Ethics-aware software engineering

work of W. Edwards Deming has convinced industry that must first measure quality and then emphasise process to improve quality. In response to Deming's arguments and in light of perception that software industry is unable to produce quality products on schedule, and within budget, more software development organisations are now emphasising process measurement, monitoring, and assessment. This paper describes what is meant by software process and discusses an approach for its measurement and improvement. INTRODUCTION Unreliable software makes big news, from emergency services disasters to social security payment blunders. Improved software quality is essential to ensure reliable products and services, and gain customer satisfaction. While software development has existed for more than four decades, we failed so far to make as an industry and as an engineering discipline rather than craft. Developing reliable and usable software that is delivered on and within budget still represents difficult endeavour for many organisations. As role of software becomes increasingly critical for businesses as well as for human lives, problems caused by software products that are late, over budget, or that do not work, become magnified. If lives are lost or people inconvenienced due to incapable computer software, news media is there to make big stories. Organisations are realising that their fundamental problems is immaturity of their software process. Robert Lai (1993) proposes that process improvement is second maturity wave of software industry. He states that the first wave of software was developed using waterfall model in 1970's. Today we are Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 8, © 1994 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517 216 Software Management in midst of second wave maturity movement as we attempt to formally define development process and best ways to continuously improve it (Lai 1993). Taking lead in this area has been Watts Humphrey (Humphrey 1989, 1990, 1991), and Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. SEI started in 1986 to develop process maturity framework to help organisations appraise maturity of their software process, and to provide guidance for organisations to improve their software process capability. A brief description of framework was released in September 1987, including maturity questionnaire. SEI evolved model and questionnaire into 5 -Level Capability Maturity Model (CMM) in 1991. In February 1993, released CMM version 1.1 (Paulk et al 1993). This paper discusses software process and describes capability maturity model (CMM). It also shows how CMM can be used as basis to measure maturity of software process of an organisation and plan its improvement. SOFTWARE QUALITY AND PROCESS IMPROVEMENT In his book Quality is Free Phil Crosby states that: Quality is free. It is not gift, is free. What cost money are unqualify of things all actions that involve not doing jobs right first time (Crosby 1980). If such statement is true for many disciplines, is particularly true for evidence is abundant in number of software products which exceeded their budget, were produced late, failed to satisfy user requirements, and are full of bugs. demand for improved software quality is increasing to ensure reliable products and services. benefits of improved quality comes in form of reduction in failure costs. For software projects failure costs include (DTI 1992): • costs of correcting defects, both before and after delivery • overruns against and budget • unnecessary high maintenance costs • indirect costs which users incur due to poor quality software link between process maturity and software quality is expressed in premise that The quality of software system is governed by quality of process used to develop and maintain it. One stumbling block to improving software quality seems to be that not enough attention is paid to overall development process itself. While software professionals typically devote their to developing, testing or documenting software products, no one has prime responsibility for improving software process. Experience has shown that if Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 8, © 1994 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517 Managing Systems 217 no one is working on software process, orderly improvement is unlikely. process certainly won't improve itself, rather, most likely, will deteriorate over time. Continuous improvement can occur only if process infrastructure is in place. Watts Humphrey argues in an early article published in Datamation, April 1989 that: Without work on process, there will be little or no progress in improving software. THE SOFTWARE PROCESS Adopting process view of software development represents revolutionary change in perspective. A process orientation to software development involves elements of structure, focus, measurement, ownership, skills, and supporting technology. In this section we investigate what is meant by software process. What Is Software Process According to Webster's dictionary, process is a system of operations in producing something .. series of actions, changes, or functions that achieve an end result. Chambers Concise Dictionary defines process as a series of actions or events .. sequence of operations or changes undergone. IEEE defines process as a sequence of steps performed for given purpose. In general business context, process is defined as a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce specified output for particular customer or market (Davenport 1993). These definitions put strong emphasis on HOW work is done, in contrast to product focus's emphasis on WHAT. Accordingly, process can be considered as a specific ordering of work activities across and place, with beginning, an end, and clearly identified inputs and outputs: structure for action. In this paper we will adopt following definitions quoted in (Humphrey 1990, Paulk et al 1993) are intended to encompass software throughout its life, which covers new development, enhancement, and repair. software process is The set of activities, methods, and practices used in production and evolution of software. software engineering process is The total set of software engineering activities needed to transform user's requirements into software. Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 8, © 1994 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517 218 Software Management People and Software Process Software development is still people-intensive activity. Talented people are most important element in any software organisation. Even if you get best people available, if they do not follow common process, if everyone wrote in different programming languages, used different conventions, or didn't co-ordinate their design and code changes with their peers, results will be chaos. Successful software organisations have learned that even best professionals need structured and disciplined environment in which to do cooperative work. Software organisations that do not establish such disciplines condemn their people to endless hours of repetitively solving technically trivial problems. obvious fact is that attracting best people is vital, but is also essential to support them with an effectively managed software process. Technology and Software Process Another myth is widespread belief that some technologically advanced tool or method will provide magic answer to software crisis. This is not only wrong, but is dangerous. Organisations which jumped on bandwagon of CASE tools, and ended up in failure and wasted and effort have learned their lesson hard way. Just ask yourself before introducing technology: What do I want to automate? In absence of defined, practised, and managed process, introducing automation can lead to increased chaos. There are several factors which limit effective use of software technology: an illdefined process, inconsistent process implementation, and poor process management. Software technology cannot be fully effective until these problems have been properly addressed. Need for Defined Process If no effort is made to define and enhance software development process across whole organisation, each software development project latches on to its own tools, methods, and practices with little guidance available on how to use them. This ad hoc approach will not be sufficient to tackle task of developing complex software systems. goal of software process management is to enable organisations to produce software that meets cost, schedules, and quality objectives. principles are same that underpins statistical process control-principles that have been successfully used in controlling scientific experiments and in high -volume manufacturing operations. Statistical concepts have been found to be just as applicable to software development as they are to production of manufactured goods such as motor cars. Applying such concepts will only be possible if there is defined and managed process. Software Process Models Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 8, © 1994 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517

