Selection of good practices for small software development teams

In this article, we discuss the impact of software developer motivation on projects. Motivation has been reported to be an important determinant of productivity and quality of work in many industries. In this article, we explore specifically how motivation impacts on development work in software engineering. We describe work previously done to suggest that software developers may have a different profile of motivators to other professionals. We present data collected from nine developers working in a software organisation that has been assessed at CMM level 5. We find that the developers working in this high maturity development environment are highly motivated. We also report relationships between motivation and progress in development work and describe the impact of motivating factors on specific aspects of software development. Our main conclusion is that good software developers are proactive, flexible and adaptable, prepared to share knowledge with team and follow good practice, for example, documenting work. Also, and in particular reference to this high maturity company, good software developers are able to resolve complex problems, innovative and eager to try new technology. The biggest motivators to such performance in a high maturity organisation are pay and benefits, recognition and opportunities for achievement. These are closely followed by technically challenging work, job security and senior management support. Cost, time, product quality — in terms of reliability — and user satisfaction are all moderately good indicators of project success. User satisfaction, however, is the best indicator of all four as its importance assumes a temporal significance as a project progresses. Finally, we found that technical competency, interpersonal skills and adherence to good practices impact favourably on software project success. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In project-based organizations knowledge is a critical resource used to develop and deliver products and services with a high level of quality. Therefore, a systematic and sustainable process is necessary to coordinate knowledge management, project management and product lifecycle. This scenario predominates in companies focused on the creation and maintenance of information systems. This article presents an exploratory study based on a framework that integrates cognitive, managerial, and operational processes in a public Brazilian organization that provides services in the area of information and communications technology, focusing on the construction and maintenance of information systems. Those processes are operationalized by three management models considering knowledge, project, and software development processes. Our proposal aims to understand the relationships between those three management models and their influence on the software development process in the organization under study. Our premise is based on the principle that cognitive management, project management, and software development management must be integrated to fulfill the demands of product development and service provision. The research data was composed of registers of working hours spent on software development and maintenance projects involving 244 people allocated to 5064 projects in the period from 2007 to 2013. The study resulted in the identification of the relationships among the three management models adopted by the organization, with emphasis on knowledge management activities, which were not directly identified, making it difficult to account for and measure them. We established a set of activities connected to each one of the knowledge management model phases. Since those activities were not visible before, our approach contributed to build a systematic process to register and relate activities linked to the dimensions of cognitive processes, project management, and software construction.

This scientific article presents the results of a study focused on the current practices and future prospects of AI-tools usage, specifically large language models (LLMs), in software development (SD) processes within European IT companies. The Pan-European study covers 35 SD teams from all regions of Europe and consists of three sections: the first section explores the current adoption of AI-tools in software production, the second section addresses common challenges in LLMs implementation, and the third section provides a forecast of the tech future in AI-tools development for SD. The study reveals that AI-tools, particularly LLMs, have gained popularity and approbation in European IT companies for tasks related to software design and construction, coding, and software documentation. However, their usage for business and system analysis remains limited. Nevertheless, challenges such as resource constraints and organizational resistance are evident. The article also highlights the potential of AI-tools in the software development process, such as automating routine operations, speeding up work processes, and enhancing software product excellence. Moreover, the research examines the transformation of IT paradigms driven by AI-tools, leading to changes in the skill sets of software developers. Although the impact of LLMs on the software development industry is perceived as modest, experts anticipate significant changes in the next 10 years, including AI-tools integration into advanced IDEs, software project management systems, and product management tools. Ethical concerns about data ownership, information security and legal aspects of AI-tools usage are also discussed, with experts emphasizing the need for legal formalization and regulation in the AI domain. Overall, the study highlights the growing importance and potential of AI-tools in software development, as well as the need for careful consideration of challenges and ethical implications to fully leverage their benefits.

In order to effectively avoid risks that might result in loss of failure in software development process, based on the experiences of software development and project management, this paper identifies 4 potential risk factors specific to software development projects which are integrated with 6 stages in software development process, and proposes a non-linear programming model to optimize funds allocation to reduce the risks. The paper provides an example to validate the effectiveness of the model.

Although the ability to make right decisions is considered a main indicator of organizational project management professionalism, many project, program, and portfolio managers are unwilling to try to improve the quality of their decisions. This ongoing research aims to develop a substantive theory about the decision-making processes considering four elements: cognitive biases, tools and techniques, emotions and organizational factors in the context of software development project-based organizations considering the three levels of project governance: project, program, and portfolio. This paper presents the first results of the research and proposes to shed light on the susceptibility of IT project managers to cognitive biases and how they deal with them, including techniques and tools they use to minimize their negative effects. This study evaluates eight cognitive biases: anchoring bias, exposure effect, hindsight bias, halo effect, planning fallacy, sunk-cost fallacy, availability-related bias, and Parkinson's law effect. The qualitative approach was based on semi-structured interviews with project managers from IT organizations from Brazil and Portugal. Agile practices and knowledge management activities were cited as good practices.

