1,721,120 research outputs found
Welcome to the 8th International Workshop on Empirical Requirements Engineering (EmpiRE 2023)
Full text linkA message from the workshop chairs of the 8th International Workshop on Empirical Requirements Engineering, co-located with the 31st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 2023) Hannover, Germany, September 4-8, 2023
Report of the 8th Workshop on Empirical RequirementsEngineering (EmpiRE 2023)
Full text linkThe Eighth International Workshop on Empirical Requirements Engineering (EmpiRE 2023), co-located with the 31st IEEE International Requirements Engineering conference (RE 2023), was held on September 5, 2023 in Hannover, Germany. This report presents the workshop structure, the keynote speech, the themes of the presented papers, and the panel discussion
Towards understanding the value-creation in agile projects
Full text linkIn recent years, iterative and incremental approaches for software development appeared as an alternative to the traditional, waterfall-style development. The reason for this is the large number of software projects in the past that failed to deliver useful products within budget, and struggled with changing requirements and scope creep. Meanwhile it is a common sense understanding that not all projects are predictable from the beginning. Market uncertainty and a fast changing business environment drives changes during the development of a software product. One of the key characteristics of any agile approach is its explicit focus on Business Value. Although any software development method aims at creating a product and thus creating value, in agile software projects the value creation for the clients represents the essence and defines the focus of the process. Thus, the agile development process is a value creation process. The agile methods allow for frequent decisions about the requirements that will be considered for implementation during the short development cycles called iterations. In practice this decision-making is implemented by the process of requirements prioritization and re-prioritization, performed at the beginning of each iteration. This work is dedicated to exploring and understanding the process of value-creation for clients in agile projects, with a particular focus on the requirements prioritization and reprioritization during a project, as an agile-specific value creation practice. We performed a number of research steps to explore some of the current agile practices that seem to contribute to the value creation, and thus to distil knowledge that the agile practitioners apply and that might help to improve the agile practice. Further, we studied in detail the agile prioritization process and identified the criteria, used in the decision-making process, and relations between the project context and the instantiation of the process. In particular, we researched the following topics: • How is business value perceived and measured in agile projects? • What practices contribute to value creation in agile projects in different contexts? • What concepts play a role in making re-prioritization decisions about requirements? These questions represent the focus of our research activities. They lead and framed the formulation of our Research Questions and the research design. The main contribution of our work to the research and practitioners’ communities consists in the rich contextual description of the process of requirements prioritization in agile projects as well as a conceptual model of this process
Threats to Validity in Software Engineering – hypocritical paper section or essential analysis?
No full textBackground: In recent years, a discourse on how to systematically consider and report threats to validity started to gain momentum within the empirical software engineering community. Aims: With this study, we aim to systematically underpin the current state of threats to validity practices in software engineering research. Method: We conduct a literature review comprising 91 papers awarded with the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering. Data is extracted and analyzed by considering six main facets of threats to validity, e.g., their explicit documentation, categorization, discussion of limitations, and trade-offs. Results: Results corroborate current critiques to the threats management state of the art. Threats result to be seldom discussed in depth, and are mostly considered as an enforced afterthought rather than an active concern of the research design and execution. Conclusions: To improve the observed practice, we derived items to consider for researchers, reviewers and readers, and call for a community action to increase the understanding of knowledge creation in empirical software engineering research
Prioritization in incremental requirements engineering
No full textThe goal of this thesis is to improve the performance of information system development projects by means of a more focused requirements elicitation process during incremental business-process-driven requirements engineering (BPRE). The main contribution is a systematic, tool-based prioritization approach that integrates domain-relevant prioritization criteria and algorithmic decision heuristics for determining a more valuable elicitation order
Assessing business-IT alignment in networked organizations
Full text linkConcerns such as identifying ways to control costs, improve quality, increase effectiveness, and manage risk have become increasingly important for organizations as they face more and more pressure to gain and maintain their competitive edge. Business-IT alignment (B-ITa) is recognized as a solution to these concerns. Aligning IT with the business remains one of the top priorities for both business practitioners and researchers. Interest in B-ITa is stimulated by cases of organizations that have successfully aligned their IT to gain competitive advantage and to improve organizational performance. There is a considerable literature on B-ITa in single organizations. Within this broad scope of literature, a number of authors have stressed the importance of assessing B-ITa in order to plan B-ITa improvement actions. In support of this, these authors have developed maturity models (MMs). MMs describe the development of a speci_c domain over time. Based on maturity assessments, organizations know the extent to which processes in such domains are predictable. That is, organizations can be aware of whether a speci_c area is su_ciently re_ned and documented so that the activities in such area now have the potential to achieve their desired outcomes. However, B-ITa in collaborative networked organizations (CNOs) has hardly been studied. Yet, this is important because improved B-ITa entails a more ef- _cient use of IT in the CNO supporting the integration of information systems and processes across organizational boundaries. CNOs form the core of a new discipline that focuses on the structure, behavior, and dynamics of networks of independent organizations that collaborate using IT to better achieve common goals. Notwithstanding the e_ective application of current B-ITa MMs for single organizations, to the best of our knowledge at the time of writing this dissertation, there is no MM that speci_cally addresses the processes needed for achieving alignment between business and IT in CNOs. In response, this dissertation introduces the ICoNOs MM, a MM to assess B-ITa in CNOs. The ICoNOs MM presents a roll up of recommendations { e.g., coordination mechanisms, implementation strategies and organizational changes, in the form of process areas, speci_c goals and practices. Through its maturity levels, the ICoNOs MM provides improvement routes for those domains that are the most important for achieving alignment in CNOs. We believe that achieving B-ITa in CNOs is more complex than in single organizations because in collaborative settings, B-ITa is driven by goals of different independent organizations commonly with no centralized decision-making processes. Throughout this dissertation, we present the results of four literature surveys, one focus group, and six case studies. Based on these conceptual and empirical research activities, we designed and validated the components underlying the ICoNOs MM and the model itself
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