Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Developing software across borders has become an emerging area of software engineering. It is one of the important competitive advantages in today’s industry. However, the increased globalization of software development creates many challenges brought by distribution of software life cycle activities among teams separated by various boundaries, such as contextual, organizational, cultural, temporal, geographical, and political.

Future predictions say that together with its neighbors Estonia and Lithuania, Latvia will be a major outsourcing center for Northern / continental Europe. The Baltic region is known for its well-educated and multinational workforce, one of the most efficient tax systems in Europe, a liberal economy, great affinity with Nordics, and identical legislation. So, where have we been 15 years ago and where are we now?

To develop security software is clearly one of the most challenging software development areas. The challenges are both technical and business based. From the business point of view, the security market is mature and highly competitive, although market needs can change even daily and there is no room for mistakes. Technically, the challenge is the ability to find and catch the threats as soon as they arise.

IT today consists of myriad combinations of outsourcing, insourcing, offshoring, global development teams, and project teams scattered across multiple time zones. Technology abounds, integration and on-time delivery become mission critical, and process improvement demands increase. But... what’s the impact of all this advancement on the people involved? As the technical demands for faster, better, and cheaper software increase, so, too, do the needs for effective communication and cultural intelligence. This presentation examines the people side of IT globalization and provides insights and recommendations for succeeding with project teams in a truly global world.

Most studies of software outsourcing focus on how to manage the outsourcing from the perspective of the outsourcer, i.e., a company issuing a subcontract. There are few studies of outsourcing presented from the viewpoint of the supplier, i.e., a company receiving a subcontract. Since more and more Chinese software companies are getting software outsourcing subcontracts from all over the world, it is important to investigate how software outsourcing projects are actually performed in China, and to identify possible enhancements. Our study has collected data by a questionnaire-based survey from 53 finished projects in 41 Chinese software suppliers. The results show that: 1) Differences in natural languages may not be the barrier of Chinese software suppliers. 2) Email is most used to discuss development related issues, while face-to-face meetings are mainly used to discuss management and requirements issues. 3) The main reasons for overtime work at the Chinese suppliers are design or requirements changes initiated by the outsourcers and the suppliers’ initial underestimation of the effort.

Many organizations have turned toward globally distributed software development in their quest for higher-quality software delivered cheaply and quickly. But this kind of development has often been reported as problematic and complex to manage. One of the fundamental factors in determining the success and failure of globally distributed software teams is trust. The aim of our work has therefore been to describe the key factors causing lack of trust, and the main effects of lacking trust in such teams. From studying 4 projects, all located in two different countries, with trust problems we found the key factors to be poor socialization and socio-cultural fit, lack of face-to-face meetings, missing conflict handling and cognitive based trust, increased monitoring and too little communication. The effect of lacking trust was a decrease in productivity, quality, information exchange, feedback and morale among the employees; the monitoring increased and the employees doubted negative feedback from manager.

In this paper, we present the application of a set of software engineering roles. Role definitions were developed using internationally recognized software engineering reference documents for a major railway development organization: Bombardier Transportation. The description of the Software Architect role is explained. This paper will also illustrate how the role set could be used for project-specific needs during a typical project planning and launch session.

In the rapidly growing modern telecommunications industry, software quality and reliability requirements are in contrast to the shorter time to market and higher complexity requirements dictated by strong competition on the telecommunications market. In such a rapidly changing environment, software development organization must improve almost on a daily basis in order to achieve the operational excellence which leads to business success. In this paper, an approach to the continuous improvement of the software verification process based on the application of Six Sigma is given. More precisely, with the help of the Six Sigma methodology, change management, and statistical tools and techniques, the proposed approach solves the problem of fault slippage through verification phases, which is particularly important in overlapping project conditions. Success of the proposed process improvement, proved using Six Sigma methodologies for a case study from a real industrial project, encourages wide and general application to any software verification process.

Most industries are challenging to increase productivity of software development. Often many process improvement activities are started with enthusiasm, unfortunately most of these are less successful than forecasted or improvements do not sustain for long. This paper presents the Seven Forces Improvement Method, SFIM, which claims to overcome unexpected disappointment in improvement results. SFIM is built upon different aspects that influence the success of software process improvements, such as culture, skills and organization. The method has been applied to improvement activities in a large software department for a number of years. The success of SFIM is compared with the compliance with the SFIM method. The paper shows that application of SFIM increases the success rate of software improvement activities in industry.

Software development organizations recognize the importance of improving software processes to enhance their competitive advantages. COPPE/ UFRJ software process research group has been providing SPI consultancy services to the Brazilian software industry for more than two decades. In order to support the SPI activities of the group, a SPI deployment strategy named SPI-KM that is supported by Knowledge Management and has been developed based on international and national reference models and standards. This paper presents the SPI-KM strategy and the results of an empirical study executed aiming to characterize the SPI initiatives that employed it. The study findings are presented as lessons learned and their applications are discussed in different organizations. We consider the adoption of the SPI-KM strategy and the lessons learned as important knowledge to be appreciated during SPI initiatives aiming to facilitate SPI deployment and to assure their success.