Successful Software Development Research Articles

The Knowledge Frame System based on Principles of Topological Functioning Model

Abstract Understanding of domain phenomena and their interrelations is necessary for successful software development. The knowledge frame system based on principles of Topological Functioning Modelling (TFM) can be used for this purpose at the Computation Independent level within Model Driven Development. Research on knowledge formats showed that inferring in the closed world paradigm and similarity to the object-oriented paradigm made frames an attractive candidate to the knowledge representation format. Frames can hold information necessary for generation of the TFM. The knowledge system based on the principles of the TFM does not allow inferring ambiguous facts and leads to the more complete discovery of knowledge.

Challenge of Millennials in Project Management

The need for understanding Generation Y employees' attitudes and expectations that considerably differed from previous generations had been a focus of researchers in the last decades. IT industry and specifically software industry had been among the most popular employment areas of Generation Y professionals and hence Generation Y Software Developers constitutes the majority of the work force in the software industry. As known, software development is a project-based business where the project management methodologies and principles are utilized. Similar to other project based works, the effectiveness of human resources management and team development is the determinant of project success in software development. Therefore, to effectively manage and to adapt appropriate approaches for leading the project teams which include Generation Y software professionals, managers and leaders prior in need to understand their perspective. In this context, research aims to understand the expectations and attitudes of Generation Y Software Developer professionals in projects. The research is structured in two parts reflecting these dual aims. The first part of the research addresses the expectations of Y generation employees from project management and project environment in software development projects. The second part of the research explores the attitudes of Y generation Employees in software development project teams. Survey is conducted with the participation of 113 Generation Y Software Professionals who are employed in major software companies in Turkey. Basic concepts that are explored in the study are expectations from working environment, expectations from project type and content, leadership, motivation factors, challenges faced, perceptions on generation conflicts and the attitudes of Generation Y professionals towards project-based work and work environments. Software industry is dominated by project based management methods, perceptions and attitudes of Generation Y in projects are expected to provide practical guidelines to policy makers and HR professionals in developing solutions and tools for improving motivations and effectiveness of Generation Y employees.

EVALUATION OF CAPTURING ARCHITECTURALLY SIGNIFICANT REQUIREMENTS

Every software development organization strives for customer satisfaction. It is universally accepted that the success of software development lies in the clear understanding of the client requirements. During requirement elicitation and analysis stage, the system analyst identifies the functional and non-functional requirements from the customer. Security, usability, reliability, performance, scalability and supportability are the significant quality attributes of a software system. These quality attributes are also referred as non-functional requirements. Only a few functional and quality attributes requirement help to identify and shape the software architecture. A software system’s architecture is the set of prime design decisions made about the system. If the requirement influences the architectural design decision then, it is referred as Architecturally Significant Requirement (ASR). Identifying and specifying all the possible ASR are important tasks in the requirement elicitation and analysis stage.In this research, general problems that are faced while capturing and specifying ASR in requirement elicitation and analysis is studied. Among the different requirement elicitation techniques, use case diagram has been identified and enhanced to solve the problem of capturing and specifying ASR during the requirement elicitation and analysis phase

Software Standards and Software Failures: A Review With the Perspective of Varying Situational Contexts

Software Engineering is a discipline that provides a systematic approach to develop software in a cost-effective manner. Successful software development is challenged by various challenges, such as varying situational contexts, conformity with standards, changing requirements, optimism of schedule, schedule pressure, software complexity, and software invisibility. Varying situational contexts are the changed circumstances that are resulted due to varying situational factors. These situational factors are the root cause of varying situations, which need to be discovered in detail. If these situational factors are left unattended, they can cause software failures. Software standards can help to deal with software failures. In this paper, we have reviewed various software engineering standards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standard Association. These software engineering standards were investigated for the factors and sub-factors that can lead to varying situations among software development team members. As a result we found 12 factors grouped with 52 sub-factors that can lead to varying situations among software development team members. These resulted factors and sub-factors can act as a source for varying situations among team members. Unattended identified situational factors can lead to software failures. This paper provides a guideline for the practitioners to consider these factors and sub-factors while performing software development in order to have a successful software development.

