Software Development Organizations Research Articles

Effective Social Productivity Measurements during Software Development — An Empirical Study

Much of contemporary scientific discussion regarding factors that influence software development productivity is undertaken in various domains where there is an insufficient empirical basis for exploring socio-technical factors of productivity that are specific to a software development organization. The purpose of the study is to characterize the multidimensional nature of software development productivity and its social aspects as a set of latent constructs (i.e. variables that are not directly observed) for a medium-sized software company. To this end, we designed an exploratory in-depth field study based on the hypothesized productivity constructs, which were modeled by a set of factors identified from literature reviews, and later refined by industrial focus groups. In order to demonstrate the applicability of our approach, we conducted confirmatory factor analysis with the data attained from a questionnaire with 216 participants. To investigate factors of influence further, we analyzed the impact of selected team-based variables over the latent constructs of productivity. Taken together, our findings confirm that such an approach can be used to explore the quantifiable influence of socio-technical factors that would affect productivity of a particular software development organization. Ultimately, the resulting model provides guidance to explore the comparative importance of a set of firm-specific factors that may help to improve the productivity of the organization.

Integrating Agile Methods into a Level 5 CMMI-DEV Organization: a Case Study

Integrating new practices into software development processes requires previous research and planning; thus, the transition becomes easier, the maturity is achieved in a gradual but constant manner, and consequently, the organization fulfills its business objectives. This paper describes the experience of a Mexican software development organization that integrated agile methods into its CMMI-DEV level 5 development processes. This case study identifies and discusses quantitative and qualitative benefits related to the competitive level of the organization, enriched ways of working, optimization of resources and time, and encouraging a motivating working environment.

A Scrumban integrated gamification approach to guide software process improvement: a Turkish case study

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in tailoring agile development methodologies by combining different agile practices. The adoption of such a balancing approach requires a systematic customization of best practices among agile methodologies. This paper presents an empirical case study for adopting a hybrid Scrumban methodology with an integrated gamification approach, which was conducted in the context of a small-medium enterprise (SME). First, we conducted a focus group to better understand the potential inquiries that might have been useful to improve the development process. Secondly, we employed a cross-sectional survey approach to explore the company personnel’s opinions regarding the changes in the process. The survey data was collected from 30 practitioners who were working for the same project in a software development organization in a technology research centre. The descriptive statistics were calculated with paired sample t-tests being used to compare for integration process that contains three stages (i) initial stage, (ii) Scrumban stage, (iii) Scrumban with integrated Gamification stage. The preliminary results of this research support the idea that a set of game elements can be integrated with a hybrid software development methodology to enhance individual and organizational productivity.

Challenges and strategies for motivating software testing personnel

ContextSoftware testing is the key to ensuring a successful and reliable software product or service, yet testing is often considered uninteresting work compared to design or coding. As any human-based activity, the outcome of the final software product is dependent of human factors and an essential challenge for software development organizations is to find effective ways to enhance the motivation and job-satisfaction of their testers. ObjectiveOur study aims to cast light on how professional software testers can be motivated and we explore the policies and rules conceptualized and implemented inside software development projects. MethodThis paper presents the results of an empirical study that collected data through semi-structured and in-depth interviews with 36 practitioners from 12 companies in Norway. The data collection was performed over a two years period and investigates the strategies applied by the companies for stimulating their testers, while considering the motivational and de-motivational factors influencing the testing personnel. ResultsOur results provide a set of motivational and de-motivational factors for software testing personnel and present the strategies deployed by the companies for stimulating their testing staff. ConclusionsThe study shows that combining testing responsibilities with development and ensuring a variety of engaging, challenging tasks and products does increase the satisfaction of testing personnel. However, despite the systematic and sincere effort invested in recognizing the importance of testing and motivating the testers, heavy emphasis is laid on minimizing project costs and duration. The results could help the companies in organizing and managing processes and stimulate their testing personnel, which will lead to better job satisfaction and productivity.

Implementing Project Management Category Process Areas of CMMI Version 1.3 Using Scrum Practices, and Assets

Software development organizations that rely on Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) to assess and improve their processes have realized that agile approaches can provide improvements as well. CMMI and agile methods can work well together and exploit synergies that have the potential to improve dramatically business performance. The major question is: How to realize the integration of these two seemingly different approaches? In an earlier work, we have conducted a field study within six companies. These companies worked with agile methods for years and the Egyptian Software Engineering Competence Center (SECC), which is the regional CMMI appraisal center, assessed them. This study was mainly conducted to enhance the empirical understanding in this research field. Additionally, it showed that companies usually don’t use agile in a good way that helps in covering the CMMI specific practices. In this paper, we present a new approach for mapping between CMMI and Scrum method. This mapping has been analyzed, enhanced, and then applied to the same companies. Putting in considerations that other previous efforts have worked in the same context but for an older version of CMMI, our research is using the latest CMMI version, which is 1.3. The research shows that our mapping approach has resulted in 37% satisfaction and achieved 17% partial satisfaction for CMMI specific practices. This resembles 19.4% enhancement in the satisfaction, and 6.2% improvement in the partial satisfaction against the previous related research effort that was already not targeting the latest CMMI version.

