Sami Jantunen

The challenge of release planning

Size and complexity of todays software products are continuously growing. This has made it increasingly difficult to decide which features shall be implemented in a products next version. Consequently, release planning, the process of planning for the next release of an evolving product has been recognized as a wicked problem. Existing studies on wicked problems suggest that it would be too simple to deal with them with intelligence gathering, linear thinking and rational decision making. Yet, it appears that this is precisely how many companies are currently trying to plan their forthcoming product releases. Although the characteristics of release planning challenges are visible and documented in the literature, is this challenge really seen? This paper reviews existing release planning practices introduced in the literature in order to understand the underlying assumptions they have been built on. The identified assumptions are then compared with reported release planning characteristics. As a result, the paper identifies the gap between the problem characteristics and the current solutions, and outlines conditions for more adequate release planning approaches to deal with release planning as complex wicked problems.

Exploring software engineering practices in small and medium-sized organizations

Small organizations have been claimed to manage their requirements in ways that bear no relation to what the textbooks say, and what is taught in undergraduate courses. This paper explores software engineering (SE) practices in five small and medium-sized organizations in order to gain a deeper understanding on how cooperative and human aspects of the SE-related practices differ in small organizations compared to the larger ones. The paper illustrates, in detail, the central role of human collaboration in small organizations and the challenges an organization meets when it begins to grow and lose opportunities for face-to-face collaboration. The findings of this study suggest that studies on using social media are a valuable addition to software engineering research agenda.

Challenges of Knowledge and Collaboration in Roadmapping

Todays software organizations need to cope with ever intensifying technical and commercial turbulence. In such environment, the level of market orientation could be the deciding factor determining the future success of a company. The activities bridging market orientation to software product development terminology have commonly been linked to terms such as roadmapping and release planning. The purpose of this paper is to explore the roadmapping practices currently followed in software product development organizations. Due to the lack of established theories of roadmapping practices, exploratory and inductive research methods were used. The study resulted with a conceptualized view of roadmapping activities. We identified three types of participants that need to be present in a roadmapping context. Each of the identified participant types relates to particular set of challenges regarding knowledge and collaboration in a roadmapping context. When comparing our results to the existing theories, we found out that the knowledge-based theory of the firm could contribute to further theory development in market-oriented software development and related areas.

How Internationalization of a Product Changes Requirements Engineering Activities: An Exploratory Study

This paper explores the Requirement Engineering (RE) activities in two software product development organizations. Both companies have in recent years extended their product offering outside of their home market. In this paper, we wish to answer what RErelated challenges companies have faced in their journey of introducing their software products in new market areas and what have the companies done in their response to their new RE-related challenges. We believe that the results of this paper are important for practitioners and researchers alike. While increasing the academic understanding on the role of internationalization in market-driven requirements engineering, the paper also helps practitioners to anticipate some of the challenges that they may meet in their internationalization efforts. We have discovered that there may be inconsistencies between the nature of the challenges companies are facing and the strategies companies have taken to respond to the challenges. In addition, many of our findings are human interaction related indicating that the social aspects may still be an undervalued topic in RE research.

Using a grounded theory approach for exploring software product management challenges

The traditional requirements engineering (RE) research paradigm, along with most engineering research and practice, is commonly seen to belong to the philosophical tradition of positivism, which construes knowledge as accruing through the systematic observation of stable and knowable phenomena. Consequently, RE methods tend to ignore social issues. However, due to the dominant role of the human being in RE, there has been an increasing need to rely on research methods of the social sciences, arts, and humanities for RE related findings. This paper illustrates one example of how social aspects in RE have been explored with a research method adopted from social sciences research tradition. Drawing heavily on the research reported in the doctoral thesis of the principal author, we describe in this paper: (1) how a study using a grounded theory approach was designed and conducted for exploring market-driven requirements engineering (MDRE) challenges in seven companies, (2) how the analysis eventually proceeded toward a proposed theory, and (3) our experiences of using a grounded theory approach within the discipline of RE.

Making Sense of Product Requirements

This paper takes a historical perspective to more than 40 years of software development within a company that is delivering its products to a diverse set of customers throughout the world. By examining the company’s past, we wish to find origins and potential remedies for the challenges that many companies presently face in determining just which, of many, features shall be implemented to forthcoming versions of their software products. We have concluded that the product-related design problems that once were manageable with rational thinking have gradually evolved into problems that have multiple and conflicting interpretations, different value orientations, unclear goals, contradictions and paradoxes. These problems occur due to the demands imposed by larger and much more diverse sets of critical stakeholders drawn from the new global business environment with its multi-cultural needs and greater numbers of highly domain-skilled, computer naïve users. For such problems sense making rather than decision making has begun to be the central organizational issue.

Utilizing Firm-Hosted Online Communities: Research challenges and needs

The increased popularity of firm-hosted online communities (FOC) has initiated a radical transformation of customer-producer relationships in many industries with important implications for product business and product development. The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we will introduce a recently established research project focusing on the challenges and opportunities with FOCs. Secondly, we will present early results of company interviews illustrating research challenges and needs that have been found relevant for companies in their own FOC development. Based on the gathered data, we categorized these needs and challenges under five themes: 1) Internal alignment, 2) Culture, 3) Individual Users, 4) Technology and 5) Changing environment.

Utilizing Firm-Hosted Online Communities in Software Product Business: A Dimensional View

This paper focuses on Firm-Hosted Online Communities (FOC) - communities that are hosted by organizations for commercial purposes. The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we will examine examples of existing FOCs in order to develop a broader view of how FOCs have been utilized in product business. This work results with a dimensional view illustrating some discovered opportunities with FOCs in firms’ commercial product-related activities. Secondly, we will make an attempt to increase our opportunities to exchange FOC-related ideas with the research community and with companies by introducing a recently established research project focusing on the challenges and opportunities with FOCs.

Establishing the Current Practice in Industry as the Baseline for Educational Infrastructure: Case South-East Finland

The gap between industry needs and the skills of software engineering graduates is a well known problem. A common approach is to leave this problem for industry to resolve since they know best what skills they require of new employees. However, since many companies tend to have a shortage of resources, this may slow down or even hinder hiring of new graduates. Acclimatizing students to the working environment in industry presents a potential solution to ease the situation but it has received limited interest up to date. In the present paper a current practice survey on a regionally bound area is reported to establish a clear picture of the software development infrastructure used in the industry. This approach can be used to alleviate the acclimatization problem of students in two ways. First, the hard data gathered on the tools and technologies can be used to increase the understanding of software engineering practice among software engineering students and the community in general. Second, it demonstrates the role of regional aspects in current practice in industry. Aligning the infrastructure used in software engineering education with the current practice in industry could prove helpful in acclimatizing students to their future working environments and reduce the time and effort required for the development of a student to an industrial software engineer

Supporting Organizational Sensemaking with Collaboration Engineering

Organizations are increasingly facing complex problems that no single individual can solve alone. When dealing with complex and ambiguous issues, people must interact, discuss, and share their different perspectives and interpretations. Existing literature recognizes sensemaking as one way for group members to understand and talk about complexity. Unfortunately, little has yet been reported on exactly how the properties of sensemaking can be materialized in practice. Collaboration Engineering (CE), on the other hand, has a practical focus in supporting collective work with an attempt to design productive, task-specific work practices that practitioners can collaboratively execute for themselves. This paper seeks to gain a deeper understanding of 1) how sensemaking and CE are related and 2) how they can jointly support the collective construction of meaning by individuals who hold different pieces of information. Drawing on sensemaking and CE literature, the paper illustrates how a collaborative sensemaking process is designed and deployed in one case company.