Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This paper describes a longitudinal study on how the XP methodology acts as a positive mood inducer to SE teams. The results provide empirical evidence of the ability of these practices to alleviate the positive feeling amongst SE teams and there is a strong relationship between the positive moods experienced by the teams and the number of the XP practices used.

Extreme programming (XP) has been introduced in various scenarios primarily because some in industry argued for a move away from what they feel are rigid documentation-based development techniques. This has usually taken place with experienced developers. This paper describes attempts by researchers from the University of Sheffield to introduce XP to relatively inexperienced student developers. This paper describes some of the important findings and provides evidence relating to common problems encountered when students attempt to adjust to XP.

Code generation automatically produces executable code by software. Model-driven code generation is currently the most flexible and scalable generative technique, but there are many complaints about the complexity it introduces into the development process, and the design decisions imposed on the code. Here, an agile code-oriented model-driven generative methodology is outlined that reduces complexity and allows the engineer to define the exact form of the produced code and embrace change in the requirements in an automated manner. A flexible tool, ECGF, supports this methodology, and a case study in rapid generation of large-scale HTML documents is outlined.

Agile methodologies are based on effective communication with the customer. The ideal case is XP’s on-site customer. Unfortunately, in practice customer representatives are too busy to work with the development team all the time. Moreover, frequently there are many of them and each representative has only partial domain knowledge. To cope with this we introduced to our projects a proxy-customer role resembling RUP’s Analyst and we equipped him with a tool, called UC Workbench, that supports the communication with the customer representatives and the developers. Analyst collects user stories from customer representatives and ‘translates’ them into use cases. UC Workbench contains among other things a use-case editor and a generator of mockups (a mockup generated by UC Workbench animates use-cases and illustrates them with screen designs).

This paper shows how System Metaphor delivers a coherent system of names that carry more information than unrelated names would.

Mobile applications are increasingly location-based; their functionality is becoming both interactive and context-aware. Combined with an overall increase in the complexity of the devices delivering such services, and a growth in the number of possible networks that they can participate in, these systems require more than just the average approach to testing. The principles and practices of agile testing may serve development teams well here; since the systems ultimately end up being developed and deployed in an iterative and evolutionary manner. In this paper, we explore a testing framework for location-based services that can be employed test-first and yet also offers the full range of non-functional tests that these applications require.

Source repositories are a promising database of information about software projects. This paper proposes a tool to extract and summarize information from CVS logs in order to identify whether there are differences in the development approach of Agile and non-Agile teams. The tool aims to improve empirical investigation of the Agile Methods (AMs) without affecting the way developers write code. There are many claims about the benefits of AMs; however, these claims are seldom supported by empirical analysis. Configuration management systems contain a huge amount of quantitative data about a project. The retrieval and part of the analysis can be automated in order to get useful insights about the status and the evolution of the project. However, this task poses formidable challenges because the data source is not designed as a measurement tool. This paper proposes a tool for extracting and summarizing information from CVS (Concurrent Versions System) repositories and a set of analysis that can be useful to identify common or different behaviors.

Writing good user stories for software systems seems to be a hard task. Story writers often tend to mix real stories (sequences of events) with descriptions of the domain (notion definitions). This often leads to inconsistencies and confusion in communication between the users and the developers. This paper proposes a tool that could support writing coherent user stories. The tool clearly separates the domain notion definitions from the actual stories. This leads to a consistent requirements model that is more readable by the users and also easier to implement by the developers.

XP recommends that developers focus on the software product ignoring issues that do not contribute directly to its construction. All wider issues are assumed to be the responsibility of the customer representative. This paper argues that there is benefit in the full development team considering the ‘big picture’ before beginning implementation as long as this can be undertaken in a suitably agile way. Evidence of the need for this wider approach is presented. Aspects of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) are then proposed as a means of performing the necessary analysis. Two analysis techniques of SSM, rich pictures and conceptual models, are evaluated against agile criteria defined by Ambler.

Genesys Solutions is a bespoke IT company, first of its kind, run by MSc and fourth year students of Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield under the supervision of Prof. Mike Holcombe and Dr. Marian Gheorghe. Genesys follows the eXtreme Programming (XP) methodology for software development based on client requirements. The commitment towards XP and its ‘good software practices’ can be considered as the greatest strength of Genesys.

is our contribution towards supporting the XP methodology by adopting the Eclipse platform along with its associated tools and frameworks within Genesys Solutions. It aimed to teach good software practices in Genesys to support XP by providing a software development life cycle management tool that will encompass the best practices of XP. It comprises of tools based on the principles of XP such as story cards, system metaphor, estimations, testing and quality assurance. ADEPT was the result of the IBM Eclipse Innovation 2004 awarded to the University of Sheffield. Also, based on the previous year’s performance and more innovative ideas to implement more principles of XP we have been awarded another grant under the IBM Eclipse Innovation 2005 programme.