| 1. |
- Hebig, Regina, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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How do students experience and judge software comprehension techniques?
- 2020
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Ingår i: IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. ; , s. 425-435
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Today, there is a wide range of techniques to support softwarecomprehension. However, we do not fully understand yet whattechniques really help novices, to comprehend a software system.In this paper, we present a master level project course on softwareevolution, which has a large focus on software comprehension. Wecollected data about student's experience with diverse comprehension techniques during focus group discussions over the course oftwo years. Our results indicate that systematic code reading canbe supported by additional techniques to guiding reading efforts.Most techniques are considered valuable for gaining an overviewand some techniques are judged to be helpful only in later stagesof software comprehension efforts.
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| 2. |
- Kasauli, Rashida, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Charting Coordination Needs in Large-Scale Agile Organisations with Boundary Objects and Methodological Islands
- 2020
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Ingår i: Proceedings - 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software and System Processes, ICSSP 2020. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. ; , s. 51-60
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Large-scale system development companies are increasingly adopting agile methods. While this adoption may improve lead-times, such companies need to balance two trade-offs: (i) the need to have a uniform, consistent development method on system level with the need for specialised methods for teams in different disciplines (e.g., hardware, software, mechanics, sales, support); (ii) the need for comprehensive documentation on system level with the need to have lightweight documentation enabling iterative and agile work. With specialised methods for teams, isolated teams work within larger ecosystems of plan-driven culture, i.e., teams become agile “islands”. At the boundaries, these teams share knowledge which needs to be managed well for a correct system to be developed. While it is useful to support diverse and specialised methods, it is important to understand which islands are repeatedly encountered, the reasons or factors triggering their existence, and how best to handle coordination between them. Based on a multiple case study, this work presents a catalogue of islands and the boundary objects between them. We believe this work will be beneficial to practitioners aiming to understand their ecosystems and researchers addressing communication and coordination challenges in large-scale development.
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| 3. |
- Maro, Salome Honest, 1987, et al.
(författare)
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Vetting automatically generated trace links: What information is useful to human analysts?
- 2018
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Ingår i: Proceedings - 2018 IEEE 26th International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2018. ; , s. 52-63
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Automated traceability has been investigated for over a decade with promising results. However, a human analyst is needed to vet the generated trace links to ensure their quality. The process of vetting trace links is not trivial and while previous studies have analyzed the performance of the human analyst, they have not focused on the analyst's information needs. The aim of this study is to investigate what context information the human analyst needs. We used design science research, in which we conducted interviews with ten practitioners in the traceability area to understand the information needed by human analysts. We then compared the information collected from the interviews with existing literature. We created a prototype tool that presents this information to the human analyst. To further understand the role of context information, we conducted a controlled experiment with 33 participants. Our interviews reveal that human analysts need information from three different sources: 1) from the artifacts connected by the link, 2) from the traceability information model, and 3) from the tracing algorithm. The experiment results show that the content of the connected artifacts is more useful to the analyst than the contextual information of the artifacts.
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| 4. |
- Mukelabai, Mukelabai, 1985, et al.
(författare)
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Tackling Combinatorial Explosion: A Study of Industrial Needs and Practices for Analyzing Highly Configurable Systems
- 2018
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Ingår i: Automated Software Engineering. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. - 1573-7535 .- 0928-8910. ; , s. 155-166
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Highly configurable systems are complex pieces of software. To tackle this complexity, hundreds of dedicated analysis techniques have been conceived, many of which able to analyze system properties for all possible system configurations, as opposed to traditional, single-system analyses. Unfortunately, it is largely unknown whether these techniques are adopted in practice, whether they address actual needs, or what strategies practitioners actually apply to analyze highly configurable systems. We present a study of analysis practices and needs in industry. It relied on a survey with 27 practitioners engineering highly configurable systems and follow-up interviews with 15 of them, covering 18 different companies from eight countries. We confirm that typical properties considered in the literature (e.g., reliability) are relevant, that consistency between variability models and artifacts is critical, but that the majority of analyses for specifications of configuration options (a.k.a., variability model analysis) is not perceived as needed. We identified rather pragmatic analysis strategies, including practices to avoid the need for analysis. For instance, testing with experience-based sampling is the most commonly applied strategy, while systematic sampling is rarely applicable. We discuss analyses that are missing and synthesize our insights into suggestions for future research.
