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Entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises usually have issues on developing new prototypes, new ideas or testing new techniques. In order to help them, in the last years, academic Software Factories, a new concept of collaboration between universities and companies have been developed. Software Factories provide a unique environment for students and companies. Students benefit from the possibility of working in a real work environment learning how to apply the state of the art of the existing techniques and showing their skills to entrepreneurs. Companies benefit from the risk-free environment where they can develop new ideas, in a protected environment. Universities finally benefit from this setup as a perfect environment for empirical studies in industrial-like environment. In this paper, we present the network of academic Software Factories in Europe, showing how companies had already benefit from existing Software Factories and reporting success stories. The results of this paper can increase the network of the factories and help other universities and companies to setup similar environment to boost the local economy.
Software and system development is complex and diverse, and a multitude of development approaches is used and combined with each other to address the manifold challenges companies face today. To study the current state of the practice and to build a sound understanding about the utility of different development approaches and their application to modern software system development, in 2016, we launched the HELENA initiative. This paper introduces the 2nd HELENA workshop and provides an overview of the current project state. In the workshop, six teams present initial findings from their regions, impulse talk are given, and further steps of the HELENA roadmap are discussed.
A behavior marker for measuring non-technical skills of software professionals : an empirical study
(2015)
Managers recognize that software development teams need to be developed. Although technical skills are necessary, non-technical (NT) skills are equally, if not more, necessary for project success. Currently, there are no proven tools to measure the NT skills of software developers or software development teams. Behavioral markers (observable behaviors that have positive or negative impacts on individual or team performance) are successfully used by airline and medical industries to measure NT skill performance. This research developed and validated a behavior marker tool rated video clips of software development teams. The initial results show that the behavior marker tool can be reliably used with minimal training.
Managers recognize that software development project teams need to be developed and guided. Although technical skills are necessary, non-technical (NT) skills are equally, if not more, necessary for project success. Currently, there are no proven tools to measure the NT skills of software developers or software development teams. Behavioral markers (observable behaviors that have positive or negative impacts on individual or team performance) are beginning to be successfully used by airline and medical industries to measure NT skill performance. The purpose of this research is to develop and validate the behavior marker system tool that can be used by different managers or coaches to measure the NT skills of software development individuals and teams. This paper presents an empirical study conducted at the Software Factory where users of the behavior marker tool rated video clips of software development teams. The initial results show that the behavior marker tool can be reliably used with minimal training.
Context: Many companies are facing an increasingly dynamic and uncertain market environment, making traditional product roadmapping practices no longer sufficiently applicable. As a result, many companies need to adapt their product roadmapping practices for continuing to operate successfully in today’s dynamic market environment. However, transforming product roadmapping practices is a difficult process for organizations. Existing literature offers little help on how to accomplish such a process.
Objective: The objective of this paper is to present a product roadmap transformation approach for organizations to help them identify appropriate improvement actions for their roadmapping practices using an analysis of their current practices.
Method: Based on an existing assessment procedure for evaluating product roadmapping practices, the first version of a product roadmap transformation approach was developed in workshops with company experts. The approach was then given to eleven practitioners and their perceptions of the approach were gathered through interviews.
Results: The result of the study is a transformation approach consisting of a process describing what steps are necessary to adapt the currently applied product roadmapping practice to a dynamic and uncertain market environment. It also includes recommendations on how to select areas for improvement and two empirically based mapping tables. The interviews with the practitioners revealed that the product roadmap transformation approach was perceived as comprehensible, useful, and applicable. Nevertheless, we identified potential for improvements, such as a clearer presentation of some processes and the need for more improvement options in the mapping tables. In addition, minor usability issues were identified.
Providing a digital infrastructure, platform technologies foster interfirm collaboration between loosely coupled companies, enabling the formation of ecosystems and building the organizational structure for value co-creation. Despite the known potential, the development of platform ecosystems creates new sources of complexity and uncertainty due to the involvement of various independent actors. For a platform ecosystem to succeed, it is essential that the platform ecosystem participants are aligned, coordinated, and given a common direction. Traditionally, product roadmaps have served these purposes during product development. A systematic mapping study was conducted to better understand how product roadmapping could be used in the dynamic environment of platform ecosystems. One result of the study is that there are hardly any concrete approaches for product roadmapping in platform ecosystems so far. However, many challenges on the topic are described in the literature from different perspectives. Based on the results of the systematic mapping study, a research agenda for product roadmapping in platform ecosystems is derived and presented.
