Muhammad Ali Babar

Using Scrum in Global Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review

There is a growing interest in applying agile practices in Global Software Development (GSD) projects. The literature on using Scrum, one of the most popular agile approaches, in distributed development projects has steadily been growing. However, there has not been any effort to systematically select, review, and synthesize the literature on this topic. We have conducted a systematic literature review of the primary studies that report using Scrum practices in GSD projects. Our search strategy identified 366 papers, of which 20 were identified as primary papers relevant to our research. We extracted data from these papers to identify various challenges of using Scrum in GSD. Current strategies to deal with the identified challenges have also been extracted. This paper presents the review’s findings that are expected to help researchers and practitioners to understand the challenges involved in using Scrum for GSD projects and the strategies available to deal with them.

A framework for classifying and comparing software architecture evaluation methods

Software architecture evaluation has been proposed as a means to achieve quality attributes such as maintainability and reliability in a system. The objective of the evaluation is to assess whether or not the architecture lead to the desired quality attributes. Recently, there have been a number of evaluation methods proposed. There is, however, little consensus on the technical and nontechnical issues that a method should comprehensively address and which of the existing methods is most suitable for a particular issue. We present a set of commonly known but informally described features of an evaluation method and organizes them within a framework that should offer guidance on the choice of the most appropriate method for an evaluation exercise. We use this framework to characterise eight SA evaluation methods.

A survey of architecture design rationale

Many claims have been made about the consequences of not documenting design rationale. The general perception is that designers and architects usually do not fully understand the critical role of systematic use and capture of design rationale. However, there is to date little empirical evidence available on what design rationale mean to practitioners, how valuable they consider it, and how they use and document it during the design process. This paper reports a survey of practitioners to probe their perception of the value of design rationale and how they use and document the background knowledge related to their design decisions. Based on 81 valid responses, this study has discovered that practitioners recognize the importance of documenting design rationale and frequently use them to reason about their design choices. However, they have indicated barriers to the use and documentation of design rationale. Based on the findings, we conclude that further research is needed to develop methodology and tool support for design rationale capture and usage. Furthermore, we put forward some specific research questions about design rationale that could be further investigated to benefit industry practice.

A systematic review of evaluation of variability management approaches in software product lines

ContextVariability management (VM) is one of the most important activities of software product-line engineering (SPLE), which intends to develop software-intensive systems using platforms and mass customization. VM encompasses the activities of eliciting and representing variability in software artefacts, establishing and managing dependencies among different variabilities, and supporting the exploitation of the variabilities for building and evolving a family of software systems. Software product line (SPL) community has allocated huge amount of effort to develop various approaches to dealing with variability related challenges during the last two decade. Several dozens of VM approaches have been reported. However, there has been no systematic effort to study how the reported VM approaches have been evaluated. ObjectiveThe objectives of this research are to review the status of evaluation of reported VM approaches and to synthesize the available evidence about the effects of the reported approaches. MethodWe carried out a systematic literature review of the VM approaches in SPLE reported from 1990s until December 2007. ResultsWe selected 97 papers according to our inclusion and exclusion criteria. The selected papers appeared in 56 publication venues. We found that only a small number of the reviewed approaches had been evaluated using rigorous scientific methods. A detailed investigation of the reviewed studies employing empirical research methods revealed significant quality deficiencies in various aspects of the used quality assessment criteria. The synthesis of the available evidence showed that all studies, except one, reported only positive effects. ConclusionThe findings from this systematic review show that a large majority of the reported VM approaches have not been sufficiently evaluated using scientifically rigorous methods. The available evidence is sparse and the quality of the presented evidence is quite low. The findings highlight the areas in need of improvement, i.e., rigorous evaluation of VM approaches. However, the reported evidence is quite consistent across different studies. That means the proposed approaches may be very beneficial when they are applied properly in appropriate situations. Hence, it can be concluded that further investigations need to pay more attention to the contexts under which different approaches can be more beneficial.