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| 5. |
- Steghöfer, Jan-Philipp, 1983, et al.
(författare)
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The MobSTr Dataset - An Exemplar for Traceability and Model-based Safety Assessment
- 2021
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering. - 2332-6441 .- 1090-705X. ; RE 2021, s. 444-445
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The MobSTr dataset contains a number of artifacts for an autonomous driver assistance system, ranging from textual requirements to models for system design and models relevant to safety assurance. The artifacts provided are connected with traceability links created and managed with Eclipse Capra, an open source traceability management tool. The dataset builds upon a custom traceability information model that provides type safety and semantics for the trace links.MobSTr is intended for researchers that work on software and systems traceability as well as on model-based safety assurance. It is already being used in a number of studies, including research on trace link consistency, change impact analysis, and automated analysis of safety and timing requirements.
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| 6. |
- Wohlrab, Rebekka, 1991, et al.
(författare)
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Collaborative traceability management: a multiple case study from the perspectives of organization, process, and culture
- 2020
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Ingår i: Requirements Engineering. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0947-3602 .- 1432-010X. ; 25:1, s. 21-45
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Traceability is crucial for many activities in software and systems engineering including monitoring the development progress, and proving compliance with standards. In practice, the use and maintenance of trace links are challenging as artifacts undergo constant change, and development takes place in distributed scenarios with multiple collaborating stakeholders. Although traceability management in general has been addressed in previous studies, there is a need for empirical insights into the collaborative aspects of traceability management and how it is situated in existing development contexts. The study reported in this paper aims to close this gap by investigating the relation of collaboration and traceability management, based on an understanding of characteristics of the development effort. In our multiple exploratory case study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 individuals from 15 industrial projects. We explored which challenges arise, how traceability management can support collaboration, how collaboration relates to traceability management approaches, and what characteristics of the development effort influence traceability management and collaboration. We found that practitioners struggle with the following challenges: (1) collaboration across team and tool boundaries, (2) conveying the benefits of traceability, and (3) traceability maintenance. If these challenges are addressed, we found that traceability can facilitate communication and knowledge management in distributed contexts. Moreover, there exist multiple approaches to traceability management with diverse collaboration approaches, i.e., requirements-centered, developer-driven, and mixed approaches. While traceability can be leveraged in software development with both agile and plan-driven paradigms, a certain level of rigor is needed to realize its benefits and overcome challenges. To support practitioners, we provide principles of collaborative traceability management. The main contribution of this paper is empirical evidence of how culture, processes, and organization impact traceability management and collaboration, and principles to support practitioners with collaborative traceability management. We show that collaboration and traceability management have the potential to be mutually beneficial—when investing in one, also the other one is positively affected.
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| 7. |
- Wohlrab, Rebekka, 1991, et al.
(författare)
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Modeling and Analysis of Boundary Objects and Methodological Islands in Large-Scale Systems Development
- 2020
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Ingår i: Lecture Notes in Computer Science. - Cham : Springer International Publishing. - 0302-9743 .- 1611-3349. - 9783030625214 ; 12400, s. 575-589
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Large-scale systems development commonly faces the challenge of managing relevant knowledge between different organizational groups, particularly in increasingly agile contexts. In previous studies, we found the importance of analyzing methodological islands (i.e., groups using different development methods than the surrounding organization) and boundary objects between them. In this paper, we propose a metamodel to better capture and analyze coordination and knowledge management in practice. Such a metamodel can allow practitioners to describe current practices, analyze issues, and design better-suited coordination mechanisms. We evaluated the conceptual model together with four large-scale companies developing complex systems. In particular, we derived an initial list of bad smells that can be leveraged to detect issues and devise suitable improvement strategies for inter-team coordination in large-scale development. We present the model, smells, and our evaluation results.
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