Distributed Development Environment Research Articles

Data Structure Profiler Using MERN Technology

Profiler introduces a cutting-edge approach to efficiently manage and track Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) in software development projects. In the realm of modern software engineering, where complexity is ubiquitous and scalability is critical, effective management of DSAs is essential for ensuring the robustness, maintainability, and performance of software systems. DSA Profiler seamlessly integrates into the development lifecycle, offering developers a centralized platform to meticulously document, organize, and monitor the implementation of various data structures and algorithms within their codebase. Its intuitive interfaces and powerful functionalities facilitate the process of incorporating, modifying, and optimizing DSAs. By providing detailed insights and analytics, DSA Profiler empowers developers to make informed decisions about the most appropriate data structures and algorithms for their specific needs, ultimately streamlining the development process and significantly enhancing code quality. One of the standout features of DSA Profiler is its ability to benchmark data structures and algorithms, allowing developers to evaluate their performance under different conditions. This benchmarking capability ensures that developers can identify and address performance bottlenecks early in the development cycle. Furthermore, This collaborative environment helps maintain consistency and adherence to standards across projects, which is particularly beneficial in large-scale and distributed development environments. Keywords - data structure benchmarking, data structure optimization, algorithm performance tracking, software scalability, development lifecycle integration, codebase management, performance analytics, collaborative development tools, real-time optimization recommendations.

ChainAgile: A framework for the improvement of Scrum Agile distributed software development based on blockchain.

Software Development based on Scrum Agile in a distributed development environment plays a pivotal role in the contemporary software industry by facilitating software development across geographic boundaries. However, in the past different frameworks utilized to address the challenges like communication and collaboration in scrum agile distributed software development (SADSD) were notably inadequate in transparency, security, traceability, geographically dispersed location work agreements, geographically dispersed teamwork effectiveness, and trust. These deficiencies frequently resulted in delays in software development and deployment, customer dissatisfaction, canceled agreements, project failures, and disputes over payments between customers and development teams. To address these challenges of SADSD, this paper proposes a new framework called ChainAgile, which leverages blockchain technology. ChainAgile employs a private Ethereum blockchain to facilitate the execution of smart contracts. These smart contracts cover a range of functions, including acceptance testing, secure payments, requirement verification, task prioritization, sprint backlog, user story design and development and payments with the automated distribution of payments via digital wallets to development teams. Moreover, in the ChainAgile framework, smart contracts also play a pivotal role in automatically imposing penalties on customers for making late payments or for no payments and penalties on developers for completing the tasks that exceed their deadlines. Furthermore, ChainAgile effectively addresses the scalability limitations intrinsic in blockchain technology by incorporating the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is used for storage solutions as an off-chain mechanism. The experimental results conclusively show that this innovative approach substantially improves transparency, traceability, coordination, communication, security, and trust for both customers and developers engaged in scrum agile distributed software development (SADSD).

Evaluation of requirement engineering best practices for secure software development in GSD: An ISM analysis

AbstractTechnological advancement makes the world a global village. Security is an evergreen and everlasting area, because of the continuous threat from Hackers and Crackers. The immense use of software systems has modernized human society in every aspect. Thus, it is crucial to devise new processes, techniques, and tools to support teams in the development of secure code from the early stages of the software development process, while potentially reducing the costs and shortening the time to market. Considering the significance of software security, it is important to consider the security practices from the early phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC), that is, requirements engineering (RE). Hence, this study aims to identify and categorize RE practices important to apply for secure software development (SSD) in a geographically distributed development environment. To study the RE practices concerning SSD, we conducted a questionnaire survey with industrial experts in the global software development (GSD) context.Furthermore, the interpretive structure modeling (ISM) approach was applied to evaluate the relationship between the RE security practice core categories. This paper identifies 70 practices and classifies them into 11 fundamental dimensions (categories) to assist GSD organizations in specifying the requirements for SSD. The ISM results show that the “Awareness of Secure Requirement Engineering (SRE)” category has the most decisive influence on the other 10 core categories of the identified RE security practices. With the help of empirical evidence and the ISM approach, this work attempts to identify potential security practices and to give a set of secure RE practices that can be used to improve the security of the software development process.

