Viktor Clerc

Global Software Development: Are Architectural Rules the Answer?

Global software development (GSD) faces additional challenges as compared to single-site software development. Some of the better known challenges include temporal, geographical, and socio-cultural differences. To overcome these challenges, organizations need to revert to measures in order to deliver software in time in a distributed setting. Some of these measures may exist in the form of architectural rules: principles and statements on the software architecture that must be complied with throughout the organization. From the GSD literature we distilled four main GSD challenges and seven sub-challenges, or issues. For each issue, we list possible solutions and observe that solutions to GSD challenges may be obtained by adhering to architectural rules. We present a study on how two organizations involved in GSD solve the GSD challenges and issues. One of the organizations mainly uses rules regulating the architecture of the product. The other organization does not emphasize these architectural rules but rather focuses on the joint team effort in establishing and committing to measures that mainly pertain to the architecture process. We conclude that rules regulating a combination of both proves valuable in handling GSD challenges.

Towards architectural knowledge management practices for global software development

In the past few years, an increasing interest in architectural knowledge is recognized in the software architecture community. Architectural knowledge is generally regarded as important to guide the development of software systems. With the trend of Global Software Development (GSD), the management of architectural knowledge becomes even more important due to the geographical, temporal, and socio-cultural distance innate to GSD. In this paper we build on the requirements engineering discipline to identify practices that can aid in overcoming GSD challenges and assess their applicability for management of architectural knowledge in a GSD setting. We provide a light-weight pattern language that we use to describe architectural knowledge management practices and provide a first validation of these practices from an ongoing case study.

Using the Cloud to Facilitate Global Software Development Challenges

With the expansion of national markets beyond geographical limits, success of any business often depends on using software for competitive advantage. Furthermore, as technological boundaries are expanding, projects distributed across different geographical locations have become a norm for the software solution providers. Nevertheless, when implementing Global Software Development (GSD), organizations continue to face challenges in adhering to the development life cycle. The advent of the internet has supported GSD by bringing new concepts and opportunities resulting in benefits such as scalability, flexibility, independence, reduced cost, resource pools, and usage tracking. It has also caused the emergence of new challenges in the way software is being delivered to stakeholders. Application software and data on the cloud is accessed through services which follow SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) principles. In this paper, we present the challenges encountered in globally dispersed software projects. Based on goals mutually shared between GSD and the cloud computing paradigm, we propose to exploit cloud computing characteristics and privileges both as a product and as a process to improve GSD.

Requirements Reasoning for Distributed Requirements Analysis Using Semantic Wiki

In large-scale collaborative software projects, thousands of requirements with complex interdependencies and different granularity spreading in different levels are elicited, documented, and evolved during the project lifecycle. Non-technical stakeholders involved in requirements engineering activities rarely apply formal techniques; therefore it is infeasible to automatically detect problems in requirements. This situation becomes even worse in a distributed context when all sites are responsible to maintain their own requirements list using various requirements models and management tools, and the detection of requirements problems across multiple sites is error-prone, and unaffordable if performed manually. This paper proposes an integrated approach of basing distributed requirements analysis on semantic wiki by requirements reasoning. First, the functions concerning reasoning support provided by semantic wiki for requirements analysis are proposed. Second, the underlying requirements rationale model for requirements reasoning is presented with sample reasoning rules. Third, our rationale model is mapped to the WinWin requirements negotiation model which further adds to its credibility.

The Usefulness of Architectural Knowledge Management Practices in GSD

Practices for architectural knowledge management (AKM) may alleviate the challenges involved with GSD. We have conducted empirical research at a large Dutch IT service provider to validate a set of practices for architectural knowledge management in GSD and to specifically investigate the relation between the number of sites and the perceived usefulness of these practices. The results show that AKM practices supporting a personalization strategy towards knowledge management are perceived to be more useful than practices that support a codification strategy. Further, the usefulness of AKM practices in general is confirmed. Finally, we observe a peak in the perceived usefulness of AKM practices in projects that evolved to a multi-site situation. This high perceived usefulness denotes a more critical need to plan for AKM practices in advance.

Using wikis to support architectural knowledge management in global software development

In the past few years, the software architecture community has shown an increasing interest in architectural knowledge. In Global Software Development (GSD), software engineering practices are performed at geographically separate locations. With this trend, the management of architectural knowledge becomes even more important due to the geographical, temporal, and socio-cultural distance involved with GSD. Practices for architectural knowledge management in global software development may alleviate challenges associated with this distance. In this paper, we identify to what extent these practices may be implemented using wikis. We relate the practices to generic wiki functionalities and conclude that wikis form a good mechanism to implement a hybrid strategy for managing architectural knowledge in global software development and that a substantial part of the AKM practices may be implemented using wikis.

Traceability in the Co-evolution of Architectural Requirements and Design

Requirements and architectural design specifications can be conflicting and inconsistent, especially during the design period when requirements and architectural design are co-evolving. One reason is that stakeholders do not have up-to-date knowledge of each other’s work to fully understand potential conflicts and inconsistencies. Specifications are often documented in a natural language, which also makes it difficult for tracing related information automatically. In this chapter, we introduce a general-purpose ontology that we have developed to address this problem. We demonstrate an implementation of semantic wiki that supports traceability of co-evolving requirements specifications and architecture design.

The GRIFFIN Collaborative Virtual Community for Architectural Knowledge Management

Modern software architecting increasingly often takes place in geographically distributed contexts involving teams of professionals and customers with different backgrounds and roles. So far, attention and effort have been mainly dedicated to individuals sharing already formalized knowledge and less to social, informal collaboration. Furthermore, in Web 2.0 contexts, little to no attention has been given to practitioners carrying out complex, collaborative, and knowledge-intensive tasks in organizational contexts.

The GRIFFIN Project: Lessons Learned

GRIFFIN is a joint research project of the VU University Amsterdam and the University of Groningen. The GRIFFIN project develops notations, tools and associated methods to extract, represent and use architectural knowledge that currently is not documented or represented in the system. The research is carried out in a consortium with various industries, both large and small, that provide case studies and give regular feedback. Paraphrasing [327], the goal of the GRIFFIN project can be summarized as “What architects know, and how they know it”. In this chapter, we give an overview of the results of the GRIFFIN project, and lessons learned with respect to software architecture knowledge management.

Do Architectural Knowledge Product Measures Make a Difference in GSD

Architectural knowledge (i.e., architectural decisions and underlying rationale) is pivotal in grasping the level of quality of software architectures and the software products that implement these architectures. When the software products are developed in a global software development context, architectural knowledge becomes of even greater importance because it is needed to overcome challenges associated with global software development. We have performed research on a series of software product assessments to identify what key elements that constitute architectural knowledge are actually used in software products. In addition, we have determined whether a difference exists in the use of the key elements in products that were developed using GSD versus products developed using local, single site development. Our results do not show a significant difference between these two groups, but do point at a lack of both view-based architecture descriptions and of the description of solution fragments in products developed using GSD.