Software engineers have always been experimenting with various models in an endeavor to improve upon software processes. Recently, a new area of software process improvement through experience management has got attention of the software engineering community. Software developers are experimenting with experience management to improve software process. This chapter explores the role of experience management in mitigating the effects of software crisis and investigates the current state of EM in Indian software engineering environment. The chapter discusses the need and integration of knowledge and experience management practices in software engineering environments. The chapter begins with the discussion of the ills of software engineering, classically referred to as “software crisis,” like late delivery of the systems, ill-functionality, and cost overruns, and justifies how managing the knowledge and experience of software engineers and practitioners can ward off these evils. The chapter then discusses the models and methodologies for knowledge and experience management in software engineering. Finally, the chapter sheds light on the major works carried out in this area and suggests possible future research avenues in this domain.

Welcome to the International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) held in Zurich, Switzerland, on June 2nd and 3rd, 2012. Having grown from a Software Process Workshop in 2005 to the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) in 2007, and finally to the International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) in 2011, this conference series has established its place in the software engineering community as a respected conference focusing on research and practice related to software and systems development process. Software and software systems development use processes as one major means for achieving and ensuring the quality of the final product. This leads to specific challenges regarding software processes such as simplicity, adaptability, standard conformance, the coordination of multiple domains and lifecycles, etc. Processes from other domains (e.g., health care, manufacturing, business, aerospace, automotive systems, and others) face similar challenges. Yet, they share interesting similarities with and differences to software processes. The question is: How can we in the software domain learn from other domains to meet our software process engineering challenges? The ICSSP conferences hence connect the traditional software and systems process community with outside views and insights, broadening its scope of software development processes to system development and explicitly including processes of other domains such as health care, business, and manufacturing. By sharing process development theories and practices from such domains, ICSSP 2012 is investigating novel solutions to today's process challenges. Correspondingly, the main theme of ICSSP 2012 is Beyond Software and Software Systems Processes, signaling our goal of learning from domains other than the traditional software process community.

