Bringing Back-in-Time Debugging Down to the Database

With back-in-time debuggers, developers can explore what happened before observable failures by following infection chains back to their root causes. While there are several such debuggers for object-oriented programming languages, we do not know of any back-in-time capabilities at the database-level. Thus, if failures are caused by SQL scripts or stored procedures, developers have difficulties in understanding their unexpected behavior. In this paper, we present an approach for bringing back-in-time debugging down to the SAP HANA in-memory database. Our TARDISP debugger allows developers to step queries backwards and inspecting the database at previous and arbitrary points in time. With the help of a SQL extension, we can express queries covering a period of execution time within a debugging session and handle large amounts of data with low overhead on performance and memory. The entire approach has been evaluated within a development project at SAP and shows promising results with respect to the gathered developer feedback.Comment: 24th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineerin

Challenges (and Opportunities!) of a Remote Agile Software Engineering Project Course During COVID-19

COVID-19 and its immediate impacts on teaching activities have required changes from computer science educators worldwide. We switched our on-site courses to remote setups without detailed knowledge of what tools, techniques, and methods would work in different teaching contexts. A growing amount of experience reports on general best practices for remote teaching in higher education are available. However, university courses featuring practical software development projects present unique challenges regarding remote learning, as effective student collaboration is vital. In these courses, students tackle situations in the project and their team meetings that would also occur in real software projects experienced in industry settings. In this paper, we share our experiences on how we successfully adapted our software engineering project course to a remote setup, which challenges we observed in student teams and how they can be mitigated, and what (surprisingly) worked better than expected. Finally, we propose improvements that we expect will be beneficial not only for future remote-only but also for hybrid or on-site courses

Understanding Business Process Evolution in Digital Ventures

Business processes are at each company\u27s core and must be adapted permanently to react to changing markets, substantial growth, or legal regulations. Especially digital ventures have the potential to evolve fast, and consequently, their business processes need to change at the same speed. Two streams of literature have looked into this. Traditional business process management sees business processes, once implemented, as relatively stable. In contrast, digital entrepreneurship literature highlights the inherent flexibility of digital ventures. Based on a multiple case study of five digital ventures, we analyze how entrepreneurs deal with this tension when business processes evolve. Building on entrepreneurial bricolage, we propose two types of resource recombination that we find, namely, usage of existing private resources and re-configuring of resources already being used within the venture. These insights contribute to extending our understanding of the evolution of business processes

On the Potential of Business Process Management for Digital Entrepreneurship: Findings from a Literature Review

Digital ventures face significant organizational challenges when scaling, including increasing sales and employee numbers, that withdraw resources from working on their market offerings. While digital entrepreneurship literature stresses the importance of creating processes that balance structure and flexibility to deal with these challenges, business process management (BPM) literature focuses on improving pre-designed business processes. We reconcile these perspectives in a structured literature review to explore how BPM can support digital venturing. We identify synergies and tensions between BPM and digital entrepreneurship and propose three avenues for future research. These include exploring ambidextrous BPM in digital ventures, treating digital venturing as a business process, and developing capabilities for balancing flexibility and structure. We contribute to information systems research by critically reviewing the literature on BPM and digital entrepreneurship and providing potential areas for future investigation

Leading Digital Innovation Units: A Repertory Grid Study about Key Skills for the Digital Age

To combat the trend of failing Digital Transformation endeavors, dedicated leadership skills are needed. However, so far there is little knowledge about the skills for successfully leading Digital Innovation Units (DIUs). We, therefore, interviewed 13 DIU leaders from various industries and elicited their skills with the Repertory Grid method. We identified 54 key skills clustered in seven categories: team development, integration of the DIU into the wider context of the organization, innovation management, personal traits, effective communication, hard skills, and visionary thinking and driving change. Furthermore, we found five influencing factors for the application of key skills: Financial support, uncertainty, certainty in tasks, stability of the product, freedom to operate, and degree of collaboration with the core organization. Finally, we report on three skill enhancers (actions, attitudes, conditions) for practitioners. We complement prior research by improving the understanding of the ideal DIU leader skill profile

