Tobias Hildenbrand

A method for collaborative requirements elicitation and decision-supported requirements analysis

As software systems become more and more complex with a multitude of stakeholders involved in development activities, novel ways of conducting the process of requirements elicitation and analysis are to be found. Therefore, this paper introduces a method for collaborative requirements elicitation and decision-supported requirements analysis. Accompanying this method, appropriate tools and techniques, both existing and custom-made, are referred to. The method is designed for a geographically distributed collaborative environment in order to support software manufacturers as well as IT departments which develop software solutions for multiple users or even consortiums of customers.

Approaches to Collaborative Software Development

Software development is becoming more and more complex. Traditionally and to date, the software development process rather corresponds to job-shop manufacturing. Therefore, the ever growing demands for different kinds of software as well as the ongoing globalization require more efficient development processes. Both scientific literature and practical experience hence postulate a necessary industrialization of software development and design of novel forms of specialization, task distribution, and collaboration. Existing approaches to collaborative software development can be classified and analyzed according to multiple categories. By evaluating these, current deficiencies are identified and discussed for further investigation.

Toward visualization and analysis of traceability relationships in distributed and offshore software development projects

Offshore software development projects provoke new issues to the collaborative endeavor of software development due to their global distribution and involvement of various people, processes, and tools. These problems relate to the geographical distance and the associated time-zone differences; cultural, organizational, and process issues; as well as language problems. However, existing tool support is neither adequate nor grounded in empirical observations. This paper presents two empirical studies of global software development teams and their usage of tools. The results are then used to motivate and inform the construction of more useful software development tools for offshore projects. This research focuses on issues that are tool-related but have not yet been solved by existing tools. The two software tools presented as solutions, Ariadne and TraVis, explicitly address yet unresolved issues in global software development and also integrate with prevalent other solutions.

Coordination in Large-Scale Agile Software Development: A Multiteam Systems Perspective

The widespread use of lean and agile development methods shows a fundamental shift in how organizations try to cope with complexity and volatility issues. In large-scale settings, the coordination of many people often results in a team of teams setup. We introduce the multiteam systems perspective to describe different conceptual strategy types for inter-team coordination. These types are illustrated with examples from a large enterprise software development organization.

Agile Methodologies for Distributed Collaborative Development of Enterprise Applications

Managing large distributed software projects for enterprise applications with traditional methodologies designed for collocated teams often leads to high planning and management overheads. The sequential and plan-driven traditional approaches often do not allow for an adequate reaction to changes in requirements. Today, Extreme Programming (XP) is the most popular agile development methodology. This paper analyzes how and to what extent XP can be transferred to distributed development projects for large enterprise applications. The focus is on XP in particular, since it is the most common agile methodology in practice and has the highest congruence to the original Agile Manifesto.

Evaluating collaboration platforms for offshore software development scenarios

Offshore software development has become one of the prominent software engineering trends in recent years. Many software development projects are switching to offshore sites due to global and economic reasons. This trend has resulted in the need for new tools and platforms to provide support for the challenges that are faced by collaborators in global teams in distributed communication, coordination and knowledge management. Understanding and employing appropriate platforms presents one of the important factors in successful global software development projects. The purpose of this paper is to compare several market-leading tools that aim at assisting software development within an offshore scenario. In doing so, new and important aspects of evaluating these tools are taken into account that are specific to the distributed aspects of these projects.

Offshore software development: transferring research findings into the classroom

Distributed software projects are becoming increasingly commonplace in industry. Yet, software engineering education rarely graduates students with the necessary skills and hands-on experience that are particular to off-shore software development projects. Three key areas in successful offshore software development projects are well documented in the literature as communication, knowledge management, as well as project and process management. This paper maps tasks within each of these three areas to functions that have to be provided by remote collaboration platforms and tools that distributed projects rely on. A case-study of an off-shore requirements engineering class experience between a Master course of Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico and a customer in a Swiss financial institution shows a correlation between areas of learning by the students and functionalities covered with the tools used in the classroom. The paper identifies additional tools, developed by the authors, which will provide additional functionalities in the deficient areas to increase the learning and preparation of the students for off-shore software development projects.

Intertwining Lean and Design Thinking: Software Product Development from Empathy to Shipment

A few years back, everybody in the industry seemed to be talking about how “Lean Thinking” can improve software development. Best practices emerged, books were written and Lean Thinking, associated with agile process frameworks became somewhat of a standard work culture in software development. Now that many people are actually practicing lean and agile development, they have started to wonder about something called “Design Thinking”. When we coach development teams in a large software company, we’re frequently being asked whether Design Thinking is the next big thing substituting lean software development. After having guided several teams through successful projects, our verdict is: Design Thinking is not Lean’s heir; in fact the two schools can be intertwined in many ways and complement each other very well. As we will elaborate in this case study, they share some integral core values and goals, and can therefore be applied in the same project without corrupting each other. As a proof of concept, we combined and utilized the underlying set of methods in order to explore a yet relatively unknown and unusual domain for SAP business applications: Software for professional sailors and their coaches that helps them to optimize their training experience and competitive performance.

Towards End-to-End Traceability: Insights and Implications from Five Case Studies

Traceability is nowadays an important aspect of software development. Despite that fact, many software development enterprises do not maintain traceability in an appropriate way. Therefore, we conducted five case studies with enterprises differing in size, industry sector, type of developed software and number of locations to determine how traceability is realized in practice and what has to be considered when creating an adoption process for introducing and/or improving traceability.

Konzeption einer Kollaborationsplattform für die zwischenbetriebliche Softwareerstellung

KernpunkteDas Projekt TASK stärkt die zwischenbetriebliche, komponentenbasierte Softwareerstellung in Baden-Württemberg. Im Rahmen dieses Projekts wurden verschiedene wissenschaftliche Studien durchgeführt. In Zusammenarbeit mit den beteiligten Unternehmen wurden u. a. folgende Ergebnisse erarbeitet:Zwischenbetriebliche Softwareerstellung kleiner und mittlerer Unternehmen erfordert neben der grundsätzlichen Bereitschaft zur Zusammenarbeit in erster Linie gegenseitiges Vertrauen und effiziente Koordination der Zusammenarbeitsprozesse.Die technische Unterstützung dieser Prozesse erfordert die stärkere Integration existierender und innovativer Lösungen für die Anbahnung, Durchführung und Verwaltung unternehmensübergreifender Softwareprojekte.Das Konzept der Kollaborationsplattform TASK 2.0 beinhaltet die funktionale Erweiterung einer existierenden Plattform und berücksichtigt dabei speziell die von uns erhobenen Anforderungen kleiner und mittlerer Unternehmen.AbstractThe development of business application software is increasingly based on the development of different components by various suppliers. In the next step, system vendors integrate these components. Hereby, inter-organizational collaboration becomes more and more important for the software industry. In order to strengthen the value-added processes within these established software supply chains, the Ministry of Economic Affairs in Baden-Württemberg funded the project TASK that aims at fostering inter-organizational design, integration, and implementation of software components. The present article on the one hand provides an insight into the structure as well as the progress of this project and, on the other hand, presents academic research results in terms of an empirical analysis of barriers and drivers of interorganizational collaboration and of the purposeful design of a collaboration platform. The article concludes with a summary and a discussion of current and upcoming issues in establishing and sustaining inter-organizational collaboration structures within the software industry.