Modelo institucional do processo de estruturação de empresas de desenvolvimento de software: um estudo de múltiplos casos

Some authors have shown the need of understanding the technological structuring process in contemporary firms. From this perspective, the software industry is a very important element because it provides products and services directly to many organizations from many fields. In this case, the Brazilian software industry has some peculiarities that distinguish it from other industries located in developed countries, which makes its understanding even more relevant. There is evidence that local firms take different strategies and structural configurations to enter into a market naturally dominated by large multinational firms. Therefore, this study aims to understand not only the structural configurations assumed by domestic firms but also the dynamic and the process that lead to these different configurations. To do so, this PhD dissertation investigates the institutional environment, its entities and the isomorphic movements, by employing an exploratory, descriptive and explanatory multiple cases study. Eight software development companies from the Recife's information technology Cluster were visited. Also, a form was applied and an interview with one of the main firm s professional was conducted. Although the study is predominantly qualitative, part of the data was analyzed through charts and graphs, providing a companies and environment overview that was very useful to analysis done through the interviews interpretation. As a result, it was realized that companies are structured around hybrids business models from two ideal types of software development companies, which are: software factory and technology-based company. Regarding the development process, it was found that there is a balanced distribution between the traditional and agile development paradigm. Among the traditional methodologies, the Rational Unified Process (RUP) is predominant. The Scrum is the most used methodology among the organizations based on the Agile Manifesto's principles. Regarding the structuring process, each institutional entity acts in such way that generates different isomorphic pressure. Emphasis was given to entities such as customers, research agencies, clusters, market-leading businesses, public universities, incubators, software industry organizations, technology vendors, development tool suppliers and manager s school and background because they relate themselves in a close way with the software firms. About this relationship, a dual and bilateral influence was found. Finally, the structuring level of the organizational field has been also identified as low, which gives a chance to organizational actors of acting independently

O impacto da utilização de design patterns nas métricas e estimativas de projetos de software: a utilização de padrões tem alguma influência nas estimativas?

VALENTIM, R. A. M. ; SOUZA NETO, Plácido Antônio de. O impacto da utilização de design patterns nas métricas e estimativas de projetos de software: a utilização de padrões tem alguma influência nas estimativas?. Revista da FARN, Natal, v. 4, p. 63-74, 2006

Milestones in Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering History: A Comparative Review

We present a review of the historical evolution of software engineering, intertwining it with the history of knowledge engineering because “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This retrospective represents a further step forward to understanding the current state of both types of engineerings; history has also positive experiences; some of them we would like to remember and to repeat. Two types of engineerings had parallel and divergent evolutions but following a similar pattern. We also define a set of milestones that represent a convergence or divergence of the software development methodologies. These milestones do not appear at the same time in software engineering and knowledge engineering, so lessons learned in one discipline can help in the evolution of the other one.

Automated Software Debugging Using Hybrid Static/Dynamic Analysis

With the increasing complexity of today's software, the software development process is becoming highly time and resource consuming. The increasing number of software configurations, input parameters, usage scenarios, supporting platforms, external dependencies, and versions plays an important role in expanding the costs of maintaining and repairing unforeseeable software faults. To repair software faults, developers spend considerable time in identifying the scenarios leading to those faults and root-causing the problems. While software debugging remains largely manual, it is not the case with software testing and verification. The goal of this research is to improve the software development process in general, and software debugging process in particular, by devising techniques and methods for automated software debugging, which leverage the advances in automatic test case generation and replay. In this research, novel algorithms are devised to discover faulty execution paths in programs by utilizing already existing software test cases, which can be either automatically or manually generated. The execution traces, or alternatively, the sequence covers of the failing test cases are extracted. Afterwards, commonalities between these test case sequence covers are extracted, processed, analyzed, and then presented to the developers in the form of subsequences that may be causing the fault. The hypothesis is that code sequences that are shared between a number of faulty test cases for the same reason resemble the faulty execution path, and hence, the search space for the faulty execution path can be narrowed down by using a large number of test cases. To achieve this goal, an efficient algorithm is implemented for finding common subsequences among a set of code sequence covers. Optimization techniques are devised to generate shorter and more logical sequence covers, and to select subsequences with high likelihood of containing the root cause among the set of all possible common subsequences. A hybrid static/dynamic analysis approach is designed to trace back the common subsequences from the end to the root cause. A debugging tool is created to enable developers to use the approach, and integrate it with an existing Integrated Development Environment. The tool is also integrated with the environment's program editors so that developers can benefit from both the tool suggestions, and their source code counterparts. Finally, a comparison between the developed approach and the state-of-the-art techniques shows that developers need only to inspect a small number of lines in order to find the root cause of the fault. Furthermore, experimental evaluation shows that the algorithm optimizations lead to better results in terms of both the algorithm running time and the output subsequence length.

