Online ISSN
1751-8814
Print ISSN
1751-8806
IET Software
Volume 6, Issue 3, June 2012
Volumes & issues:
Volume 6, Issue 3
June 2012
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- Author(s): M. Niazi ; N. Cerpa ; V. Casey
- Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 3, p. 165 –166
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2012.0088
- Type: Article
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- Author(s): L. Fernández-Sanz and Sanjay Misra
- Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 3, p. 167 –175
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2011.0070
- Type: Article
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Software development is mainly a social activity where teams of developers should work as a coordinated unit to fulfill the needs of customers. Studies have shown the importance of teamwork ability as the main skill for software professionals both in local settings and in global software development. Teamwork performance can be evaluated according to different approaches but we need deeper analysis within software teams of differences in individuals’ performance related to culture, nationality or even gender. We applied a simple evaluation experience named teamwork benefits awareness (TBA) to groups of last-year students of computing degrees with experience as junior IT professionals during intensive multinational workshops based on international software projects. TBA allowed to measure individual and team performance during a requirements analysis session based on a real project. Results segmented by nationality and gender are presented and analysed in comparison with the data collected from computing professionals in local settings. In general, no significant differences have been found out although interesting relations are suggested with two Hofstede's country indicators. TBA is also perceived as a good technique for highlighting both teamwork benefits as well as the nature of real situations of software requirements analysis and orientation to customer needs. - Author(s): D. Tuffley
- Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 3, p. 176 –184
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2011.0044
- Type: Article
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The globalisation of the software development industry has solved one set of problems and created a new set. Skills shortages in the host organisation can be solved by Global Software Development, yet the effective management of virtual teams is a new challenge. This study proposes a process reference model (PRM) and assessment model for the leadership of project teams, including complex virtual teams. Using modelling techniques from Software Engineering, the Leadership PRM describes the attributes that a project manager should possess, and the activities they should perform if they are to be perceived by those around them as leaders. The developed model contains the essential leadership characteristics. Leadership is difficult to define since it is situationally expressed. The context determines the outward form that leadership takes in a given situation. A manager who innately embodies these essential leadership qualities will be perceived as a leader by those around them. Leadership is a skill that can be learned and developed over time to a higher level of competence. Managers coordinate the activities of team members in the pursuit of goals, while leaders extend this management capability by knowing how to motivate team members to want to do what it is the leader wants them to do. - Author(s): R.R. Palacio ; A.L. Morán ; V.M. González ; A. Vizcaíno
- Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 3, p. 185 –198
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2011.0077
- Type: Article
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The software industry is facing a recent trend called distributed software development (DSD), in which distributed teams require continuous support in their communication and coordination. However, there is a lack of communication tools that actually support the coordination of DSD activities. Current communication mechanisms appear to favour the issuer of an interaction, because the context of the receiver is not always considered. In this study, the authors introduce selective availability (SA), a mechanism with which to provide information about the current activities of the members in a distributed team, in order to motivate a more suitable means to initiate interactions, thus facilitating the communication and coordination of DSD activities. Moreover, the authors describe the CWS-IM tool, an extended instant messaging application that supports SA, by notifying collaborators about each of their colleague's activities. Therefore, issuers can decide whether the time is right to start the interaction. The results of an evaluation of the actual use of the tool in a DSD software development company are also presented. These results indicate that developers perceive CWS-IM to be more useful and easier to use than other traditional instant messaging applications when initiating collaboration in DSD environments. - Author(s): O. Gotel ; C. Scharff ; V. Kulkarni
- Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 3, p. 199 –213
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2011.0078
- Type: Article
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This paper describes five years of a software engineering education initiative led by Pace University in New York City. The initiative brought together faculty and students from across the globe to work on distributed software development projects, encompassing the Institute of Technology of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, the University of Delhi in India, Mahidol University in Thailand, the Royal University of Phnom Penh in Cambodia and the Ecole Supérieure Polytechnique in Senegal. The purpose of this paper is to show the trajectory that this initiative took over its first five years and to provide a resource for other instructors and institutions working on similar long-term global software development education initiatives. - Author(s): A. Vizcaíno ; F. García ; I. Caballero ; J.C. Villar ; M. Piattini
- Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 3, p. 214 –225
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2011.0087
- Type: Article
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As planning an R&D project named ORIGIN addressing global software development (GSD) foundations, the authors soon became aware of the need for all the participants to share the same vision of GSD projects. The authors therefore reached the conclusion that one of the first steps should be to set up a shared and consistent GSD project-related vocabulary, since this would help to improve communication between the five companies involved in ORIGIN. After analysing existing GSD initiatives, the authors discovered that none of them really satisfied our specific needs. As a consequence, they decided to develop a new ontology, which was named O-GSD. This paper describes not only how the ontology was developed -including the reasons which led us to include each term in O-GSD- but also its usage in real contexts -what allowed us to extract some insights to refine and validate the ontology. The main contribution of this paper is the O-GSD ontology which is used and to be used in real GSD projects with the aim of helping project managers to better describe their particular GSD projects.
