Context Of Software Development Research Articles

Achieving offshore software development success: An empirical analysis of risk mitigation through relational norms

Behavioral risks such as shirking and misappropriation of information assets are more prominent in offshore software development context and could adversely affect offshore outsourcing success. This paper studies the moderating effects of different relational norms on the link between behavioral risks and offshore software development success. We focused on three major modes of relational norms: norm of flexibility, norm of solidarity and norm of information exchange. Using PLS path modeling to test a sample of 40 US corporations engaged in offshore software development, we found that the norms of solidarity and flexibility reduced the negative effects shirking risk on offshore software development success. Our results suggest that client firms shall benefit by forming the right mode of relational norms to achieve offshore success.

Countermeasure graphs for software security risk assessment: An action research

Software security risk analysis is an important part of improving software quality. In previous research we proposed countermeasure graphs (CGs), an approach to conduct risk analysis, combining the ideas of different risk analysis approaches. The approach was designed for reuse and easy evolvability to support agile software development.CGs have not been evaluated in industry practice in agile software development. In this research we evaluate the ability of CGs to support practitioners in identifying the most critical threats and countermeasures.The research method used is participatory action research where CGs were evaluated in a series of risk analyses on four different telecom products.With Peltier (used prior to the use of CGs at the company) the practitioners identified attacks with low to medium risk level. CGs allowed practitioners to identify more serious risks (in the first iteration 1 serious threat, 5 high risk threats, and 11 medium threats). The need for tool support was identified very early, tool support allowed the practitioners to play through scenarios of which countermeasures to implement, and supported reuse.The results indicate that CGs support practitioners in identifying high risk security threats, work well in an agile software development context, and are cost-effective.

Analyzing and handling local bias for calibrating parametric cost estimation models

ContextParametric cost estimation models need to be continuously calibrated and improved to assure more accurate software estimates and reflect changing software development contexts. Local calibration by tuning a subset of model parameters is a frequent practice when software organizations adopt parametric estimation models to increase model usability and accuracy. However, there is a lack of understanding about the cumulative effects of such local calibration practices on the evolution of general parametric models over time. ObjectiveThis study aims at quantitatively analyzing and effectively handling local bias associated with historical cross-company data, thus improves the usability of cross-company datasets for calibrating and maintaining parametric estimation models. MethodWe design and conduct three empirical studies to measure, analyze and address local bias in cross-company dataset, including: (1) defining a method for measuring the local bias associated with individual organization data subset in the overall dataset; (2) analyzing the impacts of local bias on the performance of an estimation model; (3) proposing a weighted sampling approach to handle local bias. The studies are conducted on the latest COCOMO II calibration dataset. ResultsOur results show that the local bias largely exists in cross company dataset, and the local bias negatively impacts the performance of parametric model. The local bias based weighted sampling technique helps reduce negative impacts of local bias on model performance. ConclusionLocal bias in cross-company data does harm model calibration and adds noisy factors to model maintenance. The proposed local bias measure offers a means to quantify degree of local bias associated with a cross-company dataset, and assess its influence on parametric model performance. The local bias based weighted sampling technique can be applied to trade-off and mitigate potential risk of significant local bias, which limits the usability of cross-company data for general parametric model calibration and maintenance.

The influence of selection bias on effort overruns in software development projects

ContextA potentially important, but neglected, reason for effort overruns in software projects is related to selection bias. Selection bias–induced effort overruns occur when proposals are more likely to be accepted and lead to actual projects when based on effort estimates that are too low rather than on realistic estimates or estimates that are too high. The effect of this bias may be particularly important in bidding rounds, but is potentially relevant in all situations where there is effort or cost-based selection between alternatives. ObjectiveTo better understand the relevance and management of selection bias effects in software development contexts. MethodFirst, we present a statistical model illustrating the relation between selection bias in bidding and other contexts and effort overruns. Then, we examine this relation in an experiment with software professionals who estimated and completed a set of development tasks and examine relevant field study evidence. Finally, we use a selection bias scenario to assess awareness of the effect of selection bias among software providers. ResultsThe results from the statistical model and the experiment demonstrated that selection bias is capable of explaining much of the effort overruns. The field evidence was also consistent with a substantial effect of selection bias on effort overruns, although there are alternative explanations for the findings. We found a low awareness of selection bias among the software providers. ConclusionSelection bias is likely to be an important source of effort overruns and should be addressed to reduce problems related to over-optimistic effort estimates.