Empathy, defined as the ability to understand and share others’ perspectives and emotions, is essential in software engineering (SE), where developers often collaborate with diverse stakeholders. It is also considered as a vital competency in many professional fields such as medicine, healthcare, nursing, animal science, education, marketing, and project management. Despite its importance, empathy remains under-researched in SE. To further explore this, we conducted a socio-technical grounded theory (STGT) study through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 22 software developers and stakeholders. Our study explored the role of empathy in SE and how SE activities and processes can be improved by considering empathy. Through applying the systematic steps of STGT data analysis and theory development, we developed a theory that explains the role of empathy in SE. Our theory details the contexts in which empathy arises, the conditions that shape it, the causes and consequences of its presence and absence. We also identified contingencies for enhancing empathy or overcoming barriers to its expression. Our findings provide practical implications for SE practitioners and researchers, offering a deeper understanding of how to effectively integrate empathy into SE processes.

The popularity of empirical methods in software engineering research is on the rise. Surveys, experiments, metrics, case studies, and field studies are examples of empirical methods used to investigate both software engineering processes and products. The increased application of empirical methods has also brought about an increase in discussions about adapting these methods to the peculiarities of software engineering. In contrast, the ethical issues raised by empirical methods have received little, if any, attention in the software engineering literature. This article is intended to introduce the ethical issues raised by empirical research to the software engineering research community and to stimulate discussion of how best to deal with these ethical issues. Through a review of the ethical codes of several fields that commonly employ humans and artifacts as research subjects, we have identified major ethical issues relevant to empirical studies of software engineering. These issues are illustrated with real empirical studies of software engineering.

The International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP), continuing the success of Software Process Workshop (SPW), the Software Process Modeling and Simulation Workshop (ProSim) and the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) conference series, has become the established premier event in the field of software and systems engineering processes. It provides a leading forum for the exchange of research outcomes and industrial best-practices in process development from software and systems disciplines. ICSSP 2018 was held in Gothenburg, Sweden, 26-27 May 2018, co-located with the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). The theme of ICSSP 2018 was studying \Demands on Processes, Processes on Demand" by recognizing the demands on processes that include the need for both welldeveloped plans and incremental deliveries (agile and hybrid processes), utilization of increased automation (model-based engineering and DevOps), higher degrees of customer collaboration, comprehensive analysis of existing products for reuse (open source and COTS), and performance requirements of enterprise-level architectures. Papers presented at ICSSP discussed these issues across different domains, providing concepts, evidence, and experiences.

Software process is the most important part of software project management, and software process models are important means of implementing the software process in any software organization. When there is need to improve the software process, then the need to improve the work-task part (software process models) of the software process must arise. As, there is need of increasing the commitment of software project managers through out the software development life cycle (SDLC), so we need to give them the list of activities in Waterfall Model, which should be made efficient by the software development team, to get the 80% productivity (output) easily, by reducing the effort of software development and ultimately increasing the performance of the software process. So, the idea of 80/20 rule (Pareto Principle, 1935) can be applied in the software engineering process model, in this regard. The Pareto Principle (1935) directed us to focus on what is really important in any field and field's work. Software process is most important part of software project management (SPM). This is also then ultimately needed for software project management (SPM) improvement. Our main research work is to improve the work-task part of the software process (i.e. software process models by applying the Pareto Principle - 80/20 Rule (1935) (or law of vital few) (1935), in the software engineering process models (or work-task part of the software process). This will be to facilitate the software project manager, using the software process models practically more efficient than without application of 80/20 Rule in software engineering Waterfall model. This has resulted in the reduction of the software development effort and increase in the performance of the software process. The results (efficient and improved software process models) will be implemented in the software industry, by software project managers, by focusing on the list of activities giving 80 percent of the overall productivity of the software process. The results will be the list of activities having the capability to give 20 percent of the overall productivity of the software Waterfall process, to be ignored, eliminated or designated to reduce the effort.

