Coordination Implications of Software Coupling in Open Source Projects

The effect of software coupling on the quality of software has been studied quite widely since the seminal paper on software modularity by Parnas [1]. However, the effect of the increase in software coupling on the coordination of the developers has not been researched as much. In commercial software development environments there normally are coordination mechanisms in place to manage the coordination requirements due to software dependencies. But, in the case of Open Source software such coordination mechanisms are harder to implement, as the developers tend to rely solely on electronic means of communication. Hence, an understanding of the changing coordination requirements is essential to the management of an Open Source project. In this paper we study the effect of changes in software coupling on the coordination requirements in a case study of a popular Open Source project called JBoss

Software quality management improvement through mentoring: an exploratory study from GSD projects

Proceeding of: OTM 2011 Workshops: Confederated InternationalWorkshops and Posters: EI2N+NSF ICE, ICSP+INBAST, ISDE, ORM, OTMA, SWWS+MONET+SeDeS, and VADER 2011, Hersonissos, Crete, Greece, October 17-21, 2011Software Quality Management (SQM) is a set of processes and procedures designed to assure the quality of software artifacts along with their development process. In an environment in which software development is evolving to a globalization, SQM is seen as one of its challenges. Global Software Development is a way to develop software across nations, continents, cultures and time zones. The aim of this paper is to detect if mentoring, one of the lead personnel development tools, can improve SQM of projects developed under GSD. The results obtained in the study reveal that the influence of mentoring on SQM is just temperate

Towards a framework for work package allocation for GSD

Proceeding of: Proceeding of: OTM 2011 Workshops: Confederated International Workshops and Posters: EI2N+NSF ICE, ICSP+INBAST, ISDE, ORM, OTMA, SWWS+MONET+SeDeS, and VADER 2011, Hersonissos, Crete, Greece, October 17-21, 2011Global software development is an inexorable trend in the software industry. The impact of the trend in conventional software development can be found in many of its aspects. One of them is task or work package allocation. Task allocation was traditionally driven by resource competency and availability but GSD introduces new complexities to this process including time-zones differences, costs and cultural differences. In this work a report on the construction of a framework for work-package allocation within GSD projects is presented. This framework lies on three main pillars: individual and organizational competency, organizational customization and sound assessment methods.This work is supported by the Spanish Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial (CDTI) under the Eureka Project E! 6244 PROPS-Tour and the national cooperation project SEM-IDi (IDI-20091150)

Mega software engineering

Abstract. In various fields of computer science, rapidly growing hardware power, such as high-speed network, high-performance CPU, huge disk capacity, and large memory space, has been fruitfully harnessed. Examples of such usage are large scale data and web mining, grid computing, and multimedia environments. We propose that such rich hardware can also catapult software engineering to the next level. Huge amounts of software engineering data can be systematically collected and organized from tens of thousands of projects inside organizations, or from outside an organization through the Internet. The collected data can be analyzed extensively to extract and correlate multi-project knowledge for improving organization-wide productivity and quality. We call such an approach for software engineering Mega Software Engineering. In this paper, we propose the concept of Mega Software Engineering, and demonstrate some novel data analysis characteristic of Mega Software Engineering. We describe a framework for enabling Mega Software Engineering.

Equity valuation models and target price accuracy in Europe : evidence from equity reports

This study examines whether European investment analysts prefer cash flow based valuation models over accrual based models, how accurate valuation models are and whether the use of cash flow based models (with or without accrual based models) improve forecast accuracy. We conduct a comprehensive content analysis of equity research reports for most of the firms on the components list of the Dow Jones Euro Stoxx 50 Index. We find that earnings multiples and the discounted cash flow (DCF) valuation models are the two most popular valuation models and the use of accrual based multiple alongside a cash flow based model improves the forecast error and this is in line with the intuition that accruals add value relevant information to cash flows. However, we also find that neither cash flow nor earnings multiples are superior to book value and return on equity (ROE) based models in terms of forecast error. Our results provide support for the use of book value and ROE based models which provide more precise forecasts and this, in turn, supports the use of accounting based models, i.e., a residual income model