Reinforcing the applicability of multi-model environments for software process improvement using knowledge management

Nowadays software development organizations look for tools and methods that help them maintain their competitiveness. A key approach for organizations in order to achieve this competitiveness is a successful implementation of software process improvement (SPI). Unfortunately, most of the times, software process improvement involves a path full of obstacles due to the lack of knowledge for choosing the right implementation. The most common and critical problem consists of the selection and application of the right reference model for guiding this implementation. As an effort for helping organizations in the selection of the right implementation of improvements, multi-model environments arised enabling the use of best practices from different reference models. Multi-model approach facilitates the improvement task in order to achieve the organization's business goals. In this context, effective integration of models and standards can play a crucial role in the implementation of multi-model environments as reference support tool. Nevertheless the use of multi-model approaches presents difficulties related to the lack of knowledge of how to manage the amount of information and the correct integration of different models and standards. In this sense, knowledge management technologies have proven to be highly promising support for knowledge sharing and system integration. This work presents an ontological framework based on a multi-model approach, which facilitates and supports the SPI for small and medium companies for a life cycle process improvement. Life cycle process improvement pursues the necessary actions in a deliberate, structured and methodical manner, required in each stage of the life cycle of software development, capable for improving process to current organization needs. Finally, a case study is presented in order to show the performance of the framework.

Exploring the Relationship between Software Process Adaptive Capability and Organisational Performance

Software development is a complex socio-technical activity, with the result that software development organisations need to establish and maintain robust software development processes. While much debate exists regarding the effectiveness of various software development approaches, no single approach is perfectly suited to all settings and no setting is unchanging. The capability to adapt the software process is therefore essential to sustaining an optimal software process. We designed an exploratory study to concurrently examine software process adaptive capability and organisational performance in 15 software development organisations, finding that companies with greater software process adaptive capability are shown to also experience greater business success. While our exploratory study of the complex relationship between these phenomena is limited in some respects, the findings indicate that software process adaptive capability may be worthy of further integration into software process engineering techniques. Software process adaptive capability may be an important organisational strength when deriving competitive advantage, and those responsible for the creation and evolution of software process models and methodologies may want to focus some of their future efforts in this area.

MeSRAM – A method for assessing robustness of measurement programs in large software development organizations and its industrial evaluation

Measurement programs in large software development organizations contain a large number of indicators, base and derived measures to monitor products, processes and projects. The diversity and the number of these measures causes the measurement programs to become large, combining multiple needs, measurement tools and organizational goals. For the measurement program to effectively support organization’s goals, it should be scalable, automated, standardized and flexible – i.e. robust. In this paper we present a method for assessing the robustness of measurement programs. The method is based on the robustness model which has been developed in collaboration between seven companies and a university. The purpose of the method is to support the companies to optimize the value obtained from the measurement programs and their cost. We evaluated the method at the seven companies and the results from applying the method to each company quantified the robustness of their programs, reflecting the real-world status of the programs and pinpointed strengths and improvements of the programs.

Understanding personality differences in software organisations using Keirsey temperament sorter

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in exploring personality differences to improve work experience in software organisations. This study presents a personality assessment process conducted on 382 software practitioners using the Keirsey temperament sorter II. The primary goal of this assessment is to explore the personality temperaments of software practitioners working in different types of software development organisations. In addition, a novel visualisation approach is proposed for arranging temperaments using a periodic table-like structure. The results suggest that the authors approach provides an effective means to investigate an organisation's personality profile while assessing personality types.

Exploring prioritization through systematic literature surveys and case studies.

The software development process is a complex process, especially when the software has to be released in a phased manner. The high stakes involved and several constraints on resources lead to the selective implementation of the user requirements at each stage of the development. If the requirements considered, do not fit well, they have to be reprioritized. The objectives of this paper are to create a background related to the area of reprioritization and to create a distinguishable position from the prioritization area. The paper elaborates on the current state of reprioritization practices adopted in the software industry. The gaps in research in the area of reprioritization to present future opportunities for the research community are also analysed. This paper builds on the findings of a systematic literature survey (to analyze state of the art in the area of reprioritization), previous case studies (to gain understanding of real scenarios through limited available information), and more detailed real case study (focussed on reprioritization alone) conducted by fewer multinational software development organizations. Based on our studies it is concluded that the efficient reprioritization methods are required to be adopted in software engineering practices of the organisation in order to sustain in the highly competitive mass market.

