Christian R. Prause

Hybrid software and system development in practice: waterfall, scrum, and beyond

Software and system development faces numerous challenges of rapidly changing markets. To address such challenges, companies and projects design and adopt specific development approaches by combining well-structured comprehensive methods and flexible agile practices. Yet, the number of methods and practices is large, and available studies argue that the actual process composition is carried out in a fairly ad-hoc manner. The present paper reports on a survey on hybrid software development approaches. We study which approaches are used in practice, how different approaches are combined, and what contextual factors influence the use and combination of hybrid software development approaches. Our results from 69 study participants show a variety of development approaches used and combined in practice. We show that most combinations follow a pattern in which a traditional process model serves as framework in which several fine-grained (agile) practices are plugged in. We further show that hybrid software development approaches are independent from the company size and external triggers. We conclude that such approaches are the results of a natural process evolution, which is mainly driven by experience, learning, and pragmatism.

Hybrid Software Development Approaches in Practice: A European Perspective

The surveyed companies applied hybrid development approaches to specific projects even when company-wide policies for process usage existed. These approaches emerged from the evolution of different work practices and were consistently used regardless of company size or industry sector.

HELENA Study: Reasons for Combining Agile and Traditional Software Development Approaches in German Companies

Many software development teams face the problem of selecting a suitable development approach fitting to their specific context. According to them, the combination of agile and traditional approaches seems to be the solution to handle this problem. However, the current state of practice with respect to hybrid approaches is not sufficiently examined. Most studies focus either on traditional or on agile methods, but the combination of both is not well investigated yet. The “Hybrid dEveLopmENt Approaches in software systems development” (HELENA) study performs a large-scale international survey in order to gain insights into the distribution of hybrid approaches. So far, the study indicates several reasons why companies combine agile and traditional approaches. The hybrid approaches aim at improving the frequency of delivery to customers, the adaptability and the flexibility of the process to react to change. Furthermore, it is the aim to increase the productivity. In this publication, we present the current state of the German results and outline the next steps.

Managing Software Process Evolution for Spacecraft from a Customer’s Perspective

The Space Administration of the German Aerospace Center designs and implements the German space program. While project management rests with the agency, suppliers are contracted for building devices and their software. As opposed to many other domains, a spacecraft is a unique device with uncommon and custom-built peripherals. Its software is specifically developed for a single mission only and often controls critical functionality. A small coding error can mean the loss of the spacecraft and mission failure. For this reason, customer and supplier closely collaborate on the field of software quality. We report from a customer’s perspective on how we manage software quality and ensure that suppliers evolve their processes: We contribute to standards, tailor quality, and process requirements to establish them in projects, and engage in cross-company product quality collaboration.

Is 100% Test Coverage a Reasonable Requirement? Lessons Learned from a Space Software Project.

To ensure the dependability and safety of spaceflight devices, rigorous standards are defined. Among others, one requirement from the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS) standards is 100% test coverage at software unit level. Different stakeholders need to have a good knowledge of the implications of such a requirement to avoid risks for the project that this requirement might entail. In this paper, we study if such a 100% test coverage requirement is a reasonable one. For this, we interviewed the industrial developers who ran a project that had the sole goal of achieving 100% unit test coverage in a spaceflight software. We discuss costs, benefits, risks, effects on quality, interplay with surrounding conditions, and project management implications. We distill lessons learned with which we hope to support other developers and decision makers when considering a 100% unit test coverage requirement.

Metadata-based code example embedding

In practice, developers usually seek different ways to save time and effort. Thus, they use different tools (such as search engines, issue tracking, or Q&A sites) to collaborate and find code examples that meet their specific needs. However, such tools only support the traditional find-alter-embed approach of code examples while ignoring the origin and location of these sources. Such information can be very useful to assist software development tasks such as bug-fixing, teamwork, and knowledge transfer, through direct notification of critical changes made to the code example, or access to the original source including its discussions, issues, and bug reports. In this paper, we propose a new approach that consists of collecting meta information about a code example to automatically track critical changes to it and its origin and provide feedback to both developers and the online community. We report on our vision, approach and challenges, and draft a software architecture to implement our research idea.