| 1. |
- Kuhrmann, Marco, et al.
(författare)
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What Makes Agile Software Development Agile
- 2022
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Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. - 0098-5589 .- 1939-3520. ; 48:9, s. 3523-3539
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Together with many success stories, promises such as the increase in production speed and the improvement in stakeholders' collaboration have contributed to making agile a transformation in the software industry in which many companies want to take part. However, driven either by a natural and expected evolution or by contextual factors that challenge the adoption of agile methods as prescribed by their creator(s), software processes in practice mutate into hybrids over time. Are these still agile In this article, we investigate the question: what makes a software development method agile We present an empirical study grounded in a large-scale international survey that aims to identify software development methods and practices that improve or tame agility. Based on 556 data points, we analyze the perceived degree of agility in the implementation of standard project disciplines and its relation to used development methods and practices. Our findings suggest that only a small number of participants operate their projects in a purely traditional or agile manner (under 15%). That said, most project disciplines and most practices show a clear trend towards increasing degrees of agility. Compared to the methods used to develop software, the selection of practices has a stronger effect on the degree of agility of a given discipline. Finally, there are no methods or practices that explicitly guarantee or prevent agility. We conclude that agility cannot be defined solely at the process level. Additional factors need to be taken into account when trying to implement or improve agility in a software company. Finally, we discuss the field of software process-related research in the light of our findings and present a roadmap for future research.
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| 2. |
- Wagner, Stefan, et al.
(författare)
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Status quo in requirements engineering : A theory and a global family of surveys
- 2019
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Ingår i: ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. - : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 1049-331X .- 1557-7392. ; 28:2, s. 1-48
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Requirements Engineering (RE) has established itself as a software engineering discipline over the past decades. While researchers have been investigating the RE discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, attempts to systematically derive an empirical theory in context of the RE discipline have just recently been started. However, such a theory is needed if we are to define and motivate guidance in performing high quality RE research and practice. We aim at providing an empirical and externally valid foundation for a theory of RE practice, which helps software engineers establish effective and efficient RE processes in a problem-driven manner. We designed a survey instrument and an engineer-focused theory that was first piloted in Germany and, after making substantial modifications, has now been replicated in 10 countries worldwide. We have a theory in the form of a set of propositions inferred from our experiences and available studies, as well as the results from our pilot study in Germany. We evaluate the propositions with bootstrapped confidence intervals and derive potential explanations for the propositions. In this article, we report on the design of the family of surveys, its underlying theory, and the full results obtained from the replication studies conducted in 10 countries with participants from 228 organisations. Our results represent a substantial step forward towards developing an empirical theory of RE practice. The results reveal, for example, that there are no strong differences between organisations in different countries and regions, that interviews, facilitated meetings and prototyping are the most used elicitation techniques, that requirements are often documented textually, that traces between requirements and code or design documents are common, that requirements specifications themselves are rarely changed and that requirements engineering (process) improvement endeavours are mostly internally driven. Our study establishes a theory that can be used as starting point for many further studies for more detailed investigations. Practitioners can use the results as theory-supported guidance on selecting suitable RE methods and techniques.
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| 3. |
- Wagner, Stefan, et al.
(författare)
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Status Quo in Requirements Engineering: A Theory and a Global Family of Surveys
- 2020
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Ingår i: Lecture Notes in Informatics. - 1617-5468. ; P-310, s. 115-116
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- While researchers have been investigating the Requirements Engineering (RE) discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, attempts to systematically derive an empirical theory in context of the RE discipline have just recently been started. We aim at providing an empirical and externally valid foundation for a theory of RE practice, which helps software engineers establish effective and efficient RE processes in a problem-driven manner. We designed a survey instrument and an engineer-focused theory that has been conducted in 10 countries. We have a theory in the form of a set of propositions inferred from our experiences and available studies, as well as the results from our pilot study in Germany. We evaluate the propositions with bootstrapped confidence intervals and derive potential explanations for the propositions.
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| 4. |
- Assar, Saïd, et al.
(författare)
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Using Text Clustering to Predict Defect Resolution Time: A Conceptual Replication and an Evaluation of Prediction Accuracy
- 2015
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Ingår i: Empirical Software Engineering. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1573-7616 .- 1382-3256.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Defect management is a central task in software maintenance. When a defect is reported, appropriate resources must be allocated to analyze and resolve the defect. An important issue in resource allocation is the estimation of Defect Resolution Time (DRT). Prior research has considered different approaches for DRT prediction exploiting information retrieval techniques and similarity in textual defect descriptions. In this article, we investigate the potential of text clustering for DRT prediction. We build on a study published by Raja (2013) which demonstrated that clusters of similar defect reports had statistically significant differences in DRT. Raja’s study also suggested that this difference between clusters could be used for DRT prediction. Our aims are twofold: First, to conceptually replicate Raja’s study and to assess the repeatability of its results in different settings; Second, to investigate the potential of textual clustering of issue reports for DRT prediction with focus on accuracy. Using different data sets and a different text mining tool and clustering technique, we first conduct an independent replication of the original study. Then we design a fully automated prediction method based on clustering with a simulated test scenario to check the accuracy of our method. The results of our independent replication are comparable to those of the original study and we confirm the initial findings regarding significant differences in DRT between clusters of defect reports. However, the simulated test scenario used to assess our prediction method yields poor results in terms of DRT prediction accuracy. Although our replication confirms the main finding from the original study, our attempt to use text clustering as the basis for DRT prediction did not achieve practically useful levels of accuracy.
