Jouni Similä

The social dynamics of software development

Abstract A variety of experiences in software development processes between a public sector organisation and several software vendors over a decade-long period are described and interpreted. Three information systems histories are presented as case examples and their analysis is based on detailed insider observations. A social process model is used to describe the relationships between key actors within the client organisation while a transaction cost framework is used to explain the joint forms of the relationships between the client and the vendors. The resulting model depicts in a concise way how the relationships have evolved and stabilised over time. In this model, major encounters between the actors are those which have at least the potential to change the relationship state between the parties. The relatively stable passages between consecutive encounters are labelled episodes. By perceiving systems development as a series of encounters and episodes, it is possible to identify the critical turning points of development work and to display the dynamics of a software development trajectory. While our findings support the well-known basic software procurement principle, this is only after the trajectories have stabilised. Two of the three trajectories exhibit major changes in software procurement strategies before reaching a steady state. The paper ends with a discussion of the findings and some implications for researchers and practitioners.

Managerial view on design for manufacturing

– The purpose of this paper is to provide a tangible example of organisational solutions in effective design for manufacturing (DfM) in a large information and communications technology (ICT) company., – An interview study was carried out in a leading ICT company to clarify the practical realisation of DfM, and the current challenges encountered. The interviews covered all the key persons involved in DfM and related processes, in a case company that has successfully applied DfM for over a decade., – The paper shows the importance of a separate management organisation for coordinating the requirements of internal functions. With relation to the case company, this organisation, in contrast to the literature, is located in production, not in product development. Despite the successful application of DfM, the case company still has challenges in exploitation of related data systems., – This paper describes one of the top companies in its field. However, the obtained results could vary to some degree, should a wider set of companies be included in the study., – Managers of other companies could learn from this example at three levels: organisational solutions for DfM, its practical realisation, and the challenges encountered., – The existing literature is relatively scarce on organisational implications of DfM implementation. This paper identifies a functional organisational location, structure and practical realisation for effective DfM.

Software product roadmapping in a volatile business environment

Product roadmapping enhances the product development process by enabling early information and long-term decision making about the products in order to deliver the right products to the right markets at the right time. However, relatively little scientific knowledge is available on the application and usefulness of product roadmapping in software product development context. This study develops a framework for software product roadmapping, which is then used to study the critical aspects of the product roadmapping process. The collection of empirical evidence includes both quantitative and qualitative data which sheds further insight into the complexities involved in product roadmapping. Results revealed that organizations view the product roadmap mainly as a tool for strategic decision making as it aims at showing the future directions of the companys products. However, only a few companies appear to have an explicit approach for handling the mechanisms for creating and maintaining such a roadmap. Finally, it is suggested that the strategic importance of product roadmapping is likely to increase in the future and, as a conclusion, a new type of agility is required in order to survive in the turbulent and competitive software business environment.

Gatekeepers in the action structure of software contracting: a case study of the evolution of user-developer relationships

The case study history of the cooperation between a software house and its client over a time span of 6 years is analyzed through the metaphor of the gatekeeper role. The analysis shows that, contrary to earlier research employing the gatekeeper metaphor, the gatekeeper role in software development work is not stable but changes considerably over time both from the point of view of the software house and the client. Moreover, there seem to be typical recurrent patterns of change for the gatekeeper role for both of the cooperating partners. The analysis indicates also that some of the main problems in contractual software development work may be alleviated through careful consideration of the content of the gatekeeper role in the cooperation phases between the software house and the client. A major question seems to be the decision when the managerial gatekeeper on each side must step aside and let the software developers and user representatives exchange information without managerial gatekeeping.

Is my software process improvement suitable for incremental deployment

Incremental delivery policies for software process improvement are anxiously required by the industry. Improvement projects need to show results as early as possible to capture the attention of the organization and to keep things focused on process improvement. Incremental policies are the foundation of building a provider-reset partnership in software process improvement. Few guidelines, if any, explicitly support such an approach. The authors examine a general approach to incremental software process improvement deployment, and investigate a method for verifying the suitability of conventional models of software process improvement for incremental improvement deployment. They present a framework including the necessary models, an evaluation method and support tools.

MOBILE ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS

This paper presents the foundations for building mobile environmental information systems (MEISs) requiring an interdisciplinary approach. MEISs require expertise from the disciplines of environmental biology, geography, and mobile technology. MEISs show great promise for the acquisition of environmental information using different mobile devices. Automatic mobile acquisition enables the forwarding of the information to central databases for storage, further processing, and transmission to the mobile devices in a form that is useful to the users. Furthermore, these systems have the potential to be used both in the protection of nature, as well as in recreational use in a way that takes the constraints of nature into account. In this paper we describe the preliminary results of the MINNE project and the prototypes currently under research in the project.

BOOTSTRAP: A SOFTWARE PROCESS ASSESSMENT AND IMPROVEMENT METHODOLOGY

The BOOTSTRAP approach to software process assessment and improvement offers a methodology which can be suitably used with different types of the software process and products, and with different software producing organization structures and sizes. The approach is supported by cumulative data about the software industry as a whole as well as its individual sectors. At the same time BOOTSTRAP is based on the ISO 9000 series quality standards and appropriately general software project management standards (ESA-PSS-05), as well as is related to such defacto maturity standards as SEIs CMM. More granularity in expressing capability (in terms of scale and multidimensionality) makes BOOTSTRAP particularly suitable for process improvement. While having established position in Europe and participating in such wider standardization efforts as ISO/SPICE, it is important for BOOTSTRAP to look for comparisons of assumptions and results elsewhere. This paper presents the BOOTSTRAP methodology and and in conclusions brings forward some topics that may constitute a cultural interface orspecific boundary conditions between different software process assessment and improvement approaches.

Exploring the Transient Nature of Agile Project Management Practices

Agile software projects have considerable freedom in shaping their emerging project management practices, and there are established ways to do that, e.g., with process retrospectives. The practices may change due to many reasons, such as (i) changes to critical system or process properties, (ii) process context, (iii) process capability maturity, etc. Maturity is not the only reason and a suitable wider perspective and support is necessary to handle the transient nature of agile practices. We propose to use a value-based approach and shift the discussion from the conventional solution space to the goal (value) space. Further we recommend an impact estimation approach for identifying current practice state (agile positioning) and a corresponding approach for navigating through the value (and solution) space as well as ways to visualize the results. This work underlies the ongoing development of an agile positioning and navigation tool including a survey approach to practice and tool impact analysis and estimation.

Development in the Growth Base of the ‘Oulu Phenomenon’

Oulu has been a place for business and export industry in Northern Finland. In the 1970s began a difficult period of recession. Then, declining and unemployment-ridden Oulu seemed unexpectedly to start to boom. High technology products were being produced in the city and these products were sold more and more in international market. The main contribution of the paper is to provide a more thorough view of the multi-scientific expertise apparent in the gradual building of the growth base of the’ Oulu phenomenon’. The analysis shows the crucial role of system-theoretical and software-oriented expertise and complements earlier views.

Software product line adoption: guidelines from a case study

It is possible to proceed with software product line adoption only once without major reinvestments and loss of time and money. In the literature, reported experiences of using the adoption models are not to be found, and especially the suitability of the models has not been reported. The purpose of this research is to compare known adoption models by formulating general evaluation criteria for the selection of an adoption model. Next an adoption model is selected for empirical research based on the context of a multimedia unit of a global telecommunication company. The empirical part consists of a case study analyzing the present state of adoption and producing plans for proceeding with the adoption. The research results can be utilized when selecting an adoption model for an empirical case and adopting a software product line in a software intensive organization.