Large critical systems, such as those created in the space domain, are usually developed by a large number of organizations and, furthermore, they have to comply with standards. Yet, the different stakeholders often do not have a common understanding of the needed quality of requirements specifications. Achieving such a common understanding is a laborious process that is currently not sufficiently supported. Moreover, such a common understanding must be aligned with the standards. In this paper, we present an approach that can be used to align the different stakeholder perceptions regarding the quality of requirements specifications. Existing quality models for requirements specifications are analyzed for equivalences, and transferred into a common representation, the so-called Aligned Quality Map (AQM). Furthermore, a process is defined that supports the alignment of different stakeholder perspectives with regard to the quality of requirements specifications using AQM, which is validated in a case study in the context of European space projects. AQM has been created and populated with an initial set of quality models. It is designed in such way that it can be extended to include further quality models. The case study has shown that an alignment of different stakeholder perspectives and the quality model of the European Cooperation for Space Standardization using AQM is feasible. The approach allows for aligning different stakeholder perspectives for a common understanding of the quality of requirements specifications in the context of standards. Furthermore, AQM supports the assessment of requirements specifications.
An assessment model to foster the adoption of agile software product lines in the automotive domain
(2018)
A software product line is commonly used for the software development in large automotive organizations. A strategic reuse of software is needed to handle the increasing complexity of the development and to maintain the quality of numerous software variants. However, the development process needs to be continuously adapted at a fast pace to satisfy the changing market demands. Introducing agile software development methods promise the flexibility to react on customers’ change requests and market demands to deliver high quality software. Despite this need, it is still challenging to combine agile software development and product lines. The maturity of an agile adoption is often hard to determine. Assessing the current situation regarding the combination is a first step towards a successful inclusion of agile methods into automotive software product lines. Based on an interview study with 16 participants and a literature review, we build the so-called ASPLA Model allowing self-assessments within the team to determine the current state of agile software development in combination with software product lines. The model comprises seven areas of improvement and recommends a possibility to improve the current status.
Back to the future: origins and directions of the “Agile Manifesto” – views of the originators
(2018)
In 2001, seventeen professionals set up the manifesto for agile software development. They wanted to define values and basic principles for better software development. On top of brought into focus, the manifesto has been widely adopted by developers, in software-developing organizations and outside the world of IT. Agile principles and their implementation in practice have paved the way for radical new and innovative ways of software and product development. In parallel, the understanding of the manifesto’s underlying principles evolved over time. This, in turn, may affect current and future applications of agile principles. This article presents results from a survey and an interview study in collaboration with the original contributors of the manifesto for agile software development. Furthermore, it comprises the results from a workshop with one of the original authors. This publication focuses on the origins of the manifesto, the contributors’ views from today’s perspective, and their outlook on future directions. We evaluated 11 responses from the survey and 14 interviews to understand the viewpoint of the contributors. They emphasize that agile methods need to be carefully selected and agile should not be seen as a silver bullet. They underline the importance of considering the variety of different practices and methods that had an influence on the manifesto. Furthermore, they mention that people should question their current understanding of "agile" and recommend reconsidering the core ideas of the manifesto.
Combining agile development and software product lines in automotive: challenges and recommendations
(2018)
Software product lines (SPLs) are used throughout the automotive industry. SPLs help to manage the large number of variants and to improve quality by reuse. In order to develop high quality software faster, agile software development (ASD) practices are introduced. From both the research and the management point of view it is still not clear how these two approaches can be combined. We derive recommendations to combine ASD and SPLs based on challenges identified for an automotive specific model. This study combines the outcome of a literature review and a qualitative interview study with 16 practitioners from the automotive domain. We evaluate the results and analyze the relationship between ASD and SPLs in the automotive domain. Furthermore, we derive recommendations to combine ASD and SPLs based on challenges identified in the automotive domain. This study identifies 86 individual challenges. Important challenges address supplier collaboration and faster software release cycles without loss of quality. The identified challenges and the derived recommendations show that the combination of ASD and SPL in the automotive industry is promising but not trivial. There is a need for an automotive-specific approach that combines ASD and SPL.
The business landscape is changing radically because of software. Companies in all industry sectors are continously finding new flexibilities in this programmable world. They are able to deliver new functionalities even after the product is already in the customer's hands. But success is far from guaranteed if they cannot validate their assumptions about what their customers actually need. A competitor with better knowledge of customer needs can disrupt the market in an instant.