Motivators and Demotivators of Agile Software Development: Elicitation and Analysis

Motivators and demotivators are key factors in software productivity. Both are also critical to the success of Agile software development. Literature reports very diverse and multidimensional critical factors affecting the quality of Agile software development, thus, there is a need to extract and map required factors systematically for wider implications. The classification of anticipated factors and sub-factors is also desired to simplify their identification and definition. The reported research focuses on the systematic mapping of motivators and demotivators in Agile software development. A systematic mapping literature study has been performed to shed light on scattered critical factors for software engineers, affecting productivity and understanding of Agile viewpoints. Additionally, this study categorizes the extracted motivators as organization, people and technical. Whereas, the sub-factors’ categorization has been concentrated, which contributes to the motivators at grass root level. This research alleviates the problems of identification, definition and classification of the critical factors in agile software development for both practitioners and researchers.

Teamwork quality and project success in software development: A survey of agile development teams

Small, self-directed teams are central in agile development. This article investigates the effect of teamwork quality on team performance, learning and work satisfaction in agile software teams, and whether this effect differs from that of traditional software teams. A survey was administered to 477 respondents from 71 agile software teams in 26 companies and analyzed using structural equation modeling. A positive effect of teamwork quality on team performance was found when team members and team leaders rated team performance. In contrast, a negligible effect was found when product owners rated team performance. The effect of teamwork quality on team members´ learning and work satisfaction was strongly positive, but was only rated by the team members. Despite claims of the importance of teamwork in agile teams, this study did not find teamwork quality to be higher than in a similar survey on traditional teams. The effect of teamwork quality on team performance was only marginally greater for the agile teams than for the traditional teams.

Suggesting Alternative Scenarios Using Use Case Specification Patterns for Requirement Completeness

Completeness in software requirements specification is one of the key factors for successful software development. For specifying software requirements, scenario-based approach is broadly used, comprising a basic flow regarding the successful use of the system, and alternative flows describing abnormal or less frequent interactions of the system. However, alternative flows tend to be frequently missed in many cases, because of the relative lower significance rather than the basic flow, which eventually have an influence on achieving the completeness of software requirements. In order to address the issue, we propose an approach for automatically recommending alternative flows from a basic flow by extracting the essential use case patterns based on the occurrence patterns of the agents and measuring the verb similarity between the main verbs of each scenario. In order to validate our approach, we apply it to three industrial case studies, and show comprehensiveness of the suggested alternative flows and synergic effectiveness for inexperienced developers.

ANALYSIS OF KNOWLEDGE SHARING PRACTICES IN DISTRIBUTED AGILE ENVIRONMENT

Knowledge plays a key role in the software development process. Knowledge is necessarily required at all the phases of software development life cycle. Knowledge is the core resource, so organizations are now attempting to manage it in more efficient and systematic way. Knowledge sharing plays a very important role in the successful development of software. Knowledge sharing in distributed agile team is helpful in achieving the goals like better quality of products delivered on time and at lower cost. Our research analyzes the knowledge sharing practices in distributed environment and found the best implicit and explicit knowledge sharing practices.

Evaluating Lehman's Laws of Software Evolution for Software Product Lines

The evolution of software to maintain its performance and usefulness over time occurs in successful software development processes. To address this, Meir Lehman formulated his well-known software-evolution laws. This article evaluates Lehman's laws in the context of two companies' real-world software-product-line projects to gain useful insights about the evolution process.

Mass market development strategies of software industries: Case study based research

Summary The success in competitive mass market software development depends on the quality of software development and market segments targeted. Market segments are categorized by uncertainties contributed by “Newness” and “turbulences”, making the software success stochastic in nature. Selecting good market segments, delivering high quality software versions in the lowest time than competitors, result in increasing demand in markets and ultimately revenues. Enhanced customer base is beneficial for current product as well as for future products of industry in the form of increased reputation and increased involvement of customers in future development. The case study was conducted with 13 representatives drawing experiences of 14 mass market projects. Results indicate that software solutions are delivered to few investors or in highly competitive markets, as per the survey's findings of the marketing departments. The software organizations are reluctant to deliver relatively complex solutions in new markets unless and until strongly convinced with the probable success. The method for selection of market segments belonging to new and existing markets for undertaking the software delivery is also proposed in this paper. The model will help software industry decide the market segments and high abstract level features that could increase probability of software success. Poor selection of markets or targeting markets of “improper” size affects the market share of the industry to a great extend.

