Abstract-There is a growing interest in applying agile practices in Global Software Development (GSD) projects. The literature on using Scrum, one of the most popular agile approaches, in distributed development projects has steadily been growing. However, there has not been any effort to systematically select, review, and synthesize the literature on this topic. We have conducted a systematic literature review of the primary studies that report using Scrum practices in GSD projects. Our search strategy identified 366 papers, of which 20 were identified as primary papers relevant to our research. We extracted data from these papers to identify various challenges of using Scrum in GSD. Current strategies to deal with the identified challenges have also been extracted. This paper presents the review's findings that are expected to help researchers and practitioners to understand the challenges involved in using Scrum for GSD projects and the strategies available to deal with them.
Context: Continuous practices, i.e., continuous integration, delivery, and deployment, are the software development industry practices that enable organizations to frequently and reliably release new features and products. With the increasing interest in and literature on continuous practices, it is important to systematically review and synthesize the approaches, tools, challenges, and practices reported for adopting and implementing continuous practices.Objective: This research aimed at systematically reviewing the state of the art of continuous practices to classify approaches and tools, identify challenges and practices in this regard, and identify the gaps for future research. Method:We used systematic literature review (SLR) method for reviewing the peer-reviewed papers on continuous practices published between 2004 and 1st June 2016. We applied thematic analysis method for analysing the data extracted from reviewing 69 papers selected using predefined criteria. Results:We have identified thirty approaches and associated tools, which facilitate the implementation of continuous practices in the following ways: (1) -reducing build and test time in continuous integration (CI)‖; (2) -increasing visibility and awareness on build and test results in CI‖; (3) -supporting (semi-) automated continuous testing‖; (4) -detecting violations, flaws and faults in CI‖; (5) -addressing security and scalability issues in deployment pipeline‖, and (6) -improving dependability and reliability of deployment process‖. We have also determined a list of critical factors such as -testing (effort and time)‖, -team awareness and transparency‖, -good design principles‖, -customer‖, -highly skilled and motivated team‖, -application domain‖, and -appropriate infrastructure‖ that should be carefully considered when introducing continuous practices in a given organization. The majority of the reviewed papers were validation (34.7%) and evaluation (36.2%) research types. This review also reveals that continuous practices have been successfully applied to both greenfield and maintenance projects. Conclusion:Continuous practices have become an important area of software engineering research and practice. Whilst the reported approaches, tools, and practices are addressing a wide range of challenges, there are several challenges and gaps which require future research work for: improving the capturing and reporting of contextual information in the studies reporting different aspects of continuous practices; gaining a deep understanding of how software-intensive systems should be (re-) architected to support continuous practices; addressing the lack of knowledge and tools for engineering processes of designing and running secure deployment pipelines.
a b s t r a c tContext: Variability management (VM) is one of the most important activities of software product-line engineering (SPLE), which intends to develop software-intensive systems using platforms and mass customization. VM encompasses the activities of eliciting and representing variability in software artefacts, establishing and managing dependencies among different variabilities, and supporting the exploitation of the variabilities for building and evolving a family of software systems. Software product line (SPL) community has allocated huge amount of effort to develop various approaches to dealing with variability related challenges during the last two decade. Several dozens of VM approaches have been reported. However, there has been no systematic effort to study how the reported VM approaches have been evaluated. Objective: The objectives of this research are to review the status of evaluation of reported VM approaches and to synthesize the available evidence about the effects of the reported approaches. Method: We carried out a systematic literature review of the VM approaches in SPLE reported from 1990s until December 2007. Results: We selected 97 papers according to our inclusion and exclusion criteria. The selected papers appeared in 56 publication venues. We found that only a small number of the reviewed approaches had been evaluated using rigorous scientific methods. A detailed investigation of the reviewed studies employing empirical research methods revealed significant quality deficiencies in various aspects of the used quality assessment criteria. The synthesis of the available evidence showed that all studies, except one, reported only positive effects. Conclusion: The findings from this systematic review show that a large majority of the reported VM approaches have not been sufficiently evaluated using scientifically rigorous methods. The available evidence is sparse and the quality of the presented evidence is quite low. The findings highlight the areas in need of improvement, i.e., rigorous evaluation of VM approaches. However, the reported evidence is quite consistent across different studies. That means the proposed approaches may be very beneficial when they are applied properly in appropriate situations. Hence, it can be concluded that further investigations need to pay more attention to the contexts under which different approaches can be more beneficial.
Systematic Literature Reviews and Systematic Mapping Studies are relatively new forms of secondary studies in software engineering. Identifying relevant papers from various Electronic Data Sources (EDS) is one of the key activities of conducting these kinds of studies. Hence, the selection of EDS for searching the potentially relevant papers is an important decision, which can affect a study's coverage of relevant papers. Researchers usually select EDS mainly based on personal knowledge, experience, and preferences and/or recommendations by other researchers. We believe that building an evidence-based understanding of EDS can enable researchers to make more informed decisions about the selection of EDS. This paper reports our initial effort towards this end. We propose an initial set of metrics for characterizing the EDS from the perspective of the needs of secondary studies. We explain the usage and benefits of the proposed metrics using the data gathered from two secondary studies. We also tried to synthesize the data from the two studies and that from literature to provide initial evidence-based heuristics for EDS selection.
Software architecture evaluation has been proposed as a means to achieve quality attributes such as maintainability and reliability in a system. The objective of the evaluation is to assess whether or not the architecture will lead to the desired quality attributes. Recently, there have been a number of evaluation methods proposed. There is, however, little consensus on the technical and non-technical issues that a method should comprehensively address and which of the existing methods is most suitable for a particular issue. This paper presents a set of commonly known but informally described features of an evaluation method and organizes them within a framework that should offer guidance on the choice of the most appropriate method for an evaluation exercise. In this paper, we use this framework to characterise eight SA evaluation methods.
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