This book introduces continuous experimentation, an approach to continuously and systematically test assumptions about the company's product or service strategy and verify customers' needs through experiments. By observing how customers actually use the product or early versions of it, companies can make better development decisions and avoid potentially expensive and wasteful activities. The book explains the cycle of continuous experimentation, demonstrates its use through industry cases, provides advice on how to conduct experiments with recipes, tools, and models, and lists some common pitfalls to avoid. Use it to get started with continuous experimentation and make better product and service development decisions that are in-line with your customers' needs.
Rapid value delivery requires a company to utilize empirical evaluation of new features and products in order to avoid unnecessary product risks. This helps to make data-driven decisions and to ensure that the development is focused on features that provide real value for customers. Short feedback loops are a prerequisite as they allow for fast learning and reduced reaction times. Continuous experimentation is a development practice where the entire R&D process is guided by constantly conducting experiments and collecting feedback. Although principles of continuous experimentation have been successfully applied in domains such as game software or SAAS, it is not obvious how to transfer continuous experimentation to the business to-business domain. In this article, a case study from a medium-sized software company in the B2B domain is presented. The study objective is to analyze the challenges, benefits and organizational aspects of continuous experimentation in the B2B domain. The results suggest that technical challenges are only one part of the challenges a company encounters in this transition. The company also has to address challenges related to the customer and organizational culture. Unique properties in each customers business play a major role and need to be considered when designing experiments. Additionally, the speed by which experiments can be conducted is relative to the speed by which production deployments can be made. Finally, the article shows how the study results can be used to modify the development in the case company in a way that more feedback and data is used instead of opinions.
The troubles began when Tom, the business analyst, asked the customer what he wants. The customer came up with good ideas for software features. Tom created a brilliant roadmap and defined the requirements for a new software product. Mary, the development team leader, was already eager to start developing and happy when she got the requirements. She and her team went ahead and created the software right away. Afterwards, Paul tested the software against the requirements. As soon as the software fulfilled the requirements, Linda, the product manager, deployed it to the customer. The customer did not like the software and ignored it. Ringo, the head of software development, was fired. How come? Nowadays, we have tremendous capabilities for creating nearly all kinds of software to fulfill the needs of customers. We can apply agile practices for reacting flexibly to changing requirements, we can use distributed development, open source, or other means for creating software at low cost, we can use cloud technologies for deploying software rapidly, and we can get enormous amounts of data showing us how customers actually use software products. However, the sad reality is that around 90% of products fail, and more than 60% of the features of a typical software product are rarely or never used. But there is a silver lining – an insight regarding successful features: Around 60% of the successes stem from a significant change of an initial idea. This gives us a hint on how to build the right software for users and customers.
Context: Nowadays the market environment is characterized by high uncertainties due to high market dynamics, confronting companies with new challenges in creating and updating product roadmaps. Most companies are still using traditional approaches which typically fail in such environments. Therefore, companies are seeking opportunities for new product roadmapping approaches.
Objective: This paper presents good practices to support companies better understand what factors are required to conduct a successful product roadmapping in a dynamic and uncertain market environment.
Method: Based on a grey literature review, essential aspects for conducting product roadmapping in a dynamic and uncertain market environment were identified. Expert workshops were then held with two researchers and three practitioners to develop best practices and the proposed approach for an outcome-driven roadmap. These results were then given to another set of practitioners and their perceptions were gathered through interviews.
Results: The study results in the development of 9 good practices that provide practitioners with insights into what aspects are crucial for product roadmapping in a dynamic and uncertain market environment. Moreover, we propose an approach to product roadmapping that includes providing a flexible structure and focusing on delivering value to the customer and the business. To ensure the latter, this approach consists of the main items outcome hypothesis, validated outcomes, and discovered outputs.
Through increasing market dynamics, rapidly evolving technologies and shifting user expectations coupled with the adoption of lean and agile practices, companies are struggling with their ability to provide reliable product roadmaps by applying traditional approaches. Currently, most companies are seeking opportunities to improve their product roadmapping practices. As a first challenge they have to assess their current product roadmapping capabilities in order to better understand how to improve their practices and how to switch to a new approach. The aim of this article is to provide an initial maturity model for product roadmapping practices that is especially suited for assessing the roadmapping capabilities of companies operating in dynamic and uncertain market environments. Based on interviews with 15 experts from 13 various companies the current state of practice regarding product roadmapping was identified. Afterwards, the model development was conducted in the context of expert workshops with the Robert Bosch GmbH and researchers. The study results in the so-called DEEP 1.0 product roadmap maturity model which allows companies to conduct a self assessment of their product roadmapping practice.
