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| 2. |
- Berander, Patrik, et al.
(författare)
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Differences in Views between Development Roles in Software Process Improvement : A Quantitative Comparison
- 2004
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper presents a quantitative study that evaluates how different roles in a software development organization view different issues in software process improvement. The study is conducted in a large Swedish telecommunication organization with the traditional roles of software development. The respondents of the study got five different questions related to process improvement. The result was that the different roles disagreed in three of the questions while they agreed in two of the questions. The disagreement was related to issues about importance of improvement, urgency of problems, and threat against successful process management, while the questions where the roles agreed focused on communication of the processes (documentation and teaching). It is concluded that it is important to be aware and take into account the different needs of different roles and that looking into other areas (e.g. marketing) could be beneficial when conducting process improvements.
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| 3. |
- Berander, Patrik, et al.
(författare)
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Evaluating two Ways of Calculating Priorities in Requirements Hierarchies : an Experiment on Hierarchical Cumulative Voting
- 2009
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Ingår i: Journal of Systems and Software. - : Wiley Blackwell. - 0164-1212. ; 82:5, s. 836-850
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- When developing large-scale software systems, there is often a large amount of requirements present, and they often reside on several hierarchical levels. In most cases, not all stated requirements can be implemented into the product due to different constraints, and the requirements must hence be prioritized. As requirements on different abstraction levels shall not be compared, prioritization techniques that are able to handle multi-level prioritization are needed. Different such techniques exist, but they seem to result in unfair comparisons when a hierarchy is unbalanced. In this paper, an empirical experiment is presented where an approach that compensate for this challenge is evaluated. The results indicate that some form of compensation is preferred, and that the subjects’ preference is not influenced by the amount of information given.
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| 4. |
- Berander, Patrik
(författare)
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Evolving Prioritization for Software Product Management
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The quality of a product is commonly defined by its ability to satisfy stakeholder needs and expectations. Therefore, it is important to find, select, and plan the content of a software product to maximize the value for internal and external stakeholders. This process is traditionally referred to as requirements engineering in the software industry, while it is often referred to as product management in industries with a larger market focus. As an increasing number of software products are delivered to a market instead of single customers, the need for product management in software companies is increasing. As a side effect, the need for mechanisms supporting decisions regarding the content of software products also increases. While decision-support within requirements engineering and product management is a broad area, requirements prioritization together with release planning and negotiation are considered as some of the most important decision activities. This is particularly true because these activities support decisions regarding the content of products, and are hence drivers for quality. At the same time, requirements prioritization is seen as an integral and important component in both requirements negotiation (with single customers) and release planning (with markets) in incremental software development. This makes requirements prioritization a key component in software engineering decision support, in particular as input to more sophisticated approaches for release planning and negotiation, where decisions about what and when to develop are made. This thesis primarily focuses on evolving the current body of knowledge in relation to release planning in general and requirements prioritization in particular. The research is carried out by performing qualitative and quantitative studies in industrial and academic environments with an empirical focus. Each of the presented studies has its own focus and scope while together contributing to the research area. Together they answer questions about why and how requirements prioritization should be conducted, as well as what aspects should be taken into account when making decisions about the content of products. The primary objective of the thesis is to give guidelines on how to evolve requirements prioritization to better facilitate decisions regarding the content of software products. This is accomplished by giving suggestions on how to perform research to evolve the area, by evaluating current approaches and suggest ways on how these can be improved, and by giving directions on how to align and focus future research to be more successful in development of decision-support approaches. This means that the thesis solves problems with requirements prioritization today, and gives directions and support on how to evolve the area in a successful way.
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| 5. |
- Berander, Patrik, et al.
(författare)
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Hierarchical Cumulative Voting (HCV) Prioritization of Requirements in Hierarchies
- 2006
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Ingår i: International Journal of Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering. - Singapore : World Scientific Publishing Company. - 0218-1940. ; 16:6, s. 819-849
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Decision support in requirements engineering is an activity that plays an important role in enabling the delivery of value to stakeholders. Requirements prioritization has been identified as an integral (and important) part of requirements negotiation and release planning in incremental software development, which makes prioritization a key issue in requirements engineering decision support. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) has for long been considered as the technique to use when prioritizing requirements on a ratio scale. Several studies have reported positively about AHP, but lately a number of studies have also reported about weaknesses, without identifying any better ratio-scale alternatives. In this paper, the strengths and weaknesses of AHP and another ratioscale prioritization technique, Cumulative Voting (CV), are compared. Based on this comparison, a new technique for prioritizing hierarchically structured requirements on a ratio scale is presented, called Hierarchical Cumulative Voting (HCV). HCV addresses the weaknesses of AHP while inheriting the strengths of CV. The suitability of HCV is discussed theoretically as well as in the light of empirical results from using HCV and CV in industrial settings. It is concluded that HCV seems very promising, but additional empirical studies are needed to address some of the open questions about the technique.
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| 6. |
- Berander, Patrik, et al.
(författare)
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Identification of Key Factors in Software Process Management : A Case Study
- 2003
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- When conducting process related work within an organization, it is important to be aware of which factors that are most important to consider. This paper presents an empirical study that was performed in order to find the key success factors in process management. One factor, namely synchronization of processes, was considered as much more important within the studied organization than within the studied literature. This shows that more research might be needed in this area. The study further shows that it is important to relate process improvement work to the properties of the affected organization and that the key factors identified are highly interrelated.
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| 7. |
- Berander, Patrik
(författare)
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Prioritization of Stakeholder Needs in Software Engineering : Understanding and Evaluation
- 2004
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In everyday life, humans confront situations where different decisions have to be made. Such decisions can be non-trivial even though they often are relatively simple, such as which bus to take or which flavor of a soft drink to buy. When facing decisions of more complex nature, and when more is at stake, they tend to get much harder. It is often possible to deal with such decisions by prioritizing different alternatives to find the most suitable one. In software engineering, decision-makers are often confronted with situations where complex decisions have to be made, and where the concept of prioritization can be utilized. Traditionally in software engineering, discussions about prioritization have focused on the software product. However, when defining or improving software processes, complex decisions also have to be made. In fact, software products and software processes have many characteristics in common which invite thoughts about using prioritization when developing and evolving software processes as well. The results presented in this thesis indicate that it is possible to share results and knowledge regarding prioritization between the two areas. In this thesis, the area of prioritization of software products is investigated in detail and a number of studies where prioritizations are performed in both process and product settings are presented. It is shown that it is possible to use prioritization techniques commonly used in product development also when prioritizing improvement issues in a software company. It is also shown that priorities between stakeholders of a software process sometimes differ, just as they do when developing software products. The thesis also presents an experiment where different prioritization techniques are evaluated with regard to ease of use, time consumption, and accuracy. Finally, an investigation of the suitability of students as subjects when evaluating prioritization techniques is presented.
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| 8. |
- Berander, Patrik, et al.
(författare)
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Requirements Prioritization
- 2005
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Ingår i: Engineering and Managing Software Requirements. - Berlin : Springer Verlag. - 9783540250432 ; , s. 69-94
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter provides an overview of techniques for prioritization of requirements for software products. Prioritization is a crucial step towards making good decisions regarding product planning for single and multiple releases. Various aspects of functionality are considered, such as importance, risk, cost, etc. Prioritization decisions are made by stakeholders, including users, managers, developers, or their representatives. Methods are given how to combine individual prioritizations based on overall objectives and constraints. A range of different techniques and aspects are applied to an example to illustrate their use. Finally, limitations and shortcomings of current methods are pointed out, and open research questions in the area of requirements prioritization are discussed.
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