Terhi Kilamo

Improving the delivery cycle

Context: Software companies seek to gain benefit from agile development approaches in order to meet evolving market needs without losing their innovative edge. Agile practices emphasize frequent releases with the help of an automated toolchain from code to delivery.Objective: We investigate, which tools are used in software delivery, what are the reasons omitting certain parts of the toolchain and what implications toolchains have on how rapidly software gets delivered to customers.Method: We present a multiple-case study of the toolchains currently in use in Finnish software-intensive organizations interested in improving their delivery frequency. We conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews in 18 case organizations from various software domains. The interviewees were key representatives of their organization, considering delivery activities.Results: Commodity tools, such as version control and continuous integration, were used in almost every organization. Modestly used tools, such as UI testing and performance testing, were more distinctly missing from some organizations. Uncommon tools, such as artifact repository and acceptance testing, were used only in a minority of the organizations. Tool usage is affected by the state of current workflows, manual work and relevancy of tools. Organizations whose toolchains were more automated and contained fewer manual steps were able to deploy software more rapidly.Conclusions: There is variety in the need for tool support in different development steps as there are domain-specific differences in the goals of the case organizations. Still, a well-founded toolchain supports speedy delivery of new software.

Knowledge transfer in collaborative teams: experiences from a two-week code camp

Software engineering has both technological and social dimensions. As development teams spanning across the globe are increasingly the norm and while the web enables massive online collaboration, there is a growing need for effective collaboration tools. In this paper, we describe experiences on collaborative programming as a tool for learning software development. To investigate the nature of collaboration in software engineering education, we arranged a two-week-long course experiment where students used a collaborative online integrated development environment to create different kinds of web services. We present lessons learned from the experiment and discuss how collaboration can act as a tool for knowledge transfer among learners.

Open Source Prediction Methods: A Systematic Literature Review

For the adoption of Open Source Software (OSS) components, knowledge of the project development and associated risks with their use is needed. That, in turn, calls for reliable prediction models to support preventive maintenance and building quality software. In this paper, we perform a systematic literature review on the state-of-the-art on predicting OSS projects considering both code and community dimension. We also distill future direction for research in this field.

Open Source, Open Innovation and Intellectual Property Rights – A Lightning Talk

Open innovation projects are fast paced aiming at producing a quick proof of concept of an innovative software product. This need for speedy results makes the use of open source components as a basis for the work appealing. Open source brings with it an inherent risk of license conflicts that may become an issue when aiming to develope an innovative demo into an actual product. In this study, the first results of investigating the knowledge the participants of innovation projects have on intellectual property are presented. The effect this may have on the project results is also discussed.

The community game: learning open source development through participatory exercise

As open source software has gained more foothold in the software industry, teaching open source development to the future software professionals has become a practical necessity. A pioneering course was arranged during the academic year 2009--2010 at Tampere University of Technology to teach software engineering students how open source is developed and what makes open source ecosystems special. To allow students to learn the practical side of open source software development, an exercise called the community game was organised. The game is a part of the courses and focuses on community-centric software development. It allows the students to initiate and nurture a small developer community and practise open sourcce development in a safe setting. The game ensures that the students have a good enough understanding on the open source development practises in order to make contributions to actual open source projects.

KommGame: A Reputation Environment for Teaching Open Source Software

The importance of teaching open source software in universities is increasing with the advent of open source as a development and business model. A novel, student centric approach of teaching open source was tried out at Tampere University of Technology where a new environment called KommGame was introduced to assist in teaching open source development. This environment includes a reputation system to motivate learners to participate. In this paper, we present our approach of teaching open source and how the KommGame environment was employed to teach open source software.

Applying Open Source Practices and Principles in Open Innovation: The Case of the Demola Platform

In numerous fields, businesses have to rely on rapid development and release cycles. Variant new ideas and concepts can emerge through open innovation as the participants are not limited to the company scope. This makes open innovation an increasingly appealing option for the industry. One such open innovation platform, Demola, allows university students to work on real life industrial cases of their own interest. We have identified similarities with its way of operation to open source software development and find that it offers a viable motivational, organizational and collaborative solution to open innovation.

Software visualization today: systematic literature review

Software visualization means visualizing various aspects and artifacts related to software. By this definition a wide range of different software engineering aspects from program comprehension to understanding software process and usage are covered. This paper presents the results of systematic literature review spanning six years of software visualization literature. The main result shows that the most studied topics in the past six years are related to software structure, behavior and evolution. Software process and usage are addressed only in few studies. In the future studying the adoption of software visualization tools in industry context would be beneficial.

The social developer: now, then, and tomorrow

The practice of software engineering needs both individual commitment as well as social interaction. It has long been widely recognized that communication problems are a major factor in the delay and failure of software projects. However, the patterns of communication that can be associated with the different development paradigms have gained less attention. In this paper, we present some views to the evolution of social dimensions in the light of software engineering methodologies and associated tools. To study this, we have surveyed a number of software developers working in industry to reflect our views into the state-of-practice in software development companies and shed light to the impact of distributed and agile development has had on developer communication. Towards the end of the paper, we provide some ideas for future research and draw some final conclusions.

Supporting Management of Hybrid OSS Communities - A Stakeholder Analysis Approach

In Hybrid Open Source Software projects, independent and commercially oriented stakeholders collaborate using freely accessible tools and development processes. Here, contributors can enter and leave the community flexibly, which poses a challenge for community managers in ensuring the sustainability of the community. This short paper reports initial results from an industrial case study of the “Qt” Open Source Software project. We present a visual stakeholder analysis approach, building on data from the three systems that provide for the Qt project’s complete software development workflow. This overview, augmented with information about the stakeholders’ organizational affiliations, proved to help the project’s community manager in finding potential for encouraging contributors and to identify issues that can potentially be detrimental for the community.