Richard Berntsson Svensson

On the journey to continuous deployment: technical and social challenges along the way

Abstract Context Continuous Deployment (CD) is an emerging software development process with organisations such as Facebook, Microsoft, and IBM successfully implementing and using the process. The CD process aims to immediately deploy software to customers as soon as new code is developed, and can result in a number of benefits for organisations, such as: new business opportunities, reduced risk for each release, and prevent development of wasted software. There is little academic literature on the challenges organisations face when adopting the CD process, however there are many anecdotal challenges that organisations have voiced on their online blogs. Objective The aim of this research is to examine the challenges faced by organisations when adopting CD as well as the strategies to mitigate these challenges. Method An explorative case study technique that involves in-depth interviews with software practitioners in an organisation that has adopted CD was conducted to identify these challenges. Results This study found a total of 20 technical and social adoption challenges that organisations may face when adopting the CD process. The results are discussed to gain a deeper understanding of the strategies employed by organisations to mitigate the impacts of these challenges. Conclusion While a number of individual technical and social adoption challenges were uncovered by the case study in this research, most challenges were not faced in isolation. The severity of these challenges were reduced by a number of mitigation strategies employed by the case study organisation. It is concluded that organisations need to be well prepared to handle technical and social adoption challenges with their existing expertise, processes and tools before adopting the CD process. For practitioners, knowing how to address the challenges an organisation may face when adopting the CD process provides a level of awareness that they previously may not have had.

Challenges When Adopting Continuous Integration: A Case Study

The complexity of software development has increased over the last few years. Customers today demand higher quality and more stable software with shorter delivery time. Software companies strive to improve their processes in order to meet theses challenges. Agile practices have been widely praised for the focus they put on customer collaboration and shorter feedback loops. Companies that have well established agile practices have been trying to improve their processes further by adopting continuous integration - the concept where teams integrate their code several times a day. However, adopting continuous integration is not a trivial task. This paper presents a case study in which we, based on interviews at a major Swedish telecommunication services and equipment provider, assess the challenges of continuous integration. The study found 23 adoption challenges that organisations may face when adopting the continuous integration process.

A study of value in agile software development organizations

Examines how Value is interpreted in 14 agile software development organizations.Data is collected from 13 project managers and 10 product owners.Sixteen categories of Value Aspects are identified and prioritized.The most important Value Aspect is Delivery process w.r.t. time.The most used activity to achieve Value is activities related to agile practices. The Agile manifesto focuses on the delivery of valuable software. In Lean, the principles emphasise value, where every activity that does not add value is seen as waste. Despite the strong focus on value, and that the primary critical success factor for software intensive product development lies in the value domain, no empirical study has investigated specifically what value is. This paper presents an empirical study that investigates how value is interpreted and prioritised, and how value is assured and measured. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with 23 participants from 14 agile software development organisations. The contribution of this study is fourfold. First, it examines how value is perceived amongst agile software development organisations. Second, it compares the perceptions and priorities of the perceived values by domains and roles. Third, it includes an examination of what practices are used to achieve value in industry, and what hinders the achievement of value. Fourth, it characterises what measurements are used to assure, and evaluate value-creation activities.

Handling non-functional requirements in Model-Driven Development: An ongoing industrial survey

Model-Driven Development (MDD) is no longer a novel development paradigm. It has become mature from a research perspective and recent studies show its adoption in industry. Still, some issues remain a challenge. Among them, we are interested in the treatment of non-functional requirements (NFRs) in MDD processes. Very few MDD approaches have been reported to deal with NFRs (and they do it in a limited way). However, it is clear that NFRs need to be considered somehow in the final product of the MDD process. To better understand how NFRs are integrated into the existing MDD approaches, we have initiated the NFR4MDD project, a multi-national empirical study, based on interviews with companies working on MDD projects. Our project aims at surveying the state of the practice for this topic. In this paper, we summarize our research protocol and present the current status of our study. The discussion will focus on the peculiarities of our studys context and organization involving about 20 researchers from 8 European countries.