Editorial: Management of Global Software Development: opportunities, challenges and lessons learned
Analysis of cultural and gender influences on teamwork performance for software requirements analysis in multinational environments
Optimising virtual team leadership in Global Software Development
Selective availability: coordinating interaction initiation in distributed software development
Mixing continents, competences and roles: five years of lessons for software engineering education
Towards an ontology for global software development
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- Author(s): A. Raza ; L.F. Capretz ; F. Ahmed
- Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 3, p. 226 –230
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2011.0105
- Type: Article
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The unlimited number of open-source software (OSS) users and the importance of end users’ experience in determining software quality make usability an even more critical quality attribute for OSS than it is for proprietary software. The research model of this study establishes the relationship between usability errors in OSS and online public forums. The results of this empirical analysis provide evidence about active management of usability-related issues in OSS. To conduct this research, the authors used a dataset consisting of 1753 OSS projects, covering a broad range of categories. The results of the study show that online forums play a significant role in identifying and fixing usability bugs in OSS. - Author(s): M. Garcı́a ; D. Llewellyn-Jones ; F. Ortin ; M. Merabti
- Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 3, p. 231 –248
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2010.0160
- Type: Article
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Distributed systems are commonly required to be flexible and scalable, as the number and arrangement of their (potentially mobile) devices may easily change. Security in distributed systems is a complex issue which can produce several problems such as eavesdropping, phishing or denial of service. To overcome these problems, there are various security measures that can be applied. This study proposes the use of dynamic aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) to implement security mechanisms in distributed systems. By applying dynamic separation of concerns using AOSD, it becomes possible to adapt the security measures of distributed systems, even when their sizes and arrangements change, without compromising global security. These changes can be applied when a distributed system is running, without requiring its execution to be stopped or interrupted. Using the dynamic and static aspect weaving AOSD platform, the authors have implemented solutions for two common security problems in distributed systems: (i) access control and data flow and (ii) encryption of transmissions. Moreover, the proposed approach has been tested in a real client–server FTP scenario. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations of both implementations are presented to estimate the pros and cons of using dynamic AOSD in the development of security measures of distributed systems. - Author(s): T. Galinac Grbac ; Ž. Car ; D. Huljenić
- Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 3, p. 249 –259
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2011.0104
- Type: Article
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Many researchers have reported the defect growth within the evolutionary-developed large-scale systems, and increased fault slips from the early verification stages into late. This suggests that improvement in the early defect detection process control is needed. This study focuses on evaluation of adding inspection effort early in the development process. Based on the examination of the existing metrics used in defect detection process, the authors establish metrics to quantify its value from the quality and cost–benefit perspective. The effect of adding inspection effort early in the development process is evaluated in a case study using industrial data from history and an ongoing project involving three geographically distributed sites of the same globally distributed software development organisation with around 300 developers. The findings show that the expert-based decision criteria for additional investment are mostly based on quality and reliability issues, and less on costs. Consequently, the additional inspection improves significantly the quality, while the cost–benefit was not statistically significant. This leads to the conclusion that better decision criteria that would incorporate the costs and not only quality perceptions are the key for improving the product reliability, as well as the overall software life-cycle cost-efficiency. This study is motivated by the real industrial environment, and thus, contributes to both research and practice by presenting the empirical evidence. - Author(s): S. Muhammad ; O. Maqbool ; A.Q. Abbasi
- Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 3, p. 260 –274
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2011.0061
- Type: Article
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Various techniques have been proposed for the automatic modularisation and architecture recovery of software systems. These techniques usually employ an algorithm to form clusters of similar entities. Similarity between entities is based on their characteristics, and is often determined by the relationships that exist between them. When using automatic techniques, selecting a suitable algorithm and appropriate relationships are challenging issues, and have a significant influence on the quality of results. Although researchers have employed different algorithms for modularising object-oriented software systems, there has been relatively little work to determine which relationships produce better modularisation results. The authors evaluate in this study a large number of relationships that may exist between entities in an object-oriented system, by dividing the relationships into different categories. For modularisation, experiments are conducted using multiple hierarchical clustering algorithms. The experimental results indicate the relationships that improve the quality of results for the algorithms, and thus may be considered more important for software clustering. - Author(s): J. Lee ; S. Kang ; D. Lee
- Source: IET Software, Volume 6, Issue 3, p. 275 –282
- DOI: 10.1049/iet-sen.2011.0066
- Type: Article
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To develop high-quality software, it is essential to use software testing methods and tools (STMTs) effectively and efficiently. The authors conducted a survey with a wide variety of companies and experts that are involved in software testing in order to identify the current practices and opportunities for improvement of STMTs. The survey results revealed five important findings regarding the current practices of STMTs and opportunities for improvement: low usage rate of STMTs, difficulties owing to alack of STMTs, use of testing tools in a limited manner, demand for interoperability support between methods and tools of software development and testing, and need for guidance to evaluate STMTs or to describe the capabilities of STMTs. These findings and other related results from the survey will be useful for improving STMTs practices and developing software testing tools.
Usability bugs in open-source software and online forums
Applying dynamic separation of aspects to distributed systems security: a case study
Quantifying value of adding inspection effort early in the development process: a case study
Evaluating relationship categories for clustering object-oriented software systems
Survey on software testing practices
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