Claes Wohlin

Using Students as Subjects—A Comparative Study ofStudents and Professionals in Lead-Time Impact Assessment

In many studiesin software engineering students are used instead of professionalsoftware developers, although the objective is to draw conclusionsvalid for professional software developers. This paper presentsa study where the difference between the two groups is evaluated.People from the two groups have individually carried out a non-trivialsoftware engineering judgement task involving the assessmentof how ten different factors affect the lead-time of softwaredevelopment projects. It is found that the differences are onlyminor, and it is concluded that software engineering studentsmay be used instead of professional software developers undercertain conditions. These conditions are identified and describedbased on generally accepted criteria for validity evaluationof empirical studies.

Engineering and Managing Software Requirements

1) Requirements Engineering: Setting the Context Part-1: State-of-the-Art Surveys of Requirements Engineering Process Research 2) Requirements Elicitation 3) Specification of Requirements Models 4) Requirements Prioritization 5) Requirements Interdependencies 6) Impact Analysis 7) Requirements Negotiation 8) Quality Assurance in Requirements Engineering Part-2: The Next Practice in Requirements Engineering 9) Modeling Goals and Reasoning with Them 10) Managing Large Repositories of Natural Language Requirements 11) Understanding Ambiguity in Requirements Engineering 12) Decision Support in Requirements Engineering 13) Market-Driven Requirements Engineering for Software Products 14) Requirements Engineering for Agile Methods 15) Requirements Engineering for Web-Based Information Systems Part-3: Studies and Industrial Experience 16) Requirements Engineering: A Case of Developing and Managing Quality Software Systems in the Public Sector 17) Good Quality Requirements in Unified Process 18) Requirements Experience in Practice: Studies of Six Companies 19) An Analysis of Empirical Requirements Survey Data 20) Requirements Engineering: Solutions and Trends

Empirical evidence in global software engineering: a systematic review

Recognized as one of the trends of the 21st century, globalization of the world economies brought significant changes to nearly all industries, and in particular it includes software development. Many companies started global software engineering (GSE) to benefit from cheaper, faster and better development of software systems, products and services. However, empirical studies indicate that achieving these benefits is not an easy task. Here, we report our findings from investigating empirical evidence in GSE-related research literature. By conducting a systematic review we observe that the GSE field is still immature. The amount of empirical studies is relatively small. The majority of the studies represent problem-oriented reports focusing on different aspects of GSE management rather than in-depth analysis of solutions for example in terms of useful practices or techniques. Companies are still driven by cost reduction strategies, and at the same time, the most frequently discussed recommendations indicate a necessity of investments in travelling and socialization. Thus, at the same time as development goes global there is an ambition to minimize geographical, temporal and cultural separation. These are normally integral parts of cross-border collaboration. In summary, the systematic review results in several descriptive classifications of the papers on empirical studies in GSE and also reports on some best practices identified from literature.

Guidelines for snowballing in systematic literature studies and a replication in software engineering

Background: Systematic literature studies have become common in software engineering, and hence it is important to understand how to conduct them efficiently and reliably. Objective: This paper presents guidelines for conducting literature reviews using a snowballing approach, and they are illustrated and evaluated by replicating a published systematic literature review. Method: The guidelines are based on the experience from conducting several systematic literature reviews and experimenting with different approaches. Results: The guidelines for using snowballing as a way to search for relevant literature was successfully applied to a systematic literature review. Conclusions: It is concluded that using snowballing, as a first search strategy, may very well be a good alternative to the use of database searches.

Requirements Abstraction Model

Software requirements arrive in different shapes and forms to development organizations. This is particularly the case in market-driven requirements engineering, where the requirements are on products rather than directed towards projects. This results in challenges related to making different requirements comparable. In particular, this situation was identified in a collaborative effort between academia and industry. A model, with four abstraction levels, was developed as a response to the industrial need. The model allows for placement of requirements on different levels and supports abstraction or break down of requirements to make them comparable to each other. The model was successfully validated in several steps at a company. The results from the industrial validation point to the usefulness of the model. The model will allow companies to ensure comparability between requirements, and hence it generates important input to activities such as prioritization and packaging of requirements before launching a development project.

A Model for Technology Transfer in Practice

Technology transfer, and thus industry-relevant research, involves more than merely producing research results and delivering them in publications and technical reports. It demands close cooperation and collaboration between industry and academia throughout the entire research process. During research conducted in a partnership between Blekinge Institute of Technology and two companies, Danaher Motion Saro AB (DHR) and ABB, we devised a technology transfer model that embodies this philosophy. We initiated this partnership to conduct industry-relevant research in requirements engineering and product management. Technology transfer in this context is a prerequisite: it validates academic research results in a real setting, and it provides a way to improve industry development and business processes

State-of-the-Art: Software Inspections after 25 Years

Software inspections, which were originally developed by Michael Fagan in 1976, are an important means to verify and achieve sufficient quality in many software projects today. Since Fagans initial work, the importance of software inspections has been long recognized by software developers and many organizations. Various proposals have been made by researchers in the hope of improving Fagans inspection method. The proposals include structural changes to the process and several types of support for the inspection process. Most of the proposals have been empirically investigated in different studies.

Context in industrial software engineering research

In order to draw valid conclusions when aggregating evidence it is important to describe the context in which industrial studies were conducted. This paper structures the context for empirical industrial studies and provides a checklist. The aim is to aid researchers in making informed decisions concerning which parts of the context to include in the descriptions. Furthermore, descriptions of industrial studies were surveyed.

A comparison of issues and advantages in agile and incremental development between state of the art and an industrial case

Recent empirical studies have been conducted identifying a number of issues and advantages of incremental and agile methods. However, the majority of studies focused on one model (Extreme Programming) and small projects. To draw more general conclusions we conduct a case study in large-scale development identifying issues and advantages, and compare the results with previous empirical studies on the topic. The principle results are that (1) the case study and literature agree on the benefits while new issues arise when using agile in large-scale and (2) an empirical research framework is needed to make agile studies comparable.

The fundamental nature of requirements engineering activities as a decision-making process

The requirements engineering (RE) process is a decision-rich complex problem solving activity. This paper examines the elements of organization-oriented macro decisions as well as process-oriented micro decisions in the RE process and illustrates how to integrate classical decision-making models with RE process models. This integration helps in formulating a common vocabulary and model to improve the manageability of the RE process, and contributes towards the learning process by validating and verifying the consistency of decision-making in RE activities.