Microservices, a Definition Analyzed by ßMACH

This chapter discusses the integration of ethical deliberations within agile software development processes. It emphasizes the importance of considering ethical implications during the development of software, not just AI. The chapter proposes modes of reflection and deliberation that include disclosive, weighing, and applicative modes of contemplation. It argues that these three kinds of thinking are guided by different normative values. The chapter suggests that agile development is an excellent starting point for implementing ethical deliberations, as it allows for continuous reflection and learning. It also proposes that development teams can perform this task themselves up to a point with proper guidance. This section further discusses the potential of agile processes to naturally accommodate ethical deliberation. However, it also acknowledges the challenges associated with implementing agile processes, especially in the context of machine learning models.

The debate on how to integrate Design Thinking and Lean Startup into the agile process has been addressed in the literature over the past few years. Researchers argue that Design Thinking can contribute to software development by offering support on how to understand user needs in order to derive solution and product options, whereas Lean Startup helps to learn about business and scaling strategies. Based on these viewpoints, we developed InnoDev, which is an approach that combines Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Scrum to create an agile software development process that can deliver the innovative customer-oriented products and services required by competitive companies. This study aims to describe InnoDev in detail by depicting all its phases. Our findings provide complementary perspectives regarding software development strategies, roles and techniques. This study will advance the knowledge of Design Thinking and software development by providing a detailed description of a tool that combines best practices for creating more innovative software products. The results of this investigation can help managers to evaluate their software development process in order to improve its effectiveness and create more efficient user-driven solutions.

One of the main goals of Software Engineering is to produce software with quality. But with the increasing use of agile methodologies in software development, it is observed that the existing quality assurance models do not adapt easily to these methods. In this context, the objective of this research is to propose critical factors of success (CFS) and tools for software development and management environment using agile methods, focusing on quality. Thus, initially, a literature review was conducted in SCOPUS and SCIELO bases, identifying 21 CFS, which were grouped into three categories: Individual; Organizational; and Technical / Process. Based on these factors, a questionnaire was applied to specialists in software management and development, reaching the sample of 101 respondents, with the most important CFS belonging to the Personal category, which reinforces the need for investment in this area. After this field research, a case study was done in a public company that uses traditional methods, making it possible to propose a development and management environment of software, adding the best practices, tools and CFS with the purpose of improve the quality of delivery of the final product. It was also observed the applicability of the agile Scrum method, allied to Kanban, taking advantage of the best practices of both, and how much was relevant in the context of the company, demonstrating the importance of agile methods to improve the quality and productivity of the whole team, including customers and sponsors. In addition, the present work generates an CFS base for knowledge of the academic community.

Context: Large-scale offshore software development programmes are complex, with challenging deadlines and a high risk of failure. Agile methods are being adopted, despite the challenges of coordinating multiple development teams. Agile processes are tailored to support team coordination. Artefacts are tangible products of the software development process, intended to ensure consistency in the approach of teams on the same development programme.Objective: This study aims to increase understanding of how development processes are tailored to meet the needs of large-scale offshore software development programmes, by focusing on artefact inventories used in the development process.Method: A grounded theory approach using 46 practitioner interviews, supplemented with documentary sources and observations, in nine international companies was adopted. The grounded theory concepts of open coding, memoing, constant comparison and saturation were used in data analysis.Results: The study has identified 25 artefacts, organised into five categories: feature, sprint, release, product and corporate governance. It was discovered that conventional agile artefacts are enriched with artefacts associated with plan-based methods in order to provide governance. The empirical evidence collected in the study has been used to identify a primary owner of each artefact and map each artefact to specific activities within each of the agile roles.Conclusion: The development programmes in this study create agile and plan-based artefacts to improve compliance with enterprise quality standards and technology strategies, whilst also mitigating risk of failure. Management of these additional artefacts is currently improvised because agile development processes lack corresponding ceremonies.

