Lightweight development techniques (e.g., Extreme Programming) promise important benefits for software development with small teams in the face of unstable and vague requirements. Software development organizations are confronted with the problem that a bunch of techniques exist without knowing which ones are suited for their specific situation and how to integrate them into a comprehensive process. Especially for startup companies, guidance is crucial because they usually do not have time and money for creating their development process on a trial-and-error basis. This paper proposes a lightweight software process for a specific application domain (i.e., database-and userinterface-oriented off-the-shelf e-business applications). The process originates from analyzing experience from past e-business projects, interviews conducted with industry, and literature study. Expected benefits of this process are cost effectiveness, sufficiently high quality of the end product, and accelerated functionality-to-market. The process is described according to the dimensions activities, artifacts, roles and tools. In addition, this paper includes a description of a lightweight measurement program that is tailored to the characteristics of the described process. It can be used for controlling the project progress during project execution as well as for evaluating the effects of performing the process in a specific organization or company.
This paper reports the results of a controlled experiment undertaken to investigate whether the methodology support offered by a CASE tool does have an impact on the tool's acceptance and actual use by individuals. Subjects used the process modelling tool SPEARMINT to complete a partial process model and remove all inconsistencies. Half the subjects used a variant of SPEARMINT that corrected consistency violations automatically and silently, whilst the other half used a variant of SPEARMINT that told them about inconsistencies both immediately and persistently but without automatic correction. Measurement of acceptance and prediction of actual use was based on the technology acceptance model, supplemented by beliefs about consistency rules. The impact of form of automated consistency assurance applied for hierarchical consistency rules was found to be significant at the 0.05 level with a type I error of 0.027, explaining 71.6% of the variance in CASE tool acceptance. However, intention to use and thus predicted use was of the same size for both variants of SPEARMINT, whereas perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use were affected contrarily. Internal validity of the findings was threatened by validity and reliability issues related to beliefs about consistency rules. Here, further research is needed to develop valid constructs and reliable scales. Following the experiment, a small survey among experienced users of SPEARMINT found that different forms of automated consistency assurance were preferred depending on individual, consistency rule, and task characteristics. Based on these findings, it is recommended that vendors should provide CASE tools with adaptable methodology support, which allow their users to fit automated consistency assurance to the task at hand.
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