1,721,118 research outputs found
Continuous Software Process Improvement through Statistical Process Control
No full textMeasurement based software process improvement is nowadays a mandatory activity. This implies continuous process monitoring in order to predict its behaviour, highlight its performance variations and, if necessary, quickly react to it. Process variations are due to common causes or assignable ones. The former are part of the process itself while the latter are due to exceptional events that result in an unstable process behaviour and thus in less predictability. Statistical Process Control (SPC) is a statistical based approach able to determine whether a process is stable or not by discriminating between the presence of common cause variation and assignable cause variation. It is a well-established technique, which has shown to be effective in manufacturing processes but not yet in software process contexts. Here experience in using SPC is not mature yet. Therefore a clear understanding of the SPC outcomes still lacks. Although many authors have used it in software, they have often not considered the primary differences between manufacturing and software process characteristics. Due to such differences SPC cannot be adopted "as is" but it must be tailored. In this sense, I propose an SPC-based approach that reinterprets SPC, and applies it from a Software Process point of view
Process Diversity and how Practitioners Can Manage It
No full textSince IT projects are unique regarding their combination of specific goals, technologies in use, and
characteristics, providing ‘general’ processes it is not an effective solution. Instead effective and efficient
processes custom tailored to a project and based on experience collected during past projects execution are
required. This is in contrast with the industry practices where reuse-oriented process descriptions and goaloriented
planning are often missing. Usually a process can undergo a certain numbers of modifications, due
to the different operative contexts in which it is executed. The modifications generate many different versions
of the process, named specialized processes. Each one of these must be managed properly in order to govern
a just evolution consistently with all the others. Considered the dimension of the actual scenarios,
maintaining all the processes and their specialized versions is not a trivial task. We have defined a process
pattern based framework to accomplish this purpose. In this paper we present the framework, that we are
realizing with an Italian enterprise, and an explanatory case study we are developing within the Research
Centre on Software Technology in Bari, Italy
Software Renewal Process Comprehension using Dynamic Effort Estimation
No full textThis paper presents a method for dynamic effort estimation, together with its supporting tool, and the experimental validation on a renewal project of a very aged software system. Method characteristics such as dynamic tuning and fine granularity allow the tool to quickly react to process variations. The experimental validation shows how the combination of meaningful predictors and fine grain calibration is effective for understanding the enacted process and its implicit changes, or controlling the efficacy of explicit process changes. The study also confirms that the estimation model is process-dependent and then cannot be reused for other processes albeit similar
ASSESSING MULTIVIEW COMPREHENSIBILITY(MF) AND EFFICIENCY: A REPLICATED EXPERIMENT
No full textGoal oriented quality models have become an important means for assessing and improving software quality. In this sense, in previous papers, authors have proposed an approach called Multiview Framework, for guiding
quality managers in designing and managing a goal oriented quality model. This approach has been validated
through a controlled experiment carried out with university students.
In this paper authors describe and discuss a strict replication of the controlled experiment carried out with
university graduates attending a master degree course in an Italian university. Although research goals and hypotheses are the same, context differs. In particular, for the replication, experimental subjects were better
representative of practitioners, given the fact that their master degree course required project work with industrial partners. This difference in context has
represented an important first step for generalizing experimental results. Data analysis and interpretation support our research goals and confirm validity of the conclusions made
Quality Models Reuse: Experimentation on Field
No full textA transferable quality model must be general. This implies that only the high level characteristics can be transferred into different settings and that the refinement of the characteristics into metrics must be operated according to the context peculiarities. In spite of the amount of quality models and approaches to quality models definition presented in literature, there aren't experiences reported showing the same quality model reused in different environments. This statement needs further investigation. The aim of this work is to present an experience on field that involves two industrial projects in which the same quality model was used. The study confirms the need to modify the quality model, not only in the metrics but also in the measurement processes and in the interpretation of the resulting measures as side effects
Abstraction Sheets for Improving Comprehensibility of Quality Models
No full textThe need for systematic evaluation of process quality and of the resulting products has always been an issue of primary importance within the software engineering community. To this end, for assessing desired quality, use of goal oriented measurement plans is adopted. Nevertheless, many software organizations still strive to define and adopt measurement plans successfully. Causes are most likely attributable to aspects such as dimensions, complexity, dependencies among goals. Such issues inevitably influence comprehensibility of the quality model and make both measurement and interpretation procedures quite onerous. In this scenario, we reconsider and reinterpret the concept of abstraction sheets. Our conjecture is that abstraction sheets are a means for improving comprehensibility of a quality model validation has been assessed out through a case study carried out on quality models developed by students in two different academic years within a software engineering course
Ontology-based similarity applied to business process clustering
No full textReverse engineering of business process enables business process to be discovered and retrieved from existing information systems, which embed many business rules that are not available anywhere else. These techniques are especially useful when business process models are unavailable, outdated, or misaligned because of uncontrolled maintenance. Reverse engineering techniques obtain well-designed business processes, but these are often retrieved with harmful quality faults as a consequence of the abstraction. Clustering techniques are then applied to reduce these quality faults and improve the understandability and modifiability of business process models. Regrettably, the most challenging concern is how to determine the similarity between two business activities to be clustered. Formal ontologies help to represent the essential concepts and constraints of a universe of discourse and determine the similarity in accordance with the given ontology. This paper shows how to compute and use the ontology-based similarity within a clustering algorithm whose aim is to improve the quality of business process models previously obtained from legacy information systems by reverse engineering. The principal contribution of this paper is the usage of an ontology-based similarity function and its application to 43 business process models retrieved from four real-life information system
Comprehensibility and Efficiency of Multiview Framework for Measurement Plan Design
No full textUnderstanding the results of measurements is a primary issue for continuous software process improvement. Models provide support for better understanding measures. One of the problems often encountered in defining a measurement plan is its dimensions in terms of goals and metrics. This inevitably impacts on the usability of a measurement plait in terms of effort needed for interpreting the measurement results and accuracy of interpretation itself. lit this work the authors validate an approach (Multiview Framework) for designing a measurement plait, according to the GQM model, and structured in order to improve usability. For this reason an experiment was executed to validate the approach and provide evidence that a GQM designed according to the Multiview Framework is more usable, and that interpretation depends from the collected measures and is independent from who interprets them. In the experiment the authors verify that a measurement plait designed according to the proposed model doesn't negatively impact on efficiency of interpretation. The experimental results are positive and encourage further replications and studies
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