Christian Bartelt

Orchestration of Global Software Engineering Projects - Position Paper

Global software engineering has become a fact in many companies due to real necessity in practice. In contrast to co-located projects global projects face a number of additional software engineering challenges. Among them quality management has become much more difficult and schedule and budget overruns can be observed more often. Compared to co-located projects global software engineering is even more challenging due to the need for integration of different cultures, different languages, and different time zones – across companies, and across countries. The diversity of development locations on several levels seriously endangers an effective and goal-oriented progress of projects. In this position paper we discuss reasons for global development, sketch settings for distribution and views of orchestration of dislocated companies in a global project that can be seen as a “virtual project environment”. We also present a collection of questions, which we consider relevant for global software engineering. The questions motivate further discussion to derive a research agenda in global software engineering.

Requirements on Evolution Management of Product Lines in Automation Engineering

Abstract The initial investment costs for a production plant are enormous – in many cases up to 100 Mio. €, and the entire life-cycle is up to 30 years. In order to preserve existing investments and to retain the competitiveness of the production plant it continuously has to be developed and improved further. In consequence, basic modules (software, electric, and/or mechanic) as well as application modules (product line based combination of basic modules) have to be upgraded during the entire life cycle of the automation system in cooperation of plant owner and module supplier. Therefore two essential topics have to be considered: a) an integrated variant- and version management of basic modules, application modules based on product lines, and modules, which are part of production plants in the field and b) an interdisciplinary compatibility supervision technique to validate the compatibility of new module versions with respect to the various application contexts and the complex dependencies between software (software design), platform (electrical design) and/or context (mechanical design). Both challenges can only be resolved with an appropriate tool support for variant and version management of modular models and for model validation to supervise the interdisciplinary compatibility. To provide this tool support a syntactic and semantic formal model is necessary. In this paper the requirements on a holistic mathematical modeling of evolution in automation engineering are proposed.