Building lean thinking in a telecom software development organization: strengths and challenges.

The potential shown by Lean in different domains has aroused interest in the software industry. However, it remains unclear how Lean can be effectively applied in a domain such as software development that is fundamentally different from manufacturing. This study explores how Lean principles are implemented in software development companies and the challenges that arise when applying Lean Software Development. For that, a case study was conducted at Ericsson R&D Finland, which successfully adopted Scrum in 2009 and subsequently started a comprehensible transition to Lean in 2010. Focus groups were conducted with company representatives to help devise a questionnaire supporting the creation of a Lean mindset in the company (Team Amplifier). Afterwards, the questionnaire was used in 16 teams based in Finland, Hungary and China to evaluate the status of the transformation. By using Lean thinking, Ericsson R&D Finland has made important improvements to the quality of its products, customer satisfaction and transparency within the organization. Moreover, build times have been reduced over ten times and the number of commits per day has increased roughly five times.The study makes two main contributions to research. First, the main factors that have enabled Ericsson R&D?s achievements are analysed. Elements such as ?network of product owners?, ?continuous integration?, ?work in progress limits? and ?communities of practice? have been identified as being of fundamental importance. Second, three categories of challenges in using Lean Software Development were identified: ?achieving flow?, ?transparency? and ?creating a learning culture?

Categorization of Anti-Patterns in Software Project Management

In the last decades, software systems have become an intrinsic element in our daily lives. Software exists in our computers, in our cars, and even in our refrigerators. Today’s world has become heavily dependent on software and yet, we still struggle to deliver quality software products, on-time and within budget. When searching for the causes of such alarming scenario, we find concurrent voices pointing to the role of the project manager. But what is project management and what makes it so challenging? Part of the answer to this question requires a deeper analysis of why software project managers have been largely ineffective. Answering this question might assist current and future software project managers in avoiding, or at least effectively mitigating, problematic scenarios that, if unresolved, will eventually lead to additional failures. This is where anti-patterns come into play and where they can be a useful tool in identifying and addressing software project management failure. Unfortunately, anti-patterns are still a fairly recent concept, and thus, available information is still scarce and loosely organized. This thesis will attempt to help remedy this scenario. The objective of this work is to help organize existing, documented software project management anti-patterns by answering our two research questions: · What are the different anti-patterns in software project management? · How can these anti-patterns be categorized?

An Analysis Of The Recommended Knowledge For The Software Project Management Discipline

According to the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge), project management is “the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements” [1]. Project Management has proven to be one of the most important disciplines at the moment of determining the success of any project [2][3][4]. Given that many of the activities covered by this discipline can be said that are “horizontal” for any kind of domain, the importance of acknowledge the concepts and practices becomes even more obvious. The specific case of the projects that fall in the domain of Software Engineering are not the exception about the great influence of Project Management for their success. The critical role that this discipline plays in the industry has come to numbers. A report by McKinsey & Co [4] shows that the establishment of programs for the teaching of critical skills of project management can improve the performance of the project in time and costs. As an example of the above, the reports exposes: “One defense organization used these programs to train several waves of project managers and leaders who together administered a portfolio of more than 1,000 capital projects ranging in Project management size from $100,000 to $500 million. Managers who successfully completed the training were able to cut costs on most projects by between 20 and 35 percent. Over time, the organization expects savings of about 15 percent of its entire baseline spending”. In a white paper by the PMI (Project Management Institute) about the value of project management [5], it is stated that: “Leading organizations across sectors and geographic borders have been steadily embracing project management as a way to control spending and improve project results”. According to the research made by the PMI for the paper, after the economical crisis “Executives discovered that adhering to project management methods and strategies reduced risks, cut costs and improved success rates—all vital to surviving the economic crisis”. In every elite company, a proper execution of the project management discipline has become a must. Several members of the software industry have putted effort into achieving ways of assuring high quality results from projects; many standards, best practices, methodologies and other resources have been produced by experts from different fields of expertise. In the industry and the academic community, there is a continuous research on how to teach better software engineering together with project management [4][6]. For the general practices of Project Management the PMI produced a guide of the required knowledge that any project manager should have in their toolbox to lead any kind of project, this guide is called the PMBOK. On the side of best practices 10 and required knowledge for the Software Engineering discipline, the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) developed the SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body of Knowledge) in collaboration with software industry experts and academic researchers, introducing into the guide many of the needed knowledge for a 5-year expertise software engineer [7]. The SWEBOK also covers management from the perspective of a software project. This thesis is developed to provide guidance to practitioners and members of the academic community about project management applied to software engineering. The way used in this thesis to get useful information for practitioners is to take an industry-approved guide for software engineering professionals such as the SWEBOK, and compare the content to what is found in the PMBOK. After comparing the contents of the SWEBOK and the PMBOK, what is found missing in the SWEBOK is used to give recommendations on how to enrich project management skills for a software engineering professional. Recommendations for members of the academic community on the other hand, are given taking into account the GSwE2009 (Graduated Software Engineering 2009) standard [8]. GSwE2009 is often used as a main reference for software engineering master programs [9]. The standard is mostly based on the content of the SWEBOK, plus some contents that are considered to reinforce the education of software engineering. Given the similarities between the SWEBOK and the GSwE2009, the results of comparing SWEBOK and PMBOK are also considered valid to enrich what the GSwE2009 proposes. So in the end the recommendations for practitioners end up being also useful for the academic community and their strategies to teach project management in the context of software engineering.