Lean Software Development: A Tutorial

To put the concept of lean software development in context, it's useful to point out similarities and differences with agile software development. Agile development methods have generally expected system architecture and interaction design to occur outside the development team, or to occur in very small increments within the team. Because of this, agile practices often prove to be insufficient in addressing issues of solution design, user interaction design, and high-level system architecture. Increasingly, agile development practices are being thought of as good ways to organize software development, but insufficient ways to address design. Because design is fundamentally iterative and development is fundamentally iterative, the two disciplines suffer if they are not carefully integrated with each other. Because lean development lays out a set of principles that demand a whole-product, complete life-cycle, cross-functional approach, it's the more likely candidate to guide the combination of design, development, deployment, and validation into a single feedback loop focused on the discovery and delivery of value.

Influence of confirmation biases of developers on software quality: an empirical study

The thought processes of people have a significant impact on software quality, as software is designed, developed and tested by people. Cognitive biases, which are defined as patterned deviations of human thought from the laws of logic and mathematics, are a likely cause of software defects. However, there is little empirical evidence to date to substantiate this assertion. In this research, we focus on a specific cognitive bias, confirmation bias, which is defined as the tendency of people to seek evidence that verifies a hypothesis rather than seeking evidence to falsify a hypothesis. Due to this confirmation bias, developers tend to perform unit tests to make their program work rather than to break their code. Therefore, confirmation bias is believed to be one of the factors that lead to an increased software defect density. In this research, we present a metric scheme that explores the impact of developers' confirmation bias on software defect density. In order to estimate the effectiveness of our metric scheme in the quantification of confirmation bias within the context of software development, we performed an empirical study that addressed the prediction of the defective parts of software. In our empirical study, we used confirmation bias metrics on five datasets obtained from two companies. Our results provide empirical evidence that human thought processes and cognitive aspects deserve further investigation to improve decision making in software development for effective process management and resource allocation.

Interpretation problems related to the use of regression models to decide on economy of scale in software development

Many research studies report an economy of scale in software development, i.e., an increase in productivity with increasing project size. Several software practitioners seem, on the other hand, to believe in a diseconomy of scale, i.e., a decrease in productivity with increasing project size. In this paper we argue that violations of essential regression model assumptions in the research studies to a large extent may explain this disagreement. Particularly illustrating is the finding that the use of the production function (Size=a·Effortb), instead of the factor input model (Effort=a·Sizeb), would most likely have led to the opposite result, i.e., a tendency towards reporting diseconomy of scale in the research studies. We conclude that there are good reasons to warn against the use of regression analysis parameters to investigate economies of scale and to look for other analysis methods when studying economy of scale in software development contexts.

MemExplorer: From C Code to Memory Allocation

In this paper, we propose to address the memory mapping problems in the software development context. Indeed, the software designers do not have both efficient methodology and tools that allow us to determine the optimum memory mapping for their applications directly from their C code program. Here, we propose mathematical model that is able to represent both all the memory conflicts generated by a given application and the memory constraints due to the memory hierarchy. Indeed in this paper, only the sub problem of optimum memory mapping for a given hierarchy is treated and not the whole problem of optimum mapping and hierarchy one. Our results, on classical digital signal processing applications, show that our methodology always generates the optimum mapping memory in reasonable time (less than 30 seconds) and that these mappings are always optimum in energy consumption point of view (energy improvement up to 75%). Our methodology is automatic since we have developed a too, MemExplorer, that generates the optimum mapping from C code and that this tool can be used by SoftExplorer (power/energy consumption estimation tool) so, this work is very user friendly for non expert engineers.

