| 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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| 11. |
- Kitchenham, Barbara, et al.
(författare)
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Can we evaluate the quality of software engineering experiments?
- 2010
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Ingår i: [Host publication title missing]. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. - 9781450300391 ; , s. 1-8
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Context: The authors wanted to assess whether the quality of published human-centric software engineering experiments was improving. This required a reliable means of assessing the quality of such experiments. Aims: The aims of the study were to confirm the usability of a quality evaluation checklist, determine how many reviewers were needed per paper that reports an experiment, and specify an appropriate process for evaluating quality. Method: With eight reviewers and four papers describing human-centric software engineering experiments, we used a quality checklist with nine questions. We conducted the study in two parts: the first was based on individual assessments and the second on collaborative evaluations. Results: The inter-rater reliability was poor for individual assessments but much better for joint evaluations. Four reviewers working in two pairs with discussion were more reliable than eight reviewers with no discussion. The sum of the nine criteria was more reliable than individual questions or a simple overall assessment. Conclusions: If quality evaluation is critical, more than two reviewers are required and a round of discussion is necessary. We advise using quality criteria and basing the final assessment on the sum of the aggregated criteria. The restricted number of papers used and the relatively extensive expertise of the reviewers limit our results. In addition, the results of the second part of the study could have been affected by removing a time restriction on the review as well as the consultation process.
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| 12. |
- Kitchenham, Barbara, et al.
(författare)
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Three Empirical Studies on the Agreement of Reviewers about the Quality of Software Engineer ing Experiments
- 2012
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Ingår i: Information and Software Technology. - : Elsevier BV. - 0950-5849. ; 54:8, s. 804-819
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Context: During systematic literature reviews it is necessary to assess the quality of empirical papers. Current guidelines suggest that two researchers should independently apply a quality checklist and any disagreements must be resolved. However, there is little empirical evidence concerning the effectiveness of these guidelines. Aims: This paper investigates the three techniques that can be used to improve the reliability (i.e. the consensus among reviewers) of quality assessments, specifically, the number of reviewers, the use of a set of evaluation criteria and consultation among reviewers. We undertook a series of studies to investigate these factors. Method: Two studies involved four research papers and eight reviewers using a quality checklist with nine questions. The first study was based on individual assessments, the second study on joint assessments with a period of inter-rater discussion. A third more formal randomised block experiment involved 48 reviewers assessing two of the papers used previously in teams of one, two and three persons to assess the impact of discussion among teams of different size using the evaluations of the "teams" of one person as a control. Results: For the first two studies, the inter-rater reliability was poor for individual assessments, but better for joint evaluations. However, the results of the third study contradicted the results of study 2. Inter-rater reliability was poor for all groups but worse for teams of two or three than for individuals. Conclusions: When performing quality assessments for systematic literature reviews, we recommend using three independent reviewers and adopting the median assessment. A quality checklist seems useful but it is difficult to ensure that the checklist is both appropriate and understood by reviewers. Furthermore, future experiments should ensure participants are given more time to understand the quality checklist and to evaluate the research papers.
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| 13. |
- Klünder, Jil, et al.
(författare)
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Catching up with Method and Process Practice: An Industry-Informed Baseline for Researchers
- 2019
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Ingår i: Proceedings - 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice, ICSE-SEIP 2019. ; May 2019, s. 255-264
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Software development methods are usually not applied by the book.companies are under pressure to continuously deploy software products that meet market needs and stakeholders' requests. To implement efficient and effective development processes, companies utilize multiple frameworks, methods and practices, and combine these into hybrid methods. A common combination contains a rich management framework to organize and steer projects complemented with a number of smaller practices providing the development teams with tools to complete their tasks. In this paper, based on 732 data points collected through an international survey, we study the software development process use in practice. Our results show that 76.8% of the companies implement hybrid methods.company size as well as the strategy in devising and evolving hybrid methods affect the suitability of the chosen process to reach company or project goals. Our findings show that companies that combine planned improvement programs with process evolution can increase their process' suitability by up to 5%.
