Cristina Casado-Lumbreras

Project managers in global software development teams: a study of the effects on productivity and performance

Globalization is having a deep impact on today’s world economy. One of the most affected industries is the software industry. Recently, global software development (GSD) has gained a lot of attention. This new trend of producing software is influencing all software processes, including human resource management. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of the implications of GSD for software project managers by analyzing project performance from different perspectives such as the 360-degree feedback evaluation. Results show that performance of GSD projects is lower than in-house projects, but apart from that, this study reveals that there are also negative consequences for software project managers, which need to be taken into account. For instance, the experiment revealed a lack of attention to tasks by software project managers and, as a consequence of this, performance losses. The main conclusions of this research may be valuable for software development organizations.

Shaping human capital in software development teams: the case of mentoring enabled by semantics

In current organisations, the importance of knowledge and competence is unquestionable. In a scenario in which knowledge workers perform their duties in knowledge-intensive organisations, mentoring has emerged as an efficient practice for the development of these personnel. On the other hand, the convergence of information technology (IT) and communication technologies and the rapid evolution of the internet has been one of the most influential factors in human resources management, and the advent of semantic technologies presents novel opportunities for the improvement of personnel development, including semantics. This study presents a solution based on semantic technologies which utilises different personal and professional data to carry out pair matching of mentors and proteges.

Using the Affect Grid to Measure Emotions in Software Requirements Engineering

Computer systems are designed and used by humans. And human being is characterized, among other things, by emotions. Giving this fact, the process of designing and developing computer systems is, like any other facet in our lives, driven by emotions. Requirements engineering is one of the main phases in software development. In Requirements engineering, several tasks include acceptance and negotiation activities in which the emotional factor represents a key role. This paper presents a study based on the application of affect grid by Russell in requirements engineering main stakeholders: developers and users. Results show that high arousal and low pleasure levels in the process are predictors of conflictive requirements.

Providing knowledge recommendations: an approach for informal electronic mentoring

The use of Web 2.0 technologies for knowledge management is invading the corporate sphere. The Web 2.0 is the most adopted knowledge transfer tool within knowledge intensive firms and is starting to be used for mentoring. This paper presents IM-TAG, a Web 2.0 tool, based on semantic technologies, for informal mentoring. The tool offers recommendations of mentoring contents built upon personal competencies of the mentee, combined with content and opinion tagging. To validate the tool, a case study comparing recommendations from the IM-TAG and a group of experts was conducted. Results show that the accuracy of IM-TAGs recommendations is notable and satisfactory. The main conclusions of this research may be valuable to organizations immersed in mentoring programs.

Analyzing Human Resource Management Practices Within the GSD Context

Abstract The development of software across different countries (and time zones) differs substantially from software development in one single country or region. The management of processes and people, who work in globally distributed teams, requires a high level of coordination and collaboration which needs to be based on established human resource management practices. The People Capability Maturity Model (People-CMM) provides a complete framework that enables quality in human resource management to be improved. However, today, the adoption of the People-CMM within organizations using Global Software Development (GSD) is not an easy task. This paper uses an empirical study to analyze the implementation of the People-CMM within the GSD context. Results confirm that cultural and communication problems are the main challenges in the implementation of the People-CMM adoption within GSD scenarios.

Decisions in software development projects management. An exploratory study

Given the importance of software in todays world, the development of software systems is a key activity that requires complex management scenarios. This article explores the implications of hard decisions in the context of software development projects (SDPs). More in deep, it focuses on the emotional consequences of making hard decisions in IT organisations. Complex SDPs involve a great variety of actors. This fact entails morale, feelings and emotions, which play an important role for communication, interaction and, ultimately, decision making. The aim of the article is twofold. First (Study 1), to identify which are the most important hard decisions in SDPS. Second (Study 2), to study the influence of emotions on decision-making processes (Study 2). Findings show the complex emotional consequences and difficulties that managers must face in hard decision-making processes.

Methodological framework for the allocation of work packages in global software development

Global software development in software development industry is a new aspect for many software project managers. In this scenario, the allocation of work packages among project participants is not a simple task. This allocation was traditionally determined by availability and competence but this new trend introduces complexity in an already complex process. Given the need to define new models to guide managers in these operations, this paper presents a framework to allocate work packages among project participants. Apart from the introduction of the framework itself, the results of its implementation are presented. These results show a notable output of the implementation in terms of accuracy of task execution to planning, effect introduction and overall satisfaction. Copyright

SemCASS: technical competence assessment within software development teams enabled by semantics

The environment surrounding organisations is characterised by an increasing necessity of competent personnel that need to be assessed. Moreover, personnel factors are capital for software development projects. Given the importance of people in certain sectors, this paper introduces SemCASS, a tool based on semantic technologies to feed competence evaluation with competence evidences within software development projects. These evidences are taken from two different sources. On the one hand competence facts derived from the analysis of project repositories using natural language processing techniques. On the other hand, standard competence evidences collected using mobile technologies. SemCASS benefits from the standardisation of personnel performance metrics related to software development teams as well as the capital importance of competence ontologies and semantic reasoning as basic support of new knowledge management efforts. Due to these set of features, the reliability and precision of the competence assessment will increase drastically.

Software Development Outsourcing: Challenges and Opportunities in Nigeria

In recent years, several emergent regions have become software development sourcing countries. This article investigates the possibilities of sub-Saharan Africa as a sourcing destination in the software field. To find out the reasons why sub-Saharan Africa countries, in general, and Nigeria, in particular, are not considered a destination for global software development projects, the authors interviewed a set of professionals from Europe and Africa. Results indicate that there are many disadvantages and difficulties impeding Nigeria from becoming a preferred sourcing destination, mainly the absence of a strong software industry and the concerns about legislative, fiscal, and commercial premises. On the other hand, it is observed that there are also relevant added values and competitive advantages in Nigeria (English-speaking country, same time zone, and cost); therefore, it can become a potential target for software development outsourcing in the medium and long terms.

Informal learning through expertise mining in the social web

The advent of Web 2.0, also called the Social Web, has changed the way people interact with the Web. Assisted by the technologies associated with this new trend, users now play a much more active role as content providers. This Web paradigm shift has also changed how companies operate and interact with their employees, partners and customers. The challenge for companies and research institutions is now to develop (semi-) automated tools for gathering usable and explicit knowledge from such content. With the aim of facilitating the achievement of such a challenge, in this work a platform architecture for informal learning, which is based on semantic technologies, is proposed. Such platform permits to perform expertise mining from Social Web-generated content. Given a topic of interest, the system carries out semantically enhanced operations on blog and microblog posts to identify experts in that specific topic area. The comprehensive evaluation of the tool has demonstrated very promising results and is also presented in this article.