The many meanings of theory and practice

The software development process (SDP) contains many variables depending on the methodology chosen. Software development methodologies such as Agile or Waterfall can specify how and in what sequence software is developed. However, the SDP remains a hot topic among practitioners and academics, who seek to clarify the key aspects that influence the successful implementation of the SDP. As the SDP is a dynamic and knowledge-intensive business process (BP), one of its most impact components is the human factor (HF). It is difficult to predict how the HF impacts the sequence and results of SDP implementation. This paper proposes a new approach to investigate the impact of the HF on the SDP through the perspectives of different software development methodologies. The advantages and novelties of this approach include modelling HF uncertainties through their fuzzification in SDP activities, modelling different SDP methodologies using a case-handling approach, and simulating a dynamic, case-based SDP with real HF-related data collected from several IT organizations. The results show that the impact of the HF on SDP performance differs across the Waterfall and Agile methodologies. The results also allow researchers and practitioners working on software development projects to familiarize themselves with the impact of the HF on different SDPs, and to assess the degree of development risk associated with the SDP depending on the methodology chosen.

In particular, an early integration of performance specifications in the SDP has been recognized during the last few years as an effective approach to improve the overall quality of a software. Performance related problems are becoming more and more strategic in the software development, especially recently with the advent of Web Services and related business-oriented composition techniques (software as a service, Web 2.0, orchestration, choreography, etc.). The goal of our work is the definition of a software development process that integrates performance evaluation and prediction. The software performance engineering development process (SPEDP) we specify is focused on performance, which plays a key role driving the software development process, thus implementing a performance/QoS-driven (software) development process. More specifically, in this paper our aim is to formally define the SPEDP design process, posing particular interest on the basis, on the first step of SPEDP, the software/system architecture design, modeling and/or representation. We define both the diagrams to use and show how to model the structure of the software architecture, its behavior and performance requirements. This is the first mandatory step for the automation of the SPEDP into a specific tool.

Performance related problems are becoming more and more strategic in the software development, especially recently with the advent of Web Services and related business-oriented composition techniques (software as a service, Web 2.0, orchestration, choreography, etc.). In particular, an early integration of performance specifications in the SDP has been recognized during the last few years as an effective approach to improve the overall quality of a software. The goal of our work is the definition of a software development process that integrates performance evaluation and prediction. The software performance engineering development process (SPEDP) we specify is focused on performance, which plays a key role driving the software development process, thus implementing a performance/QoS-driven (software) development process. More specifically, in this paper our aim is to formally define the SPEDP design process, posing particular interest on the basis, on the first step of SPEDP, the software/system architecture design, modeling and/or representation. We define both the diagrams to use and show how to model the structure of the software architecture, its behavior and performance requirements. This is the first mandatory step for the automation of the SPEDP into a specific tool, which we have partially implemented as a performance plug-in for ArgoUML, ArgoPerformance.

The existing software engineering seldom considers software usability, and human-computer interaction (HCI) techniques which can improve the software usability cannot guarantee development efficiency. Recently, more and more stakeholders and users begin to regard the usability as an important software requirement. In order to bring respective advantages of software engineering and HCI techniques into full play to improve software usability and development efficiency, the paper presents user model driven software development, which integrates HCI techniques into software development method by eliciting user model under the participation of user, HCI designer and software engineer. Applications show that the method can be effectively applied to small software development team, and can raise software usability and development efficiency.

The main objective of the paper is to create context sensitive decision support services within flexible Quality Assurance (QA) of software development projects and their resulting products. The new QA process is supported by an Internet solution composed of several knowledge, context sensitive services based on open standards that is able to detect changes in the scope and requirements of an application (or changes in its development process) and provide the adequate set of assessments as a basis for an accurate measurement of the quality of the process and product at any time and allow for effective decision making within QA. The Internet Services monitor the different stages of the software development process, interoperating with the existing applications and systems to provide quantitative information about the quality of each phase (i.e. project management, requirements gathering, functional and technical design, development and testing), the project as a whole and the resulting product. They also monitor context under which the SW is developed and decisions on QA have to be made. Data obtained in real-time by the monitoring services are used in an indistinctive way by software engineers, designers, developers, testers and managers alike for different collaborative decision making. The paper is one of the first attempts to apply context sensitivity to support decision making in QA for SW development. The approach is assessed in 2 different business cases in order to validate the results under different conditions. The first business case belongs to a large software company developing large Internet projects based on Rational Unified Process methodology. The second business case belongs to a SME developing complex projects based on agile methodologies.