Component Reusability in Extreme Programming Using Microservice Architecture

Background/Objectives: In a distributed development environment, the different teams share the code leading to dependencies and shadowing the purpose of microservices. This study is to propose the technique of component reusability in Online Order Management to measure the reusability in terms of lib reuse, product customization and vendor services. Methods: The case study on online order management software was analysed, developed and tested. The mean and standard deviation are calculated to what extent OOM projects can be reused in other application domains like audio, business, communication, games, software development, library management, home utilities and education. The source of our descriptive analysis is the Kruskal- Wallis test. Reusability is calculated by three markers: lib-reuse, Reusefrequency and throughput. The proposed technique is efficient in terms of throughput. Findings: The presented case study is a practical application that illustrates the percentage of reusability of the proposed model. This will not only minimize engineering efforts but also reduces resource costs. Reusability is directly proportional to resource cost. More the reuse percentage lesser the resource cost. The results have shown the reusability percentage for each domain. Projects are selected based on popularity from GitHub and BitBucket. Novelty: The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the fact that the specific application domains can be considered as reusing assets from open-source software projects. The proposed approach increases the autonomy between the teams and also helps teams to operate with minimal dependencies. The software professionals can benefit from the proposed methods. Keywords: Reusability; Microservices; Extreme Programming

Empirical Investigation About the Factors Affecting the Cost Estimation in Global Software Development Context

Software organization always aims at developing a quality software product using the estimated development resources, effort, and time. Global Software Development (GSD) has emerged as an essential tool to ensure optimal utilization of resources, which is performed in globally distributed settings in various geographical locations. Global software engineering focuses on reducing the cost, increasing the development speed, and accessing skilled developers worldwide. Estimating the required amount of resources and effort in the distributed development environment remains a challenging task. Thus, there is a need to focus on cost estimation models in the GSD context. We nevertheless acknowledge that several cost estimation techniques have been reported. However, to the best of our knowledge, the existing cost estimation techniques/models lack considering the additional cost drivers required to compute the accurate cost estimation in the GSD context. Motivated by this, the current work aims at identifying the other cost drivers that affect the cost estimation in the context of GSD. To achieve the targeted objectives, current state-of-the-art related to existing cost estimation techniques of GSD is reported. We adopted SLR and Empirical approach to address the formulated research questions. The current study also identifies the missing factors that would help the practitioners improve the cost estimation models. The results indicate that previously conducted work ignores the additional elements necessary for the cost estimation in the GSD context. Moreover, the current work proposes a conceptual cost estimation model tailored to fit the GSD context.

Literature-based identification of success-relevant influencing factors of distributed product development

Increasingly complex products and processes, tougher international competition and increasing customer requirements are some of the trends leading to the current organizational change. Companies are more and more conducting their development activities across locations and national borders. The aim is to optimally exploit the potential created by the changed environment and to gain an advantage over the competitors. Furthermore, companies are facing additional challenges, such as increased organizational effort, a lack of personal contact and the resulting communication delays. In order to be able to react flexibly to the changed boundary conditions, companies are increasingly trying to implement agile measures. The implementation of these measures and the addressing of the heterogeneity of the distributed development environments increase the complexity of the entire product development process. In order to successfully master this complexity in the transformation process, the question arises which influencing factors are decisively contributing to the success of distributed development processes. This contribution is therefore dedicated to the literature-based identification of the success-relevant influencing factors in distributed product development. In addition, the success-relevant influencing factors were assigned to the dimensions people, technology and organization to further be able to investigated what effect changing an influencing factor has on the dimensions and thus also on the influencing factors classified under them. Finally, the collection of success-relevant influencing factors indicates which influencing factors must be considered when adapting processes, methods and tools as part of the operation system of the product development process to the prevailing distributed development situation. Additionally, it must be considered that the transformation process can only be successful if the integrated consideration of the three dimensions technology, organization as well as the individual people affected by change as the center of product development is taken into account.

Exploring and Expanding GSE Education with Open Source Software Development

Global software engineering (GSE) courses traditionally require cooperation between at least two universities so as to provide a distributed development environment to the students. In this study, we explore an alternative way to organize a global software engineering course where students work on open source software development (OSSD) projects rather than in a multi-university collaboration setting. The results show that the new setup may provide core GSE challenges as well as challenges associated with software development outsourcing and challenges related to working on large open source software. The present article compares the experiences gained from running a combined GSE and OSSD course against the experiences gained from running a traditional GSE course. The two alternatives are compared in terms of students’ learning outcomes and course organization. The authors found that a combined GSE and OSSD course provides learning opportunities that are partly overlapping with, and partly complementary to, a traditional GSE course. The authors also found that the combined OSSD and GSE course was somewhat easier to organize because most of the activities took place in a single university setting. The authors used the extended GSE taxonomy for the comparison and found it to be a useful tool for this, although it had some limitations in expressive power. Therefore, two additional relationship dimensions are proposed that will further enrich the extended taxonomy in classifying GSE (and OSSD) projects.

