Quality Of Software Development Process Research Articles

QUALITY ASSESSMENT OF THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS OF AN IT COMPANY BASED ON THE USE OF THE UTILITY FUNCTION

The paper considers the software development process as an object of research, which is a poorly structured system. A description of such systems is given in the form of general characteristics, which include: difficulties in building an analytical model; incompleteness, inaccuracy, unreliability and uncertainty of information; benchmarks required for assessing weakly structured systems are often absent; uniqueness of the decision-making process; dynamic nature of models of poorly structured systems, etc. In this paper, the quality assessment of the software development process is considered based on maturity model standards, which can have continuous and discrete variants. The continuous version assesses the quality of the individual focus areas and processes of the maturity models. For this purpose, a discrete point scale of the first type is used, when the assessment is carried out according to an objective criterion. The quality assessment of individual focus areas and processes characterizes the local criteria for assessing the quality of the entire software development process. Therefore, the task is to form some kind of integral quality assessment on their basis. One of the options for solving this problem is a discrete maturity model, where the scale for assessing the entire software development process has five gradations called maturity levels. Starting from the second level, each gradation is characterized by a set of focus areas with corresponding levels of capability. The availability of such a scale allows not only assessing the quality of the entire software development process, but also solving the task of planning to improve its quality. But first, it is necessary to analyse such a scale from the point of view of its balance, namely, that the distances on the scale between the gradations are approximately equal. Therefore, the paper analyses the existing scales that can be proposed for expert assessment for the quality of the software development process. Their construction can be realized on the basis of a utility function using the local criteria of maturity models formalized in this paper. For this purpose, a fundamental property of systems is used. Namely, the dependence of the utility (efficiency) of a complex system on the invested resources over the life cycle interval, which usually takes the form of a logistic curve. Further research will be devoted to using this fact to build a balanced scale for assessing the entire software development process based on maturity models.

VERBAL DESCRIPTION OF THE TECHNOLOGY FOR PLANNING THE QUALITY IMPROVEMENT OF A SUBSET OF THE PROCESSES OF THE SPICE MATURITY REFERENCE MODEL

It is noted that to solve the problem of developing information technology for planning the increase of maturity level of a subset of the processes of the SPICE reference maturity model, this issue must first be considered at the verbal level as a technology (sequence of stages) for the implementation of the given problem. At the first stage, the structure of the SPICE reference model, which consists of a number of separate processes, was formalized. This set is presented as a hierarchical structure: the first level is a set of processes and subprocesses; the second level is a set of process groups; the third level is a set of process categories. At the second stage, the method of assessing the level of possibility of a separate process/sub-process of the reference maturity model SPICE is considered. It is given from the point of view of two dimensions of the SPICE model: the purpose of the processes; the attributes of the processes (measurable characteristics necessary for managing the process and increasing the possibility of its execution). The third stage of the technology is focused on the synthesis of planning model of the subset development processes for the SPICE model, which determines the quality level of a separate component of the software development process (SDP), which in turn has a positive effect on the level of development of software systems. Assessment and planning of the possibility level of a subset of processes is implemented during a certain planning period under conditions of limited resources based on their optimal distribution, taking into account the importance of individual processes and their practices during the planning period. At the fourth stage of the technology, an algorithm for planning the development of a subset of processes of the reference maturity model SPICE is considered based on the method of sequential analysis of options. This is primarily due to the fact that the optimization model has an additive objective function. The method allows discarding those appropriate solutions that do not contain optimal solutions. In the future, when specifying the model, it is planned to choose an algorithm that belongs to this method and adapt it to the solution of the given problem. The fifth stage is devoted to information technology implementation of the developed model and algorithm. At this stage, the following set of problems is solved. Analysis of business processes of the technology of improving the quality of software development process. Definition of software requirements. Forming a diagram of use cases. Development of data models. Justification of the choice of tools for software development. Selection of reference system architecture. Next, software coding and testing. At the sixth stage, based on information technology, a number of variants of the plan for improving the quality of a subset of the processes of the SPICE maturity model are formed in order to support decision-making by the management of the IT company. For this, a set of effective solutions is preliminarily determined, which is proposed to determine the final option, which is implemented later.

