Software process commonality analysis

Abstract

To remain viable and thrive, software organizations must rapidly adapt to frequent and, often, rather far-ranging changes to their operational context. These changes typically concern many factors, including the nature of the organization's marketplace in general, its customers' demands, and its business needs. In today's most highly dynamic contexts, such as web services development, other changes create additional, severe challenges. Most critical are changes to the technology in which a software product is written or which the software product has to control or use to provide its functionality. These product-support technology changes are frequently relatively small and incremental. They are, therefore, often handled by relatively small , incremental changes to the organization's software processes. However, the frequency of these changes is high, and their impact is elevated by time-to-market and requirements change demands. The net result is an extremely challenging need to create and manage a large number of customized process variants, collectively having more commonalities than differences, and incorporating experience-based, proven best practices . This paper describes a tool-based approach to coping with product-support technology changes. The approach utilizes established capabilities such as descriptive process modeling and the creation of reference models. It incorporates a new, innovative, tool-based capability to analyze commonalities and differences among processes. The paper includes an example-based evaluation of the approach in the domain of Wireless Internet Services as well as a discussion of its potentially broader application

Requirements for adopting software process lines

“…The method areas that appear in the primary studies are grouped into nine main blocks, namely: analysis (requirements analysis ( Mishra and Mishra, 2011 ;Ocampo et al, 2005 ;Pereira et al, 2007 ), requirements engineering ( Hurtado et al, 2014 ;Ortega et al, 2012 ), requirements management ( Niazi and Babar, 2009 )), design, implementation, test, quality assurance, project management (measurement and analysis ( Niazi and Babar, 2009 ), project planning ( Hurtado and Bastarrica, 2012 ;Niazi and Babar, 2009 ), project assessment and control ( Hurtado and Bastarrica, 2012 ;Niazi and Babar, 2009 )), support methods (configuration management ( Niazi and Babar, 2009 ), support process ( Martínez-Ruiz et al, 2011 )), and methodology. As shown in Fig.…”

“…The impact of tailoring criteria on agile practices adoption: A survey with novice agile practitioners in Brazil ( Campanelli et al, 2018 ) Journal of Systems and Software [9] Tailoring and introduction of the rational unified process ( Hanssen et al, 2007 ) European Conference on Software Process Improvement [10] Tailoring RUP to a defined project type: A case study International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement [11] Strengths and barriers behind the successful agile deployment-Insights from the three software intensive companies in Finland ( Pikkarainen et al, Software process commonality analysis ( Ocampo et al, 2005 ) Software Process: Improvement and Practice [22] A systematic approach to process tailoring ( Pereira et al, 2007 ) International A tool for modeling software development contexts in small software organizations ( Ortega et al, 2012 ) International Conference of the Chilean Computer Science Society [33] Challenges and success factors for large-scale agile transformations: A systematic literature review ( Dikert et al, 2016 ) Journal of Systems and Software…”

The effect of process tailoring on software project performance: The role of team absorptive capacity and its knowledge‐based enablers

“…With this assumption, software process tailoring can be extended to consider a beneficial effect on the project's overall performance in terms of schedule, budget and quality goals. However, according to some studies, the work of SPT is not always a “silver bullet” and may be risky (Alegría et al, 2014; Ocampo, Bella, & Munch, 2005). Software project teams are often seen as unfamiliar with all of the technical tailoring methods or as lacking sufficient knowledge or know‐how to conduct the SPT task (Alegría et al, 2014; Xu & Ramesh, 2007).…”

A Model-Driven Approach for Software Process Line Engineering

“…There is no software process suitable for all development situations [2], as the suitability of a process depends on various product, project, and organizational characteristics [3]. Thus, building custom processes has become critical for software development organizations [4]; however, defining a specific process for each and every project is a time-consuming and costly endeavor [5]. Method tailoring is an effective approach for building bespoke software processes [6].…”