Systematic literature review on agile practices in global software development

ContextDeveloping software in distributed development environments exhibits coordination, control and communication challenges. Agile practices, which demand frequent communication and self-organization between remote sites, are increasingly found in global software development (GSD) to mitigate said challenges. ObjectiveWe aim to provide detailed insight into what is reported on the successful application of agile practices in GSD from 1999 to 2016 and also identify the most frequently applied agile practices and reported distribution scenarios. We further strive to uncover research opportunities and gaps in the field of agile GSD. MethodWe build our systematic literature review on top of a previous review, which investigated studies published between 1999 and 2009, and extend the review by years 2010–2016, for which we conduct both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis. ResultsOur results show that the majority of the cases studied is global and involves complex distribution scenarios with Scrum or combined Scrum/Extreme Programming being the most used agile methods. Key results include that in contrast to 1999–2009, where four Extreme Programming practices were among the ten most frequently used agile practices, in 2010–2016 Scrum is in the center of agile GSD implementations with eight Scrum-based practices in the top ten agile practices used in GSD. ConclusionAgile GSD is a maturing research field with higher quality contributions and a greater variety of publication types and methods from 2010 to 2016 than before from 1999 to 2009. However, researchers need to report full empirical contextual details of their studied cases in order to improve the generalizability of results and allow the future creation of stronger frameworks to drive the implementation of agile practices in GSD.

A Multi Release Cost Model in Distributed Environment

Software industry has reached far beyond since its origin. Technical advancements are taking place at a speed faster than ever. This has further enhanced the pressure on software developers. They are trying hard to keep a pace with these rapid developments by coming out with strategies to increase the pace of their work without significantly affecting the software quality and reliability. One such strategy is distributed development of software in which the software is composed of two different types of components viz. newly developed and re-used component. Software developed in Distributed Development Environment (DDE) is characterized by enhanced availability and reliability. At the same time, the ever growing contention in the market and increasing needs of customers obligate the developers to come out with enhanced functionalities in the software from time to time leading to multiple releases of a software. The added functionalities further enhance the existing complexity of the software and testing team may not be able to perfectly remove the faults leading to imperfect debugging or add more bugs due to lack of knowledge about the software in the initial phase known as error generation. In this paper, we incorporated this real-life phenomenon to come out with a multi up-gradations modeling for removal of software fault in a distributed environment. In the present framework we described a cost model to obtain optimal release time in multi up-gradation of software under distributed environment. To validate the analytical results of the proposed framework, numerical illustration is provided.

A study of software development project cost, schedule and quality by outsourcing to low cost destination

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to find good values of onsite-offshore team strength; number of hours of communication between business users and onsite team and between onsite and offshore team so as to reduce project cost and improve schedule in a global software development (GSD) environment for software development project. Design/methodology/approach – This study employs system dynamics simulation approach to study software project characteristics in both co-located and distributed development environments. The authors consulted 14 experts from Indian software outsourcing industry during our model construction and validation. Findings – The study results show that there is a drop in overall team productivity in outsourcing environment by considering the offshore options. But the project cost can be reduced by employing the offshore team for coding and testing work only with minimal training for imparting business knowledge. The research results show that there is a potential to save project cost by being flexible in project schedule. Research limitations/implications – The implication of the study is that the project management team should be careful not to keep high percentage of manpower at offshore location in distributed software environment. A large offshore team can increase project cost and schedule due to higher training overhead, lower productivity and higher error proneness. In GSD, the management effort should be to keep requirement analysis and design work at onsite location and involves the offshore team in coding and testing work. Practical implications – The software project manager can use the model results to divide the software team between onsite and offshore location during various phases of software development in distributed environment. Originality/value – The study is novel as there is little attempt at finding the team distribution between onsite and offshore location in GSD environment.

Distributed software development in an offshore outsourcing project: A case study of source code evolution and quality