Agile development practices have been widely adopted in a variety of organizations, yet only a few tools are available to help make the practical process of managing agile teams less painful and more successful. HP Agile Manager is a purpose-built SaaS-based Agile planning tool. HP Agile Manager provides a simpler, smarter way to manage collaborative development. Liran Tal provides a practical, concise approach to using Agile Manager in a variety of settings to better plan, conduct, and manage software releases within development teams. His step-by-step approach will show you how to plan your products features, streamline the agile sprint process, work with user stories, and track defects throughout the development process. Agile Manager can work for small startups, mid-sized teams, as well as scale up for bigger organizations as a cost-effective and flexible tool to apply agile techniques to improve your software development process. What youll learnHow to apply the concepts of agile management in software development teams to better execute and increase performance and delivery How a software release cycle works, how to manage sprints, set timelines, build a products backlog, and manage day to day team tasks How to leverage agile best practices to guide your team through effective release planning and team collaboration Understand and apply agile software delivery concepts such, estimating and prioritizing user stories. Streamlining sprints planning, execution, and retrospective How to setup, and use HP Agile Manager to effectively manage software lifecycle through agile methodology, and learn how to leverage Agile Manager's flexible workflow to meet your team requirements and processes Using Agile Manager's dashboards for real-time view into the current status of releases, and sprints to gain insights and pro-actively respond to changes, as well as tracking your team progress, work-load, and keeping an eye on tasks burn-down, or cumulative flow Who this book is for Developers, quality engineers, development team leaders and new managers will find this book to serve them well in learning and applying agile methodologies in their teams.

The need for understanding Generation Y employees' attitudes and expectations that considerably differed from previous generations had been a focus of researchers in the last decades. IT industry and specifically software industry had been among the most popular employment areas of Generation Y professionals and hence Generation Y Software Developers constitutes the majority of the work force in the software industry. As known, software development is a project-based business where the project management methodologies and principles are utilized. Similar to other project based works, the effectiveness of human resources management and team development is the determinant of project success in software development. Therefore, to effectively manage and to adapt appropriate approaches for leading the project teams which include Generation Y software professionals, managers and leaders prior in need to understand their perspective. In this context, research aims to understand the expectations and attitudes of Generation Y Software Developer professionals in projects. The research is structured in two parts reflecting these dual aims. The first part of the research addresses the expectations of Y generation employees from project management and project environment in software development projects. The second part of the research explores the attitudes of Y generation Employees in software development project teams. Survey is conducted with the participation of 113 Generation Y Software Professionals who are employed in major software companies in Turkey. Basic concepts that are explored in the study are expectations from working environment, expectations from project type and content, leadership, motivation factors, challenges faced, perceptions on generation conflicts and the attitudes of Generation Y professionals towards project-based work and work environments. Software industry is dominated by project based management methods, perceptions and attitudes of Generation Y in projects are expected to provide practical guidelines to policy makers and HR professionals in developing solutions and tools for improving motivations and effectiveness of Generation Y employees.

Traditional software development organizations have rigid processes that can be difficult to change. One of the most critical challenges is the management processes that can ensure the customer’s desired level of quality and optimize the organization’s resources. Kanban represents one of the most well-known approaches that bring Lean principles, philosophies, and tools into software organizations. This study analyses the leadership behind the Lean methodology, based on which the Kanban software implementation method has been created, by doing a literature review focusing on lean leadership principles that can optimize the software delivery and implementation. Lean practices can be applied in almost any domain like accounting, services industry, product services, and even software development. Two basic concepts stay at the core of the Lean model that can be employed at any organization level. The first focuses on eliminating waste by optimizing processes and systems, and the second focuses on maximized customer value. Consequently, it can be affirmed that Lean is focused on maximizing customer value with a minimum amount of waste. Furthermore, a case study is presented that shows the Kanban implementation at a software development company. The practical case of the Kanban adoption is analyzed, highlighting the link between the leadership principles and the process development flow. Finally, key performance indicators are identified and instituted to guarantee the continuous improvement of the software delivery model. The software development projects driven by the Kanban project management approach reported essential improvements such as waste reduction, team communication, and collaboration enhancement, work in progress diminishment, productivity-boosting, better delivery predictability, and project visibility. Therefore, the type of leadership influences the software development projects’ performance. The findings suggest that Kanban effectively enhances the software development delivery model and team performance.KeywordsLeadershipKanbanLean practicesSoftware developmentSoftware implementationAgile transformation