Influência da revisão de atividades executadas para melhoria da acurácia na estimativa de software utilizando planning poker

Abstract – Background – The software effort estimation research area aims to improve the accuracy of this estimation in software projects and activities. Aims – This study describes the development and usage of a web application tocollect data generated from the Planning Poker estimation process and the analysis of the collected data to investigate the impact of revising previous estimates when conducting similar estimates in a Planning Poker context. Method – Software activities were estimated by Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná (UTFPR) computer students, using Planning Poker, with and without revising previous similar activities, storing data regarding the decision-making process. And the collected data was used to investigate the impact that revising similar executed activities have in the software effort estimates' accuracy.Obtained Results – The UTFPR computer students were divided into 14 groups. Eight of them showed accuracy increase in more than half of their estimates. Three of them had almost the same accuracy in more than half of their estimates. And only three of them had loss of accuracy in more than half of their estimates. Conclusion – Reviewing the similar executed software activities, when using Planning Poker, led to more accurate software estimates in most cases, and, because of that, can improve the software development process.

Mejora de los procesos de estimación de costos de software. Caso del sector de software de Barranquilla

El presente artículo es resultado de la investigación: “Diseño de un modelo para mejorar los procesos de estimación de costos para las empresas desarrolladoras de software”. Se presenta una revisión de la literatura a nivel internacional con el fin de identificar tendencias y métodos para realizar estimaciones de costos de software más exactas. Por medio del método predictivo Delphi, un conjunto de expertos pertenecientes al sector de software de Barranquilla clasificaron y valoraron según la probabilidad de ocurrencia cinco escenarios realistas de estimaciones. Se diseñó un experimento completamente aleatorio cuyos resultados apuntaron a dos escenarios estadísticamente similares de manera cualitativa, con lo que se construyó un modelo de análisis basado en tres agentes: Metodología, capacidad del equipo de trabajo y productos tecnológicos; cada uno con tres categorías de cumplimiento para lograr estimaciones más precisas

Early investigation towards defining and measuring sustainability as a quality attribute in software systems

Sustainability in software system is still a new practice that most software developers and companies are trying to incorporate into their software development lifecycle and has been largely discussed in academia. Sustainability is a complex concept viewed from economic, environment and social dimensions with several definitions proposed making sometimes the concept of sustainability very fuzzy and difficult to apply and assess in software systems. This has hindered the adoption of sustainability in the software industry. A little research explores sustainability as a quality property of software products and services to answer questions such as; How to quantify sustainability as a quality construct in the same way as other quality attributes such as security, usability and reliability? How can it be applied to software systems? What are the measures and measurement scale of sustainability? The Goal of this research is to investigate the definitions, perceptions and measurement of sustainability from the quality perspective. Grounded in the general theory of software measurement, the aim is to develop a method that decomposes sustainability in factors, criteria and metrics. The Result is a method to quantify and access sustainability of software systems while incorporating management and users concern. Conclusion: The method will empower the ability of companies to easily adopt sustainability while facilitating its integration to the software development process and tools. It will also help companies to measure sustainability of their software products from economic, environmental, social, individual and technological dimension.

