Carina Frota Alves

Requirements engineering for software product lines: A systematic literature review

Context: Software product line engineering (SPLE) is a growing area showing promising results in research and practice. In order to foster its further development and acceptance in industry, it is necessary to assess the quality of the research so that proper evidence for adoption and validity are ensured. This holds in particular for requirements engineering (RE) within SPLE, where a growing number of approaches have been proposed. Objective: This paper focuses on RE within SPLE and has the following goals: assess research quality, synthesize evidence to suggest important implications for practice, and identify research trends, open problems, and areas for improvement. Method: A systematic literature review was conducted with three research questions and assessed 49 studies, dated from 1990 to 2009. Results: The evidence for adoption of the methods is not mature, given the primary focus on toy examples. The proposed approaches still have serious limitations in terms of rigor, credibility, and validity of their findings. Additionally, most approaches still lack tool support addressing the heterogeneity and mostly textual nature of requirements formats as well as address only the proactive SPLE adoption strategy. Conclusions: Further empirical studies should be performed with sufficient rigor to enhance the body of evidence in RE within SPLE. In this context, there is a clear need for conducting studies comparing alternative methods. In order to address scalability and popularization of the approaches, future research should be invested in tool support and in addressing combined SPLE adoption strategies.

A systematic mapping study on creativity in requirements engineering

In the last years, the field of creativity for requirements engineering has received a growing interest from researchers and practitioners. This paper presents a mapping study to aggregate literature in this field. The motivation is to identify trends and research opportunities in the application of creativity approaches to support the requirements engineering. The mapping study analyzed 46 papers. The results show four main research groups working on creativity in RE. Requirements elicitation is the phase concentrating the majority of studies. The study confirms that creativity techniques enhance creative thinking in requirements activities. However, creative thinking strategies should be fully integrated in current requirements engineering processes, methods and tools.

Challenges in Requirements Engineering for Mobile Games Development: The Meantime Case Study

The development of new market-driven software products involves several challenges for the requirements engineering process. The challenges are deeper in the case these products are mobile video games. In particular, the mobile games must satisfy a number of critical non-functional requirements (e.g. portability, gameplay, emotional issues). In addition to that, mobile games are developed for mass market, demanding from the development team to understand the requirements of very diverse and sometimes unknown groups of stakeholders. This paper presents the experience of meantime, a global mobile game developing company, in conducting requirements engineering activities during the development of the Frogman game. It also presents some lessons learned in the process.

Competition and collaboration in requirements engineering: A case study of an emerging software ecosystem

Increasingly, small to medium software producing organisations are working together in collaboration networks to supply complex compositions of their products and services to customers. In this paper, we present a case study of two software companies that are evolving their partnership towards the creation of a software ecosystem. We investigate the impacts of their tightening partnership on software product management, with a focus on requirements engineering practices. We observe that the requirements definition and negotiation processes are directly affected by their fluid collaborative and competitive relationships. Power disputes, volatile roles and mismatches in release synchronisation are also aspects observed in the studied software ecosystem.We extract several observations from the case study that support small to medium software firms in making decisions within their software ecosystem.

Software Ecosystems Governance - A Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda.

The field of Software ecosystems is a growing discipline that has been investigated from managerial, social, and technological perspectives. The governance of software ecosystems requires a careful balance of control and autonomy given to players. Orchestrators that are able to balance their own interests by bringing joint benefits for other players are likely to create healthy ecosystems. Selecting appropriate governance mechanisms is a key problem involved in the management of proprietary and open source ecosystems. This article summarizes current literature on software ecosystem governance by framing prevalent definitions, classifying governance mechanisms, and proposing a research agenda. We performed a systematic literature review of 63 primary studies. Several studies describe governance mechanisms, which were classified in three categories: value creation, coordination of players, and organizational openness and control. The number of studies indicates that the domain of software ecosystems and their governance is maturing. However, further studies are needed to address central challenges involved on the implementation of appropriate governance mechanisms that can nurture the health of ecosystems. We present a research agenda with several opportunities for researchers and practitioners to explore these issues.

Creativity patterns guide: support for the application of creativity techniques in requirements engineering

Creativity techniques are tools for stimulating creative thinking. The importance of creativity fostering techniques in software development has been recognized and investigated by researchers for over a decade, yet the greater software engineering (SE) community makes little use of the myriads of techniques available. In order to encourage a wider adoption and to support the use of creativity techniques in software development, we have reviewed a large number of creativity techniques and have created a Creativity Patterns Guide. This paper describes the part of the guide tailored for the requirements engineering phase. The guide has been evaluated in real-world projects.

The Merits of a Meritocracy in Open Source Software Ecosystems

The Eclipse open source ecosystem has grown from a small internal IBM project to one of the biggest Integrated Development Environments in the market. Open source communities and ecosystems do not follow the standard governance strategies typically used in large organizations. A meritocracy is a frequently occurring form of governance on different levels in open ecosystems. In this paper we investigate how this form of governance influences the health of projects within the Eclipse ecosystem in terms of the amount of commits within each month. We analyzed the hierarchy of Eclipse, how merits are conceptualized within the ecosystem and the effect of the appointments of mentors and project leads on the amount of commits. From our research, we can conclude that this system is not always as fair as it seems; merits are only a benefit in some cases.

BPM Governance: An Exploratory Study in Public Organizations

Business Process Management is a widely known approach focused on aligning processes of an organization in order to achieve improved efficiency and client satisfaction. Governance is an important requirement to enable successful BPM initiatives. This paper provides a qualitative empirical study to investigate what BPM governance elements are adopted by teams conducting early BPM initiatives in public organizations. The results suggest that early BPM adopters in public sector face several barriers due to difficulties in acquiring professionals with BPM expertise, bureaucracy and legislation rigidity, among others. In particular, committed sponsorship and monitoring were appointed as important BPM governance facilitators by participants of the study. Findings also show that further empirical studies are needed to increase the body of evidence in this field.

Scientists' Needs in Modelling Software Ecosystems

Currently the landscape of software ecosystem modelling methods and languages is like Babel after the fall of the tower: there are many methods and languages available and interchanging data between researchers and organizations that actively govern their ecosystem, is practically impossible. The lack of a universally accepted set of modelling methods is hampering the advancement of software ecosystems research. Using a literature study and a set of interviews amongst peers, we aim to establish a set of understandings and requirements for a universally accepted set of software ecosystem modelling methods. The work is an initial push in a larger research initiative that has the goal of advancing the maturity of (software) ecosystems modelling. The success of such an initiative will be found in the availability of common databases, better interchange formats between researchers, and more capable software ecosystem modelling tools.

A theory of power in emerging software ecosystems formed by small-to-medium enterprises

Abstract In a software ecosystem, partner companies rely on each other to succeed and survive. This scenario of mutual dependence entails a flow of power among companies. Power is an intrinsic property of their relationship and an asset to be exercised with a degree of intentionality. This paper presents a substantive theory to explain how power and dependence manifest in partnerships among small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) building a software ecosystem. We performed exploratory case studies of two emerging software ecosystems formed by SMEs. We interpreted the results in light of a theoretical framework underpinned by French and Ravens power taxonomy. Finally, we performed a cross-case analysis to evaluate our findings and build the theory. The proposed theory highlights the interactions among different forms of power and corresponding sources of power employed by companies. It provides a better understanding on how power and dependence influence the behaviour and coordination of companies within a software ecosystem. The theory is a useful lens for researchers to explore ecosystem partnerships by understanding the structure and impact of power relationships between partners. In addition, it is a valuable tool for companies to analyse power distribution and define sustainable strategies for software ecosystem governance.