요구사항 시나리오 기계 학습을 이용한 자동 소프트웨어 요구사항 패턴 추출 기법

Software requirement analysis is necessary for successful software development project. Specially, incomplete requirement is the most influential causes of software project failure. Incomplete requirement can bring late delay and over budget because of the misunderstanding and ambiguous criteria for project validation. Software requirement patterns can help writing more complete requirement. These can be a reference model and standards when author writing or validating software requirement. Furthermore, when a novice writes the software scenario, the requirement patterns can be one of the guideline. In this paper proposes an automatic approach to identifying software scenario patterns from various software scenarios. In this paper, we gathered 83 scenarios from eight industrial systems, and show how to extract 54 scenario patterns and how to find omitted action of the scenario using extracted patterns for the feasibility of the approach.

Interpreting barriers to success in software development and deployment using systems theory

The purpose of this paper is to investigate issues that restrict success in the development and deployment of software. As software becomes more complex it evolves as a system of systems (SoS) containing new, modified, existing, and legacy parts. As portions are modified and integrated, the effort is confronted with a host of issues often leading to failure, regardless of a well-developed project plan and exceptional communications. Many of the restrictions that are exemplified as issues and failures identified during or after software development originate in the system of system's governance structure and manifest themselves as barriers to project success. This paper analyses frequently cited challenges in software development and migration and production rollout that lead to program and project failure. Systems theory principles provide the framework (or theoretical lens) by which these challenges are viewed. Realisation of these underlying systemic roots informs the project team's worldview, leading to greater success in future technological pursuits to support the needs of the system of systems.

Optimised class point approach for software effort estimation using adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system model

The success of software development depends very much on proper estimation of effort required to develop the software. There is no simple way to make an accurate estimate of these parameters required to develop a software system. There are basically some points approach which are available for software effort estimation such as function point, use case point, class point, object point, etc. In this paper, our aim is to estimate the cost of various software projects using class point approach. The parameters are optimised using various soft computing techniques such as fuzzy logic and adaptive neuro-fuzzy logic so as to achieve better accuracy. Also, a comparative analysis of software effort estimation using the techniques such as artificial neural network ANN, fuzzy logic FL and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system ANFIS has been provided.

Identify and Classify Critical Success Factor of Agile Software Development Methodology Using Mind Map

Selecting the right method, right personnel and right practices, and applying them adequately, determine the success of software development. In this paper, a qualitative study is carried out among the critical factors of success from previous studies. The factors of success match with their relative principles to illustrate the most valuable factor for agile approach success, this paper also prove that the twelve principles poorly identified for few factors resulting from qualitative and quantitative past studies. Dimensions and Factors are presented using Critical success Dimensions and Factors Mind Map Model.

Classification of Non-Functional Requirements Using Semantic-FSKNN Based ISO/IEC 9126

Non-functional requirements is one of the important factors that play a role in the success of software development that is often overlooked by developers, so it cause adverse effects. In order to obtain the non-functional requirements, it requires an identification automation system of non-functional requirements. This research proposes an automation system of identification of non-functional requirements from the requirement sentence-based classification algorithms of FSKNN with the addition of semantic factors such as the term development by hipernim and measurement of semantic relatedness between the term and every category of quality aspects based ISO / IEC 9126. In the test, the dataset is 1342 sentences from six different datasets. The result of this research is that the Semantic-FSKNN method can reduce the value of hamming loss or error rate by 21.9%, and also raise the value of accuracy by 43.7%, and also the precision value amounted to 73.9% compared to FSKNN method without the addition of semantic factors in it.

A method of requirements change management for global software development

Context: Requirements change is an inevitable software development activity and can occur due to changes in user requirements, increased understanding of the stakeholders’ needs, customer organizational re-structure, and availability of new technologies. Timely management of these changes is vital to successful software development, which can be achieved through a rigorous requirements change management (RCM) process. RCM is not straight forward in collocated software development; and with the presences of geographical, social, cultural and temporal factors in Global Software Development (GSD), it makes RCM even more difficult for GSD. Existing RCM methods do not take into consideration of the GSD issues. Objective: In this paper, we present a method for managing requirements changes for GSD. Method: Our method consists of three stages: (i) an understanding of the changes required between different GSD sites is to be established; (ii) a change analysis is to be performed with respect to the development work, which might be either directly or indirectly affected by the changes; and (iii) a finalization of the changes will be made between GSD sites. Past researchers used student groups in a university environment to play the roles of stakeholders in experiments in GSD studies. We validate our method by applying it to a case study of an online shopping system, where the roles of stakeholders were played by a group of students. Results: The results showed that our method facilitates stakeholders to manage requirements changes for GSD better than the existing methods could. Conclusion: Managing changes in requirements at the right time improves the chance of developing a GSD project successfully by minimizing the risks associated with it.

