| 1. |
- Alahyari, Hiva, 1979, et al.
(författare)
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A study of value in agile software development organizations
- 2017
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Ingår i: Journal of Systems and Software. - : Elsevier BV. - 0164-1212 .- 1873-1228. ; 125, s. 271-288
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Agile manifesto focuses on the delivery of valuable software. In Lean, the principles emphasise value, where every activity that does not add value is seen as waste. Despite the strong focus on value, and that the primary critical success factor for software intensive product development lies in the value domain, no empirical study has investigated specifically what value is. This paper presents an empirical study that investigates how value is interpreted and prioritised, and how value is assured and measured. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with 23 participants from 14 agile software development organisations. The contribution of this study is fourfold. First, it examines how value is perceived amongst agile software development organisations. Second, it compares the perceptions and priorities of the perceived values by domains and roles. Third, it includes an examination of what practices are used to achieve value in industry, and what hinders the achievement of value. Fourth, it characterises what measurements are used to assure, and evaluate value-creation activities. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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| 2. |
- Berntsson Svensson, Richard, 1978, et al.
(författare)
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Quality Requirements in Industrial Practice - An Extended Interview Study at Eleven Companies
- 2011
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Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. - 0098-5589 .- 1939-3520.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In order to create a successful software product and assure its quality, it is not enough to fulfill the functional requirements, it is also crucial to find the right balance among competing quality requirements (QR). An extended, previously piloted, interview study was performed to identify specific challenges associated with the selection, trade-off, and management of QR in industrial practice. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with eleven product managers and eleven project leaders from eleven software companies. The contribution of this study is fourfold: First, it compares how QR are handled in two cases, companies working in business-to-business markets, and companies that are working in business-to-consumer markets. These two are also compared in terms of impact on the handling of QRs. Second, it compares the perceptions and priorities of QR by product and project management respectively. Third, it includes an examination of the interdependencies among quality requirements perceived as most important by the practitioners. Fourth, it characterizes the selection and management of QR in down-stream development activities.
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| 3. |
- Bjarnason, Elizabeth, et al.
(författare)
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Challenges and practices in aligning requirements with verification and validation : a case study of six companies
- 2014
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Ingår i: Empirical Software Engineering. - : Springer. - 1382-3256 .- 1573-7616. ; 19:6, s. 1809-1855
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Weak alignment of requirements engineering (RE) with verification and validation (VV) may lead to problems in delivering the required products in time with the right quality. For example, weak communication of requirements changes to testers may result in lack of verification of new requirements and incorrect verification of old invalid requirements, leading to software quality problems, wasted effort and delays. However, despite the serious implications of weak alignment research and practice both tend to focus on one or the other of RE or VV rather than on the alignment of the two. We have performed a multi-unit case study to gain insight into issues around aligning RE and VV by interviewing 30 practitioners from 6 software developing companies, involving 10 researchers in a flexible research process for case studies. The results describe current industry challenges and practices in aligning RE with VV, ranging from quality of the individual RE and VV activities, through tracing and tools, to change control and sharing a common understanding at strategy, goal and design level. The study identified that human aspects are central, i.e. cooperation and communication, and that requirements engineering practices are a critical basis for alignment. Further, the size of an organisation and its motivation for applying alignment practices, e.g. external enforcement of traceability, are variation factors that play a key role in achieving alignment. Our results provide a strategic roadmap for practitioners improvement work to address alignment challenges. Furthermore, the study provides a foundation for continued research to improve the alignment of RE with VV.
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| 4. |
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| 5. |
- Ivarsson, Martin, 1980, et al.
