Method for Lightening Software Processes through Optimizing the Selection of Software Engineering Best Practices

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

Uptake of HCI and usability engineering by software development organisations can be terminally impeded by lack of appreciation of the benefits of HCI activities. However, descriptions of HCI offerings in terms of activities (e.g. task analysis, user mapping, allocation of function, interaction design) and methods (e.g. user profiling, prototyping, GOMS modelling) do not convey to product managers a readily comprehensible conception of the value of such offerings. Similarly, descriptions of HCI activities and methods give little indication of how these are to be associated and managed with reference to stages and deliverables in a software development life cycle. This lack of clear association between usability engineering and software engineering contributes to the marginalisation of usability related activities. Even when investment is made in usability resources its eventual pay off can be minimal, with resulting disillusionment on both sides. Specification of usability deliverables can provide a solid basis for a manageable usability perspective on the development of software products. The article identifies usability deliverables and describes their content and relation to deliverables in a software design and development process. More general implications for an approach to the specification of quality processes for the creation of interactive software products are discussed.

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.

Clean room software engineering is a formal software development method that can strictly engineer software development and eliminate defects before they can cause serious harm. The clean room software engineering model has its own advantages and disadvantages in use. To use it in traditional software engineering, it is necessary to clarify the relationship between it and traditional software engineering methods and practices. Based on the technology and principles of the clean room software process, this paper gets the advantages and disadvantages of the clean room. Corresponding the traditional method-based software process to the key technology of the clean room, making the traditional management-based software engineering method and the tailored clean room compatible, and the software engineering practice of the clean room software process is compared with the traditional software engineering practice. To discuss the clean room and traditional software engineering, in order to expand the use of clean room methods, improve the clean room software process, and improve the quality of software.

Software engineering is an engineering division connected with development of software product using well-defined scientific principles, techniques and actions. Two different types of activities like software framework activities and umbrella activities are included in standard software process model. Testing acts important job in software development process, i.e. the specified functionality and requirements are tested. The objective of this paper is to provide the software process framework and testing techniques for young researchers.

Methods for Monitoring Productivity in Applicative Software Development

The low-code approach is an important area of research being developed to improve the rapid creation and performance of software applications. This approach allows developers and users to easily create software applications through an interactive interface. Existing research shows that the low-code approach accelerates the development process in innovative ways, saves effort and time, and reduces code complexity. This study analyses and compares automatic code generation and transformation techniques in low-code platforms. The study analyses the contributions of automatic code generation and transformation to software engineering processes and evaluates the impact of these techniques on software product quality and development speed. The importance of the Model-Based Development (MBD) approach in automated code generation processes is highlighted. It is stated that MBD provides benefits such as speeding up the software development process and reducing errors by enabling automatic code generation from high-level abstract models. In the study, various literature studies were evaluated to examine the impact of automatic code generation and transformation techniques on the application development process. These studies have shown how automatic code generation and transformation techniques are applied, what results are achieved and what contributions these techniques make to the software development process. The results of the study show that automatic code generation and transformation techniques have a great impact on the application development process. In particular, the acceleration of the software development process, the reduction of errors and the ability to produce more effective and efficient software products are important benefits of these techniques. In addition, it has been found that this approach increases the success of software projects by enabling software developers to produce fast and accurate solutions in complex systems. In this context, the importance of automatic code generation and transformation techniques plays an important role in software development processes.

Many papers proposed in the software engineering and information systems literature are dedicated to analysis of software projects missing their schedules, exceeding their budgets, delivering software products with poor quality and in some cases even wrong functionality. The expression “software crisis“ has been coined since the late 60's to illustrate this phenomenon. Various solutions has been proposed by academics and practitioners in order to deal with the software crisis, counter these trends and improve productivity and software quality. Such solutions recommend software process improvement as the best way to build software products needed by modern organizations. Among the well-known solutions, many are based either on software development tools or on software development approaches, methods, processes, and notations. Nevertheless, the scope of these solutions seems to be limited and the improvements they provide are often not significant. We think that since software artifacts are accumulation of knowledge owned by organizational stakeholders, the software crisis is due to a knowledge gap resulting from the discrepancy between the knowledge integrated in software systems and the knowledge owned by organizational actors. In particular, integrating knowledge management in software development process permits reducing the knowledge gap through building software products which reflect at least partly the organization's know-how. In this paper, we propose a framework which provides a definition of knowledge based on information systems architecture and describes a knowledge-oriented software development process to help organizations in reducing the software crisis impacts.