Automatic Use Case Flow Pattern Generation Using Verb Clustering

Software requirements completeness is the one of the key elements for successful software development. Incomplete requirements can cause one to misunderstand requirements and eventually build a wrong system as a developer interprets them in an ad-hoc manner. In order to handle this issue, the use case pattern is suggested, which is a set of commonly discovered scenarios in the use case specification. However, identifying the use case pattern is not systematic and comprehensive without providing any algorithmic or statistical rationale. This paper proposes an automatic approach to identifying the use case flow pattern from various use case specification. In this paper, we gathered 83 use case specifications from eight industrial systems, and presented two use case flow patterns identified from the use case specification.

Specification, verification, and quantification of security in model-based systems

Modern systems are more and more complex and security has become a key component in the success of software and systems development. The main challenge encountered in industry as well as in academia is to develop secure products, prove their security correctness, measure their resilience to attacks, and check if vulnerabilities exist. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art related to security specification, verification, and quantification for software and systems that are modeled by using UML or SysML language. The reviewed work fall into the field of secure software and systems engineering that aims at fulfilling the security as an afterthought in the development of secure systems.

An experiment on the impact of transparency on the effectiveness of requirements documents

Effective communication is important to successful software development, but it is difficult to achieve. We believe transparency -- the visibility of information to stakeholders -- is an important factor in the effectiveness of communication in software projects. We theorise that more effective communication results from more transparent requirements documents. To test our theory, we conducted an experiment. We developed an operational definition of transparency with three attributes: accessibility, understandability, and relevance. We had students and software practitioners use requirements documents of differing levels of transparency based on these attributes to answer questions. We found that participants with the more transparent document spent less time, answered more questions correctly, and were more confident about their answers, than participants with the less transparent document. The results of our experiment provide evidence that our view of transparency may help evaluate the effectiveness of documents as a form of communication. Further work is needed to reproduce our results, and to determine whether they are generalizable to other types of stakeholders and forms of communication.

Accelerating collaboration to find a cure: a nonprofit's evolving business model

Synopsis This is a field-researched case about a nonprofit organization, the Accelerated Cure Project (ACP), dedicated to accelerating advances toward a cure for multiple sclerosis (MS). Inspired by the successful open source software development platform, ACP brings the strengths of that platform into the medical research and development environment. At the opening of the case, Robert McBurney, an Australian scientist with extensive experience in the biotech world, has been named CEO. McBurney and his team want to use ACP's bio-sample and data Repository to drive innovation in the search for the cure for MS by fostering collaborative research and development across research institutions, pharmaceutical and bio-tech companies. To encourage such collaboration ACP waives its rights to potentially lucrative Intellectual Property. This decision to foster collaboration at the expense of revenue sources appears problematic, since ACP does not have the staff or resources to undertake fundraising at the scale needed to fund current projects. ACP chooses to serve instead as an open access research accelerator making an impact on the field by functioning as an innovation driver rather than a profit maker. Is this an innovative recipe for success in finding a cure for MS or a recipe for financial disaster for ACP? Research methodology Interviews provided the primary source of data for this case. Four semi-structured interviews were conducted with the CEO of ACP, the Vice President of Scientific Operations, and a member of the organization's Board of Trustees, a collaborating university researcher, and the President of a bio-tech company working with ACP. Interview data was supplemented with additional information from ACP's web site, news reports, McBurney's comments at Suffolk University's Global Leadership in Innovation and Collaboration Award event, and follow-up conversations. Relevant courses and levels This case is intended for use in an undergraduate course examining strategic management issues midway through the term. The case discussion can center on issues relating to: first, the development of the business model; second, revenue resources and fundraising. Students are expected to spend two to three hours of outside preparation reviewing concepts of change leadership and the collaborative enterprise business model. They should read the case materials and brainstorm options for improved change leadership. The case can be taught in one two-hour class period. Theoretical basis The purpose of this case is to introduce students to the strategic management and funding challenges faced by an organization that is using a non-traditional business model in an increasingly complex environment. As a result of discussing this case, students should be able to: first, examine strategic organizational strengths, analyze opportunities created by business, market and environmental factors, and strategize to minimize weaknesses and to address threats identify an organization's strategic focus; recognize and recommend options at crucial decision making junctures in a business situation; second, assess an organization's revenue model; analyze how this model can be improved; third, analyze the functionality and sustainability of an organization's business model.