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

Supporting User Story Management with a Mobile Application

Eine verbreitete Technik in der agilen Softwareentwicklung ist die Verwendung von User Stories. In der Praxis werden bei dieser Methode die Funktionalitäten einer Software als kurze Geschichten formuliert und schriftlich auf Karteikarten fixiert. Mit Hilfe dieser Karteikarten, den sogenannten Story Cards, implementieren die Entwickler die Software in iterativen Zyklen. Ein wesentliches Problem bei dieser Herangehensweise ist das Management der erstellten User Stories. Über die gesamte Dauer des Projektes sammelt sich eine Vielzahl von Karteikarten an, die nur schwer zu überblicken sind. Für eine bessere Übersicht werden die Karteikarten meist an einer Pinnwand strukturiert. Diese Lösung ist aber nur möglich, wenn sich das Entwicklerteam an einem lokalen Ort befindet. Für verteilte Teams ist eine solche Arbeitsweise nur schwer zu realisieren und permanent aufrecht zu erhalten. Aus diesem Grund gibt es einige Softwareprodukte, die sich mit der Verwaltung von User Stories befassen. Oftmals bieten diese Applikationen nur einen geringeren Funktionsumfang durch den zwar die Verwaltung, aber nicht unbedingt die umfassende Arbeit mit User Stories bezüglich aller agilen Prozessphasen möglich ist. Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit dieser Problematik. Mittels einer Analyse der Eigenschaften, der Vor- und Nachteile von User Stories und von den zugehörigen Karteikarten sowie der Betrachtung der einzelnen Prozesse der agilen Softwareentwicklung, sollen Anforderungen erhoben und Konzepte entwickelt werden. Durch die Realisierung dieser Konzepte in einer mobilen Applikation wird eine adäquate Überführung der relevanten Aspekte bei der Arbeit mit User Stories und Story Cards in das elektronische System erreicht. Dabei wurde der Fokus auf den Bereich der mobilen Anwendungen gelegt, da das Format und die Art der Bedienung von Tablet-Geräten einen interessanten Ansatzpunkt für die Umsetzung der Arbeit mit User Stories bieten. Durch die direkte Steuerung des Tablets mit den Fingern ist eine natürlichere Handhabung der elektronischen Story Cards möglich. Daraus resultiert wiederrum eine adäquatere Überführung von den Aktivitäten der einzelnen agilen Prozesse in die Applikation. Insgesamt kann damit zum einen das Management von User Stories unterstützt werden, indem die Applikation die Verwaltung der erstellten Story Cards ermöglicht. Zum anderen kann mit der entwickelten Android-Applikation ein effizientes Arbeiten bei der agilen Entwicklung eines Projektes mittels User Stories über die gesamte Projektdauer gewährleisten werden.A common technique of agile software development is the use of user stories. In practice of this method, desired software features can be formulated as short stories and written down on index cards. With the help of these cards, the so-called story cards, the developers implement the software in iterative cycles. A major challenge for this approach is the management of the created user stories. Over the entire duration of the project a large number of index cards accumulates, which is difficult to overlook. To get a better overview of the cards, they are usually structured on a pin board. This solution is only possible, if the development team is co-located. For distributed teams, such a procedure is difficult to achieve and to hold up permanently. For this reason, there are some software products that deal with the management of user stories. Often these applications only offer certain functionalities for the administrative work, but not necessarily for the extensive work with user stories regarding all agile process phases. This work deals with this issue. To derive requirements and concepts the characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of user stories and of the related index cards are analyzed. Further, a consideration of the individual processes of agile software development is used. Through the realization of the concepts in a mobile application, the relevant aspects of working with user stories are transferred into an electronic system. The focus was placed on mobile applications, as the size and type of operation of tablet devices offer an interesting starting point for the implementation of the work with user stories. Since the elements on a tablet can be controlled with the fingers, working with electronic story cards can feel more natural and intuitive. With this, the activities of agile processes can be supported by an application more adequately. Overall, the application supports the management of user stories by enabling the management of created story cards. It also provides efficient work in an agile project using user stories across the entire project lifecycle with the developed Android application

Linking use cases and associated requirements: On the impact of linking variants on reading behavior

A wide variety of use case templates supports different linking variants. The main purpose of all linking options is to highlight the interrelationships between a use case and its associated requirements. Regardless of the linking, a reader needs to consider all materials together in order to achieve a high understanding of the overall content. Due to the efforts of creating and maintaining links, we investigated their impact on the reading behavior in terms of visual effort and intended way of interrelating both artifacts in an eye tracking study. Our findings show that all investigated linking variants cause comparable visual effort and share the most frequent reading pattern. In all cases, the use case and the requirements are read separated and successively. Nevertheless, we found significant differences in the reading behaviors between the linking variants. Only the most detailed linking variant significantly increases the number of attention switches between both artifacts which represents the required reading behavior of interrelating both artifacts. This summary refers to the paper "Interrelating Use Cases and Associated Requirements by Links - An Eye Tracking Study on the Impact of Different Linking Variants on the Reading Behavior" [KRS18] which was published as original research article in the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering. © 2019 Gesellschaft fur Informatik (GI). All rights reserved

SciKGTeX -- A LaTeX Package to Semantically Annotate Contributions in Scientific Publications

Scientific knowledge graphs have been proposed as a solution to structure the content of research publications in a machine-actionable way and enable more efficient, computer-assisted workflows for many research activities. Crowd-sourcing approaches are used frequently to build and maintain such scientific knowledge graphs. To contribute to scientific knowledge graphs, researchers need simple and easy-to-use solutions to generate new knowledge graph elements and establish the practice of semantic representations in scientific communication. In this paper, we present a workflow for authors of scientific documents to specify their contributions with a LaTeX package, called SciKGTeX, and upload them to a scientific knowledge graph. The SciKGTeX package allows authors of scientific publications to mark the main contributions of their work directly in LaTeX source files. The package embeds marked contributions as metadata into the generated PDF document, from where they can be extracted automatically and imported into a scientific knowledge graph, such as the ORKG. This workflow is simpler and faster than current approaches, which make use of external web interfaces for data entry. Our user evaluation shows that SciKGTeX is easy to use, with a score of 79 out of 100 on the System Usability Scale, as participants of the study needed only 7 minutes on average to annotate the main contributions on a sample abstract of a published paper. Further testing shows that the embedded contributions can be successfully uploaded to ORKG within ten seconds. SciKGTeX simplifies the process of manual semantic annotation of research contributions in scientific articles. Our workflow demonstrates how a scientific knowledge graph can automatically ingest research contributions from document metadata.Comment: Accepted for publication at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2023 (JCDL2023