(författare)
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A Practitioners Guide to Light Weight Software Process Assessment and Improvement Planning
- 2007
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Ingår i: Journal of Systems and Software. - New York : Elsevier BV. - 0164-1212. ; 81:6, s. 972-995
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Software process improvement (SPI) is challenging, particularly for small and medium sized enterprises. Most existing SPI frameworks are either too expensive to deploy, or do not take an organizations’ specific needs into consideration. There is a need for light weight SPI frameworks that enable practitioners to base improvement efforts on the issues that are the most critical for the specific organization.This paper presents a step-by-step guide to process assessment and improvement planning using improvement framework utilizing light weight assessment and improvement planning (iFLAP), aimed at practitioners undertaking SPI initiatives. In addition to the guide itself the industrial application of iFLAP is shown through two industrial cases. iFLAP is a packaged improvement framework, containing both assessment and improvement planning capabilities, explicitly developed to be light weight in nature. Assessment is performed by eliciting improvements issues based on the organization’s experience and knowledge. The findings are validated through triangulation utilizing multiple data sources. iFLAP actively involves practitioners in prioritizing improvement issues and identifying dependencies between them in order to package improvements, and thus establish a, for the organization, realistic improvement plan. The two cases of iFLAP application in industry are presented together with lessons learned in order to exemplify actual use of the framework as well as challenges encountered.
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| 6. |
- Ivarsson, Martin, 1980, et al.
(författare)
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Practice Selection Framework
- 2012
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Ingår i: International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering. - : World Scientific Pub Co Pte Ltd. - 0218-1940 .- 1793-6403. ; 22:1, s. 17-58
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Knowledge management (KM) in software engineering and software process improvement (SPI) are challenging. Most existing KM and SPI frameworks are too expensive to deploy or do not take an organization's specific needs or knowledge into consideration. There is thus a need for scalable improvement approaches that leverage knowledge already residing in the organizations. This paper presents the Practice Selection Framework (PSF), an Experience Factory approach, enabling lightweight experience capture and use by utilizing postmortem reviews. Experiences gathered concern performance and applicability of practices used in the organization, gained from concluded projects. Project managers use these as decision support for selecting practices to use in future projects, enabling explicit knowledge transfer across projects and the development organization as a whole. Process managers use the experiences to determine if there is potential for improvement of practices used in the organization. This framework was developed and subsequently validated in industry to get feedback on usability and usefulness from practitioners. The validation consisted of tailoring and testing the framework using real data from the organization and comparing it to current practices used in the organization to ensure that the approach meets industry needs. The results from the validation are encouraging and the participants' assessment of PSF and particularly the tailoring developed was positive.
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| 7. |
- Ivarsson, Martin, 1980, et al.
(författare)
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Tool support for disseminating and improving development practices
- 2012
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Ingår i: Software Quality Journal. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1573-1367 .- 0963-9314. ; 20:1, s. 173-199
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Knowledge management in software engineering and software process improvement activities pose challenges as initiatives are deployed. Most existing approaches are either too expensive to deploy or do not take an organization's specific needs into consideration. There is thus a need for scalable improvement approaches that leverage knowledge already residing in the organizations. This paper presents tool support for an Experience Factory approach for disseminating and improving practices used in an organization. Experiences from using practices in development projects are captured in postmortems and provide iteratively improved decision support for identifying what practices work well and what needs improvement. An initial evaluation of using the tool for organizational improvement has been performed utilizing both academia and industry. The results from the evaluation indicate that organizational characteristics influence how practices and experiences can be used. Experiences collected in postmortems are estimated to have little effect on improvements to practices used throughout the organization. However, in organizations where different practices are used in different parts of the organization, making practices available together with experiences from use, as well as having context information, can influence decisions on what practices to use in projects.
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| 8. |
- Ouriques, Raquel, et al.
(författare)
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Knowledge Management Strategies and Processes in Agile Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review
- 2019
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Ingår i: International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering. - : World Scientific. - 0218-1940. ; 29:3
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Knowledge-intensive companies that adopt Agile Software Development (ASD) rely on efficient implementation of Knowledge Management (KM) strategies to promote different Knowledge Processes (KPs) to gain competitive advantage. This study aims to explore how companies that adopt ASD implement KM strategies utilizing practices that promote the KPs in the different organizational layers. Through a systematic literature review, we analyzed 32 primary studies, selected by automated search and snowballing in the extant literature. To analyze the data, we applied narrative synthesis. Most of the identified KM practices implement personalization strategies (81%), supported by codification (19%). Our review shows that the primary studies do not report KM practices in the strategic layer and two of them in the product portfolio layer; on the other hand, in the project layer, the studies report 33 practices that implement personalization strategy, and seven practices that implement codification. KM strategies in ASD promote mainly the knowledge transfer process with practices that stimulates social interaction to share tacit knowledge in the project layer. As a result of using informal communication, a significant amount of knowledge can be lost or not properly transferred to other individuals and, instead of propagating the knowledge, it remains inside a few individuals' minds.