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a critical process in Software Engineering (SE) activities. RE helps stakeholders to manage requirements appropriately before dedicated requirements are used to design and implement software. The first stage in RE process is known as requirements elicitation whereby during elicitation, stakeholders will perform a set of activities to permit understanding in problem domain for respected scenario and hence proposing a set of established requirements in developing software. In elicitation, stakeholders need to collaborate and communicate in order to produce unambiguous requirements and create mutual agreement for software design and development. This can produce desired solution for all stakeholders. Soft issue is one of non-technical requirements that can associate with social presence, social interaction elements such as comfort, connectedness and motivation. This requirements need to be emphasized during RE process especially for a system that is categorized in Computer- Supported Collaboration Working (CSCW) domain. Users need CSCW domain system to carry out virtual communication, knowledge sharing via system's features. The aim of this paper is to carry out a preliminary study on RE process and requirements elicitation activities by identifying whether soft issues have been engaged in existing requirements elicitation process. Another aim is to compare stakeholders' roles based on selected articles. The method to investigate requirements elicitation process is done by identifying existing elicitation processes as well as involvement of stakeholders' collaboration during elicitation. According to the study, the comparison of existing requirements elicitation processes and comparison of job roles have been produced as a result in this paper.

A software engineering curriculum must provide the student with: a strong mathematical and theoretical base; problem solving and analysis skills; written and oral communication skills; knowledge of and experience in software engineering principles, processes, and products; knowledge of and experience in measurement, analysis, and control of software processes and products; and an understanding of applicable societal and ethical issues. To effectively address the needs of industry, software engineering education must include experience of applying software engineering principles to nontrivial problems. Here, the author describes how, in an environment of rapidly changing technology and limited educational budgets, delivering a sufficiently robust software engineering educational experience is a challenge.

Software engineering environments have a history of about two decades. Early environments provided support for small fragments of the software process (usually focusing on programming-in-the small). Then there was a trend towards support for more complete software processes (from early phases like requirements analysis and design down to testing and configuration management). Ten years ago the notion of process-centered software engineering environments initiated a new field in software engineering: software process research. The key idea is to use a model of a software process as input parameter for a software engineering environment. The environment is supposed to “behave” in accordance to the process model. Some aspects of this vision became true, others turned out to be of little practicability. In this article, we discuss the history of software engineering environments with a particular focus on process-centered software engineering environments (PCSEEs). We discuss the notion of distributed software processes (as one of the most substantial current trends in software process research) and we motivate the notion of a software process middleware which serves as basis of real-world software processes spread over various sites. In addition, we discuss some other trends in the software process research arena.

The software engineering process is a growing concern for many software development organizations. The need for well-educated software engineers is bringing new software engineering programs to universities. In many programs, software process education adds up to a few hours of lectures in an introductory software engineering course. This paper presents the structure and the content for a full, one-semester course on software processes, which has been designed in close collaboration with industry. The course is based on a software process called UPEDU (Unified Process for EDUcation), pronounced Yoopeedoo, and has been customized from the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for the educational environment. Many artifacts derived from a project case study are used as examples or templates. The content of the course is oriented towards the cognitive skills needed to perform the various activities required in the software process.

It is important to count on tools to help software professionals to evaluate the software process and how it may be affected by factors related to its deployment. Simulation models are a valuable means to illustrate the behaviour of such a process since scenario generation supports the prediction of potential outcomes and the prevention of undesired scenarios which are harmful to the process and the company in charge of the project to be developed. This work explores the effectiveness of introducing system dynamics (SD) models in the software engineers’ process of understanding, from a management perspective, the software process dynamics. The used SD simulation model of the software process emphasises the representation of an iterative process. The COCOMO II model drivers and their main attributes were used, providing a set of reference factors that affect the software process, the estimation of project cost and the effort required. A set of 59 junior software professionals with no previous knowledge about SD participated in a validation study. For simple predictive scenarios, there was no important improvement effect, while for more complex predictive scenarios SD helped them to guess better and provide a rationale for the expected behaviour of the software process performance.

article Free Access Share on The software engineering process: definition and scope Author: W. S. Humphrey Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie-Mellon UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering NotesVolume 14Issue 4June 1989 pp 82–83https://doi.org/10.1145/75111.75122Online:01 April 1988Publication History 23citation2,737DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations23Total Downloads2,737Last 12 Months164Last 6 weeks13 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

In this chapter, an overview of the research progress both in software processes and software evolution are presented from the viewpoints of methodologies, technologies, tools and management. Firstly, the basic concepts related to software processes are discussed. In addition, an overview of the research progress in the areas of software process modelling and descriptions, software process modelling languages and description languages, software process improvement, CMM, software process reuse and process-centred software engineering environments is presented. Furthermore, the basic concepts related to software evolution are discussed. Finally, the work in the areas of software evolution and software reengineering is also discussed. The research outlined in this chapter shows that both software evolution and software process have become the hot spots in software engineering. The combination of software evolution and software process will promote smooth and effective software evolution.

