Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Mentor programs are important mechanisms that serve functions such as career development as well as knowledge transfer. Many see mentor programs as an efficient, inexpensive, flexible and tailored way of transferring technical knowledge from experts to less experienced employees. We have investigated how a mentor program works in a small software consultancy company, and propose that the learning effect of the program could be improved by introducing methods to increase the employees level of reflection.

The process of software deployment into an organization is a complex process that encompasses various aspects. Studies on the impact of software systems deployment in the customer’s environment in the medium and long terms are hardly found, specially when the deployment of the software product and the introduction of data processing into the organization happen at the same time. Nevertheless the client’s perception goes beyond the specific moment at which the software was installed. User’s and customer’s satisfaction can only be evaluated in the long term taking into account the satisfaction with the product use and with its impact on business. This paper describes an empirical study of the introduction of data processing into the coffee agribusiness in Brazil. The paper uses cluster analysis to group 0-1 variables. Theses variables describe the impacts of data processing on the coffee agribusiness in the state of Minas Gerais, one of the main Brazilian coffee producers. Influences on employment, employee and enterprise structure are examined. Some commonly used procedures as well as main changes at corporation and individual level are detected.

Organizations often encounter problems in the Product Integration process. The difficulties include finding errors at integration related to mismatch between the different components and problems in other parts of the system than the one that was changed. The question is if these problems can be decreased if the awareness of the integration process is increased in other activities. To get better understanding of this problem we have analyzed the integration process in two product development organizations. One of the organizations has two different groups with slightly different integration routines while the other is basing the development on well defined components. The obstacles found in product integration are highlighted and related to best practices as described in the interim standard EIA-731.1. Our conclusion from this study is that the current descriptions for best practices in product integration are available in standards and models, but are insufficiently used and can be supported by technology to be accepted and utilized by the product developers.

In this paper we firstly describe the appraisal method that was developed by the Centre for Software Process Technologies (CSPT) to assess software processes within small to medium sized (SMEs) organisations that have little or no experience of software process improvement programmes. We then discuss our experience of developing and using our appraisal method within six SMEs organisations within Northern Ireland. Next we compare our assessment method with existing lightweight assessment methods that have also been used to assess software processes within SMEs software development organisations. We then describe new features that we are currently introducing to improve our software process appraisal method.

The activity of the software process improvement can be supported by reusing various kinds of knowledge on existing successful software processes in the form of process patterns. There are several catalogs of process patterns available on WWW; however, all of relations among patterns are closed in each pattern catalog. To acquire the cross-cutting relations over the different process pattern catalogs, we have applied the technique for the automatic relation analysis among the patterns. Our technique utilizes existing text processing techniques to extract patterns from documents and to calculate the strength of pattern relations. As a result of experimental evaluations, it is found that the system implementing our technique has extracted appropriate cross-cutting relations over the different process pattern catalogs without information on relations described in original pattern documents. These cross-cutting relations will be useful for dealing with larger problems than those dealt with by individual process patterns.

The Unified Process is a widely used process framework for software development. The framework is covering many of the roles, activities and artifacts needed in a software development project. However, a tailoring of the framework is necessary to fit specific needs. This tailoring may be accomplished in various ways. In this paper we describe a concrete attempt to tailor the Rational Unified Process to a defined project type; a Mainstream Software Development Project Type. The paper has focus on the process of creating the tailored Rational Unified Process as well as the resulting Rational Unified Process. The paper makes some conclusions and has a proposition for further research.

Currently, proposed development processes are often considered too generic for operational use. This often leads to a misunderstanding of the project-specific processes and its refuse. One reason for non-appropriate project-specific processes is insufficient support for the tailoring of generic processes to project characteristics and context constraints. To tackle this problem, we propose a method for the acquisition of a project-specific process. This method uses a domain-specific process line for top-down process tailoring and supports bottom-up refinement of the defined generic process based on tracking process activities. The expected advantage of the method is tailoring efficiency gained by usage of a process line and higher process adherence gained by bottom-up adaptation of the process. The work described was conducted in the automotive domain. This article presents an overview of the so-called Emergent Process Acquisition method (EPAc) and sketches an initial validation study.

In response to the increasingly challenging task of developing software, many companies turn to Software Process Improvement (SPI). One of many factors that SPI depends on is user (staff) involvement, which is complicated by the fact that process users may differ in viewpoints and priorities. In this paper, we present a case study in which we performed a pre-SPI examination of process users’ viewpoints and priorities with respect to their roles. The study was conducted by the means of a questionnaire sent out to the process users. The analysis reveals differences among roles regarding priorities, in particular for product managers and designers, but not regarding viewpoints. This indicates that further research should investigate in which situations roles are likely to differ and in which they are likely to be similar. Moreover, since we initially expected both viewpoints and priorities to differ, it indicates that it is important to cover these aspects in SPI, and not only rely on expectations.

There is a lack of early project control when automotive software is developed by external suppliers. This paper proposes a process improvement that targets early deliverables from suppliers as a means to improve project control. An addition to the existing automotive process employing a two-level use case approach is presented. In an example study involving Volvo 3P we show that the process improvements are applicable in real industrial development processes and that use cases are suitable for automotive requirements communication. The example also showed that use cases can be employed at the level of detail necessary to describe embedded systems.

Software organizations have to adapt efficiently to cope with clients needs changes and new and evolving technologies in order to guarantee business success. Moreover, organizations must continuously enhance their capability to develop software in order to increase products and processes quality. These characteristics constitute dynamic environments that require specific competences from software engineers such as knowledge related to software technologies, ability to adapt software processes concerning project characteristics, and experience on product and process quality management. This paper presents enterprise-oriented software development environments that support software engineers to execute software processes more effectively and to produce products with better quality. A main feature of these environments is the support offered to organizational knowledge management. Thus the paper also presents the main characteristics of the knowledge management infrastructure integrated to those environments. The practical experience using the environments has shown several benefits, such as an increase of product and process quality, and the preservation of organizational knowledge related to software processes and the development of software products.