Renato Balancieri

Knowledge and Contextual Information Management in Global Software Development: Challenges and Perspectives

Global Software development approach has become a reality with growing demand for complex software. However, this approach requires a greater attention because it demands additional coordination and communication among the distributed team members. So, tools and techniques to share information and knowledge generated by each team geographically dispersed are necessary. In this scenario, this position paper presents a set of challenges and opportunities for research in global software development (GSD). These challenges and opportunities are focused on contextual information management, knowledge management, performance management, socio-cultural aspects of GSD, and strategies to store and sharing data. They were mapped into a proposed research agenda with the following items: knowledge management in GSD projects; definition of mechanisms to support the capture of contextual information; use of cloud computing paradigm to store data generated; study of techniques for dealing with the contextual information; and establishment of performance dimensions to provide support for the decision maker that manages the distributed teams. The research agenda also includes strategies defined aiming to strengthen the partnership between university and industry. We believe that the collaboration between university and industry can contribute for the consolidation of the area in Brazil.

Mixed Integer Programming helping Requirements Allocation for the NRP in SCRUM Teams

This paper proposes an approach based on mathematical modeling to provide decision making support for the Next Release Problem (NRP) arising in software development and maintenance companies that use SCRUM to manage teams and new releases of its software products. This approach aims to support the decisions from Product Owners and Teams about which requirements should be implemented for the next software release. Therefore it is proposed to use mixed integer programming in three different objective functions: (i) maximization of the customer satisfaction (considering their business value), (ii) minimization of software development time and (iii) minimization of the costs to produce the requirements. We consider constraints such as team availability, dependencies among requirements, the teams performance among others. The modeling was performed with the help of the AIMMS tool and some case studies were performed in three software development and maintenance companies using real data. The results show that it was possible to adapt the NRP for this kind of companies, achieving a better customers satisfaction and business results using our approach.

Gesture and Voice-Based Natural User Interface for Electronic Whiteboard System in a Medical Emergency Department

Electronic Whiteboards are introduced in critical hospital environments, such as emergency rooms, to manage tasks developed by the multidisciplinary health team. However, the users interaction with such equipment, generally touch sensitive or by keyboard and mouse, has raised discussions about the possibility of disease transmission by hands contact. The main objective of this research was the implementation and user evaluation of a gesture and voice-based natural interaction module to the electronic whiteboard system, named SHAVI, developed for the emergency department of the University Hospital of Maringá. The use evaluation was performed with ten professionals from different health areas who work in the hospital. The evaluation method used was the observation in a controlled environment. The evaluation results has revealed the need to improve the prototype and suggest that users consider this type of interaction useful, therefore, they are interested in learning and using them.

Managing Distributed Software Development with Performance Measures

The Distributed Software Development (DSD) has been increasingly adopted for providing advantages over traditional software development. But this approach presents some challenges such as communication difficulties, cultural differences among the involved and low proximity among developers. This paper presents a set of performance measures for management through five perspectives: financial, customer, internal processes and, learning and growth, based on Balanced Scorecard (BSC).The fifth perspective, geographical dispersion, has been proposed as an extension of the BSC System for DSD projects. The performance perspectives aim measure and to support the decision making process of stakeholders through metrics related to the attributes of quality, productivity, cost, time and geographic dispersion, fundamental in the software project management. So, the performance measures are a mechanism to evaluate the return on financial investment, the satisfaction of customers and employees, the performance of processes running on the DSD, the continuous improvement of the organization and the success of the geographical dispersion.