Search-based software engineering (SBSE) consists of the application of metaheuristic search techniques—such as genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, hill climbing, and tabu search—to software engineering problems. This idea is based on the observation that some software engineering activities can be thought of as optimization problems, and on the fact that techniques providing exact solutions are, very often, unable to adequately scale to large, real-world software engineering problems. Define fitness functions to guide an automated search for solutions, rather than attempting to construct solutions from scratch by hand. SBSE moves the engineer up the abstraction chain, from the tedious and expensive role of detailed solution construction, to the potentially more productive and more cost-effective area of fitness function design. This approach has been repeatedly demonstrated to have successful applications across the software engineering life cycle from requirements and project planning to maintenance and testing. This special issue focuses on applications of search SBSE to the maintenance phase of the life cycle. After software testing 2, software maintenance is the most widely studied application area for SBSE research. Work on SBSE applications to problems in software maintenance can be traced back to the pioneering work of the Mancoridis et al. 3, which led to the development of the Bunch tool for software re-modularization 4. In the past five years there has been a significant increase in SBSE applications to software maintenance and evolution. Search-based techniques have been applied to post-development code improvement problems, such as object-oriented refactoring 5, 6, and imperative language slicing and transformation 7. Other applications are related to software engineering economics and project management problems, such as release planning 8-12, effort, and cost estimation 13-16, and project staffing and planning 17-20. Last, but not the least, SBSE has been applied to deal with service-oriented architectures, for example for services QoS-aware composition 21, service-level agreement negotiation 22, and testing 23. A complete overview of SBSE with a discussion of future research trends can be found in the recent International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) ‘Future of Software Engineering’ paper 24. This issue of the Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice features three outstanding papers, dealing with different aspects of software maintenance and evolution: release planning and staffing, re-factoring, and component substitution. The paper ‘Optimized Staffing for Product Releases—Focused Search and its Application at Chartwell Technologies’ by Puneet Kapur, An Ngo-The, Günther Ruhe, and Andrew Smith presents an approach for optimizing the staffing for product releases. The problem they solve can be viewed as part of the more general release planning problem, which assigns features to releases such that technical, resource, risk, and budget constraints are met. In particular, the genetic search-based approach the authors propose aims at assigning human resources to software development tasks, taking them from a pool of developers having different levels of skills. The applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated with an industrial case study. The paper ‘Search-Based Refactoring: an Empirical Study’ by Mark O'Keffe and Mel Ó Cinnéide presents an approach to automatically re-factor, using search-based techniques, object-oriented systems that undergo repeated addition of functionality. Such addition can, very often, deteriorate the quality of the system's underlying design. Their re-factoring is guided by the QMOOD quality model 25, and the paper compares different optimization techniques, such as Genetic Algorithms, Simulated Annealing, and Multiple Ascent Hill-Climbing. The results of experiments carried out on five software systems suggest that the latter technique outperforms the others. The paper ‘Search-based Many-to-one Component Substitution’ by Nicolas Desnos, Marianne Huchard, Guy Tremblay, Christelle Urtado, and Sylvain Vauttier presents a search-based approach that allows the replacement of an obsolete component with a composition of multiple components. When a component becomes obsolete, the approach searches for a minimal assembly of other components, exposing their functionality by means of ports that preserves the behavior of the original component. The proposed approach has been evaluated on a set of randomly generated components. We hope that readers will enjoy this special issue and find the selected papers insightful and inspiring. We would like to thank all the authors who presented papers for this special issue: there were many good quality papers, but unfortunately we could accept only three of them. Last, but not the least, we would like to thank the reviewers who provided timely, detailed and constructive feedbacks to the authors. Without their precious help this special issue would not have been possible.