Experience in spacecraft on-board software development

This paper describes some important aspects of high- integrity software development based on the authors' work. Current group research is oriented towards mixed- criticality partitioned systems, development tools, real- time kernels, and language features. The UPMSat-2 satellite software is being used as technology demonstra- tor and a case study for the assessment of the research results. The flight software that will run on the satellite is based on proven technology, such as GNAT/ORK+ and LEON3. There is an experimental version that is being built using a partitioned approach, aiming at assessing a toolset targeting partitioned multi-core em- bedded systems. The singularities of both approaches are discussed, as well as some of the tools that are being used for developing the software.

Study and analysis of the Leap Motion sensor and the Software Development Kit (SDK) for the implementation of visual Human Computer Interfaces

En este proyecto, se presenta un informe técnico sobre la cámara Leap Motion y el Software Development Kit correspondiente, el cual es un dispositivo con una cámara de profundidad orientada a interfaces hombre-máquina. Esto es realizado con el propósito de desarrollar una interfaz hombre-máquina basada en un sistema de reconocimiento de gestos de manos. Después de un exhaustivo estudio de la cámara Leap Motion, se han realizado diversos programas de ejemplo con la intención de verificar las capacidades descritas en el informe técnico, poniendo a prueba la Application Programming Interface y evaluando la precisión de las diferentes medidas obtenidas sobre los datos de la cámara. Finalmente, se desarrolla un prototipo de un sistema de reconocimiento de gestos. Los datos sobre la posición y orientación de la punta de los dedos obtenidos de la Leap Motion son usados para describir un gesto mediante un vector descriptor, el cual es enviado a una Máquina Vectores Soporte, utilizada como clasificador multi-clase.

Looking for the Holy Grail of Software Development

The history of Software Engineering has been marked by many famous project failures documented in papers, articles and books. This pattern of lack of success has prompted the creation of dozens of software analysis, requirements definition, and design methods, programming languages, software development environments and software development processes all promoted as solving ?the software problem.? What we hear less about are software projects that were successful. This article reports on the findings of an extensive analysis of successful software projects that have been reported in the literature. It discusses the different interpretations of success and extracts the characteristics that successful projects have in common. These characteristics provide Software Project Managers with an agenda of topics to be addressed that will help ensure, not guarantee, that their software project will be successful.

MDD vs. traditional software development: a practitioner’s subjective perspective

Context: Today’s project managers have a myriad of methods to choose from for the development of software applications. However, they lack empirical data about the character of these methods in terms of usefulness, ease of use or compatibility, all of these being relevant variables to assess the developer’s intention to use them. Objective: To compare three methods, each following a different paradigm (Model-Driven, Model-Based and Code-Centric) with respect to their adoption potential by junior software developers engaged in the development of the business layer of a Web 2.0 application. Method: We have conducted a quasi-experiment with 26 graduate students of the University of Alicante. The application developed was a Social Network, which was organized around a fixed set of modules. Three of them, similar in complexity, were used for the experiment. Subjects were asked to use a different method for each module, and then to answer a questionnaire that gathered their perceptions during such use. Results: The results show that the Model-Driven method is regarded as the most useful, although it is also considered the least compatible with previous developers’ experiences. They also show that junior software developers feel comfortable with the use of models, and that they are likely to use them if the models are accompanied by a Model-Driven development environment. Conclusions: Despite their relatively low level of compatibility, Model-Driven development methods seem to show a great potential for adoption. That said, however, further experimentation is needed to make it possible to generalize the results to a different population, different methods, other languages and tools, different domains or different application sizes.