Distributed Agile Software Development (DASD) is the most important approach for the modern software industry that allows geographically independent software development. In the past, different tools and frameworks were proposed to solve communication and collaboration issues in DASD but they lacked transparency, trust, traceability, and security. These shortcomings resulted in project failure or overdue, customer dissatisfaction, project deal cancellations, and payment clashes between the customers and development teams. This paper addresses and overcomes the major issues of transparency, trust, security, traceability, coordination, and communication in DASD by embedding blockchain technology. We have proposed a novel blockchain-based framework named as AgilePlus which executes the smart contracts on a private ethereum blockchain for acceptance testing, secure payment, verification of developer’s payment requirements, and automatic payment distribution into the digital wallets of development teams. The execution of these smart contracts automatically assign penalties to the customers for late or non-payments and also to the developers for overdue tasks. Moreover, we have also solved the blockchain’s scalability challenge in AgilePlus by utilizing Interplanetary File System (IPFS) as off-chain storage. Lastly, experimental results prove that the proposed framework enhances transparency, communication, coordination, traceability, security and solves trust issues of both customers and developers in DASD.

Agile development processes such as Scrum have been successfully applied in the software industry for many years. Based on experience, industrial practitioners indicate three predominant benefits of agile development processes compared to traditional software development processes. First of all, development results better fit customers’ and other stakeholders’ needs. That is because they are intensively involved in the development process by receiving, applying and assessing functional software increments in a defined cadence throughout the development process. Secondly, agile development processes better cope with unexpected changes in the development process due to the built-in process flexibility. Lastly, development speed has significantly increased in most of the agile software development projects, resulting in a shorter time-to-market. Especially in the context of radical innovations for technical systems, manufacturing companies are striving for approaches to optimize their development processes in a similar direction. Traditional plan-oriented development approaches such as VDI 2221 or Cooper’s Stage-Gate Process turn out to be insufficiently customer oriented, too inflexible and project duration is usually too long to reach an adequate time-to-market. For that reason, a large community in academia and industrial practice is developing and implementing approaches to adapt agile software development practices for the development of technical systems. However, a current study in industrial practice reveals that out of 23 objectives, that are expected when introducing agile development processes to technical systems, the three objectives mentioned above, show the largest negative deviations from expected benefit to realized benefit. Therefore, the overall goal of this research is to address these gaps by developing an explicit methodological approach for an agile development of technical systems. It turns out, that mainly the role of prototyping and the way product specifications are handled during the development process change significantly in the course of introducing agility to development of technical systems. Agile practitioners strive to not necessarily define product specifications comprehensively upfront, as it is postulated in plan-oriented development processes. In contrast, product specifications, which are of major importance to the overall development project, are specified and validated with customers and other stakeholders in early prototypes. Therefore, prototypes are realized in a defined cadence throughout the development process to gradually specify and validate the product. However, the way product specifications are prioritized and selected in the development of technical systems has to differ substantially from the general way Scrum or other existing agile development processes propose. That is because technical systems are characterized by multiple technical interrelations, resulting in informational dependencies for the development process. For that reason, a prioritization along criteria such as customer value, development effort and risk seems too narrow in the context of technical systems. In fact, the prioritization of product specifications has to consider both, the value being generated by their realization as well as the informational dependencies towards other specifications. Furthermore, when designing a prototype, time constraints need to be particularly considered due to lead times in parts delivery and prototype production. Therefore, this paper introduces a methodology to prioritize and select technical design parameters in agile development processes. The methodology can be applied in the cyclical sprint planning that aims at defining the scope of the next prototype to be developed. As outlined above, the major paradigms of value generation, informational dependencies as well as lead-time and effort are crucial when adapting agile for technical systems and are consequently implemented in the methodology. These paradigms are operationalized to explicitly address the mentioned major objectives of agile development processes, which are currently showing are large gap between expected benefit and realized benefit in industrial practice. The methodology is applied to the real development process of an RGB laser light source for digital cinema projectors, which is summarized as a case study in the paper. Insights from this application are equally discussed as the resulting next steps in further developing and aligning the methodology to the needs of industrial practice.