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| 14. |
- Kuhrmann, Marco, et al.
(författare)
-
Preface
- 2018
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Ingår i: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). - 1611-3349 .- 0302-9743. ; 11271 LNCS, s. V-VI
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 15. |
- Mäntylä, Mika, et al.
(författare)
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How many individuals to use in a QA task with fixed total effort?
- 2012
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Increasing the number of persons working on quality assurance (QA) tasks, e.g., reviews and testing, increases the number of defects detected - but it also increases the total effort unless effort is controlled with fixed effort budgets. Our research investigates how QA tasks should be configured regarding two parameters, i.e., time and number of people. We define an optimization problem to answer this question. As a core element of the optimization problem we discuss and describe how defect detection probability should be modeled as a function of time. We apply the formulas used in the definition of the optimization problem to empirical defect data of an experiment previously conducted with university students. The results show that the optimal choice of the number of persons depends on the actual defect detection probabilities of the individual defects over time, but also on the size of the effort budget. Future work will focus on generalizing the optimization problem to a larger set of parameters, including not only task time and number of persons but also experience and knowledge of the personnel involved, and methods and tools applied when performing a QA task.
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| 16. |
- Mäntylä, Mika, et al.
(författare)
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How many individuals to use in a QA task with fixed total effort? - Defect detection as a function of time
- 2012
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Ingår i: [Host publication title missing]. - 1938-6451. ; , s. 311-314
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Increasing the number of persons working on quality assurance (QA) tasks, e.g., reviews and testing, increases the number of defects detected – but it also increases the total effort unless effort is controlled with fixed effort budgets. Our research investigates how QA tasks should be configured regarding two parameters, i.e., time and number of people. We define an optimization problem to answer this question. As a core element of the optimization problem we discuss and describe how defect detection probability should be modeled as a function of time. We apply the formulas used in the definition of the optimization problem to empirical defect data of an experiment previously conducted with university students. The results show that the optimal choice of the number of persons depends on the actual defect detection probabilities of the individual defects over time, but also on the size of the effort budget. Future work will focus on generalizing the optimization problem to a larger set of parameters, including not only task time and number of persons but also experience and knowledge of the personnel involved, and methods and tools applied when performing a QA task.
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| 17. |
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| 18. |
- Santos, Adrian, et al.
(författare)
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A family of experiments on test-driven development
- 2021
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Ingår i: Empirical Software Engineering. - : Springer. - 1382-3256 .- 1573-7616. ; 26:3
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Context:: Test-driven development (TDD) is an agile software development approach that has been widely claimed to improve software quality. However, the extent to which TDD improves quality appears to be largely dependent upon the characteristics of the study in which it is evaluated (e.g., the research method, participant type, programming environment, etc.). The particularities of each study make the aggregation of results untenable. Objectives:: The goal of this paper is to: increase the accuracy and generalizability of the results achieved in isolated experiments on TDD, provide joint conclusions on the performance of TDD across different industrial and academic settings, and assess the extent to which the characteristics of the experiments affect the quality-related performance of TDD. Method:: We conduct a family of 12 experiments on TDD in academia and industry. We aggregate their results by means of meta-analysis. We perform exploratory analyses to identify variables impacting the quality-related performance of TDD. Results:: TDD novices achieve a slightly higher code quality with iterative test-last development (i.e., ITL, the reverse approach of TDD) than with TDD. The task being developed largely determines quality. The programming environment, the order in which TDD and ITL are applied, or the learning effects from one development approach to another do not appear to affect quality. The quality-related performance of professionals using TDD drops more than for students. We hypothesize that this may be due to their being more resistant to change and potentially less motivated than students. Conclusion:: Previous studies seem to provide conflicting results on TDD performance (i.e., positive vs. negative, respectively). We hypothesize that these conflicting results may be due to different study durations, experiment participants being unfamiliar with the TDD process, or case studies comparing the performance achieved by TDD vs. the control approach (e.g., the waterfall model), each applied to develop a different system. Further experiments with TDD experts are needed to validate these hypotheses. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC part of Springer Nature.