SYNTHESIS OF THE UTILITY FUNCTION OF THE IT COMPANY'S SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS BASED ON THE SPICE REFERENCE MODEL

The work distinguishes two types of complex systems: "real systems" and "virtual systems". The first ones are the object of computer science research, and the second ones are the object of software engineering. The latter include software systems (SS) and the software development process (SDP), which is the object of scientific work research. SDP refers to goal-oriented systems. In such systems, on the basis of the set goals, the task of synthesizing their structure (individual elements and the relationship between them) arises, which is aimed at achieving the set goals related to the quality of SDP. It is believed that the success of SS development directly depends on the quality of SDP. The work considers the problem of assessment and improvement of SDP on the basis of two maturity models: SMMI, SPICE. Both models use a point scale of the first type, when the assessment is made according to objective criteria, so that individual assessments are some fluctuations of the real values. At the same time, there are generally accepted standards that correspond to the gradations of the point scale. The main component of the SMMI model is the focal area, which is characterized by the "level of opportunity" on a point scale from 0 to 3. The main component of the SPICE model is a process characterized by a "level of possibility" on a point scale from 1 to 5. For the discrete version of the SMMI model, the concept of "maturity level" is used, thanks to which the quality of the SDP of the entire IT organization is assessed. The formalization of the model was carried out and static and dynamic planning models of the SDP of the IT organization have been implemented, which are integrated into a single technology of "sliding" planning. One of the main disadvantages of the discrete version of the SMMI model is that it does not take into account the specifics of the IT organization activity. On the other hand, the SPICE model does not allow for the assessment of the entire SDP of the IT organization. Therefore, a synthesis of a discrete maturity model based on the SPICE reference model was proposed. Its main goal is to minimize the main drawbacks of the SMMI model. For this purpose, the use of utility theory was proposed. A hierarchical structure of criteria is formed, on the basis of which the utility function is synthesized. Previously, at the level of a separate process, the SPICE model was formalized and the structure of the utility function was determined on this basis. Taking into account the fundamental properties of the systems, the trend of its change based on the used resources is presented. Next, the experts compare the characteristics of the processes of the SPICE model and the IT company from the point of view of the importance of the processes for increasing the level of maturity of the SDP. This information from the experts is provided to the analysts, who place the processes in a queue depending on the importance from the point of view of the utility function.

DevOps Enabled Agile: Combining Agile and DevOps Methodologies for Software Development

The Agile and DevOps software development methodologies have made revolutionary advancements in software engineering. These methodologies vastly improve software quality and also speed up the process of developing software products. However, several limitations have been discovered in the practical implementation of Agile and DevOps, including the lack of collaboration between the development, testing and delivery sectors of different software projects and high skill requirements. This paper presents a solution to bridge the existing gaps between Agile and DevOps methodologies by integrating DevOps principles into Agile to devise a hybrid DevOps Enabled Agile for software development. This study includes the development of a small-scale, experimental pilot project to demonstrate how software development teams can combine the advantages of Agile and DevOps methodologies to fulfill the gaps and provide further improvements to the speed and quality of software development process while maintaining feasible skill requirements.

Measuring the Quality of the Development Process Academic System with E-GQM Method

In a software development project, aspects of software quality are fundamental; all stakeholders expect high-quality software. To ensure the quality of software products, it is necessary to ensure the software quality process. A software process is essential to be assessed from their quality. In the software development process, the developer needs guidance in carrying out every aspect of it. The goals to achieve and the procedure to measure for each aspect's goals performance must be determined. One method that can be used is the Extended Goal Question Metric method. This method determines what aspects must be achieved for each development process. A few goals to measure are defined for each aspect. For each goal, one or more goals determine one or more relevant questions. For each question, an appropriate metric is  determined. The next step is mapping between G to Q and Q to M. The measurement was conducted by calculating the goal value obtained from the metric calculation. From this metric, each goal's value could be obtained, whether it is achieved or not. The tests were carried out on the software process to develop the academic Directorate of Technology and Information System Development of Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember Surabaya, Indonesia. Each goal's value exceeded 0.51 (for a scale of 0-1), which achieved the Software development process's quality. The total average score was 0.889.

DEVOPS PROCESS MODEL ADOPTION IN SAUDI ARABIA: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

Many software development organizations are starting adopting the Development-Operation (DevOps) to foster better collaboration between development and operations teams, in order to improve the software development process quality and efficiency; therefore, it’s very important to measure the adoption of the DevOps for these organizations. Maturity models are used as a tool to assess the effectiveness of organizational processes on adopting certain practices and identify what capabilities they need to acquire next in order to improve their performance and reach higher maturity level. However, there is few DevOps maturity models recently have been emerged as means to assess DevOps adopted practices. This research aims to conduct an empirical field study to assess the DevOps adoption level in seven Saudi organizations using one of the published DevOps maturity models namely Bucena model. The findings show that the Saudi organizations are ranging from the third level (Defined) to the fourth level (Managed) in their adoption. This shows promise in the Saudi organization adoption of DevOps as no organization of the surveyed ones recorded in lower levels.

