A design for evidence - based soft research

Abstract

Active research is being done in how to go from requirements to architecture. However, no studies have been attempted in this area despite a long history of empirical research in software engineering (SE). Our goal is to establish a framework for the transformation from requirements to architecture on the basis of a series of empirical studies. The first step is to collect evidence about practice in industry before designing relevant techniques, methods and tools. As part of this step, we use an interview-based multiple-case study with a carefully designed process of conducting the interviews and of preparing the data collected for analysis while preserving its integrity. In this paper, we describe the design of this multiple-case study, delineate the evidence trail, discuss validity issues, outline the data analysis focus, discuss meta issues on evidence-based SE particularly on combining and using evidence, describe triangulation approaches, and present two methods for accumulating evidence.

A mechanism to explore proactive knowledge retention in open source software communities

“…The productivity of the individual contributor as well as the overall project suffers due to the information blocking and a lack of understanding of the code base. According to estimates, information blocking consumes 60% of developers' efforts …”

“…In a typical OSS project during the preparation of a release, contributors make changes to align their work with the goals of the release, therefore creating abandoned code which has the knock‐on impact of increasing the number of reported defects . The maintenance of abandoned code is a challenging task as the team lacks knowledge of its creation and structure . The source code that remains unmaintained (unless a legacy system) has an element of uncertainty for the development team since the contributors who wrote it have left the project .…”