The NA-42 TI program initiated an effort in FY2010 to standardize its software development efforts with the long term goal of migrating toward a software management approach that will allow for the sharing and reuse of code developed within the TI program, improve integration, ensure a level of software documentation, and reduce development costs. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has been tasked with two activities that support this mission. PNNL has been tasked with the identification, selection, and implementation of a Shared Software Component Library. The intent of the library is to provide a common repository that is accessible by all authorized NA-42 software development teams. The repository facilitates software reuse through a searchable and easy to use web based interface. As software is submitted to the repository, the component registration process captures meta-data and provides version control for compiled libraries, documentation, and source code. This meta-data is then available for retrieval and review as part of library search results. In FY2010, PNNL and staff from the Remote Sensing Laboratory (RSL) teamed up to develop a software application with the goal of replacing the aging Aerial Measuring System (AMS). The application under development includes an Advanced Visualization and Integration of Data (AVID) framework and associated AMS modules. Throughout development, PNNL and RSL have utilized a common AMS code repository for collaborative code development. The AMS repository is hosted by PNNL, is restricted to the project development team, is accessed via two different geographic locations and continues to be used. The knowledge gained from the collaboration and hosting of this repository in conjunction with PNNL software development and systems engineering capabilities were used in the selection of a package to be used in the implementation of the software component library on behalf of NA-42 TI. The second task managed by PNNL is the development and continued maintenance of the NA-42 TI Software Development Questionnaire. This questionnaire is intended to help software development teams working under NA-42 TI in documenting their development activities. When sufficiently completed, the questionnaire illustrates that the software development activities recorded incorporate significant aspects of the software engineering lifecycle. The questionnaire template is updated as comments are received from NA-42 and/or its development teams and revised versions distributed to those using the questionnaire. PNNL also maintains a list of questionnaire recipients. The blank questionnaire template, the AVID and AMS software being developed, and the completed AVID AMS specific questionnaire are being used as the initial content to be established in the TI Component Library. This report summarizes the approach taken to identify requirements, search for and evaluate technologies, and the approach taken for installation of the software needed to host the component library. Additionally, it defines the process by which users request access for the contribution and retrieval of library content.

A Framework for Managing, Measuring, and Predicting Attributes of Software Development Products and Processes Reflecting the immense progress in the development and use of software metrics in the past decades, Software Metrics: A Rigorous and Practical Approach, Third Edition provides an up-to-date, accessible, and comprehensive introduction to software metrics. Like its popular predecessors, this third edition discusses important issues, explains essential concepts, and offers new approaches for tackling long-standing problems. New to the Third Edition This edition contains new material relevant to object-oriented design, design patterns, model-driven development, and agile development processes. It includes a new chapter on causal models and Bayesian networks and their application to software engineering. This edition also incorporates recent references to the latest software metrics activities, including research results, industrial case studies, and standards. Suitable for a Range of Readers With numerous examples and exercises, this book continues to serve a wide audience. It can be used as a textbook for a software metrics and quality assurance course or as a useful supplement in any software engineering course. Practitioners will appreciate the important results that have previously only appeared in research-oriented publications. Researchers will welcome the material on new results as well as the extensive bibliography of measurement-related information. The book also gives software managers and developers practical guidelines for selecting metrics and planning their use in a measurement program.