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| 9. |
- Pernstål, Joakim, 1964, et al.
(författare)
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A Study Investigating Challenges in The Interface Between Product Development and Manufacturing in The Development of Software-Intensive Automotive Systems
- 2012
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Ingår i: International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering. - : WORLD SCIENTIFIC PUBL CO PTE LTD. - 0218-1940. ; 22:7, s. 965-1004
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The automotive industry is facing a tremendous growth in the engineering of software-intensivesystems, giving rise to various challenges. To prevent problems related to the ¯t of newsoftware technologies in vehicles and the manufacturing processes, a well functioning interactionbetween the functions for product development and manufacturing is crucial. This iscomplicated by the fact that the changeable nature of software development causes unprecedentedneeds for collaboration and coordination between these two functions. This paperreports on a process assessment that focuses on the interface between the functions forproduct development and manufacturing in the development and design of software-intensiveautomotive systems. The main purpose of the study was to identify the key issues for improvementin the area assessed. The assessment was performed at two Swedish automotivecompanies where data were collected from documents and in interviews with practitioners.Nine key improvement issues were established ranging from challenges in requirements engineeringto the need for knowledge transfer between manufacturing and product development.In addition, to increase the understandability of the results and map possible avenues for solution and future research, the paper provides an extensive analysis of each improvement issue in relation to the state-of-the-art.
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| 10. |
- Pernstål, J., et al.
(författare)
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Software process improvement in inter-departmental development of software-intensive automotive systems - A case study
- 2013
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Ingår i: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). - Berlin, Heidelberg : Springer Berlin Heidelberg. - 1611-3349 .- 0302-9743. - 9783642392580 ; 7983, s. 93-107
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper presents a software process improvement (SPI) initiative conducted at two automotive companies, focusing on the inter-departmental interplay between manufacturing and product development, which are central players in automotive development. In such a complex environment with multiple departments with varying challenges - the planning of improvement possibilities was considered as mission critical to get support for changes in the companies. This paper reports the results of the SPI efforts following the process assessment, namely specifically the improvement planning step, which is often overlooked in empirical reports. We also thoroughly describe and report on lessons learned from employing our tailored planning method involving 41 professionals. We found that requirements engineering, early manufacturing involvement and roles and responsibilities were prioritized as main challenges to address. Furthermore, our and the involved professionals' experiences of the used SPI (planning) method, showed that it was useful, giving valuable decision support for the planning of the improvement.
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| 11. |
- Pernstål, Joakim, 1964, et al.
(författare)
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The lean gap: A review of lean approaches to large-scale software systems development
- 2013
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Ingår i: Journal of Systems and Software. - : Elsevier BV. - 0164-1212. ; 86:11, s. 2797-2821
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Lean approaches to product development (LPD) have had a strong influence on many industries and in recent years there have been many proponents for lean in software development as it can support the increasing industry need of scaling agile software development. With it's roots in industrial manufacturing and, later, industrial product development, it would seem natural that LPD would adapt well to large-scale development projects of increasingly software-intensive products, such as in the automotive industry. However, it is not clear what kind of experience and results have been reported on the actual use of lean principles and practices in software development for such large-scale industrial contexts. This was the motivation for this study as the context was an ongoing industry process improvement project at Volvo Car Corporation and Volvo Truck Corporation. The objectives of this study are to identify and classify state of the art in large-scale software development influenced by LPD approaches and use this established knowledge to support industrial partners in decisions on a software process improvement (SPI) project, and to reveal research gaps and proposed extensions to LPD in relation to its well-known principles and practices. For locating relevant state of the art we conducted a systematic mapping study, and the industrial applicability and relevance of results and said extensions to LPD were further analyzed in the context of an actual, industrial case. A total of 10,230 papers were found in database searches, of which 38 papers were found relevant. Of these, only 42 percent clearly addressed large-scale development. Furthermore, a majority of papers (76 percent) were non-empirical and many lacked information about study design, context and/or limitations. Most of the identified results focused on eliminating waste and creating flow in the software development process, but there was a lack of results for other LPD principles and practices. Overall, it can be concluded that research in the much hyped field of lean software development is in its nascent state when it comes to large scale development. There is very little support available for practitioners who want to apply lean approaches for improving large-scale software development, especially when it comes to inter-departmental interactions during development. This paper explicitly maps the area, qualifies available research, and identifies gaps, as well as suggests extensions to lean principles relevant for large scale development of software intensive systems. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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| 12. |
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| 13. |
- Svensson, R. B., et al.
