Luka Milovanov

Evaluating the XP customer model and design by contract

We describe one of the series of experiments with extreme programming, carried out as a summer project. The focus in this experiment was to try out the XP customer model and design by contract. The experiment indicates that the extreme programming emphasis on having an onsite customer available during the project improves the communication between customers and the programming team, and markedly decreases the number of false features and feature misses. It also indicates that the systematic use of design by contract leads to a low post-release defect rate for the software system built.

Software development and experimentation in an academic environment: the Gaudi experience

In this article, we describe an approach to empirical software engineering based on a combined software factory and software laboratory. The software factory develops software required by an external customer while the software laboratory monitors and improves the processes and methods used in the factory. We have used this approach during a period of four years to define and evaluate a software process that combines practices from Extreme Programming with architectural design and documentation practices in order to find a balance between agility, maintainability and reliability.

Software process improvement with agile practices in a large telecom company

Besides the promise of rapid and efficient software development, agile methods are well-appreciated for boosting communication and motivation of development teams. However, they are not practical as such in large organizations. especially because of the well-established, rigid processes in the organizations. In this paper, we present a case study where a few agile practices were injected into the software process of a large organization in order to pilot pair programming and improve the motivation and competence build-up. The selected agile practices were pair programming, the planning game and collective code ownership. We show how we adjust these practices in order to integrate them into the existing software process of the company in the context of a real software project.

A Workbench to Experiment on New Model Engineering Applications

There are many di.erent tools that support, in one way or another, the Uni.ed Modeling Language (UML), but most of these tools are targeted to software developers. The System Modeling Workbench (SMW) [8] is a collection of tools targeted to those interested in doing research on new modeling languages and constructing tools to transform and derive new artifacts from models in those languages.

Using stepwise feature introduction in practice: an experience report

Stepwise Feature Introduction is an incremental method and software architecture for building object-oriented system in thin layers of functionality, and is based on the Refinement Calculus logical framework. We have evaluated this method in a series of real software projects. The method works quite well on small to medium sized software projects, and provides a nice fit with agile software processes like Extreme Programming. The evaluations also allowed us to identify a number of places where the method could be improved, most of these related to the way inheritance is used in Stepwise Feature Introduction. Three of these issues are analyzed in more detail here: diamond inheritance, complexity of layering and unit testing of layered software.