With the rapid development of information and network technology, the scale and complexity of software are becoming larger and larger, and the traditional software development process has become increasingly difficult to cope with the rapidly changing market. In the fierce market competition, more software development teams begin to use lightweight agile management methods to replace the traditional software project management process. Due to the incremental nature of agile methods and their emphasis on communication and people-centered values, some conventional software project management processes and methods cannot be applied. First of all, through the analysis of the current situation of software management projects and the quality problems in the agile process, the direction of quality improvement is clarified.

Nowadays, medical devices rely on software whether completely such as mobile medical applications or as embedded software into medical chips such as tele surgery systems. Medical device software usually developed by using traditional development methods such as V-model and Waterfall model as these methods are straightforward and has the ability to comply with regulatory requirements such as documentation that ensures traceability. However, these methods could take a long time, could be costly, and these are inappropriate in case of requirements changing. In contrast, agile processes have several benefits such as producing a product of a high-quality with low cost and in short period with the capability to embrace change during development. Therefore, companies that develop medical device software can benefit from adopting agile practices. While the adoption rate of agile practices in software development in different industries is increasing, healthcare industries still have a low rate of agile adoption. This due to the gaps between agile practices and the stringent requirements of healthcare regulations such as documentation, traceability, and formality. The main question of this research is how capable are Agile processes can be in dealing with MDR requirements? This paper will investigate the capability of agile processes to support European Medical Device Regulation (MDR) requirements by extracting the MDR requirements that are related to software development life cycle. Then investigating the robustness of agile processes, to support MDR regulations. These objectives will be conducting by comparing and analysing the most popular agile processes (XP, Scrum, and FDD) to identify the gaps between MDR requirements and agile processes. The analysis revealed that XP is inappropriate for MDR requirements since it lacks the fixed up-front planning and also have insufficient documentations for treatability, Scrum has a model status report can be used for traceability but also it has insufficient documentation for MDR, and FDD is the closest agile practices to satisfy MDR requirements because it has a develop overall model phase which can be considered as semi-fixed up-front planning as well as has more documentations than the XP for traceability purposes such as UML modelling.

Project management decisions are the primary basis for project success (or failure). Mostly, such decisions are based on an intuitive understanding of the underlying software engineering and management process and have a likelihood of being misjudged. Our problem domain is product-line evolution. We model the dynamics of the process by incorporating feedback loops appropriate to two decision structures: staffing policy, and the forces of growth associated with long-term software evolution. The model is executable and supports project managers to assess the long-term effects of possible actions. Our work also corroborates results from earlier studies of E-type systems, in particular the FEAST project and the rules for software evolution, planning and management.

The COVID-19 pandemic has lasted for over 1 year. During the pandemic, several software development companies migrated to working from home (WFH). Several studies have recorded an initial moment of adaptation to WFH. This study investigated how Brazilian software development teams dealt with WFH after 1 year of a pandemic and how this change in work was on the software development process. We applied a survey with 67 participants of software development teams and investigated aspects, as: work routine, collaboration, communication, productivity, financial assistance and software development process. We performed a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the survey results and compared them with previous studies. Our key findings are: (i) 56.71% of the participants said that it has an impact on the work routine related to work overload and exceeds the company's standard hours; (ii) 92.54% of the participants consider their team to be collaborative; (iii) 82.70% are satisfied with the communication at WFH; (iv) 86.55% has meetings once or twice a day; (v) 59.7% had an improvement in productivity in WFH and 75% are satisfied with their productivity; (vi) 79.60% receive some assistance from the company for WFH; (vii) 82.1% said that the company intends or probably intends to continue in the WFH, and (viii) 55.2% said they had changed in the software development process due to WFH. The main positive changes in the process are related to the practices of: daily meetings, agile processes, code review, pair programming and code versioning.