Know-cap: um método para capitalização de conhecimento no desenvolvimento de software

The intensive character in knowledge of software production and its rising demand suggest the need to establish mechanisms to properly manage the knowledge involved in order to meet the requirements of deadline, costs and quality. The knowledge capitalization is a process that involves from identification to evaluation of the knowledge produced and used. Specifically, for software development, capitalization enables easier access, minimize the loss of knowledge, reducing the learning curve, avoid repeating errors and rework. Thus, this thesis presents the know-Cap, a method developed to organize and guide the capitalization of knowledge in software development. The Know-Cap facilitates the location, preservation, value addition and updating of knowledge, in order to use it in the execution of new tasks. The method was proposed from a set of methodological procedures: literature review, systematic review and analysis of related work. The feasibility and appropriateness of Know-Cap were analyzed from an application study, conducted in a real case, and an analytical study of software development companies. The results obtained indicate the Know- Cap supports the capitalization of knowledge in software development.

Modelo institucional do processo de estruturação de empresas de desenvolvimento de software: um estudo de múltiplos casos

Some authors have shown the need of understanding the technological structuring process in contemporary firms. From this perspective, the software industry is a very important element because it provides products and services directly to many organizations from many fields. In this case, the Brazilian software industry has some peculiarities that distinguish it from other industries located in developed countries, which makes its understanding even more relevant. There is evidence that local firms take different strategies and structural configurations to enter into a market naturally dominated by large multinational firms. Therefore, this study aims to understand not only the structural configurations assumed by domestic firms but also the dynamic and the process that lead to these different configurations. To do so, this PhD dissertation investigates the institutional environment, its entities and the isomorphic movements, by employing an exploratory, descriptive and explanatory multiple cases study. Eight software development companies from the Recife's information technology Cluster were visited. Also, a form was applied and an interview with one of the main firm s professional was conducted. Although the study is predominantly qualitative, part of the data was analyzed through charts and graphs, providing a companies and environment overview that was very useful to analysis done through the interviews interpretation. As a result, it was realized that companies are structured around hybrids business models from two ideal types of software development companies, which are: software factory and technology-based company. Regarding the development process, it was found that there is a balanced distribution between the traditional and agile development paradigm. Among the traditional methodologies, the Rational Unified Process (RUP) is predominant. The Scrum is the most used methodology among the organizations based on the Agile Manifesto's principles. Regarding the structuring process, each institutional entity acts in such way that generates different isomorphic pressure. Emphasis was given to entities such as customers, research agencies, clusters, market-leading businesses, public universities, incubators, software industry organizations, technology vendors, development tool suppliers and manager s school and background because they relate themselves in a close way with the software firms. About this relationship, a dual and bilateral influence was found. Finally, the structuring level of the organizational field has been also identified as low, which gives a chance to organizational actors of acting independently

Problem-Based SRS: método para especificação de requisitos de software baseado em problemas

Requirements specification has long been recognized as critical activity in software development processes because of its impact on project risks when poorly performed. A large amount of studies addresses theoretical aspects, propositions of techniques, and recommended practices for Requirements Engineering (RE). To be successful, RE have to ensure that the specified requirements are complete and correct what means that all intents of the stakeholders in a given business context are covered by the requirements and that no unnecessary requirement was introduced. However, the accurate capture the business intents of the stakeholders remains a challenge and it is a major factor of software project failures. This master’s dissertation presents a novel method referred to as “Problem-Based SRS” aiming at improving the quality of the Software Requirements Specification (SRS) in the sense that the stated requirements provide suitable answers to real customer ́s businesses issues. In this approach, the knowledge about the software requirements is constructed from the knowledge about the customer ́s problems. Problem-Based SRS consists in an organization of activities and outcome objects through a process that contains five main steps. It aims at supporting the software requirements engineering team to systematically analyze the business context and specify the software requirements, taking also into account a first glance and vision of the software. The quality aspects of the specifications are evaluated using traceability techniques and axiomatic design principles. The cases studies conducted and presented in this document point out that the proposed method can contribute significantly to improve the software requirements specification.

