Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Software inspections have been acknowledged as an important method in software engineering, but they are not well applied in practice. This paper discusses the current practices and the related problems based on six case studies in industrial settings. The analysis of inspection practices was organized according to ICMM, which is a model for systematically assessing and improving software inspection process maturity. The sample case organizations used inspections relatively regularly. The involved units are compared and the revealed practices, their characteristics, inspection problems and implications of the study discussed. The main problem areas were non-existent inspection training, limited formality of inspections and immaturity of inspection metrics.

With the growing interest for Extreme Programming, test driven development (TDD) has been increasingly investigated, and several experiments have been executed with the aim of understanding if and when it is preferable to the traditional practice of testing the code after having written it (named TAC in the paper). However, the research concerning TDD is at its beginning and the body of knowledge is largely immature. This paper discusses an experiment carried out within a Spanish software company with the aim of comparing productivity in TDD and TAC.

Faults introduced into systems during development are costly to fix, and especially so for business-critical systems. These systems are developed using common development practices, but have high requirements for dependability. This paper reports on an ongoing investigation of fault reports from Norwegian IT companies, where the aim is to seek a better understanding on faults that have been found during development and how this may affect the quality of the system. Our objective in this paper is to investigate the fault profiles of four business-critical commercial projects to explore if there are differences in the way faults appear in different systems. We have conducted an empirical study by collecting fault reports from several industrial projects, comparing findings from projects where components and reuse have been core strategies with more traditional development projects. Findings show that some specific fault types are generally dominant across reports from all projects, and that some fault types are rated as more severe than others.

Software process improvement (SPI) has received much attention in both academia and industry. SPI aims to improve the effectiveness of the software development process. Several different approaches have been developed for SPI, including the SEI’s Capability Maturity Model (CMM), more recently the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and ISO’s SPICE. Research shows that the effort put into these approaches can assist in producing high quality software. This paper has a two-fold objectives: first to review and summarise the empirical evidence thus far on the costs and benefits of SPI approaches; second to establish a relationship between different approaches to SPI and to seek and identify whether these approaches fulfil all the needs for an effective SPI initiative. The aim of this review is to analyse material about SPI approach and to set the scene for future research in the area of Software Process Improvement.

In this paper, characteristics of a runaway project are revealed based on combinations of risk factors which appear in the project. Concretely, an association rule mining technique is applied with an actual questionnaire data to induce rules that associate combinations of risk factors with runaway status of software projects. Furthermore, the induced rules are integrated and reduced based on a certain rule obtained from experts’ perception to simplify the representation of characteristics of a runaway project. Then, for confirming the effectiveness of this characterization, it is evaluated how many runaway projects in distinct data set were identified by the reduced rules. The result of the experiment suggested that the induced rules are effective to characterize runaway projects.

In this paper we describe a framework which combines several models for organizational change. The framework enables an organization to decide which strategies will be most successful when implementing a specific change in its particular setting. The conditions for change is assessed in relation to each of the strategies for organizational change and a list-of-fit is produced, which reveals the degree to which each of the strategies fits the specific setting. The framework was developed and evaluated within a field study involving four companies in the financial sector. The IT organizations in two of these collaborated with the researchers in providing promising evaluations of the framework.

In this paper, we propose a technique for establishing process lines, which are sets of common processes in particular problem domains, and process line architectures that incorporate commonality and variability. Process line architectures are used as a basis for deriving process lines from the perspective of overall optimization. The proposed technique includes some extensions to the Software Process Engineering Metamodel for clearly expressing the commonality and variability in the process workflows described as UML activity diagrams. As a result of applying the proposed technique to hardware/software co-design processes in an embedded system domain, it is found that the proposed technique is useful for defining consistent and project-specific processes efficiently.

The main aim of this paper is to present how to refine software logical architectures by application of a recursive model-based transformation approach called 4SRS (four step rule set). It is essentially based on the mapping of UML use case diagrams into UML object diagrams. The technique is based on a sequence of steps that are inscribed in a tabular representation that is used to derive the software architecture for a focused part of the global system.

Process Pattern is an emergent approach to reuse process knowledge. However, in practice this concept still remains difficult to be exploited due to the lack of formalization and supporting methodology. In this paper, we propose a way to formalize the process pattern concept by introducing it into a process meta-model. We provide a general definition to cover various kinds of process-related patterns in different domains. We define rigorously process concepts and their relations to allow representing processes based on process patterns and to facilitate the development of supporting tools. By distinguishing process patterns at different abstraction levels, we aim to develop a systematic approach to define and apply process patterns.

Release planning addresses the process of deciding which requirement of an evolving software system should be assigned to which release. We study two fundamentally different software release planning approaches: (i) ad hoc planning and (ii) systematic planning. Ad hoc planning is mainly based on human intuition, experience and communication. Systematic planning, based on formalization, assumes a quantitative description of the problem, and application of optimization algorithms for its solution. We have performed a controlled experiment intended to investigate hypotheses related to confidence, understanding, and trust related to the two approaches. The stated hypotheses were based on an explorative pre-study and prior industrial release planning projects. Although limited in scope and size, the experiment provided interesting insight into the performance of the stated approaches. Overall, systematic planning based on tool support increased confidence into the solutions and was trusted more than ad hoc planning.