(författare)
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Quality Requirements in Industrial Practice-An Extended Interview Study at Eleven Companies
- 2012
-
Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. - : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). - 0098-5589 .- 1939-3520. ; 38:4, s. 923-935
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In order to create a successful software product and assure its quality, it is not enough to fulfill the functional requirements, it is also crucial to find the right balance among competing quality requirements (QR). An extended, previously piloted, interview study was performed to identify specific challenges associated with the selection, tradeoff, and management of QR in industrial practice. Data were collected through semistructured interviews with 11 product managers and 11 project leaders from 11 software companies. The contribution of this study is fourfold: First, it compares how QR are handled in two cases, companies working in business-to-business markets and companies that are working in business-to-consumer markets. These two are also compared in terms of impact on the handling of QR. Second, it compares the perceptions and priorities of QR by product and project management, respectively. Third, it includes an examination of the interdependencies among quality requirements perceived as most important by the practitioners. Fourth, it characterizes the selection and management of QR in downstream development activities.
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| 14. |
- Torkar, Richard, 1971, et al.
(författare)
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Prediction of faults-slip-through in large software projects: An empirical evaluation
- 2014
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Ingår i: Software quality journal. - Netherlands : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0963-9314 .- 1573-1367. ; 22:1, s. 51-86
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A large percentage of the cost of rework can be avoided by finding more faults earlier in a software test process. Therefore, determination of which software test phases to focus improvement work on has considerable industrial interest. We evaluate a number of prediction techniques for predicting the number of faults slipping through to unit, function, integration, and system test phases of a large industrial project. The objective is to quantify improvement potential in different test phases by striving toward finding the faults in the right phase. The results show that a range of techniques are found to be useful in predicting the number of faults slipping through to the four test phases; however, the group of search-based techniques (genetic programming, gene expression programming, artificial immune recognition system, and particle swarm optimization–based artificial neural network) consistently give better predictions, having a representation at all of the test phases. Human predictions are consistently better at two of the four test phases. We conclude that the human predictions regarding the number of faults slipping through to various test phases can be well supported by the use of search-based techniques. A combination of human and an automated search mechanism (such as any of the search-based techniques) has the potential to provide improved prediction results.
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| 15. |
- Unterkalmsteiner, Michael, et al.
(författare)
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A Taxonomy for Requirements Engineering and Software Test Alignment
- 2014
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Ingår i: ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. - : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 1049-331X .- 1557-7392. ; 23:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Requirements Engineering and Software Testing are mature areas and have seen a lot of research. Nevertheless, their interactions have been sparsely explored beyond the concept of traceability. To fill this gap, we propose a definition of requirements engineering and software test (REST) alignment, a taxonomy that characterizes the methods linking the respective areas, and a process to assess alignment. The taxonomy can support researchers to identify new opportunities for investigation, as well as practitioners to compare alignment methods and evaluate alignment, or lack thereof. We constructed the REST taxonomy by analyzing alignment methods published in literature, iteratively validating the emerging dimensions. The resulting concept of an information dyad characterizes the exchange of information required for any alignment to take place. We demonstrate use of the taxonomy by applying it on five in-depth cases and illustrate angles of analysis on a set of thirteen alignment methods. In addition, we developed an assessment framework (REST-bench), applied it in an industrial assessment, and showed that it, with a low effort, can identify opportunities to improve REST alignment. Although we expect that the taxonomy can be further refined, we believe that the information dyad is a valid and useful construct to understand alignment. BORS F, 2009, P 1 INT C ADV SYST T, P123
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