Diseño de una metodología para la gestión de pruebas y ensayo en proyectos de software

Independientemente de la metodología que se adopte en el desarrollo de software, se contemplan aquellas actividades gerenciales o de dirección del proyecto y las inherentes a las técnicas, propias del desarrollo del producto como tal, como los requerimientos demandados, análisis, diseño, implementación y pruebas o ensayos previos a su materialización -- El presente trabajo se deriva del interés por diseñar una metodología para la gestión de la fase de pruebas y ensayo, con base en el modelo de integración de las actividades contempladas en la guía del PMBOK, la cual es compatible con las funciones de dirección y actividades técnicas de otras metodologías, especialmente en su etapa de prueba; de allí la importancia que representa para los gerentes de proyectos obtener resultados satisfactorios en esta fase, por su impacto directo y significativo en el cumplimiento del tiempo y los costos estimados, lo que permite prevenir o mitigar, tiempos adicionales o sobrecostos por reproceso, evitando ser transferidos al cliente o asumidos por el fabricante de software -- Así mismo, asegurar una ejecución correcta de la fase de pruebas y ensayo, garantiza que el proyecto responda a los estándares de calidad, de acuerdo con sus indicadores de medición y la satisfacción del usuario

Pervasive Software Visualizations

A picture tells a thousand words. We all know that. Then why are our development tools showing mainly text with so much obstinacy? Even when visualizations do make it into our tools, they typically do not make it past the periphery. Something is deeply wrong. We argue that visualizations must become pervasive in software development, and to accommodate this goal, the integrated development environments must change significantly.

Leadership competencies in the requirements phase of IS/IT development projects

Doutoramento em Gestão

Adaptive Software Fault Prediction Approach Using Object-Oriented Metrics

As users continually request additional functionality, software systems will continue to grow in their complexity, as well as in their susceptibility to failures. Particularly for sensitive systems requiring higher levels of reliability, faulty system modules may increase development and maintenance cost. Hence, identifying them early would support the development of reliable systems through improved scheduling and quality control. Research effort to predict software modules likely to contain faults, as a consequence, has been substantial. Although a wide range of fault prediction models have been proposed, we remain far from having reliable tools that can be widely applied to real industrial systems. For projects with known fault histories, numerous research studies show that statistical models can provide reasonable estimates at predicting faulty modules using software metrics. However, as context-specific metrics differ from project to project, the task of predicting across projects is difficult to achieve. Prediction models obtained from one project experience are ineffective in their ability to predict fault-prone modules when applied to other projects. Hence, taking full benefit of the existing work in software development community has been substantially limited. As a step towards solving this problem, in this dissertation we propose a fault prediction approach that exploits existing prediction models, adapting them to improve their ability to predict faulty system modules across different software projects.

Data, Software, and Advanced Computational Usage of University of Washington Research Leaders

Scientific research is increasingly data-intensive, relying more and more upon advanced computational resources to be able to answer the questions most pressing to our society at large. This report presents findings from a brief descriptive survey sent to a sample of 342 leading researchers at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, Washington in 2010 and 2011 as the first stage of the larger National Science Foundation project “Interacting with Cyberinfrastructure in the Face of Changing Science.” This survey assesses these researcher’s use of advanced computational resources, data, and software in their research. We present high-level findings that describe UW researchers’: demographics, interdisciplinarity, research groups, data use, software and computational use—including software development and use, data storage and transfer activities, and collaboration tools, and computing resources. These findings offer insights into the state of computational resources in use during this time period as well as offering a look at the data intensiveness of UW researchers.