H. Dieter Rombach

Practical Guidelines for Measurement-based Process Improvement

Despite significant progress in the last 15 years, implementing a successful measurement program for software development is still a challenging undertaking. Most problems are not of theoretical but of methodological or practical nature. In this article, we present lessons learned from experiences with goal-oriented measurement. We structure them into practical guidelines for efficient and useful software measurement aimed at process improvement in industry. Issues related to setting measurement goals, defining explicit measurement models, and implementing data collection procedures are addressed from a practical perspective. In addition, guidelines for using measurement in the context of process improvement are provided.

Outsourcing in India [software development]

Starting in the early 1990s and motivated initially by the desire to cut personnel costs, many companies have explored multisite, multi-country software development approaches. India and Eastern Europe, in particular, have drawn attention. Most companies today distribute their development primarily to access human resources and competencies not available at home and only secondarily to cut labor costs. After examining various possible outsourcing models, this article reports on the experiences of Tenovis GmbH and Co. KG, a German company in the private (in-house) telecommunication domain, and its software development partner in Bangalore, India.

Linking Software Development and Business Strategy Through Measurement

The GQM+Strategies approach extends the goal/question/metric paradigm for measuring the success or failure of goals and strategies, adding enterprise-wide support for determining action on the basis of measurement results. An organization can thus integrate its measurement program across all levels.

Integrated software process and product lines

Increasing demands imposed on software-intensive systems will require more rigorous engineering and management of software artifacts and processes. Software product line engineering allows for the effective reuse of software artifacts based on the pro-active organization of similar artifacts according to similarities and variances. Software processes – although also variable across projects – are still not managed in a similar systematic way. This paper motivates the need for Software Process Lines similar to Product Lines. As a result of such organization, processes within an organization could be organized according to similarities and differences, allowing for better tailoring to specific project needs (corresponds to application engineering in product lines). The vision of SPPL (integrated product and process line) engineering is presented, where suitable artifacts and processes can be chosen based on a set of product & process requirements and project constraints. The paper concludes with some resulting challenges for research, practice, and teaching.

Repeatable software engineering experiments for comparing defect-detection techniques

Techniques for detecting defects in source code are fundamental to the success of any software development approach. A software development organization therefore needs to understand the utility of techniques such as reading or testing in its own environment. Controlled experiments have proven to be an effective means for evaluating software engineering techniques and gaining the necessary understanding about their utility. This paper presents a characterization scheme for controlled experiments that evaluate defect-detection techniques. The characterization scheme permits the comparison of results from similar experiments and establishes a context for cross-experiment analysis of those results. The characterization scheme is used to structure a detailed survey of four experiments that compared reading and testing techniques for detecting defects in source code. We encourage educators, researchers, and practitioners to use the characterization scheme in order to develop and conduct further instances of this class of experiments. By repeating this experiment we expect the software engineering community will gain quantitative insights about the utility of defect-detection techniques in different environments.

Directions in Software Process Research

Abstract Developing and maintaining software systems involves a variety of highly interrelated activities. The discipline of software engineering studies processes of both product engineering and process engineering. Product engineering aims at developing software products of high quality at reasonable cost. Process engineering in contrast aims at choosing those product engineering processes appropriate for a given set of project goals and characteristics as well as improving the existing knowledge about those processes. Explicit models of both types of processes help a software development organization to gain competitive advantage. This paper motivates the need for explicit process models, surveys existing languages to model processes, discusses tools to support model usage, and proposes a research agenda for future software process research.

A Survey on the State of the Practice in Distributed Software Development: Criteria for Task Allocation

The allocation of tasks can be seen as a success-critical management activity in distributed development projects. However, such task allocation is still one of the major challenges in global software development due to an insufficient understanding of the criteria that influence task allocation decisions. This article presents a qualitative study aimed at identifying and understanding such criteria that are used in practice. Based on interviews with managers from selected software development organizations, criteria currently applied in industry are identified. One important result is, for instance, that the sourcing strategy and the type of software to be developed have a significant effect on the applied criteria. The article presents the goals, design, and results of the study as well as an overview of related and future work.

Teaching disciplined software development

Discipline is an essential prerequisite for the development of large and complex software-intensive systems. However, discipline is also important on the level of individual development activities. A major challenge for teaching disciplined software development is to enable students to experience the benefits of discipline and to overcome the gap between real professional scenarios and scenarios used in software engineering university courses. Students often do not have the chance to internalize what disciplined software development means at both the individual and collaborative level. Therefore, students often feel overwhelmed by the complexity of disciplined development and later on tend to avoid applying the underlying principles. The Personal Software Process (PSP) and the Team Software Process (TSP) are tools designed to help software engineers control, manage, and improve the way they work at both the individual and collaborative level. Both tools have been considered effective means for introducing discipline into the conscience of professional developers. In this paper, we address the meaning of disciplined software development, its benefits, and the challenges of teaching it. We present a quantitative study that demonstrates the benefits of disciplined software development on the individual level and provides further experience and recommendations with PSP and TSP as teaching tools.

Toward full life cycle control: adding maintenance measurement to the SEL

Abstract Organization-wide measurement of software products and processes is needed to establish full life cycle control over software products. The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL)—a joint venture between NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Maryland, and Computer Sciences Corporation—started measurement of software development more than 15 years ago. Recently, the measurement of maintenance has been added to the scope of the SEL. In this article, the maintenance measurement program is presented as an addition to the already existing and well-established SEL development measurement program and evaluated in terms of its immediate benefits and long-term improvement potential. Immediate benefits of this program for the SEL include an increased understanding of the maintenance domain, the differences and commonalities between development and maintenance, and the cause-effect relationships between development and maintenance. Initial results from a sample maintenance study are presented to substantiate these benefits. The long-term potential of this program includes the use of maintenance baselines to better plan and manage future projects and to improve development and maintenance practices for future projects wherever warranted.

Towards a Multi-criteria Development Distribution Model: An Analysis of Existing Task Distribution Approaches

Distributing development tasks in the context of global software development bears both many risks and many opportunities. Nowadays, distributed development is often driven by only a few factors or even just a single factor such as workforce costs. Risks and other relevant factors such as workforce capabilities, the innovation potential of different regions, or cultural factors are often not recognized sufficiently. This could be improved by using empirically-based multi-criteria distribution models. Currently, there is a lack of such decision models for distributing software development work. This article focuses on mechanisms for such decision support. First, requirements for a distribution model are formulated based on needs identified from practice. Then, distribution models from different domains are surveyed, compared, and analyzed in terms of suitability. Finally, research questions and directions for future work are given.