Improving the Quality of Software Development Process by Introducing a New Methodology–AZ-Model

Quality is the most important factor for software development as it mainly defines customer satisfaction that is directly related to the success of a software project. The software process model is used to ensure software quality, represent a variety of task settings, manage project duration, improve the process and range to execute the process understanding, and to appropriate implicit conjecture for all task settings. Several software processes models exist in software albeit with limited scope. Given this viewpoint, this paper presents a new software development life cycle model, “AZ-Model,” for software development by introducing new activities during software development life cycle. It overcomes the limitations of traditional models and significantly impacts the production of a quality product in a time-box. This paper also presents a comprehensive comparative study and statistical analyses to examine the significance of AZ–Model for software development.

Entropy-based discretisation for performance prediction of employee: strategy for improving software quality

Software engineering focuses upon generation of high quality product through well defined process. Quality can be perceived by two major dimensions namely through process quality and through people quality. Since people drive the process, the quality of software development process is controlled by the quality level of the people. Consequently, it is vital to carry the software development activities with team possessing good skills set. Personnel attributes provide the largest scope for improving software development and enhancing the quality. A fundamental issue is however to assess human performance. An in-depth analysis using data mining techniques is carried out in several software industries and the results thus obtained enable one to gain an insight about the quality of personnel information. These approach further aids to identify the most capable project personnel who can drive the quality of the software being developed.

A Quality Framework for Software Continuous Integration

The research in this paper combines two main areas, the first one is software quality and the second is the agile practices of continuous integration. Software quality has been an important topic since the beginning of the software development and production. Many researches have been conducted to discuss how the quality of software is a critical factor to its success [1–5]. Because software became an important part of almost every task in our daily life, having high quality software that meets the users’ expectations is important [6]. Software integration is a stage in every software development lifecycle, it is defined as the process to assemble the software components and produce a single product. It has been shown that software integration and integration testing can make more than 40% of the overall project cost, so it is important that they are done efficiently and easily to be able to manage the involved risks [7]. A software engineering practice called continuous integration (CI) was introduced by Kent Beck and Ron Jeffries to mitigate the risks of software integration, enhance its process and improve its quality [8]. In this research, the principles of CI are identified and applied to a case study in order to analyze their impact on the software development process quality factors.

An Enhanced Software Project Management Methodology Accompanying Agile and CMMI

The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has conducted extensive research on improving the quality of software development process. Project management (PM) is an important part in software development organizations. Without proper software project management, it can lead to the failure of software projects. Many software projects are failed to implement the required functionality within schedule and budget. Agile process models emphasize on rapid development. These models have gained great popularity in software development community. One area, often under estimated but crucial, for every software development project, is its management. The major problem with the characteristics of Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is that it does not make any contribution to the productivity of individual engineers. This paper defines when to implement agile models using CMMI to reduce the failure of software projects Index Terms—PM, CMMI, KPA.

Quantitative Software Quality/Reliability Prediction Based on Project Management Data for Waterfall and Agile Development Paradigms

Software development productivity and product quality are related to quality of the software development process. Therefore, if we can improve quality of software development process based on project management technologies, software development productivity and product quality will be increased. In this paper, we conduct a multivariate analysis by using process measurement data, and derive a relational expression based on statistically significant factors, which can quantitatively predict final product quality/reliability. Furthermore, we apply a method of collaborative filtering by using process measurement data to predict final product quality from the similarity of software projects. Finally, we compare the results of two methods, i.e., multiple regression analysis and collaborative filtering, in terms of predictive accuracy of final product quality/reliability.

Adaptation of the standards ISO/IEC 12207:2002 and ISO/IEC 15504:2003 for the assessment of the software processes in developing countries

Improvement in software development processes gives companies guaranteed high levels of maturity in their processes and increases their competitiveness in international terms. There are improvement, assessment and quality models which enjoy world-wide recognition but which must be adapted to the particular characteristics of the specific countries where those models are applied. These models can not easily be applied in the majority of organizations in many Latin American countries due to the large investment in money, time and resources that the models require. There is also the factor of the complexity of the recommendations they give, and the fact that the return on the investment is a long term prospect. This paper’s main goal is to present MECPDS, a light-weight model for the assessment of the quality of software development processes. This model is based on the ISO/IEC 12207 e ISO/IEC 15504 standards which are applicable to micro organizations, as well as small and medium ones. The model fulfils its function in a simple, economical way, using only a small amount of resources and in a short period of time.

A Survey of Boehm's Work on the Spiral Models and COCOMO II—Towards Software Development Process Quality Improvement

Successful engineering and evaluation of complex software depends on successfully completing all the stages of the Software Development Life Cycle. There have been many models which illustrate the stages Software Engineers have to go through to produce software. This paper investigates one of these—The Spiral Model (Sommerville 1997) with particular reference to recent enhancements to it, examines the interaction of COCOMO II (19xx) within the WinWin framework, and reports on a case study using the WinWin Spiral Model (Boehm et al. 1998) to develop software.