Assessing the process of an Eastern European software SME using systemic analysis, GQM, and reliability growth models

Abstract

This paper reports on the experience of the authors in quantitatively assessing the development process of an Eastern European software SME (Small or Medium Size Enterprise). The company produces a very successful workflow and documentation tool, features about 30 full time developers and has a customer base of about 40 major organizations. It has hired the authors as consultants to address quality and productivity issues raised by the upper management and customers. The adopted approach is based on systemic analysis, and starts with a comprehensive GQM session with the top managers of the company, to fully define the scope of work, and progresses analysing the documentation, interviewing the manager and the lead developers, and quantitatively analysing the issue tracking system in place. Specific attention is placed in identifying "schismogenesis", situations that may lead to unresolvable conflicts. The approach has been proven successful in providing a result in short forecasted timeframe, and systemic analysis has been effective in spotting the most critical situations present in the company. The result has been a set of prioritized recommendations, centered first in eliminating the schismogenetic situations and then ranging from adopting a more quantitative process control, to streamline the activities, to organize a line of product.

Toward a Better Understanding of How to Develop Software Under Stress – Drafting the Lines for Future Research

“…The work in this area will start from the idea of noninvasive data collection recently revised and actualized with the system Innometrics, whose most recent description will be presented at the 33rd ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2018) [Bykov et al, 2018]. The data collection at companies will also be performed through suitable questionnaires and surveys, using the best standards in the field as can be applied in software engineering, as described in [Pedrycz et al, 2011, Ivanov et al, 2016. Additional data will be collected from full capacity EEG devices, one instance of which is already in use for feasibility studies at Innopolis University using the on one side the recent experience collected in software engineering [Lee et al, 2016] and on the other the decades long competence presence in neurosciences.…”

“…As mentioned, the data will be analyzed using statistics and machine learning. Statistics will be the standard statistical tools, as described in [Moser et al, 2007], more advanced regression techniques, as described in [di Bella et al, 2013], approaches coming from reliability growth models [Ivanov et al, 2016]. In terms of machine learning, we propose to use simple models based on logistic regression, support vector machine and random indexes , techniques based on neural networks, fuzzy logic, granular computing [Pedrycz et al, 2015b], etc.…”

A Systemic Approach to Evaluating the Organizational Agility in Large-Scale Companies

“…[1]. For this reason, companies' managers often resort to "experts" or have assessments performed by independent entities [7]- [9].…”

“…In order to avoid issues, the interviews are need to be conducted by professionals because respondents tend to provide biased answers based on their expectations of the outcome of a questionnaire [27], [28]. Therefore, it is advisable to complement interviews with other approaches as demonstrated in [7], [9].…”

“…In the past, we drafted a possible approach to such assessment for small operations based on the GQM (Goal, Question, Metrics) model and systemic theory [7]. In this paper, we present a refined approach suitable for large companies and we analyze its implementation on the IT spin-off of a bank in the form of an action research [29].…”