Davi Viana

Evaluating a technique for requirements extraction from business process diagrams through empirical studies

In the area of requirements engineering there are elicitation techniques that are based on business context to identify the software requirements. However, these techniques do not commonly use business processes models as a source of information relevant to the elicitation of requirements. Such techniques extract use cases from business processes models. However, before modeling use cases, it is important to produce a document with functional and non-functional requirements and business rules. Therefore, this work proposes a new technique to aid extracting the requirements from business process diagrams: the REMO (Requirements Elicitation oriented by business process MOdeling) technique. This paper shows that, through the use of empirical studies, it was possible to obtain results that contributed to the evolution of the REMO technique. Additionally, the paper describes the qualitative analysis of the second empirical study, which used the procedures of two different methods: the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Grounded Theory.

How have Software Engineering Researchers been Measuring Software Productivity? - A Systematic Mapping Study.

Context: productivity has been a recurring topic, and despite its importance, researchers have not yet reached a consensus on how to properly measure productivity in software engineering. Aim: to investigate and better understand how software productivity researchers are using software productivity metrics. Method: we performed a systematic mapping study on publications regarding software productivity, extracting how software engineering researchers are measuring software productivity. Results: In total, 91 software productivity metrics were extracted. The obtained results show that researchers apply these productivity metrics mainly focusing on software projects and developers, and these productivity metrics are predominantly composed by Lines of Code (LOC), Time and Effort measures. Conclusion: although there is no consensus, our results shows that single ratio metrics, such as LOC/Effort, for software projects, and LOC/Time, for software developers, are a tendency adopted by researchers to measure productivity.

Applying Knowledge Codification in a Post-mortem Process

In information systems, acquiring experiences in projects can result in new knowledge to people or the organization. Knowledge Management analyzes such experiences as a significant resource to the organization. Through the Post-mortem analysis, people can remember experiences and situations that they had during a software development project. In order to support such analysis, the PABC-pattern structure proposes codifying knowledge, assisting practitioners in registering key elements to facilitate the understanding of that experience. This paper proposes a process of Post-mortem Analysis based on the KJ method. We have integrated the PABC-Pattern approach as a final product in order to record the experiences and gathered information.

A qualitative study about the life cycle of lessons learned

Software activities are executed by people and demand great knowledge. For this reason, knowledge dissemination activities are important in software organizations. One of the ways of sharing knowledge is through the practice of lessons learned dissemination. The form of dissemination could help to clarify questions about how lessons learned are shared in the organization. This paper aims to analyze the life cycle of lessons learned in a software organization, in order to understand how they are treated during the course of the projects. Results show that discussions of the lessons encourage the exchange of knowledge between the team members. However, it is necessary to improve the form of knowledge dissemination in all the organization, as well as encourage learning this knowledge.

Linking Knowledge Mapping and Lessons Learned in a Research and Development Group: A Pilot Study

In Software Engineering, Knowledge Mapping is a process to discover aspects or meanings through the analysis of relationships between artifacts or people. However, to create a knowledge map, we need a process for capturing and analyzing data, so that we can extract information that reflects those aspects. In this paper, we propose a knowledge mapping process that generates a knowledge map and a set of knowledge profiles considering each mapped member. We developed a new technique by improving existing techniques in literature. In addition, we planned and performed a pilot study in a Research and Development (R&D) group. In this paper, we present our findings regarding the application of the proposed technique and the analysis of the knowledge map for that group. Additionally, we generated links between the knowledge profiles and collected lessons learned for one of the projects that was performed by this R&D group.

Knowledge Mapping in a Research and Development Group

In Enterprise Systems, representing the flow of knowledge may indicate how participants work using their knowledge. Such representation allows the understanding of how knowledge circulates between the development team and improvement opportunities. Knowledge Management supports the management of knowledge through techniques that identify how knowledge behaves in projects. One of these techniques is Knowledge Mapping, which supports representing how participants share their knowledge, which sources of knowledge are consulted and which people it helps during a project. However, to draw up a knowledge map, we need a process for capturing and analyzing data that can extract information that reflect these aspects. This work aims at presenting a process for Knowledge Mapping to develop a map indicating what knowledge the participants used, who or what they accessed and indications of its core competencies. Additionally, this paper discusses a pilot study regarding the application of the proposed process. As a result, we generated a knowledge map for a software engineering research and development group, in which contains a set of profiles and features what the main skills that a participant uses are.