Software test process improvement approaches: A systematic literature review and an industrial case study

Software test process improvement (STPI) approaches are frameworks that guide software development organizations to improve their software testing process. We have identified existing STPI approaches and their characteristics (such as completeness of development, availability of information and assessment instruments, and domain limitations of the approaches) using a systematic literature review (SLR). Furthermore, two selected approaches (TPI NEXT and TMMi) are evaluated with respect to their content and assessment results in industry. As a result of this study, we have identified 18 STPI approaches and their characteristics. A detailed comparison of the content of TPI NEXT and TMMi is done. We found that many of the STPI approaches do not provide sufficient information or the approaches do not include assessment instruments. This makes it difficult to apply many approaches in industry. Greater similarities were found between TPI NEXT and TMMi and fewer differences. We conclude that numerous STPI approaches are available but not all are generally applicable for industry. One major difference between available approaches is their model representation. Even though the applied approaches generally show strong similarities, differences in the assessment results arise due to their different model representations.

Apathy Towards the Integration of Usability Work: A Case of System Justification

In this article we report from a case study of a software development organization and we study in particular the developers’ and product managers’ attitudes towards integrating usability work into software development. We offer explanations based on system justification theory illuminating what would-be integrators might be up against. The analysis shows how the developers only pay lip service to usability work and how they treat users superficially. It further shows how that leads to stereotyping of usability designers and users in order to preserve status quo, and how internalization of inequality between the developers and usability designers rationalizes the preservation of status quo. These findings will have significant implications for managers of software development.

Extracting Development Tasks to Navigate Software Documentation

Knowledge management plays a central role in many software development organizations. While much of the important technical knowledge can be captured in documentation, there often exists a gap between the information needs of software developers and the documentation structure. To help developers navigate documentation, we developed a technique for automatically extracting tasks from software documentation by conceptualizing tasks as specific programming actions that have been described in the documentation. More than 70 percent of the tasks we extracted from the documentation of two projects were judged meaningful by at least one of two developers. We present TaskNavigator, a user interface for search queries that suggests tasks extracted with our technique in an auto-complete list along with concepts, code elements, and section headers. We conducted a field study in which six professional developers used TaskNavigator for two weeks as part of their ongoing work. We found search results identified through extracted tasks to be more helpful to developers than those found through concepts, code elements, and section headers. The results indicate that task descriptions can be effectively extracted from software documentation, and that they help bridge the gap between documentation structure and the information needs of software developers.

Design an Algorithm for Software Development in Cbse Environment using Feed Forward Neural Network

A In software development organizations, Component based Software engineering (CBSE) is emerging paradigm for software development and gained wide acceptance as it often results in increase quality of software product within development time and budget. In component reusability, main challenges are the right component identification from large repositories at right time. The major objective of this work is to provide efficient algorithm for storage and effective retrieval of components using neural network and parameters based on user choice through clustering. This research paper aims to propose an algorithm that provides error free and automatic process (for retrieval of the components) while reuse of the component. In this algorithm, keywords (or components) are extracted from software document, after by applying k mean clustering algorithm. Then weights assigned to those keywords based on their frequency and after assigning weights, ANN predicts whether correct weight is assigned to keywords (or components) or not, otherwise it back propagates in to initial step (re-assign the weights). In last, store those all keywords into Repositories for effective retrieval. Proposed algorithm is very effective in the error correction and detection with user base choice while choice of component for reusability for efficient retrieval is there. To check the results of our algorithm based on factors like accuracy, precision and recall compare with existing technique i.e. integrated classification scheme for retrieval of components based on keyword search and results are so encouraging.

Proceso de pruebas para pequeñas organizaciones desarrolladoras de software

<p>Definir un proceso de pruebas dentro de una organización puede ser valioso en la medida en que permita: (i) incrementar la calidad del producto, (ii) facilitar la comunicación y la comprensión entre los miembros del equipo, (iii) apoyar la mejora continua del proceso, y (iv) soportar la ejecución automática de ciertas tareas. En este sentido, este artículo propone un proceso liviano definido para guiar y apoyar la realización de las pruebas en pequeñas organizaciones desarrolladoras de software. El proceso propuesto incorpora técnicas de pruebas funcionales con el objetivo de concretar las actividades requeridas para evaluar la funcionalidad de un producto software de manera organizada y sistemática, especialmente aquellas que tienen que ver con el diseño y ejecución de las pruebas. Este proceso ha sido definido a partir del análisis de los procesos de pruebas existentes en algunos modelos de referencia y en diferentes estudios revisados de la literatura. Tras su ejecución exitosa en una pequeña empresa de desarrollo software, se ha observado que este proceso puede ser útil y práctico para llevar a cabo las pruebas de un producto software por organizaciones de este tipo.</p>

Social debt in software engineering: insights from industry

Social debt is analogous to technical debt in many ways: it represents the state of software development organisations as the result of “accumulated” decisions. In the case of social debt, decisions are about people and their interactions. Our objective was to study the causality around social debt in practice. In so doing, we conducted exploratory qualitative research in a large software company. We found many forces together causing social debt; we represented them in a framework, and captured anti-patterns that led to the debt in the first place. Finally, we elicited best practices that technicians adopted to pay back some of the accumulated debt. We learned that social debt is strongly correlated with technical debt and both forces should be reckoned with together during the software process.

