Päivi Parviainen

Measurement automation: methodological background and practical solutions a multiple case study

Continuous collection and analysis of measurement data is crucial in tracking and managing a software development process efficiently. However, practice has shown that setting up and carrying out a measurement programme requires a lot of effort. Despite their tight schedules, project managers and project personnel perform measurement activities in addition to their main daily duties. Furthermore, measurement tasks may be perceived as secondary work for a software development project, which, as such, may harm the success of the measurement programme. Thus, all measurement activities that are reasonable to automate should be automated. In this paper, we propose a measurement automation process that is based on the principles of goal-driven measurement. We give two industrial examples to demonstrate what measurement automation means in practice. We also discuss tool requirements and, as an example, we present a software measurement management tool enhanced by measurement automation.

Collaborative embedded systems development: survey of state of the practice

This paper describes the results of a survey about the problems of and solutions for collaborative SW development. The survey was done through several interviews of companies doing collaborative development and also through a literature search to find already published experiences and solutions. As a result, we found that the literature focuses on solutions for more general issues like communication and team building, and industrial problems are related to specific engineering tasks. Mapping and practical examples of general solutions to specific tasks are needed to support collaborative software development

Improving Knowledge Management in Software Reuse Process

We demonstrate the need for reuse in todays software development organisations in the light of widely accepted literature. Based on this need, we introduce the reuse processes and identify the knowledge dependent processes involved. We provide an introduction to the KM process model developed at VTT and describe the process of continuous improvement integrated to it. We establish a link between reuse and KM and then develop a theory of KM process improvement. Finally we give an outlook on a coming customer project in which we are going to evaluate this theory in an industrial case.

A SURVEY OF EXISTING REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGIES AND THEIR COVERAGE

Requirements engineering is a process in which a most diverse set of product demands from a most diverse set of stakeholders has to be considered. Thus, requirements engineering is generally thought of as the most critical and complex process within the development of embedded systems. Over the years, a lot of requirements engineering research has been carried out and reported, but still it seems clear that the industry is struggling with requirements engineering. Why is that, and what should be done to support the industry in tackling its problems? Develop a new method, tailor the existing ones, or better inform the industry of what is available that could help them in their problems? To find some answers, we carried out an inventory of the available requirements engineering technologies, while also looking into their support for requirements engineering. This paper describes the survey and reports our findings indicating that what is most urgently needed is information and evidence of the applicability of the available technologies in different situations, though further development of the technologies is also required.

Knowledge-related challenges and solutions in GSD

A number knowledge-related challenges may complicate the work in global software development GSD projects. In practice, even a small amount of missing knowledge may cause an activity to fail to create and transfer information which is critical to later functions, causing these later functions to fail. Thus, knowledge engineering holds a central role in order to succeed with globally distributed product development. Furthermore, examining the challenges faced in GSD from a cognitive perspective will help to find solutions that take into account the knowledge needs of different stakeholders in GSD and thus help to establish conditions for successful GSD projects. In this paper, we will discuss these challenges and solutions based on an extensive literature study and practical experience gained in several international projects over the last decade. Altogether, over 50 case studies were analysed. We analysed the challenges identified in the cases from a cognitive perspective for bridging and avoiding the knowledge gaps and, based on this analysis, we will present example solutions to address the challenges during the GSD projects. We will conclude that through understanding both the nature of GSD and the KE challenges in depth, it will be possible for organizations to make their distributed operations successful.

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.

Variability Management Strategies to Support Efficient Delivery and Maintenance of Embedded Systems

Software intensive organisations that are able to efficiently handle product variability can reach competitive advantage by shorter development lead times, improved customer satisfaction, and reduced costs of product management. Improved reusability and flexibility, combined with variability strategies can provide companies mechanisms to offer new product variants fast to customers. Especially for long living embedded systems, it is essential to effectively maintain the delivered systems and keep maintenance costs at reasonable level. This paper describes a case study in which three industrial product development projects were studied in order to understand which variability strategies were implemented in their specific variability context. Results indicate that variability challenges and selected variability strategies depend both on the product platform maturity, as well as, the project development model. However, variability strategy needs continuous evaluation during the product lifecycle.

Challenges for Product Roadmapping in Inter-company Collaboration

Product roadmapping is a critical activity in product development, as it provides a link between business aspects and requirements engineering and thus helps to manage a high-level view of the company’s products. Nowadays, inter-company collaboration, such as outsourcing, is a common way of developing software products, as through collaboration, organisations gain advantages, such as flexibility with in-house resources, savings in product development costs and gain a physical presence in important markets. The role of product roadmapping becomes even more critical in collaborative settings, since different companies need to align strategies and work together to create products. In order to support companies in improving their own product roadmapping processes, this paper first gives an overview of product roadmapping and then discusses in detail an empirical study of the current practices in industry. The presented results particularly focus on the most challenging and important activities of product roadmapping in collaboration.