ContextOffshore outsourcing collaborations can result in distributed development, which has been linked to quality-related concerns. However, there are few studies that focus on the implication of distributed development on quality, and they report inconsistent findings using different proxies for quality. Thus, there is a need for more studies, as well as to identify useful proxies for certain distributed contexts. The presented empirical study was performed in a context that involved offshore outsourcing vendors in a multisite distributed development setting. ObjectiveThe aim of the study is to investigate how quality changes during evolution in a distributed development environment that incurs organizational changes in terms of number of companies involved. MethodA case study approach is followed in the investigation. Only post-release defects are used as a proxy for external quality due to unreliable defect data found pre-release such as those reported during integration. Focus group meetings were also held with practitioners. ResultsThe results suggest that practices that can be grouped into product, people, and process categories can help ensure post-release quality. However, post-release defects are insufficient for showing a conclusive impact on quality of the development setting. This is because the development teams worked independently as isolated distributed teams, and integration defects would help to better reflect on the impact on quality of the development setting. ConclusionsThe mitigation practices identified can be useful information to practitioners that are planning to engage in similar globally distributed development projects. Finally, it is important to take into consideration the arrangement of distributed development teams in global projects, and to use the context to identify appropriate proxies for quality in order to draw correct conclusions about the implications of the context. This would help with providing practitioners with well-founded findings about the impact on quality of globally distributed development settings.

A web-based collaborative framework for facilitating decision making on a 3D design developing process

Abstract Increased competitive challenges are forcing companies to find better ways to bring their applications to market faster. Distributed development environments can help companies improve their time-to-market by enabling parallel activities. Although, such environments still have their limitations in real-time communication and real-time collaboration during the product development process. This paper describes a web-based collaborative framework which has been developed to support the decision making on a 3D design developing process. The paper describes 3D design file for the discussion that contains all relevant annotations on its surface and their visualization on the user interface for design changing. The framework includes a native CAD data converting module, 3D data based real-time communication module, revision control module for 3D data and some sub-modules such as data storage and data management. We also discuss some raised issues in the project and the steps underway to address them.

Ensuring data quality beyond change management in virtual enterprise

Concurrent engineering in distributed development environments like those in the automotive or aerospace industry sets enormous demands on the organisation for a close collaboration between the companies and departments involved. Seamless data communication in all phases of the product development process is a prerequisite for cost-optimal and successful collaboration processes. Automotive suppliers that develop system components for a number of different OEMs or tier-1 suppliers face the challenge of ensuring that they make the CAD data available in the format required by their customers and with a high level of reliability and, if data translation is involved, that they take the system configuration of the respective customer into consideration. The main problem in this process chain is the insufficient data quality. This paper describes the approaches taken in cooperation between the supplier portal http://www.opendesc.com and Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG.

End-to-End Formal Specification, Validation, and Verification Process: A Case Study of Space Flight Software

The quality of requirements and the effectiveness of verification and validation (V&V) techniques in guaranteeing that a final system reflects its established requirements have a direct influence on the quality and dependability of the delivered system. The V&V process can be efficient from a managerial point of view, but ineffective from a technical perspective, and vice versa. This paper presents an end-to-end formal computer-aided specification, validation, and verification (SV&V) process, whose feasibility and effectiveness were evaluated against the flight software for the Brazilian Satellite Launcher. Unified modeling language (UML) statechart assertions, scenario-based validation, and runtime verification are used to formally specify and verify the system, and metrics of the ongoing process and its V&V results are collected during the application of the process. The results of the case study indicate that the process and its computer-aided environment were both technically feasible to apply and managerially effective, will likely scale well to cater to SV&V of mission-critical systems that have a larger number of behavioral requirements, and can be used for V&V in a distributed development environment.

Testing-Effort Dependent Software Reliability Model for Distributed Systems

Distributed systems are being developed in the context of the client-server architecture. Client-server architectures dominate the landscape of computer-based systems. Client-server systems are developed using the classical software engineering activities. Developing distributed systems is an activity that consumes time and resources. Even if the degree of automation of software development activities increased, resources are an important limitation. Reusability is widely believed to be a key direction to improving software development productivity and quality. Software metrics are needed to identify the place where resources are needed; they are an extremely important source of information for decision making. In this paper, an attempt has been made to describe the relationship between the calendar time, the fault removal process and the testing-effort consumption in a distributed development environment. Software fault removal phenomena and testing-effort expenditures are described by a non-homogenous Poisson process (NHPP) and testing-effort curves respectively. Actual software reliability data cited in literature have been used to demonstrate the proposed model. The results are fairly encouraging.

