Mark Woodman

Software engineering: community and culture

Ideas and techniques from the social sciences can improve the theory and practice of the software engineering discipline. To illustrate the contributions this cross-pollination has made, the authors focus on the nature of paradigms and software quality management systems. Their studies underscore the importance of community in how new technical ideas become accepted, how despite software engineers too often prefer polemic to evidence, and the primacy given to the local guru that transcends formal organizational structures.

COCOMO-Based Effort Estimation for Iterative and Incremental Software Development

Incremental software development and delivery have been used in software projects in many ways for many years. Justifications for incremental approaches include risk amelioration, the management of evolving requirements, and end-user involvement. Incremental development, including iterative, incremental delivery, has become a norm in many sectors. However, there has been little work on modelling the effort in such development and hence a dearth of comparative analyses of cost models for incremental development/delivery. We attempt to rectify this by proposing a COCOMO-style effort model for incremental development/delivery and explore the relationship between effort and the number of increments, thereby providing new insights into the economic impact of incremental approaches to software projects.

The role of 'culture' in successful software process improvement

Software development takes place within a rich cultural setting. To be successful, a programme aimed at improving software development processes needs to recognise this context and to make explicit the software practices as they are actually understood and applied by software developers. But what aspects of the context are relevant and how can they be identified? To begin addressing this question we have been studying the adoption and evolution of software quality management systems using techniques from the social sciences to collect data from five organisations of different sizes. This paper reports on our experiences of a week-long study of one organisation. In this study, we aimed to uncover implicit assumptions, values and beliefs within the community which were affecting (positively or negatively) the adoption and evolution of their software quality management system. We discuss our approach, summarise our findings, and reflect on the techniques used.

Success Dimensions in Selecting Cloud Software Services

Cloud computing is promoted by providers as a service offering to satisfy the modern information system needs of the business stakeholder. These services are presented in a way that can be elastic, scalable, cost-effective and delivered via the internet on a pay-for-usage pricing model. These services are now within the grasp of the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME). Businesses in general, and SMEs in particular, may not have the technical capability to explicitly state their service needs or expectations or to assess risks. This paper highlights some of the unseen technical hurdles faced by SMEs in selecting and identifying software-as-a-service offerings. The research was undertaken through an analysis of providers considered by businesses, the expertise the businesses sought, and an ethnographic observation of a service selection. The results are used to propose indicative success dimensions for cloud service selection and a need for more detailed research to support SME in service selection

Tensions around the adoption and evolution of software quality management systems: a discourse analytic approach

This paper reports some results from a project to uncover the non-technical factors that affect the adoption and evolution of software quality management systems (SQMS). The data which the paper discusses comes from interviews with people involved in the quality effort in four different companies. Our approach to data collection was to use semi-structured interviews and to encourage interviewees to talk about their experiences of quality management and software development in their own organizations. We analysed this data using discourse analysis, informed by ethnographic observation, and identified a number of themes, one of which was the tensions that exist around the adoption and evolution of SQMS. In this paper, we present and discuss our approach to discourse analysis and some results that illustrate the tensions we found. We hope, thereby, to demonstrate how software engineers may use a technique from the social sciences to better understand their own practices.

Using Metaphor to Analyse Qualitative Data: Vulcans and Humans in Software Development

This paper reports on an experience of using metaphor in qualitative research of software engineering in practice. Our project aimed to uncover non-technical factors affecting the adoption and evolution of Software Quality Management Systems (referred to here as ‘the quality process’). Previously we have reported the tensions we uncovered around the quality process in four companies, based on semi-structured interviews. This paper extends this work by applying metaphor to the results. We show how we were able to produce more general statements regarding the tensions and their amelioration, and then introduce results from a fifth company, which we compare against our general statements. We find that these statements are generally supported by results from this fifth company. Finally we present some reflections on our experience of using metaphor in this way.

GROUNDING AND MAKING SENSE OF AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

The paper explores areas of strategic frameworks for sense-making, knowledge management and Grounded Theory methodologies to offer a rationalization of some aspects of agile software development. In a variety of projects where knowledge management form part of the solution we have begun to see activities and principles that closely correspond to many aspects of the wide family of agile development methods. We offer reflection on why as a community we are attracted to agile methods and consider why they work.

Prioritization of Stakeholder Value Using Metrics

Given the reality of resource constraints, software development always involves prioritization to establish what to implement. Iterative and incremental development methods increase the need to support dynamic prioritization to identify high stakeholder value. In this paper we argue that the current prioritization methods fail to appropriately structure the data for stakeholder value. This problem is often compounded by a failure to handle multiple stakeholder viewpoints. We propose an extension to an existing prioritization method, impact estimation, to move towards better capture of explicit stakeholder value and to cater for multiple stakeholders. A key feature is the use of absolute scale data for stakeholder value. We use a small industry case study to evaluate this new approach. Our findings argue that it provides a better basis for supporting priority decision-making over the implementation choices for requirements and designs.

Web Service Standards: Do we need them?

There is a three-fold argument that there are too many overlapping Web service standards, they are not constraining enough and they exhibit too much proprietary interest. These criticisms suggest a dilemma of whether Web service standards are worth investing time in — which raises the question of whether we should use standards or not. This dichotomy raises issues critical to both software engineering and business. Deciding which standards to adhere to is difficult from the viewpoints of the software developer and the perspective of the business arm. We discuss standards’ benefits and downfalls, looking at the implications for stakeholders. For successful uptake standards need precision and flexibility in solutions to common development challenges. Whether there are enough rigorous standards, or whether there are not sufficient robust standards is at the heart of the matter. We will expose different facets of an argument pointing to a standards marshalling framework for easier adherence.

Balancing the multimedia mix in a large scale distance education course

We describe our experience in deploying the full range of multimedia for a large scale distance education course enrolling over 5000 mature students per year and raise issues about how to effectively balance the types of media. The course introduces computing to both computing majors and non-majors. It represents a radical change in the curriculum, taking a fully object-oriented approach to software development, for example, teaching programming using Smalltalk. The course is large (one sixth of a degree) and the design of materials for the innovative syllabus required experimentation and frequent rebalancing the use of various media. This paper relates the experiences and reflects on the issues encountered.