Contextualizing agile systems engineering

Discussion about agility within Systems Engineering is ongoing [9,10,13] but there had been little discussion about the right context for it. This proposed a classification scheme for the right context of the Agile Development Cycle that was identified to be the main principle of agile development. Prior work about the context of agile software development [5,7, 8] was taken as the basis. Interviews in system developing companies were used to investigate the differences between context of agile software and systems development (hardware systems). It was found that the nature of the system is not only the main difference between the two domains but also the main driver for the right context of the Agile Development Cycle. In contrast to software, hardware systems that have to be produced physically often are difficult to be developed in small cyclic steps. Only if prototyping, testing, and implementing changes can be done quickly and cheaply, this principle is feasible. The system should not be safety-critical as well. Another requirement for feasibility is the willingness of customer to support this kind of development. On the other hand, some factors were identified to drive the demand for agility, like market dynamism, level of innovation, and rate of change. Therefore the context of Agile Systems Engineering was classified into the two dimensions: feasibility and demand. Some company examples were given to describe the different situations in this classification scheme. By using the factors one company can be classified within the scheme. So we find if the Agile Development Cycle can be put into the right context. For a situation where the Cycle is not feasible but agility is needed it we also show how it could be applied partially.

Coordination in co-located agile software development projects

Agile software development provides a way to organise the complex task of multi-participant software development while accommodating constant project change. Agile software development is well accepted in the practitioner community but there is little understanding of how such projects achieve effective coordination, which is known to be critical in successful software projects. A theoretical model of coordination in the agile software development context is presented based on empirical data from three cases of co-located agile software development. Many practices in these projects act as coordination mechanisms, which together form a coordination strategy. Coordination strategy in this context has three components: synchronisation, structure, and boundary spanning. Coordination effectiveness has two components: implicit and explicit. The theoretical model of coordination in agile software development projects proposes that an agile coordination strategy increases coordination effectiveness. This model has application for practitioners who want to select appropriate practices from agile methods to ensure they achieve coordination coverage in their project. For the field of information systems development, this theory contributes to knowledge of coordination and coordination effectiveness in the context of agile software development.

Convergent Trends Toward Ubiquitous Music

Current musical practices point to convergent research trends that bring together eco-composition, cooperative composition, mobile music and networked music. We present results of three compositional studies devised to test three musical interaction metaphors for ubiquitous computing contexts: the cup metaphor, time tagging and spatial tagging. These metaphors were developed through a conceptual and methodological framework that places compositional activities within the context of software development. We discuss the theoretical underpinnings of our approach and propose ubiquitous music as a frame of reference for this type of research.

Extracting and answering why and why not questions about Java program output

When software developers want to understand the reason for a program's behavior, they must translate their questions about the behavior into a series of questions about code, speculating about the causes in the process. The Whyline is a new kind of debugging tool that avoids such speculation by instead enabling developers to select a question about program output from a set of “why did and why didn't” questions extracted from the program's code and execution. The tool then finds one or more possible explanations for the output in question. These explanations are derived using a static and dynamic slicing, precise call graphs, reachability analyses, and new algorithms for determining potential sources of values. Evaluations of the tool on two debugging tasks showed that developers with the Whyline were three times more successful and twice as fast at debugging, compared to developers with traditional breakpoint debuggers. The tool has the potential to simplify debugging and program understanding in many software development contexts.