The Future of Enterprise Information Systems

[First paragraph] Enterprise information systems (EIS) have been important enablers of crossfunctional processes within businesses since the 1990s. Often referred to as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, they were extended in line with electronic businesses to integrate with suppliers as well as customers. Today, EIS architectures comprise not only ERP, supply chain, and customer relationship management systems, but also business intelligence and analytics. Recently, the move towards decentralized technologies has created new perspectives for EIS. Information systems (IS) research has already addressed opportunities and challenges of these developments quite well, but what will be the pressing opportunities and challenges for supporting enterprises with IS in the coming years? The remainder of this discussion focuses on the future of EIS from diverse but complementary perspectives

Ebola Outbreak Containment: Real-Time Task and Resource Coordination With SORMAS

Background: Since the beginning of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, more than 11,000 people died. For outbreaks of infectious diseases like this, the rapid implementation of control measures is a crucial factor for containment. In West African countries, outbreak surveillance is a paper-based process with significant delays in forwarding outbreak information, which affects the ability to react adequately to situational changes. Our objective therefore was to develop a tool that improves data collection, situation assessment, and coordination of response measures in outbreak surveillance processes for a better containment. Methods: We have developed the Surveillance and Outbreak Response Management System (SORMAS) based on findings from Nigeria's 2014 Ebola outbreak. We conducted a thorough requirements engineering and defined personas and processes. We also defined a data schema with specific variables to measure in outbreak situations. We designed our system to be a cloud application that consists of interfaces for both mobile devices and desktop computers to support all stakeholders in the process. In the field, health workers collect data on the outbreak situation via mobile applications and directly transmit it to control centers. At the control centers, health workers access SORMAS via desktop computers, receive instant updates on critical situations, react immediately on emergencies, and coordinate the implementation of control measures with SORMAS. Results: We have tested SORMAS in multiple workshops and a field study in July 2015. Results from workshops confirmed derived requirements and implemented features, but also led to further iterations on the systems regarding usability. Results from the field study are currently under assessment. General feedback showed high enthusiasm about the system and stressed its benefits for an effective outbreak containment of infectious diseases. Conclusions: SORMAS is a software tool to support health workers in efficiently handling outbreak situations of infectious diseases, such as Ebola. Our tool enables a bi-directional exchange of situational data between individual stakeholders in outbreak containment. This allows instant and seamless collection of data from the field and its instantaneous analysis in operational centers. By that, SORMAS accelerates the implementation of control measures, which is crucial for a successful outbreak containment.Peer Reviewe

Test Quality Feedback Improving Effectivity and Efficiency of Unit Testing

International audienceWriting unit tests for a software system enhances the confidence that a system works as expected. Since time pressure often prevents a complete testing of all application details developers need to know which new tests the system requires. Developers also need to know which existing tests take the most time and slow down the whole development process. Missing feedback about less tested functionality and reasons for long running test cases make it, however, harder to create a test suite that covers all important parts of a software system in a minimum of time. As a result a software system may be inadequately tested and developers may test less frequently. Our approach provides test quality feedback to guide developers in identifying missing tests and correcting low-quality tests. We provide developers with a tool that analyzes test suites with respect to their effectivity (e.g., missing tests) and efficiency (e.g., time and memory consumption). We implement our approach, named PathMap, as an extended test runner within the Squeak Smalltalk IDE and demonstrate its benefits by improving the test quality of representative software systems

Orca: A Single-Language Web Framework for Collaborative Development

In the last few years, the Web has been established as a platform for interactive applications. However, creating Web applications involves numerous challenges since the Web has been created to serve static content. In particular, the separation of the client- and the server-side, being only connected through the unidirectional Hypertext Transfer Protocol, forces developers to apply two programming languages including different libraries, conventions, and tools. Developers create expert knowledge by specializing on a few of all involved technologies. Consequently, the diverse knowledge of team members makes collaboration in Web development laboriously. We present the Orca framework that allows developers to work collaboratively on client-server applications in a single object-oriented programming language. Based on the Smalltalk programming language, full access to existing libraries, and a bidirectional messaging abstraction, Orca provides a consistent environment that supports common idioms and patterns in client- and server-side code. It reduces expert knowledge and the number of development tools and, thus, facilitates the collaboration of Web developers