One Approach to the Problem Solution of Specialized Software Development for Subject Search

In the article relevance of system development for subject search using computational linguistics is considered. The basic principles of system functioning are defined. The principle of grammar development for information retrieval from the partially structured text in a natural language is considered. The ranging principle of results of information search is defined.

Software development for the array computer ILLIAC IV,

"Supported in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency as administered by the Rome Air Development Center under contract no. US AF 30(602) 4144."

Features of software development tools /

Item 247.

Moomba - A collaborative environment for supporting distributed extreme programming in global software development

Global Software Development (GSD) is an emerging distributive software engineering practice, in which a higher communication overhead due to temporal and geographical separation among developers is traded with gains in reduced development cost, improved flexibility and mobility for developers, increased access to skilled resource-pools and convenience of customer involvements. However, due to its distributive nature, GSD faces many fresh challenges in aspects relating to project coordination, awareness, collaborative coding and effective communication. New software engineering methodologies and processes are required to address these issues. Research has shown that, with adequate support tools, Distributed Extreme Programming (DXP) – a distributive variant of an agile methodology – Extreme Programming (XP) can be both efficient and beneficial to GDS projects. In this paper, we present the design and realization of a collaborative environment, called Moomba, which assists a distributed team in both instantiation and execution of a DXP process in GSD projects.

An operational approach to object-oriented software development

The traditional waterfall software life cycle model has several weaknesses. One problem is that a working version of a system is unavailable until a late stage in the development; any omissions and mistakes in the specification undetected until that stage can be costly to maintain. The operational approach which emphasises the construction of executable specifications can help to remedy this problem. An operational specification may be exercised to generate the behaviours of the specified system, thereby serving as a prototype to facilitate early validation of the system's functional requirements. Recent ideas have centred on using an existing operational method such as JSD in the specification phase of object-oriented development. An explicit transformation phase following specification is necessary in this approach because differences in abstractions between the two domains need to be bridged. This research explores an alternative approach of developing an operational specification method specifically for object-oriented development. By incorporating object-oriented concepts in operational specifications, the specifications have the advantage of directly facilitating implementation in an object-oriented language without requiring further significant transformations. In addition, object-oriented concepts can help the developer manage the complexity of the problem domain specification, whilst providing the user with a specification that closely reflects the real world and so the specification and its execution can be readily understood and validated. A graphical notation has been developed for the specification method which can capture the dynamic properties of an object-oriented system. A tool has also been implemented comprising an editor to facilitate the input of specifications, and an interpreter which can execute the specifications and graphically animate the behaviours of the specified systems.

Combining data driven programming with component based software development:with applications in geovisualisation and dynamic data driven application systems

Software development methodologies are becoming increasingly abstract, progressing from low level assembly and implementation languages such as C and Ada, to component based approaches that can be used to assemble applications using technologies such as JavaBeans and the .NET framework. Meanwhile, model driven approaches emphasise the role of higher level models and notations, and embody a process of automatically deriving lower level representations and concrete software implementations. The relationship between data and software is also evolving. Modern data formats are becoming increasingly standardised, open and empowered in order to support a growing need to share data in both academia and industry. Many contemporary data formats, most notably those based on XML, are self-describing, able to specify valid data structure and content, and can also describe data manipulations and transformations. Furthermore, while applications of the past have made extensive use of data, the runtime behaviour of future applications may be driven by data, as demonstrated by the field of dynamic data driven application systems. The combination of empowered data formats and high level software development methodologies forms the basis of modern game development technologies, which drive software capabilities and runtime behaviour using empowered data formats describing game content. While low level libraries provide optimised runtime execution, content data is used to drive a wide variety of interactive and immersive experiences. This thesis describes the Fluid project, which combines component based software development and game development technologies in order to define novel component technologies for the description of data driven component based applications. The thesis makes explicit contributions to the fields of component based software development and visualisation of spatiotemporal scenes, and also describes potential implications for game development technologies. The thesis also proposes a number of developments in dynamic data driven application systems in order to further empower the role of data in this field.