A novel composite model approach to improve software quality prediction

Context: How can quality of software systems be predicted before deployment? In attempting to answer this question, prediction models are advocated in several studies. The performance of such models drops dramatically, with very low accuracy, when they are used in new software development environments or in new circumstances. Objective The main objective of this work is to circumvent the model generalizability problem. We propose a new approach that substitutes traditional ways of building prediction models which use historical data and machine learning techniques. Method In this paper, existing models are decision trees built to predict module fault-proneness within the NASA Critical Mission Software. A genetic algorithm is developed to combine and adapt expertise extracted from existing models in order to derive a “composite” model that performs accurately in a given context of software development. Experimental evaluation of the approach is carried out in three different software development circumstances. Results The results show that derived prediction models work more accurately not only for a particular state of a software organization but also for evolving and modified ones. Conclusion Our approach is considered suitable for software data nature and at the same time superior to model selection and data combination approaches. It is then concluded that learning from existing software models (i.e., software expertise) has two immediate advantages; circumventing model generalizability and alleviating the lack of data in software-engineering.

Reverse Presentations

Reverse Presentations is a method for requirements validation in offshore software development. In this paper, the authors present and conceptually refine this method and carry out an initial evaluation. The method provides cross-phase support and is characterized by a structured and iterative validation process. In contrast to existing methods, it focuses on the client perspective and takes into account social distance challenges. The method aims at creating a common understanding of the future system by means of “reverse presentations”. This core element of the method facilitates the transfer of knowledge across social worlds for validation purposes. Case studies with clients confirm that the method fits well with the offshore software development context. The cases point to the method’s positive impact on the inter-organizational interaction and control.

Reverse Presentations

Reverse Presentations is a method for requirements validation in offshore software development. In this paper, the authors present and conceptually refine this method and carry out an initial evaluation. The method provides cross-phase support and is characterized by a structured and iterative validation process. In contrast to existing methods, it focuses on the client perspective and takes into account social distance challenges. The method aims at creating a common understanding of the future system by means of “reverse presentations”. This core element of the method facilitates the transfer of knowledge across social worlds for validation purposes. Case studies with clients confirm that the method fits well with the offshore software development context. The cases point to the method’s positive impact on the interorganizational interaction and control.

Discursive construction of ‘user innovations’ in the open source software development context

This paper analyzes the discursive construction of user innovations in open source software (OSS) development. A review of the literature on user innovation is conducted, after which a refined conceptualization of this topic encompassing the Foucauldian and social shaping of technology traditions is offered. A discourse analytic approach is used to examine both the process and the outcome of user innovation. Through an interpretive case study, a set of discourses evolving within an OSS project's website is identified, each implying particular subject positions for the OSS users and OSS developers in software production and consumption processes. Particular kinds of subject positions for the OSS users are adopted, negotiated, opposed as well as created by the OSS users in the analyzed discourses. The developers are in an authoritative position as the decision-makers and the ones realizing the innovations, but the users are allowed important positions of co-creators and co-cultivators. User innovation is characterized as a continuous, evolving co-creation process of the modes of subjectivity offered for the OSS users. This kind of process could be experimented with in other kinds of development contexts. On the other hand, this study questions many assumptions related to user innovation that are taken for granted, highlighting the difficulty of simply and straightforwardly enhancing it in any context. Finally, implications for theory and practice are discussed.

SPDW+: a seamless approach for capturing quality metrics in software development environments

Among the key factors for the success of a metrics program are the regularity of metrics collection, a seamless and efficient data collection methodology, and the presence of non-intrusive automated data collection tools. This paper presents the software process data warehousing architecture SPDW+ as a solution to the frequent, seamless, and automated capturing of software quality metrics, and their integration in a central repository for a full range of analyses. The striking features of the SPDW+ ETL (data extraction, transformation, and loading) approach are that it addresses heterogeneity issues related to the software development context, it is automatable and non-intrusive, and it allows different capturing frequency and latency strategies, hence allowing both analysis and monitoring of software metrics. The paper also provides a reference framework that details three orthogonal dimensions for considering ETL issues in the software development process context, used to develop SPDW+ ETL. The advantages of SPDW+ are: (1) flexibility to meet the requirements of the frequent changes in SDP environments; (2) support for monitoring, which implies the execution of frequent and incremental loads; (3) automation of the complex and time-consuming task of capturing metrics, making it seamless; (4) freedom of choice regarding management models and support tools used in projects; and (5) cohesion and consistency of the information stored in the metrics repository which will be used to compare data of different projects. The paper presents the reference framework, illustrates the key role played by the metrics capturing process in a metrics program using a case study, and presents the striking features of SPDW+ and its ETL approach, as well as an evaluation based on a prototype implementation.

