Software Development Discipline Research Articles

Teamwork dynamics in the context of large-size software development courses

BackgroundEffectively facilitating teamwork experiences, particularly in the context of large-size courses, is difficult to implement. This study seeks to address the challenges of implementing effective teamwork experiences in large courses. This study integrated teamwork pedagogy to facilitate a semester-long project in the context of a large-size class comprising 118 students organized into 26 teams. The data for this study were collected from two online teamwork sessions when teams collaborated and self-recorded during the in-class time. The video recordings were qualitatively analyzed to identify patterns in team dynamics processes through visualizations. The study aims to provide insights into the different ways team members engaged in team dynamics processes during different phases of the semester.ResultsFindings suggest that members of teams were mostly active and passive during meetings and less constructive and interactive in their engagement. Team members mainly engaged in communication, team orientation, and feedback behaviors. Over time, team members' interactions with one another remained about the same, with feedback behaviors tending to diminish and coordination behaviors staying about the same or slightly increasing over time.ConclusionThe implications of this study extend to both practice and theory. Practically, combining cooperative learning and scrum practices enabled a blend of collaborative and cooperative work, which suggests providing teams with tools and structures to coordinate teamwork processes and promote interaction among team members. From a theoretical perspective, this study contributes to the understanding of temporal aspects of teamwork dynamics by examining how team interactions evolve during working sessions at different points in time. Overall, this research provides valuable insights for educators, practitioners, and researchers aiming to enhance teamwork experiences in large courses, particularly in software development disciplines.

What more can Software Development Learn from Agile Manufacturing? Some Pointers on the 20th Anniversary of the Agile Manifesto

The concept of agility originated in manufacturing and was later adopted by the software development discipline. In this article we argue that in the process some important aspects of the agility theory have been either ignored or misinterpreted. A historical review of the evolving paradigms and practices in software development and manufacturing on the 20th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto (2001) suggests that if the ideas and principles underlying agility are faithfully implemented it would lead to significant improvement in the software development process.

Towards Continuous Deployment for Blockchain

Ensuring a production-ready state of the application under development is the immanent feature of the continuous delivery approach. In a blockchain network, nodes communicate, storing data in a decentralized manner. Each node executes the same business application but operates in a distinct execution environment. The literature lacks research, focusing on continuous practices for blockchain and distributed ledger technology. In particular, such works with support for both software development disciplines of design and deployment. Artifacts from considered disciplines have been placed in the 1 + 5 architectural views model. The approach aims to ensure the continuous deployment of containerized blockchain distributed applications. The solution has been divided into two independent components: Delivery and deployment. They interact through Git distributed version control. Dedicated GitHub repositories should store the business application and deployment configurations for nodes. The delivery component has to ensure the deployment package in the actual version of the business application with the node-specific up-to-date version of deployment configuration files. The deployment component is responsible for providing running distributed applications in containers for all blockchain nodes. The approach uses Jenkins and Kubernetes frameworks. For the sake of verification, preliminary tests have been conducted for the Electricity Consumption and Supply Management blockchain-based system for prosumers of renewable energy.

Exploring the Relations Between Net Benefits of IT Projects and CIOs’ Perception of Quality of Software Development Disciplines

Software development enterprises are under consistent pressure to improve their management techniques and development processes. These are comprised of several disciplines like requirements acquisition, design, coding, testing, etc. that must be continuously improved and individually tailored to suit specific software development project. This paper presents an evaluation approach that enables the enterprises to increase development process net benefits by improving disciplines' quality and increasing developers' satisfaction. Our approach builds on Kano's model of quality. Based on an empirical study of top 1000 enterprises from Slovenia we find that application of software development methodologies in individual development disciplines significantly relates to net benefits of IT projects. The results show that different types of Kano quality are present in individual disciplines. Enterprises should be cautious when altering must-be quality disciplines like testing or deployment as they can significantly disrupt the established routines, cause great dissatisfaction between developers and significantly reduce benefits. On the other hand, changing the attractive quality disciplines like requirements acquisition can notably increase developers' satisfaction and benefits but is less likely to disrupt the established routines.

Analogy-Based Approaches to Improve Software Project Effort Estimation Accuracy

Abstract In the discipline of software development, effort estimation renders a pivotal role. For the successful development of the project, an unambiguous estimation is necessitated. But there is the inadequacy of standard methods for estimating an effort which is applicable to all projects. Hence, to procure the best way of estimating the effort becomes an indispensable need of the project manager. Mathematical models are only mediocre in performing accurate estimation. On that account, we opt for analogy-based effort estimation by means of some soft computing techniques which rely on historical effort estimation data of the successfully completed projects to estimate the effort. So in a thorough study to improve the accuracy, models are generated for the clusters of the datasets with the confidence that data within the cluster have similar properties. This paper aims mainly on the analysis of some of the techniques to improve the effort prediction accuracy. Here the research starts with analyzing the correlation coefficient of the selected datasets. Then the process moves through the analysis of classification accuracy, clustering accuracy, mean magnitude of relative error and prediction accuracy based on some machine learning methods. Finally, a bio-inspired firefly algorithm with fuzzy analogy is applied on the datasets to produce good estimation accuracy.

Continuous Testing and Solutions for Testing Problems in Continuous Delivery: A Systematic Literature Review

Continuous Delivery is a software development discipline where quality software is built in a way that it can be released into production at any time. However, even though instructions on how to implement it can be found in the literature, it has been challenging to put it into practice. Testing is one of these biggest challenges. On the one hand, there are several Continuous Delivery testing problems related to Continuous Delivery reported in the literature. On the other hand, some sources state that Continuous Testing is the missing element in Continuous Delivery. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review. We look at proposals, techniques, approaches, methods, frameworks, tools and solutions for testing problems. We also attempt to validate whether Continuous Testing is the missing component of Continuous Delivery by analyzing the different definitions of it and the testing stages and levels in Continuous Delivery. Finally, we look for open issues in Continuous Testing. We have found 56 articles and the results indicate that Continuous Testing is straight related to Continuous Delivery. We also describe how solutions have been proposed to face the testing problems. Lastly, we show that there are still open issues to solve.

