Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

To increase the likelihood for software project success, it is important to be able to identify the drivers of success. This paper compares three methods to identify similar projects with the objective to predict project success. The hypothesis is that projects with similar characteristics are likely to have the same outcome in terms of success. Two of the methods are based on identifying similar projects using all available information. The first method of these aims at identifying the most similar project. The second method identifies a group of projects as most similar. Finally, the third method pinpoints some key characteristics to identify project similarity. Our measure of success for these identifications is whether project success for these projects identified as similar is the same. The comparison between methods is done in a case study with 46 projects with varying characteristics. The paper evaluates the performance of each method with regards to its ability to predict project success. The method using key drivers of project success is superior to the others in the case study. Thus, it is concluded that it is important for software developing organizations to identify its key project characteristics to improve its control over project success.

In various fields of computer science, rapidly growing hardware power, such as high-speed network, high-performance CPU, huge disk capacity, and large memory space, has been fruitfully harnessed. Examples of such usage are large scale data and web mining, grid computing, and multimedia environments. We propose that such rich hardware can also catapult software engineering to the next level. Huge amounts of software engineering data can be systematically collected and organized from tens of thousands of projects inside organizations, or from outside an organization through the Internet. The collected data can be analyzed extensively to extract and correlate multi-project knowledge for improving organization-wide productivity and quality. We call such an approach for software engineering . In this paper, we propose the concept of Mega Software Engineering, and demonstrate some novel data analysis characteristic of Mega Software Engineering. We describe a framework for enabling Mega Software Engineering.

In this article, we describe an approach to empirical software engineering based on a combined software factory and software laboratory. The software factory develops software required by an external customer while the software laboratory monitors and improves the processes and methods used in the factory. We have used this approach during a period of four years to define and evaluate a software process that combines practices from Extreme Programming with architectural design and documentation practices in order to find a balance between agility, maintainability and reliability.

The motivation for this research comes from a need to improve software inspection practices in software organizations. Even if inspections are well defined and regularly used in an organization, there may be some problems which can greatly reduce inspection effectiveness. The paper presents a list of inspection related problems which are known in the literature. It also relates some experiences from two case organizations. In addition, this paper provides an approach which helps identifying problems of this kind and directing limited improvement resources effectively.

Within industry the demand for short lead-time and reduced effort consumption is in focus. For an associated industry partner the lead-time and effort focus has meant turning the interest towards the Verification and Validation (V&V) process. The industry cooperation motivating this study aims at providing a tailored and applicable V&V process, where the order of verification and validation may be changed as well as the amount of V&V activities conducted. Through the industry cooperation as well as industrial and academic experience, a method has been formulated that address how to select a suitable V&V process depending on the functionality being developed. The method describes how a suitable process is created and selected, where the appropriate process is identified based on functionality and coupling between the system entities being developed. It is concluded that the method provides support, structure and clarification to address the possibilities to a trade-off between verification and validation.

Software inspection helps to improve the quality of software products early in the development process. For design inspection recent research showed that usage-based reading of documents is more effective and efficient than traditional checklists. Usage-based reading guides actively the inspector with pre-sorted use cases, while traditional checklists let the inspector figure out how best to proceed. This paper investigates the impact of active guidance on an inspection process: We introduced checklists that give the inspector a process to follow, which should be as flexible as traditional checklists but more efficient. We compared the performance of this approach in a controlled experiment in an academic environment with traditional checklist and usage-based reading. Main results of the investigation are (a) checklists with active guidance are significantly more efficient than traditional checklists for finding major defects and (b) usage-based reading is more effective and efficient than both types of checklists. These results suggest that active guidance improves the efficiency of inspectors while the upfront investment into usage-based reading pays off during inspection.

Designing experiments to be carried out with students as subjects in an XP setup is a difficult task: Students lack experiences with XP, there are limited resources, the experiment might not be taken seriously and other effects interfere. This paper presents an experiment using student subjects examining test-first in comparison to classical-testing. We proved several hypotheses about test coverage, number of test-cases, contacts with customer, acceptance for test-first, development speed and not required features. While designing the experiment we noticed that it is useful to include some additional XP techniques on top of test first, because of our special setup and the demands we had. Despite careful planning and conduction of the experiment we still faced a number of problems. In this paper we also discuss the problems with our experimental setup.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how agile development affects collaboration in an organization. Agile processes have received interest from the software development community during the last years as they address changes, such as new customer requirements or re-prioritization of development tasks, which is important to manage in software development. Most of the research published about agile processes are based on opinions from teams applying these processes. However, since software development is an activity where many parties often collaborate, it is interesting to investigate from an organizational point of view, how agile development affects collaboration between these teams and their organizations. An agile process based on extreme programming, XP, was applied by a team during eight months. The team interacted with its surrounding organization regularly. People from the organization which the team collaborated with were interviewed to understand how the use of the process affected their collaboration with the team. The results show that the interviewed people perceived an improvement of their collaboration with the team, as the team started develop software in an agile way.

Background: Agile methods are starting to get established not only in new business organizations, but also in organizations dealing with innovation and early product development in more traditional branches like automotive industry. Customers of those organizations demand a specified quality of the delivered products.

Objective: Adapt the PROFES Improvement Methodology for use in an industrial, agile process context, to ensure more predictable product quality.

Method: An explorative case study at BMW Car IT, which included several structured interviews with stakeholders such as customers and developers.

Result: Adapted PROFES methodology with regard to agility and initial product-process dependencies, which partially confirm some of the original PROFES findings.

Conclusion: The cost-value ratio of applying PROFES as an improvement methodology in an agile environment has to be carefully considered.

Agile Methods, like Extreme Programming, have increasingly become a viable alternative for conducting software projects, especially for projects with a very short time-to-market or uncertain customer-requirements. Using a technique called Agile Hours it is possible to convey many feelings associated with an Extreme Programming project. Within 70 minutes, a project is performed in which a product is built with Lego bricks. We applied this approach to (1) students and (2) IT professionals. By comparing the two groups, we found that both behaved comparable: we observed a number of interesting differences, although of minor importance. Both groups seemed to benefit from the Agile (Lego) Hours.