Quest Trail: An Effective Approach for Construction of Personalized Search Engine

Personalized search refers to search experiences that are tailored specifically to an individual's interests by incorporating information about the individual beyond specific query provided. Especially people working in a software development organization (analysts, developers, testers, maintenance team members), find it increasingly difficult to get relevant results to their searches. We propose methods to personalize searches by resolving the ambiguity of query terms, and increase the relevance of search results in order to match the user‟s interests. Difficulty in web searches has given rise to the need for development of personalized search engines. Personalized search engines create user profiles to capture the users‟ personal preferences and as such identify the actual goal of the input query. Since users are usually reluctant to explicitly provide their preferences due to the extra manual effort involved, the search engine faces the entire burden of predicting the user‟s preferences and intentions behind a query in order to yield more relevant search results. In this paper we define a QUEST to be the objective of user‟s search; here we combine quest level analysis of user‟s search logs and semantic analysis of the user‟s query in order to personalize user‟s search results. Most personalization methods focus on the creation of one single profile for a user and apply the same profile to all of the user‟s queries. Hence we propose a personalized search for a software development organization by creating QUEST or domain based profile rather than individual user based profile.

A comparative study of software process improvement implementation success factors

AbstractContextIt has been observed that software process improvement (SPI) initiatives have been around for more than a decade, yet many companies are still facing SPI implementation challenges.ObjectiveIn this paper, a systematic literature review (SLR) has been conducted, and the results are compared with the previously collected data of SPI implementation success factors. The overarching objective of this research is to gain an in‐depth understanding of success factors that play a positive role in SPI implementation; this will assist SPI managers in better designing and managing SPI programs. We are interested to discover if there are any differences in the success factors identified by the three research strategies used, that is, informal literature review, SLR, and interviews.MethodData were collected and analyzed using the three research strategies. For informal literature review, the snowballing technique was used. The SLR was conducted for formal literature reviews. For an empirical study, interviews were conducted with Australian SPI practitioners.ResultsResults show that (i) senior management commitment and (ii) staff involvement are the frequently cited common SPI success factors in all three research strategies. The results also uncover similarities and differences among the three research strategies regarding the importance of the SPI success factors: (i) SPI awareness is a frequently cited common SPI success factor in interviews and formal literature review, and the Spearman's rank‐order correlation is rs(37) = 0.413, p = 0.011; (ii) reviews are a frequently cited common SPI success factor in formal and informal literature reviews, and the Spearman's rank‐order correlation is rs(37) = 0.517, p = 0.001; and (iii) training and mentoring is a frequently cited common SPI success factor in interviews and an informal literature review, and the Spearman's rank‐order correlation is rs(37) = 0.195, p = 0.247.ConclusionsThe understanding of these factors can help both researchers and software development organizations in successfully planning and implementing SPI initiatives. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Capability erosion dynamics

The notion of capability is widely invoked to explain differences in organizational performance, and research shows that strategically relevant capabilities can be both built and lost. However, while capability development is widely studied, capability erosion has not been integrated into our understanding of performance heterogeneity. To understand erosion, we study two software development organizations that experienced diverging capability trajectories despite similar organizational and technological settings. Building a simulation‐based theory, we identify the adaptation trap, a mechanism through which managerial learning can lead to capability erosion: well‐intentioned efforts by managers to search locally for the optimal workload balance lead them to systematically overload their organization and, thereby, cause capabilities to erode. The analysis of our model informs when capability erosion is likely and strategically relevant. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Investigation of Adherence Degree of Agile Requirements Engineering Practices in Non-Agile Software Development Organizations

Requirements are critical for the success of software projects. Requirements are practically difficult to produce, as the hardest stage of building a software system is to decide what the system should do. Moreover, requirements errors are expensive to fix in the later phases of the software development life cycle. The rapidly changing business environment is highly challenging traditional Requirements Engineering (RE) practices. Most of the software development organizations are working in such dynamic environment, as a result, either by or without their awareness agile methodologies are adopted in various phases of their software development cycles. The aim of this paper is to investigate the adherence degree of agile RE practices in various software development organizations that are classifying themselves as adopting traditional (i.e. non-agile) software development methodologies. An approach is proposed for achieving this aim and it is applied on five different projects from four different organizations. The result shows that even the non-agile software development organizations are applying agile RE practices by different adherence degrees.