Towards a Theory of Trusted Performance in Software Development Projects

Within the software development discipline, teams are created and disintegrated at an extremely rapid pace. IT organizations are therefore looking at ways to create an environment of greater performance in a shorter period of time. This paper integrates organizational trust (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995) into the research on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) to help more clearly understand the relationships that are performance impacting. This integration called the “theory of trusted performance” should be able to be leveraged to deliver greater performance within an organization. This paper ends with a brief discussion of practical ways organizational leaders can leverage this model for software development and suggests ways to test this model.

Towards a competency model for requirements analysts

AbstractRequirements engineering is a software development discipline, executed by requirements analysts (RAs), that includes requirements elicitation, analysis, specification and validation. Its successful outcome is very often essential to overall project success. However, there is a lack of systematically conducted empirical research on the competencies of RAs. This paper addressed this gap by conducting 64 interviews at eight major North American and European financial services companies. Our qualitative research design follows an interpretive approach and uses critical incident technique. We develop a competency model, which specifies 16 critical competencies, and integrates contextual and situational factors as well as results variables. ‘Consulting others’, ‘Testing assumptions and investigating’ and ‘Explaining concepts and opinions’ were the most frequently identified competencies. This indicates that for an effective analyst, close interaction and communication with customers is indeed crucial – but of equally importance is the critical questioning of the expressed needs. Surprisingly, applying specific tools and advanced techniques did not seem to play a significant role from the interviewees' perspective. This study contributes to theory as it is the first to elaborate a competency model for RAs. It also provides a foundation for the development of competency‐based training in companies and universities.

Improving agility and discipline of software development with the Scrum and CMMI

This study presents a method of combining the Scrum methodology with the CMMI maturity model to improve both agility and discipline of software development. First, the authors propose the CMMI-Scrum reference model, which maps Scrum practices onto 123 practices of CMMI staged levels 2 and 3. For 60- of CMMI practices, which are insufficiently covered by Scrum they add new practices that improve discipline while maintaining agility. The practices to improve an actual software development process are selected from the reference model with the P-Sel algorithm based on answers to a questionnaire with 25 single-choice questions. They have applied our approach to processes of two IT companies, where on average 72- of the suggested practices were confirmed, 24.5- were mismatched and 3.5- were rejected.

Democratizing software: Open source, the hacker ethic, and beyond

The development of computer software and hardware in closed-source, corporate environments limits the extent to which technologies can be used to empower the marginalized and oppressed. Various forms of resistance and counter-mobilization may appear, but these reactive efforts are often constrained by limitations that are embedded in the technologies by those in power. In the world of open source software development, actors have one more degree of freedom in the proactive shaping and modification of technologies, both in terms of design and use. Drawing on the work of philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg, I argue that the open source model can act as a forceful lever for positive change in the discipline of software development. A glance at the somewhat vacuous hacker ethos, however, demonstrates that the technical community generally lacks a cohesive set of positive values necessary for challenging dominant interests. Instead, Feenbergos commitment to "deep democratization" is offered as a guiding principle for incorporating more preferable values and goals into software development processes.

What can happen when metrics make the call

The software development discipline uses many well-intended metrics in ways that can be detrimental to a company's financial well-being. The most dangerous are the derived metrics-measures produced from some sort of equation that purport to show progress toward a goal. These are dangerous precisely because they are goal-oriented: they try to measure the goodness of a product or process. Derived metrics are built from feature metrics-they measure readily identifiable and relatively unambiguous features of a product or process. In isolation, feature metrics don't describe goodness, but they can be used in a derived metric to judge the quality. Bogus software metrics are an almost unavoidable side-effect of trying to understand and manage software products and processes. Yet managers and metrics groups can take one important lesson to heart: listen to your developers and listen very carefully. If you have seen why a metric is bogus, don't just leave it at that or treat it as a secondary issue. Root out the problem and figure out how to do it right or, at the very least, better than you did it before. >

The sociology of microprogramming

Microprogramming is an implementation technique. As computer complexity has risen, it has gained increased importance and wider application. As we proceed through the 80's, we are witness to more specialization and divergence between hardware and software. Hardware trends toward VLSI introduce new tradeoffs that are to be evaluated by design engineers. Concurrency and complex security mechanisms in operating systems and databases have extended the software development discipline to new limits. Each of these examples illustrate the trend toward a larger gap between hardware and software. The purpose of this paper is first, to re-examine the role that microprogramming or firmware engineering plays in the design and implementation of computer systems and, second, to analyze its ability to bridge the gap between hardware and software as perceived and affected by various corporate cultures.

Relationship of software engineering and simulation

In response to the enormous annual dollar value spent on software, major emphasis is being placed within industry, Government and academia on the establishment of a rigorous discipline for the development of software—i. e., on the establishment of software engineering. This has significance in the realm of computer system simulation for two basic reasons: first, computer system simulation (any simulation for that matter) does itself involve the development of software; and second, computer system simulation is a technique/tool which can be applied to the discipline of software development. It will be the purpose of this workshop to discuss both the role of software engineering in computer system simulation and the role of computer system simulation in software engineering. Potential topics for discussion include, but are not limited to: a. Identification of software engineering b. Disciplines required for software engineering c. Software engineering in support of computer system simulation d. Computer system simulation as a tool in software engineering e. Recent progress in the direction of establishing the software engineering discipline.