Selecting a suitable development method for a specific project context is one of the most challenging activities in process design. Every project is unique and, thus, many context factors have to be considered. Recent research took some initial steps towards statistically constructing hybrid development methods, yet, paid little attention to the peculiarities of context factors influencing method and practice selection. In this paper, we utilize exploratory factor analysis and logistic regression analysis to learn such context factors and to identify methods that are correlated with these factors. Our analysis is based on 829 data points from the HELENA dataset. We provide five base clusters of methods consisting of up to 10 methods that lay the foundation for devising hybrid development methods. The analysis of the five clusters using trained models reveals only a few context factors, e.g., project/product size and target application domain, that seem to significantly influence the selection of methods. An extended descriptive analysis of these practices in the context of the identified method clusters also suggests a consolidation of the relevant practice sets used in specific project contexts.
Selecting a suitable development method for a specific project context is one of the most challenging activities in process design. To extend the so far statistical construction of hybrid development methods, we analyze 829 data points to investigate which context factors influence the choice of methods or practices. Using exploratory factor analysis, we derive five base clusters consisting of up to 10 methods. Logistic regression analysis then reveals which context factors have an influence on the integration of methods from these clusters in the development process. Our results indicate that only a few context factors including project/product size and target application domain significantly influence the choice. This summary refers to the paper “Determining Context Factors for Hybrid Development Methods with Trained Models”. This paper was published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Software and System Process in 2020.
Die Kombination von Softwareproduktlinien und agiler Softwareentwicklung in der Automobilbranche ist vielversprechend. Das Ziel ist hierbei, sowohl die Vorteile agiler Methoden wie kurze Entwicklungszyklen als auch die Vorteile systematischer Wiederverwendung wie beispielsweise das effektive Management von Varianten zu erzielen. Allerdings ist die Kombination auch mit Herausforderungen verbunden und erfordert eine geeignete Einführungs- oder Transformationsstrategie. Basierend auf Erkenntnissen einer Interviewstudie und existierenden Produktlinienentwicklungen werden Herausforderungen und Lösungsideen aufgezeigt.
Software development consists to a large extent of human-based processes with continuously increasing demands regarding interdisciplinary team work. Understanding the dynamics of software teams can be seen as highly important to successful project execution. Hence, for future project managers, knowledge about non-technical processes in teams is significant. In this paper, we present a course unit that provides an environment in which students can learn and experience the role of different communication patterns in distributed agile software development. In particular, students gain awareness about the importance of communication by experiencing the impact of limitations of communication channels and the effects on collaboration and team performance. The course unit presented uses the controlled experiment instrument to provide the basic organization of a small software project carried out in virtual teams. We provide a detailed design of the course unit to allow for implementation in further courses. Furthermore, we provide experiences obtained from implementing this course unit with 16 graduate students. We observed students struggling with technical aspects and team coordination in general, while not realizing the importance of communication channels (or their absence). Furthermore, we could show the students that lacking communication protocols impact team coordination and performance regardless of the communication channels used.
In the era of digital transformation, the notion of software quality transcends its traditional boundaries, necessitating an expansion to encompass the realms of value creation for customers and the business. Merely optimizing technical aspects of software quality can result in diminishing returns. Product discovery techniques can be seen as a powerful mechanism for crafting products that align with an expanded concept of quality - one that incorporates value creation. Previous research has shown that companies struggle to determine appropriate product discovery techniques for generating, validating, and prioritizing ideas for new products or features to ensure they meet the needs and desires of the customers and the business. For this reason, we conducted a grey literature review to identify various techniques for product discovery. First, the article provides an overview of different techniques and assesses how frequently they are mentioned in the literature review. Second, we mapped these techniques to an existing product discovery process from previous research to provide concrete guidelines for establishing product discovery in their organizations. The analysis shows, among other things, the increasing importance of techniques to structure the problem exploration process and the product strategy process. The results are interpreted regarding the importance of the techniques to practical applications and recognizable trends.