The Determinants of Individual Performance and Collective Value in Private-Collective Software Innovation

We investigate if the actions by individuals in creating effective new innovations are aligned with the reuse of those innovations by others in a private-collective software development context. This relationship is studied in the setting of eleven “wiki-like” programming contests, where contest submissions are open for reuse by others, each involving more than one hundred contributors and several thousand attempts to generate, over a one-week period, the “best” software solution to a difficult programming challenge. We find that greater amounts of new code and novel recombinations of others’ code, in a contest submission, increases both the probability of achieving top rank and the subsequent reuse by others in their own submission (community value). While, increasing use of borrowed code in a submission reduces the probability of achieving top rank, but increases the community value of the submission. Code structures that are more non-conforming to commonly accepted programming conventions similarly increase the probability of generating a top performer, but reduce subsequent reuse by others. Surprisingly, greater code complexity in a submission increases both the odds of generating a top performing entry and its community value. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of the literature on private-collective innovation with an emphasis on the importance of considering both individual and community perspectives as they relate to knowledge creation, reuse and recombination for innovation. *Please send comments to klakhani@hbs.edu

‘Listening to the Voices of the Users' in Product Based Software Development

(IT) development, but it is often challenging, especially in the product based software development context. This article critically examines the practice of ‘listening to the voices of the users’; how it is accomplished in product based software development. First literature addressing users’ role in the product development context is reviewed. Afterwards, empirical analysis in three IT companies involved in product business but with different degrees of productization is carried out. In the analysis, the focus is on: 1) Where do the uses’ voices come from? 2) When are the users’ voices listened to? 3) What happens to the users’ voices; whether and how do they affect the development? 4) What are the challenges and particularities of each case? The analysis reveals similarities but also clear differences between the cases. Implications both for theory and practice discussed.

Software engineering: a quality management perspective

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of quality related to the context of software development using the ISO, TickIT and CMM frameworks. The paper also seeks to stress the fact that the different perspectives of those involved in software development will influence how quality is seen and measured. In the context of software engineering projects, quality takes on a broad meaning that refers not only to the way in which companies manage software engineering projects, but also to the software development process itself.Design/methodology/approachThe approach and methodology adopted for this paper were a review of the literature and best practice in software engineering. It is argued that users of software systems are more interested in how easy the software is to use than in the underlying application code that is used to generate the system. Using the body of knowledge that is software quality the basic characteristics of software quality are described and compared in terms of quality standards such as ISO, TickIT and CMM. Each of these standards is decomposed further in order to clarify its usefulness.FindingsThe findings in the paper suggest that, whilst there are many differences in the quality standards used, there are a number of similar characteristics. In essence the underlying philosophies of ISO and CMM have at the core the same goals. Some academics see CMM as being technically over‐engineered; a CMM‐compliant quality system is in many respects far in advance of ISO.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper helps define the strengths and weaknesses within ISO, TickIT and CMM from a software engineering practitioner perspective.Practical implicationsThe paper shows that software engineers need to pay more attention to the performance and conformance issues in software projects and to be proactive rather than reactive to quality issues.Originality/valueIt may be argued that the importance of this paper lies in the assertion that those engaged in the software engineering are in need of a multi‐perspective view on quality and, with that in mind, this paper should appeal to practitioners and members of the academic community with an interest in software quality.