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| 5. |
- Borg, Markus, et al.
(författare)
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Analyzing Networks of Issue Reports
- 2013
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Ingår i: [Host publication title missing]. - 1944-2793 .- 1534-5351. ; , s. 79-88
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Completely analyzed and closed issue reports in software development projects, particularly in the development of safety-critical systems, often carry important information about issue-related change locations. These locations may be in the source code, as well as traces to test cases affected by the issue, and related design and requirements documents. In order to help developers analyze new issues, knowledge about issue clones and duplicates, as well as other relations between the new issue and existing issue reports would be useful. This paper analyses, in an exploratory study, issue reports contained in two Issue Management Systems (IMS) containing approximately 20.000 issue reports. The purpose of the analysis is to gain a better understanding of relationships between issue reports in IMSs. We found that link-mining explicit references can reveal complex networks of issue reports. Furthermore, we found that textual similarity analysis might have the potential to complement the explicitly signaled links by recommending additional relations. In line with work in other fields, links between software artifacts have a potential to improve search and navigation in large software engineering projects.
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| 6. |
- Borg, Markus, et al.
(författare)
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Do better IR tools improve the accuracy of engineers’ traceability recovery?
- 2011
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Ingår i: [Host publication title missing]. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. ; , s. 23-30
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Large-scale software development generates an ever-growing amount of information. Multiple research groups have proposed using approaches from the domain of information retrieval (IR) to recover traceability. Several enhancement strategies have been initially explored using the laboratory model of IR evaluation for performance assessment. We conducted a pilot experiment using printed candidate lists from the tools RETRO and ReqSimile to investigate how different quality levels of tool output affect the tracing accuracy of engineers. Statistical testing of equivalence, commonly used in medicine, has been conducted to analyze the data. The low number of subjects in this pilot experiment resulted neither in statistically significant equivalence nor difference. While our results are not conclusive, there are indications that it is worthwhile to investigate further into the actual value of improving tool support for semi-automatic traceability recovery. For example, our pilot experiment showed that the effect size of using RETRO versus ReqSimile is of practical significance regarding precision and F-measure. The interpretation of the effect size regarding recall is less clear. The experiment needs to be replicated with more subjects and on varying tasks to draw firm conclusions.
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| 7. |
- Borg, Markus, et al.
(författare)
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Industrial comparability of student artifacts in traceability recovery research - An exploratory survey
- 2012
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Ingår i: [Host publication title missing]. - 9780769546667 ; , s. 181-190
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Abstract in UndeterminedAbout a hundred studies on traceability recovery have been published in software engineering fora. In roughly half of them, software artifacts developed by students have been used as input. To what extent student artifacts differ from industrial counterparts has not been fully explored in the literature. We conducted a survey among authors of studies on traceability recovery, including both academics and practitioners, to explore their perspectives on the matter. Our results indicate that a majority of authors consider software artifacts originating from student projects to be only partly representative to industrial artifacts. Moreover, only few respondents validated student artifacts for industrial representativeness. Furthermore, our respondents made suggestions for improving the description of artifact sets used in studies by adding contextual, domain-specific and artifact-centric information. Example suggestions include adding descriptions of processes used for artifact development, meaning of traceability links, and the structure of artifacts. Our findings call for further research on characterization and validation of software artifacts to support aggregation of results from empirical studies.
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Garousi, Vahid, et al.
(författare)
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Characterizing industry-academia collaborations in software engineering : evidence from 101 projects
- 2019
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Ingår i: Empirical Software Engineering. - : Springer New York LLC. - 1382-3256 .- 1573-7616. ; 24:4, s. 2540-2602
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Research collaboration between industry and academia supports improvement and innovation in industry and helps ensure the industrial relevance of academic research. However, many researchers and practitioners in the community believe that the level of joint industry-academia collaboration (IAC) projects in Software Engineering (SE) research is relatively low, creating a barrier between research and practice. The goal of the empirical study reported in this paper is to explore and characterize the state of IAC with respect to industrial needs, developed solutions, impacts of the projects and also a set of challenges, patterns and anti-patterns identified by a recent Systematic Literature Review (SLR) study. To address the above goal, we conducted an opinion survey among researchers and practitioners with respect to their experience in IAC. Our dataset includes 101 data points from IAC projects conducted in 21 different countries. Our findings include: (1) the most popular topics of the IAC projects, in the dataset, are: software testing, quality, process, and project managements; (2) over 90% of IAC projects result in at least one publication; (3) almost 50% of IACs are initiated by industry, busting the myth that industry tends to avoid IACs; and (4) 61% of the IAC projects report having a positive impact on their industrial context, while 31% report no noticeable impacts or were “not sure”. To improve this situation, we present evidence-based recommendations to increase the success of IAC projects, such as the importance of testing pilot solutions before using them in industry. This study aims to contribute to the body of evidence in the area of IAC, and benefit researchers and practitioners. Using the data and evidence presented in this paper, they can conduct more successful IAC projects in SE by being aware of the challenges and how to overcome them, by applying best practices (patterns), and by preventing anti-patterns. © 2019, The Author(s).
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