Cláudia Maria Lima Werner

Staffing a software project: A constraint satisfaction and optimization-based approach

Software development is a people intensive activity. The abilities possessed by developers are strongly related to process productivity and final product quality. Thus, one of the most important decisions to be made by a software project manager is how to properly staff the project. However, staffing software projects is not a simple task. There are many alternatives to ponder, several developer-to-activity combinations to evaluate, and the manager may have to choose a team from a larger set of available developers, according to the project and organizational needs. Therefore, to perform the staffing activity with ad hoc procedures can be very difficult and can lead the manager to choose a team that is not the best for a given situation. This work presents an optimization-based approach to support staffing a software project. The staffing problem is modeled and solved as a constraint satisfaction problem. Our approach takes into account the characteristics of the project activities, the available human resources, and constraints established by the software development organization. According to these needs, the project manager selects a utility function to be maximized or minimized by the optimizer. We propose several utility functions, each addressing values that can be sought by the development organization. A decision support tool was implemented and used in an experimental study executed to evaluate the relevance of the proposed approach.

Supporting risks in software project management

Complex software development is a risky job. The number of unsuccessful projects surpasses the number of successful developments, particularly when large projects are analyzed. This paper describes an approach to develop, retrieve, and reuse management knowledge and experience concerned with software development risks. Scenarios are used to model risk impact and resolution strategies efficacy within risk archetypes. A risk archetype is an information structure that holds knowledge about software development risks. A risk management process organizes the use of risk archetypes within an application development effort. The process resembles a reuse process framework, where two sub-processes are respectively responsible for identifying and reusing risk information. Simulating the impact of the expected risks can support some of the decisions throughout the software development process. The contribution of this paper is to show how risk archetypes and scenario models can represent reusable project management knowledge. An observational analysis of applying such an approach in an industrial environment and a feasibility study are also described.

Towards supporting the life cycle of large scale scientific experiments

One of the main challenges of scientific experiments is to allow scientists to manage and exchange their scientific computational resources (data, programs, models, etc.). The effective management of such experiments requires a specific set of cardinal facilities, such as experiment specification techniques, workflow derivation heuristics and provenance mechanisms. These facilities may characterise the experiment life cycle into three phases: composition, execution, and analysis. Works concerned with supporting scientific workflows are mainly concerned with the execution and analysis phase. Therefore, they fail to support the scientific experiment throughout its life cycle as a set of integrated experimentation technologies. In large scale experiments this represents a research challenge. We propose an approach for managing large scale experiments based on provenance gathering during all phases of the life cycle. We foresee that such approach may aid scientists to have more control on the trials of the scientific experiment.

Odyssey-VCS: a flexible version control system for UML model elements

Many current version control systems use a simple data model that is barely sufficient to manipulate source-code. This simple data model is not sufficient to provide versioning capabilities for software modeling environments, which are strongly focused on analysis and architectural design artifacts. In this work, we introduce a flexible version control system for UML model elements. This version control system, named Odyssey-VCS, deals with the complex data model used by UML-based CASE tools. Moreover, it allows the configuration of both the unit of versioning and unit of comparison for each specific project, respecting the different needs of the diverse development scenarios.

ArchTrace: Policy-Based Support for Managing Evolving Architecture-to-Implementation Traceability Links

Traditional techniques of traceability detection and management are not equipped to handle evolution. This is a problem for the field of software architecture, where it is critical to keep synchronized an evolving conceptual architecture with its realization in an evolving code base. ArchTrace is a new tool that addresses this problem through a policy-based infrastructure for automatically updating traceability links every time an architecture or its code base evolves. ArchTrace is pluggable, allowing developers to choose a set of traceability management policies that best match their situational needs and working styles. We discuss ArchTrace, its conceptual basis, its implementation, and our evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses in a retrospective analysis of data collected from a 20 month period of development of Odyssey, a large-scale software development environment. Results are promising: with respect to the ideal set of traceability links, the policies applied resulted in 95% precision at 89% recall

Towards odyssey-VCS 2: improvements over a UML-based version control system

Models are becoming first class artifacts in Software Engineering. Due to that, an infrastructure is needed to support model evolution in the same way we have for source-code. One of the key elements of such infrastructure is a version control system properly designed for models. In previous work, we presented Odyssey-VCS, a version control system tailored to fine-grained UML model elements. In this paper, we discuss the main improvements that we are incorporating on the second release of this system, which are: support for UML 2, reflective processing, explicit branching and auto-branching, generic merge algorithm, support for pessimistic concurrency policy, and support for hooks.

The use of mediation and ontology technologies for software component information retrieval

Component Based Developed aims at constructing software through the inter-relationship between pre-existing components. However, these components should be bound to a specific application domain in order to be effectively reused. Reusable domain components and Their related documentation are usually stored in a great variety of data sources. Thus, a possible solution for accessing this information is to use a software layer that integrates different component information sources. We present a component information integration data layer, based on mediators. Through mediators, domain ontology acts as a technique/formalism for specifying ontological commitments or agreements between component users and providers, enabling more accurate software component information search.

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.

Applying Refactoring Techniques to UML/OCL Models

The Object Constraint Language (OCL) plays an important role in the elaboration of precise UML models. Although OCL was designed to be both formal and simple, UML/OCL models may be difficult to understand and evolve, particularly when constraints containing complex or duplicate expressions are present. Moreover, the evaluation of how changes in the definition of the underlying classes impact the OCL part of a model may be a difficult and time-consuming task. In this paper, we discuss how refactoring techniques can be applied in order to improve the understandability of a UML/OCL model and how to support its evolution. In particular, we present a collection of refactorings and discuss how they can be specified and automated. We also show how the model animation features can be used to increase our confidence that the semantics of a model is preserved when a refactoring is manually performed.

Using ontologies for domain information retrieval

The main objective of domain engineering is to provide domain information that helps the specification of domain applications. Some applications need to reuse information from multiple domains. Currently, there are several Domain Engineering methods that provide domain information using different representations that are stored in various formats. Due to the costs involved in a domain engineering initiative, it is important to be able to access all available domain information. This paper describes a retrieval agent system that provides access to information from multiple domains, regardless of its heterogeneity or distribution. Domain ontologies and an evolutionary model of the users interests are some of the basic concepts used by the system to help users identify and retrieve relevant domain information.