Software process improvement in software development organisations is a complex task that can be solved using knowledge management strategies. In this area, the definition and use of process patterns are a proven approach to apply knowledge management strategies in software engineering organisations. One of the main problems for the effective application of process patterns in the software industry is the difficulty of formalising the knowledge about the development process using these approaches. This study presents a framework to manage software project patterns. This framework (which is composed of a metamodel and a platform for patterns modelling and reuse) is able to formalise the knowledge on software development projects including software engineers' previous experience, development methodologies, references frameworks and lessons learnt. The authors carried out an empirical study at Carlos III University of Madrid, where junior software engineers used the project patterns defined in this research work. The evidences and findings obtained during the empirical study execution indicates that correctness of the pattern depends on relevance of the bibliographic references used to create it, implementation of a knowledge sharing strategy among the personnel involved and previous experience in the business areas related to the information systems being developed. The results obtained from the empirical study also envisage that the usefulness of an sdPP (Software Development Project Pattern) depends on the ease of identifying when and how to apply a specific sdPP in a software project.

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.

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.

In this paper, we identify a set of factors that may be used to forecast software productivity and software development time. Software productivity was measured in function points per person hours, and software development time was measured in number of elapsed days. Using field data on over 130 field software projects from various industries, we empirically test the impact of team size, integrated computer aided software engineering (ICASE) tools, software development type, software development platform, and programming language type on the software development productivity and development time. Our results indicate that team size, software development type, software development platform, and programming language type significantly impact software development productivity. However, only team size significantly impacts software development time. Our results indicate that effective management of software development teams, and using different management strategies for different software development type environments may improve software development productivity.

Object and purpose of research. The object of the research is the dynamic positioning system of a vessel with electric propulsion, the purpose is to create a computer tool for debugging the algorithms for the operation of control system for the ship’s dynamic positioning. Materials and methods. The indigenous simulation environment SimInTech is used. The model of vessel’s plane-parallel motion and methods of complex technical objects computer modeling are used. Main results. The concept and computer model of the ship technical means control system in the domestic modeling environment, mathematical and circuit models of the control object for conducting computational studies of ship control modes, developing and debugging algorithms for controlling the dynamic positioning of the ship, taking into account the optimal use of electric power system resources. Conclusion. The developed computer model of ship with the dynamic positioning system is a flexible tool for creating and debugging ship control systems and control algorithms. It provides a large number of computational studies of ship control modes for the creation and debugging of algorithms for controlling ship movement during its positioning, taking into account the optimal use of the resources of the ship's electric power system, which reduces the complexity of development and debugging of control algorithms, minimizes the number of physical experiments necessary to create ship’s dynamic positioning systems.

BackgroundPublic health and primary care are distinct sectors within western health care systems. Within each sector, work is carried out in the context of organizations, for example, public health units and primary care clinics. Building on a scoping literature review, our study aimed to identify the influencing factors within these organizations that affect the ability of these health care sectors to collaborate with one another in the Canadian context. Relationships between these factors were also explored.MethodsWe conducted an interpretive descriptive qualitative study involving in-depth interviews with 74 key informants from three provinces, one each in western, central and eastern Canada, and others representing national organizations, government, or associations. The sample included policy makers, managers, and direct service providers in public health and primary care.ResultsSeven major organizational influencing factors on collaboration were identified: 1) Clear Mandates, Vision, and Goals; 2) Strategic Coordination and Communication Mechanisms between Partners; 3) Formal Organizational Leaders as Collaborative Champions; 4) Collaborative Organizational Culture; 5) Optimal Use of Resources; 6) Optimal Use of Human Resources; and 7) Collaborative Approaches to Programs and Services Delivery.ConclusionWhile each influencing factor was distinct, the many interactions among these influences are indicative of the complex nature of public health and primary care collaboration. These results can be useful for those working to set up new or maintain existing collaborations with public health and primary care which may or may not include other organizations.

An overview of the optimization modelling applications