Andréa Magalhães Magdaleno

Reconciling software development models: A quasi-systematic review

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to characterize reconciliation among the plan-driven, agile, and free/open source software models of software development. Design/methodology/approach: An automated quasi-systematic review identified 42 papers, which were then analyzed. Findings: The main findings are: there exist distinct - organization, group and process - levels of reconciliation; few studies deal with reconciliation among the three models of development; a significant amount of work addresses reconciliation between plan-driven and agile development; several large organizations (such as Microsoft, Motorola, and Philips) are interested in trying to combine these models; and reconciliation among software development models is still an open issue, since it is an emerging area and research on most proposals is at an early stage. Research limitations: Automated searches may not capture relevant papers in publications that are not indexed. Other data sources not amenable to execution of the protocol were not used. Data extraction was performed by only one researcher, which may increase the risk of threats to internal validity. Implications: This characterization is important for practitioners wanting to be current with the state of research. This review will also assist the scientific community working with software development processes to build a common understanding of the challenges that must be faced, and to identify areas where research is lacking. Finally, the results will be useful to software industry that is calling for solutions in this area. Originality/value: There is no other systematic review on this subject, and reconciliation among software development models is an emerging area. This study helps to identify and consolidate the work done so far and to guide future research. The conclusions are an important step towards expanding the body of knowledge in the field.

Towards Collaboration Maturity in Business Processes: An Exploratory Study in Oil Production Processes

Abstract Organizations have been relying on collaboration for knowledge sharing and productivity improvement in order to reduce costs or boost revenue. However, organizations still cannot assure that collaboration is properly conducted in daily work. This paper presents an approach to stimulating collaboration between professionals in an organization. The approach, combining a BPM methodology with the CollabMM collaboration maturity model and its corresponding method, is a result of an exploratory study in a real setting in an oil company in Brazil. The project is a move towards improving decision-making during one of the companys business processes and establishing collaboration among professionals through information sharing.

A maturity model to promote collaboration in business processes

This research aims at providing an approach for designing business processes for adequate collaborative support. This approach comprises the explicit representation of collaboration practices in business processes. It is argued that, by explicitly considering collaboration in process models, collaboration can be discussed within the organisation. Moreover, requirements for collaborative support can be identified. This paper proposes a process maturity model (CollabMM) which organises collaboration practices and a method providing a progressive step for introducing those practices into business process models. Two case studies are described to illustrate the method and the model.

An Optimization-based Approach to Software Development Process Tailoring

A major activity performed by the manager before starting a software project is tailoring its development process. Such activity requires information about the context under which the project will be executed, including organizational, project, and team characteristics. In addition, it also requires pondering many factors and evaluating all existing constraints. In this scenario, we claim that a balance between collaboration and discipline can be the drivers to tailor software development processes in order to meet project and organization needs. With the purpose of facilitating this balancing, it is possible to automate some of the steps to solve the problem, reducing the effort required to execute this task and improving the obtained process. Therefore, this work presents an optimization-based approach where the balancing in process tailoring is defined, modeled and briefly analyzed. This approach uses collaboration and discipline as utility functions to select the most appropriate process for a software development project, considering its current context.

EvolTrack: improving design evolution awareness in software development

Software differs from most manufactured products because it is intangible. This characteristic makes it difficult to detect, control, and understand how it evolves. This paper presents an approach based on software visualization that can detect and externalize design evolution made in a software project during its initial development or at any further phase. By using this approach, a developer can be aware of the current state of the software as a whole and can additionally verify if the current design, also called emerging design, is evolving according to the team expectations and leader guidance, preventing problems caused by misunderstandings of the expected software solution. The approach was evaluated with free/open source software (FOSS) projects. The results indicate that the approach behaves as expected when applied to real software development projects, with minor performance bottlenecks.

Balancing collaboration and discipline in software development processes

Neither traditional, agile or free/open software development models can be effective to all projects contexts. We claim that collaboration and discipline can be the driver to tailor software development processes to meet projects and organizations needs. This work proposes that process tailoring can be conducted through a context management approach.

Analyzing collaboration in software development processes through social networks

Plan-driven, agile or free/open source are software development models that although effective, cannot fully address all the variability of projects and organizations alone. In this work, it is argued that two distinct characteristics of these models - collaboration and discipline - can be the drivers to tailor software development processes to meet projects and organizations needs. In particular, this article focuses on the aspect of collaboration and argues that it can be analyzed through social networks. In this sense, we studied several tools and identified the requirements necessary to explore collaboration, through social networks, in software development processes. These requirements motivated the construction of EvolTrack-SocialNetwork tool.

A roadmap to the Collaboration Maturity Model (CollabMM) evolution

Organizations have been relying on collaboration for productivity improvement and knowledge sharing. The first step to foster collaboration in organizations is to make it explicit. With this aim, the Collaboration Maturity Model (CollabMM) was proposed and evaluated. The lessons learned during model applications in previous work pointed out the need to review both the model and its evaluation instruments. A literature review also showed some improvement opportunities. Therefore, the objective of this work is to develop a roadmap to highlight the main opportunities of evolution in CollabMM. These opportunities will compose our research agenda in this topic and guide future work.

An exploratory study on collaboration understanding in software development social networks

Collaboration is important for productivity, quality, and knowledge sharing in software development. In this context, the use of social networks analysis can help to track the level of collaboration in a development project. In this work, an exploratory study was conducted, in the context of free/open source software, using EvolTrack-SocialNetwork tool, to investigate collaboration in software teams. The preliminary results indicate a potential to increase ones ability to understand the course that the collaboration is taking.

Bringing out collaboration in software development social networks

Software development is considered a collaborative activity, although this collaboration may not be visible or understood among work group members or project managers. This research work proposes the identification and classification of characteristics of collaboration based on social networks properties --- centrality and density --- and on collaboration levels defined by the Collaboration Maturity Model (CollabMM). Exploratory studies in free/open source projects were conducted to help this classification.