A comparative study of architecture knowledge management tools

Recent research suggests that architectural knowledge, such as design decisions, is important and should be recorded alongside the architecture description. Different approaches have emerged to support such architectural knowledge (AK) management activities. However, there are different notions of and emphasis on what and how architectural activities should be supported. This is reflected in the design and implementation of existing AK tools. To understand the current status of software architecture knowledge engineering and future research trends, this paper compares five architectural knowledge management tools and the support they provide in the architecture life-cycle. The comparison is based on an evaluation framework defined by a set of 10 criteria. The results of the comparison provide insights into the current focus of architectural knowledge management support, their advantages, deficiencies, and conformance to the current architectural description standard. Based on the outcome of this comparison a research agenda is proposed for future work on AK tools.

A Tool for Managing Software Architecture Knowledge

This paper describes a tool for managing architectural knowledge and rationale. The tool has been developed to support a framework for capturing and using architectural knowledge to improve the architecture process. This paper describes the main architectural components and features of the tool. The paper also provides examples of using the tool for supporting well-known architecture design and analysis methods.

Comparison of scenario-based software architecture evaluation methods

Software engineering community has proposed several methods to evaluate software architectures with respect to desired quality attributes such as maintainability, performance, and so on. There is, however, little effort on systematically comparing such methods to discover similarities and differences between existing approaches. In this paper, we compare four well known scenario-based SA evaluation methods using an evaluation framework. The framework considers each method from the point of view of method context, stakeholders, structure, and reliability. The comparison reveals that most of the studied methods are structurally similar but there are a number of differences among their activities and techniques. Therefore, some methods overlap, which guides us to identify five common activities that can form a generic process model.

A tale of migration to cloud computing for sharing experiences and observations

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm, which promises to make the utility computing model comprehensively implemented by using virtualization technologies. An increasing number of enterprises have started providing and using Cloud-enabled infrastructures and services. However, the advancement of cloud computing poses several new challenges to existing methods and approaches to develop and evolve software intensive systems. This paper reports our experiences and observations gained from migrating an Open Source Software (OSS), Hackystat, to cloud computing. We expect that our description of Hackystats architecture prior and after migration and design decisions can provide some guidance about modifying architecture of a service-based system for cloud computing. Moreover, we also hope that our experiences reported in this paper can contribute to the identification of some research questions for improving software engineering support for developing and evolving cloud-enabled systems.

A Survey of the Use and Documentation of Architecture Design Rationale

Many claims have been made about the problems caused by not documenting design rationale. The general perception is that designers and architects usually do not fully understand the critical role of systematic use and capture of design rationale. However, there is to date little empirical evidence available on what design rationale mean to practitioners, how valuable they consider them, and how they use and document design rationale during the design process. This paper reports an empirical study that surveyed practitioners to probe their perception of the value of design rationale and how they use and document background knowledge related to their design decisions. Based on eighty-one valid responses, this study has discovered that practitioners recognize the importance of documenting design rationale and frequently use them to reason about their design choices. However, they have indicated barriers to the use and documentation of design rationale. Based on the findings, we conclude that much research is needed to develop methodology and tool support for design rationale capture and usage. Furthermore, we put forward some research questions that would benefit from further investigation into design rationale in order to support practice in industry.

A systematic review of comparative evidence of aspect-oriented programming

Context: Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) promises to improve many facets of software quality by providing better modularization and separation of concerns, which may have system wide affect. There have been numerous claims in favor and against AOP compared with traditional programming languages such as Objective Oriented and Structured Programming Languages. However, there has been no attempt to systematically review and report the available evidence in the literature to support the claims made in favor or against AOP compared with non-AOP approaches. Objective: This research aimed to systematically identify, analyze, and report the evidence published in the literature to support the claims made in favor or against AOP compared with non-AOP approaches. Method: We performed a systematic literature review of empirical studies of AOP based development, published in major software engineering journals and conference proceedings. Results: Our search strategy identified 3307 papers, of which 22 were identified as reporting empirical studies comparing AOP with non-AOP approaches. Based on the analysis of the data extracted from those 22 papers, our findings show that for performance, code size, modularity, and evolution related characteristics, a majority of the studies reported positive effects, a few studies reported insignificant effects, and no study reported negative effects; however, for cognition and language mechanism, negative effects were reported. Conclusion: AOP is likely to have positive effect on performance, code size, modularity, and evolution. However its effect on cognition and language mechanism is less likely to be positive. Care should be taken using AOP outside the context in which it has been validated.