Selecting creativity techniques for creative requirements: An evaluation of four techniques using creativity workshops

Requirements engineering is recognized as a creative process where stakeholders jointly discover new creative ideas for innovative and novel products that eventually are expressed as requirements. This paper evaluates four different creativity techniques, namely Hall of Fame, Constraint Removal, Brainstorming, and Idea Box, using creativity workshops with students and industry practitioners. In total, 34 creativity workshops were conducted with 90 students from two universities, and 86 industrial practitioners from six companies. The results from this study indicate that Brainstorming can generate by far the most ideas, while Hall of Fame generates most creative ideas. Idea Box generates the least number of ideas, and the least number of creative ideas. Finally, Hall of Fame was the technique that led to the most number of requirements that was included in future releases of the products.

Reflecting on Evidence-Based Timelines

Project retrospectives can be powerful tools for project teams to collectively identify communication gaps and practices to improve for future projects. However, even if project members take the time for a retrospective, it can be hard to correctly remember and jointly discuss past events in a constructive way. Fact-based timelines that visualize a projects events offer a possible solution.

Is role playing in Requirements Engineering Education increasing learning outcome

Requirements Engineering has attracted a great deal of attention from researchers and practitioners in recent years. This increasing interest requires academia to provide students with a solid foundation in the subject matter. In Requirements Engineering Education (REE), it is important to cover three fundamental topics: traditional analysis and modeling skills, interviewing skills for requirements elicitation, and writing skills for specifying requirements. REE papers report about using role playing as a pedagogical tool; however, there is a surprising lack of empirical evidence on its utility. In this paper we investigate whether a higher grade in a role playing project have an effect on students’ score in an individual written exam in a Requirements Engineering course. Data are collected from 412 students between the years of 2007 and 2014 at Lund University and Chalmers | University of Gothenburg. The results show that students who received a higher grade in the role playing project scored statistically significant higher in the written exam compared to the students with a lower role playing project grade.

A Case Study Evaluation of the Guideline-Supported QUPER Model for Elicitation of Quality Requirements

[Context & motivation] For market-driven software product developing organizations operating on a competitive open market, it is important to plan the product’s releases so that they can reach the market as early as possible with a competitive level of quality compared to its competitors’ products. Hence, quality requirements can be seen as a key competitive advantage. The QUPER model was developed with the aim to support high-level decision-making in release planning of quality requirements. [Question/problem] As a follow up on previous studies on QUPER, this study investigates: What are practitioners’ views on the utilities of QUPER extended with guidelines including domain-specific examples? [Principal ideas/results] In the presented case study, a set of detailed guidelines of how to apply QUPER in practice, including how to handle cost dependencies between quality requirements, was evaluated at a case company in the mobile handset domain with 24 professionals using real quality requirements. [Contribution] The results point to the importance of having concrete guidelines combined with instructive examples from real practice, while it is not always obvious for a practitioner to transfer cost-dependency examples into the domains that are different from the example domain. The transferability of guidelines and examples to support methodology adoption is an interesting issue for further research.

Creativity Techniques for More Creative Requirements: Theory vs. Practice

Requirements engineering was initially regarded as a front-end activity to form a basis for the coming activities of software development, which can be achieved by gathering and producing unambiguous and consistent requirements. However, in recent years, requirements engineering has been recognized as a creative process. A systematic literature review followed by an online questionnaire with practitioners were employed to identify a comprehensive overview of existing empirical evidence using creativity techniques in the requirements engineering process. The results show a limited range of applied creativity techniques with insufficient empirical evidence to adequately evaluate if the techniques create more creative requirements. The contribution of this study is threefold: First, it compares which creativity techniques have been empirically evaluated in literature. Second, it compares the identified creativity techniques. Third, it includes an examination of which creativity techniques are used in industry.

Aligning quality requirements and test results with QUPER's roadmap view for improved high-level decision-making

Weak alignment of requirements engineering (RE) and Software Testing (ST) may lead to problems in delivering the required products in time with the right quality. Despite the importance of aligning RE and ST, the research have mainly been focused on one or the other of RE and ST. Previous work has identified several challenges in aligning RE and ST related to Quality Requirements, for example, the need for tool support for QR, defining and managing QR, and verification of QR. In this position paper, we introduce a new view of the QUPER model, namely aligning QR targets and test results in QUPERs roadmap view. The alignment view was evaluated at a case company with 13 practitioners. The results show that the alignment of QR and test results using QUPERs roadmap view was viewed as an important input to the decision-making process.