be intertwined and shaped by their context. This understanding is based upon a structurational perspective that highlights how the process improvements are enabled and constrained by their context. The work builds on the recent recognition that the improvements can be understood from an organisational learning perspective. Fresh insights to the improvement process are developed by recognising the role of the individual to facilitate or resist the improvement. The understanding gained here can be applied by organisations to enable them to improve the effectiveness of their SPI programmes, and so improve the quality of their software. Lessons are derived that show how software organisations can support the ongoing improvement through recognition of the learning and political aspects of the change by adopting an agile approach to SPI

Towards a Change Leadership Framework: Assessing Capabilities within an IT Service Organization

There are many change initiatives reported today that are failing to deliver the expected results. The reasons for failure include the lack of leadership, lack of direction, no clear strategy, employee resistance and an inability to sustain changes in the long term. This paper investigates IT leaders’ capabilities and the impact their role has within the change cycle. It explores what makes a successful change leader while uncovering some of the behavioral issues that people display during change. This paper argues that by adopting the right change approach as a team collective and developing strategies for managing resistance, communication, speed and sustainability along with a framework model should create the right conditions for change to flourish thereby improving the chance of future success. The research assesses the change capability of an IT services business leadership team about to embark upon a major change program across its global organization. A qualitative approach was used to establish current leadership change capability levels and readiness state of the organization through the use of semi-structured interviews with the individual IT leaders. From this evaluation, the paper explores the creation of a model to aid the management of change leadership

Migrating Software Products to the Cloud

Cloud computing, as a disruptive innovation, has the potential to adversely affect companies. The effects can be particularly extreme for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Subsequently, considerations of organisational resilience should be made when integrating with disruptive innovations like cloud computing. This paper reports of a longitudinal study investigating how a set of SME high-value software vendors are migrating their software products to the cloud. Adaptive socio-technical systems (ASTSs) concepts are used to provide a framework for understanding the adoption process. This study draws out a set of macro and micro themes relating to key phases of strategy development, the migration process and the impact on customer perceptions. From the findings, more systemic and holistic approaches are identified to address key tensions through the adoption life cycle while considering organisational resilience

Migrating software products to the cloud: an adaptive STS perspective.

Cloud computing, as a disruptive innovation, has the potential to adversely affect companies. The effects can be particularly extreme for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Subsequently, considerations of organisational resilience should be made when integrating with disruptive innovations like cloud computing. This paper reports of a longitudinal study investigating how a set of SME high-value software vendors are migrating their software products to the cloud. Adaptive socio-technical systems (ASTSs) concepts are used to provide a framework for understanding the adoption process. This study draws out a set of macro and micro themes relating to key phases of strategy development, the migration process and the impact on customer perceptions. From the findings, more systemic and holistic approaches are identified to address key tensions through the adoption life cycle while considering organisational resilience

Modelling Case-Based Reasoning in Situation-Aware Disaster Management

Situation-aware disaster management (SADIM) is a continuous decision-making and action taking process. This process requires prior knowledge of the ongoing environment and context. SADIM comprises two major processes: situation awareness (SA) - a cognitive process that assesses current situations and anticipate future situations in the environment; and, disaster management (DM) which is a decision-making process preventing, preparing, responding, and recovering for and from a disaster. One of the decision-making technologies used in current SADIM is case-based reasoning (CBR) CBR is used for the disaster management element only. Situation awareness process in current SADIM is carried out using domain rules, statistical reasoning and other methods. This paper therefore presents a method of using CBR to carry out both situation assessment and disaster management decision-making processes in SADIM, building on previous work focusing in SA alone. Using CBR for both processes provides the capability of using past experiences to understand the state of the environment and also solve specific disaster problems. The paper evaluates the method through implementation in disaster prevention in the petroleum drilling domain for early kick detection to prevent a blowout disaster. The results show a clear improvement in similarity assessment and problem solving prediction to prevent blowout

Automated Software Quality Visualisation Using Fuzzy Logic Techniques

In the past decade there has been a concerted effort by the software industry to improve the quality of its products. This has led to the inception of various techniques with which to control and measure the process involved in software development. Methods like the Capability Maturity Model have introduced processes and strategies that require measurement in the form of software metrics. With the ever increasing number of software metrics being introduced by capability based processes, software development organisations are finding it more difficult to understand and interpret metric scores. This is particularly problematic for senior management and project managers where analysis of the actual data is not feasible. This paper proposes a method with which to visually represent metric scores so that managers can easily see how their organisation is performing relative to quality goals set for each type of metric. Acting primarily as a proof of concept and prototype, we suggest ways in which real customer needs can be translated into a feasible technical solution. The solution itself visualises metric scores in the form of a tree structure and utilises Fuzzy Logic techniques, XGMML, Web Services and the .NET Framework. Future work is proposed to extend the system from the prototype stage and to overcome a problem with the masking of poor scores