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| 19. |
- Scott, Ezequiel, et al.
(författare)
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Initial results of the HELENA survey conducted in Estonia with comparison to results from Sweden and worldwide
- 2017
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Ingår i: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). - Cham : Springer International Publishing. - 1611-3349 .- 0302-9743. ; 10611 LNCS, s. 404-412
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The way how software is developed in industry has considerably changed with the advent of the agile development paradigm about 20 years ago. The HELENA initiative tries to investigate the current state of practice in software and system development. This paper reports about initial results of an online survey that was conducted in 26 countries simultaneously, focusing on results from Estonia and comparing these results with results from Sweden as well as with the joint results from all participating countries worldwide.
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| 20. |
- Sletholt, Magnus Thorstein, et al.
(författare)
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A literature review of agile practices and their effects in scientific software development
- 2011
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Ingår i: [Host publication title missing]. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. - 9781450305983 ; , s. 1-9
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The nature of scientific research and the development of scientific software have similarities with processes that follow the agile manifesto: responsiveness to change and collaboration are of the utmost importance. But how well do current scientific software development processes match the practices found in agile development methods, and what are the effects of using agile practices in such processes? In order to investigate this, we conduct a literature review, focusing on evaluating the agility present in a selection of scientific software projects. Both projects with intentionally agile practices and projects with a certain degree of agile elements are taken into consideration. In the agility assessment, we define and utilize an agile mapping chart. The elements of the mapping chart are based on Scrum and XP, thus covering two of the most prominent agile reference models. We compared the findings of the literature review to results of a previously conducted survey. The comparison indicates that scientific software development projects adopting agile practices perceive their testing to be better than average. No difference to average projects was perceived regarding requirements-related activities. Future work includes an in-depth case study to further investigate the existence and impact of agility in three large scientific software projects, ultimately aiming at a better understanding of the particularities involved in developing scientific software.
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| 21. |
- Sletholt, Magnus Thorstein, et al.
(författare)
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What Do We Know about Scientific Software Development's Agile Practices?
- 2012
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Ingår i: Computing in Science & Engineering. - 1521-9615. ; 14:2, s. 24-36
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The development of scientific software has similarities with processes that follow the software engineering "agile manifesto": responsiveness to change and collaboration are of utmost importance. But how well do current scientific software-development processes match the practices found in agile development methods, and what are the effects of using agile practices in such processes?
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| 22. |
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| 23. |
- Wnuk, Krzysztof, et al.
(författare)
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How can Open Source Software Development Help Requirements Management Gain the Potential of Open Innovation: An Exploratory Study
- 2012
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Ingår i: Proceedings Of The ACM-IEEE International Symposium On Empirical Software Engineering And Measurement (ESEM'12). - 1938-6451. ; , s. 271-279
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- A key component in successfully managing software products is to properly, and in a timely manner, identify and secure competitive advantage by innovation via feature differentiation. Although open source software (OSS) is not a new idea, several product development companies that operate in a market-driven context have started to use open source solutions as core software components in their products. Adopting open source core components implies a lower degree of control over software development and increased business risk associated with integrating differentiating contributions into the core release stream. Whether and how to adjust the current requirements management practices after the adoption of OSS components to fully benefit from the concept of open innovation has not yet been empirically explored. We outline experiences and challenges related to leveraging open innovation via engaging in OSS identified during 19 interviews with practitioners occupying different roles in the requirements management process at a large company followed by four validation interviews with other practitioners. We then propose a research agenda for requirements and decision management in the open innovation context and suggest which challenges in requirements engineering open innovation affects.
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