Juho Eskeli

Continuous deployment of software intensive products and services: A systematic mapping study

Abstract The software intensive industry is moving towards the adoption of a value-driven and adaptive real-time business paradigm. The traditional view of software as an item that evolves through releases every few months is being replaced by the continuous evolution of software functionality. This study aims to classify and analyse the literature related to continuous deployment in the software domain in order to scope the phenomenon, provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, investigate the scientific evidence in the reported results and identify areas suitable for further research. We conducted a systematic mapping study and classified the continuous deployment literature. The benefits and challenges related to continuous deployment were also analysed. RESULTS: The systematic mapping study includes 50 primary studies published between 2001 and 2014. An in-depth analysis of the primary studies revealed ten recurrent themes that characterize continuous deployment and provide researchers with directions for future work. In addition, a set of benefits and challenges of which practitioners may take advantage were identified. CONCLUSION: Overall, although the topic area is very promising, it is still in its infancy, thus offering a plethora of new opportunities for both researchers and software intensive companies.

Extending Global Tool Integration Environment towards Lifecycle Management

Development and verification of complex systems requires close collaboration between different disciplines and specialists operating in a global development environment with various tools and product data storage. Fluent integration of the tools and databases facilitate a productive development environment by enabling the user to easily launch tools and transfer information between the disconnected databases and tools. The concept of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) was established to indicate the coordination of activities and the management of artefacts during the software products lifecycle. This paper presents the analysis of an open source global tool integration environment called ToolChain, and proposes improvement ideas for it towards application lifecycle management. The demonstration of ToolChain and the collection of improvement proposals were carried out in the telecommunication industry. The analysis was made using the ALM framework and Global Software Development (GSD) patterns developed in previous studies in the automation industry.

Integrating Early V&V Support to a GSE Tool Integration Platform

The ever-growing market pressure and complex products demand high quality work and effectiveness from software practitioners. This relates also for the methods and tools they use for the development of software-intensive systems. Validation and verification (V&V) are the cornerstones of the overall quality of a system. By performing efficient V&V activities to detect defects during the early phases of development, the developers are able to save time and effort required for fixing them. Tool support is available for all types of V&V activities, especially testing, model checking, syntactic verification, and inspection. In distributed development the role of tools is even more relevant than in single-site development, and tool integration is often imperative for ensuring the effectiveness of work. In this paper, we discuss how a tool integration framework was extended to support early V&V activities via continuous integrations. We find that integrating early V& V supporting tools is feasible and useful, and makes a tool integration framework even more beneficial.

Supporting Hardware-Related Software Development with Integration of Development Tools

Development of embedded systems is challenging and for addressing these issues a multitude of tools have been created. This multitude of tools needs to be used seamlessly during development, but usually the tools are disconnected making their use laborious as the consistency of data in the tools have to be managed manually. Tool integration helps in improving the quality and effectiveness of the software development by integrating the various tools used. In this paper we presented how some of the hardware-related software development challenges can be solved by means of improved tool support and their interoperability. This is done via extensions to an existing tool integration framework, which extensibility is then also evaluated.

Experiences of Tool Integration: Development and Validation

Generally in software development, there is a need to link the development work products with each other i.e., requirements with the corresponding design artefacts, to the resulting software and associated test cases. This enables, for instance, the efficient change impact analysis and reporting facilities during the different phases of the software development life cycle. Establishing and maintaining these links manually is a laborious and error prone task, so tool support is needed. This paper describes a configurable tool integration solution (the Merlin ToolChain) that integrates project management, requirements management, configuration management and testing tools. The paper introduces the architecture of the ToolChain as well as describes the development and validation activities carried out. Experiences from real life industrial case showed that the ToolChain works and is useful in collaborative software development.