An Effective Development Environment Setup for System and Application Software

Introduction Software development is the construction of system or application software that can be deployed on computers to execute repetitive tasks; more or less this software automates manual tasks. Software development is very often understood as programming, or writing a source code by using a particular computer language, but it can also include all other tasks from an initial idea to the implementation of the same idea. Implementation in this case means specification of all details or algorithms, design, programming, testing, deployment, and maintenance. While most of the current literature is dedicated to the description of methodology and processes (Sommerville, 2001; Larman, 2005; Leffingwell & Widrig, 2000; Beck, 2002; Beck et al., 2001; Beck et al., 2001a), a very important part, the implementation platform, is often ignored. The reason is probably based on the understanding that the methodology should be independent from implementation details. The description of an implementation platform is ignored, and it is assumed that a method implementation requires a computer. This assumption is, of course, correct; because in order to execute the software we need a processor and hardware. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap information, and to draw attention to the concept that an effective development environment requires adequate tools. To be productive and effective, any kind of production requires tools, no matter where--in civil engineering, construction, mechanical engineering, or software engineering. Today it is unimaginable to even think about producing machine parts manually. This is a job for highly specialized machines connected to the computers, with their operations managed by Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems. Some will argue that software development is different, and of course it is, as any production type is different; however, the use of tools is a common pattern, and replacing manual work improves productivity, reduces the number of errors, and, generally speaking, significantly improves the average product quality. While it can be argued that these tools and the development environment setup are important for any software development method, we believe that an effective development environment is more vital in the agile and distributed development environment. In the case of the agile development approach, waiting a day or two for a new release to be deployed and tested is not an option. Short iteration requires prompt feedback. Also, what is very important today, when outsourcing is present, is prompt and timely information-sharing and storing, even in small development teams. Although communications through e-mail messages, chats, and over video conferences can help to share information and quickly clarify issues, they do not guarantee that information, as well as any conclusions or actions, will be stored in a repository that enables fast and easy searching, filtering, or retrieving. An effective collaboration environment needs tools that can inform and warn the stakeholders about any kinds of changes. Setting up an effective development environment in advance is very rare. Development environment setup, as well as using of proper tools, is mostly left to the particular developer. Although many IT companies are aware of the need to use an effective development environment and standard set of tools, very seldom does this awareness assist in the choosing of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) framework and target database software. Aside from creating an ineffective use of tools, this approach can also create a lot of issues in the future. An example issue is the replacement of skilled developers with those that are not familiar with the tools, or tool installation and configuration. An effective development environment can significantly speed up the software development process and improve final product quality. …

Migration of the Gaudi and LHCb software repositories from CVS to Subversion

A common code repository is of primary importance in a distributed development environment such as large HEP experiments. CVS (Concurrent Versions System) has been used in the past years at CERN for the hosting of shared software repositories, among which were the repositories for the Gaudi Framework and the LHCb software projects.Many developers around the world produced alternative systems to share code and revisions among several developers, mainly to overcome the limitations in CVS, and CERN has recently started a new service for code hosting based on the version control system Subversion.The differences between CVS and Subversion and the way the code was organized in Gaudi and LHCb CVS repositories required careful study and planning of the migration. Special care was used to define the organization of the new Subversion repository. To avoid as much as possible disruption in the development cycle, the migration has been gradual with the help of tools developed explicitly to hide the differences between the two systems.The principles guiding the migration steps, the organization of the Subversion repository and the tools developed will be presented, as well as the problems encountered both from the librarian and the user points of view.

Contextualizing agile software development

SUMMARYThis paper presents a contextual model for software‐intensive systems development to guide the adoption and adaptation of agile software development practices. This model was found especially useful when the project context departs significantly from the “agile sweet spot”, that is, the ideal conditions in which agile software development practices originated from, and where they are most likely to succeed, “out of the box”. This is the case for large systems, distributed development environment, safety‐critical systems, system requiring a novel architecture, or systems with an unorthodox business model or governance model. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Technologies and Tools for Distributed Teams

Several technologies support communication, control, and coordination problems in a distributed development environment. The authors discuss such collaboration and integration technologies and take a close look at their tools for particular software processes, as the technologies often have a general purpose.

A generalized software fault classification model

Most non-homogenous Poisson process (NHPP) based software reliability growth models (SRGMs) presented in the literature assume that the faults in the software are of the same type. However, this assumption is not truly representative of reality. It has been observed that the software contains different types of faults and each fault requires different strategies and different amount of testing-effort to remove it. If this assumption is not taken into account, the SRGM may give misleading results. This paper proposes a generalized model based on classification the faults in the software system according to their removal complexity. The removal complexity is proportional to the amount of testing-effort required to remove the fault. The testing-effort expenditures are represented by the number of stages required to remove the fault after the failure observation / fault isolation (with time delay between the stages). Therefore, it explicitly takes into account the faults of different severity and can capture variability in the growth curves depending on the environment it is being used and at the same time it has the capability to reduce either to exponential or S-shaped growth curves. Such modelling approach is very much suited for object-oriented programming and distributed development environments. Actual software reliability data have been used to demonstrate the proposed generalized model.