Iva Krasteva

Reuse with Software Components - A Survey of Industrial State of Practice

Software is often built from pre-existing, reusable components, but there is a lack of knowledge regarding how efficient this is in practice. In this paper we therefore present qualitative results from an industrial survey on current practices and preferences, highlighting differences and similarities between development with reusable components, development without reusable components, and development of components for reuse. Component reuse does happen, but the findings are still partly disappointing: currently, many potential benefits are not achieved. Still, the findings are encouraging: there are indeed good, reusable components properly verified and documented, and mature organizations who manage to reuse these components efficiently, e.g. by leveraging the previous component verification. We also find that replacing one component for another is not necessarily complicated and costly.

Challenges for Migrating to the Service Cloud Paradigm: An Agile Perspective

Migrating to the Service Cloud Paradigm implies the migration of legacy software systems to a service-oriented architecture with deployment in the cloud. Although this specific software modernization paradigm promises numerous strategic and operational advantages, it poses also many complex organizational and technical challenges, among which is the lack of mature processes, methods and techniques. This paper examines the questions of whether agile methods and techniques could be scaled to fit the migration to the Service Cloud Paradigm and how they could help overcoming the challenges of software modernization in this specific context. The research methodology presented here first extracts the challenges of the migration to Service Cloud Paradigm through a systematic literature review and then, using expert judgment, evaluates how different agile techniques, taken from Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP), could address the identified challenges. As a result, a ranked list of applicable agile techniques is presented and suggestions for their adoption in software modernization projects are drawn.

Experience-based approach for adoption of agile practices in software development projects

The agile approach for software development has attracted a great deal of interest in both academic and industry communities in the last decade. Nevertheless the wide adoption of agile methods in ever growing number of software development projects, shifting the development process of an organization to an agile one is not straightforward. Certain considerations for the applicability of agile practices should be taken into account when this transition is performed. In this paper, an approach for situational engineering of agile methods is proposed. The approach is based on the experience gained in adopting agile practices in both internal and external projects of organizations. A knowledge-base supporting the selection of agile practices that are suitable for certain project is introduced. Automated generation of appropriate software development process is included as well. Particular realization of the approach supported by SPEM-based tools is also presented in the paper.

A Systematic Approach for Selection and Adoption of Agile Practices in Component-Based Projects

A lot of success stories of the adoption of agile development in continually growing number of software domains and projects have been published. However, every single adoption has unique challenges as well as general guidelines (e.g. [1]) which should be addressed when agile practices are introduced into a project. Depending on particular characteristics of the project, environment and people, certain considerations of the applicability of agile practices should be taken into account. In addition, the agile approach encourages adaptation and customization of the development method throughout the execution of the project, which makes the adoption process continuous and interactive activity.

A Survey on Industrial Software Engineering

In this paper, we present on-going work on data collected by a questionnaire surveying process practices, preferences, and methods in industrial software engineering.