This paper presents the arguments for creation and validation of a composite process framework (CASDPF) that would enable formal modeling and management of the application software development & integration. The arguments for this research are based on the practical understanding of the authors that no single 'type' of process appears to be suitable for software development projects. Increasingly, there appears to be a need to use high-ceremony 'waterfall' type approaches at the programme and project management level, whereas at individual level, 'agile' aspects of a process seem to help. A composite process framework has the potential for accepting this responsibility of balancing the modeling with software projects, as is argued in this paper. The development of software application systems, and management of the corresponding systems development life cycle is considered complex, time consuming and costly. This is so because, as argued by Unhelkar [5], the nature, type and size of software projects are different and so they result in differing requirements, development and implementation procedures.. Marks [3] indicates that the Waterfall model does not provide good project planning control and risk management. According to Marks [3], the iterative process has many strengths such as rapid feedback from users based on the actual system prototype, flexibility to address system evolving requirements, the rapid discovery of design flaws, and ease of deploying new functionality. An iterative project might run the risk of never ending process, due to its ability to react to continuous changes of business needs, and incomplete system documentation due to the fact that there is no scheduled period for documentation. The agile methods are suitable for projects with requirements that are rapidly changing and not very suitable for systems that have high criticality, reliability and safety requirements [2]. Agile methods are evaluated based on project criticality, size and requirements. Boehm [1] Spiral life-cycle model that combines features of the prototyping and Waterfall model [4] is favored for large, expensive, and complicated projects. The following model as shown in (Figure 1). Shows that the Waterfall approach is best for project management as it gives the project manager full control over the project life-cycle. The iterative approach is the best during the analysis, design and implementation phases since it gives the project team more flexibility to address evolving system requirements and to iterate within these phases to ensure a comprehensive analysis and design has been done. The Agile approach is best during the implementation and testing phases since it helps produce incremental small software releases within a short iterative development cycles. The Composite approach will split the project into a set of increments; each increment will consist of a set of the project life-cycle phases. For each increment, it will bring the best aspects of available software development processes (Waterfall, Iterative and Agile) together that can be used to develop and manage application software development.

A major challenge in Information Systems and Information Technology is to improve the ability to conceptualize, design, develop and deliver information systems that meet customer requirements. Project management is often adopted to create solutions that work and meet customer needs. The principles of project management as defined by the Project Management Institute, can improve project success rates. Researchers in the project management need to help practitioners understanding the impact of different principles on the success of IS development. This study undertakes a survey of project management experts on the state of practice and research to examine the need for improving project management, and suggest areas that can be improved. Research may be the most effective means of defining opportunities for enhancing project success rates by tapping the wealth of literature and complementing it with the expertise of project management practitioners. INTRODUCTION Software development applications require frequent changes and updates in order to support enterprise systems. These frequent changes to IS/IT comprise a large volume of software development efforts. These efforts, undertaken as projects, are generally complex and take place in a dynamic environment where business conditions and technologies change frequently during the life of the project (Chen, et. al., 2004). The factors of project success include user involvement and project size, management and planning (Schmidt, et al., 2001). A fully operational project management system in enterprise offers the best opportunity for project success through the implementation of methods and tools for planning, organizing, and managing team-based activities to accomplish specific directives (Jurison, 1999). Project management is widely adopted in Corporate America embraces project management to implement system changes (Muriithi & Crawford, 2003; Park & Pena-Mora, 2003; Yilmaz & Phillips, 2007), which are even considered as too significant to outsource (Fish & Seydel, 2006) or having high risk of leading to undesirable consequences (Wei & Peach, 2006). However, many projects fail, even when performed using project management techniques. Such project failure reduces the capability of technology components. The 2004 Chaos report by the Standish Group found that only 28% of IT projects were successful, down from 34% in earlier report; The proportion of IT projects canceled before completion increased to 18% (from 15%), and a further 51% of IT projects were considered challenged as they are seriously late, over budget and missing expected features (The Standish Group, 2004; The Standish Group, 2007). Possible causes for these findings are the size and expense of large projects, a return to traditional development practices on large projects (Boddy, 1993), the absence of user involvement (Turner & Cochrane, 1993; Akbulut & Motwani, 2005), and lack of executive support (Munns & Bjeirmi, 1996). Thus, scope management is regarded as a key area of successful project management in practice (Hayes, 2004). Although some project failures are because of technical reasons, most are directly related to the failure of stakeholders to embrace the principles of good project management (Jurison, 1999). As part of the project management process, project teams must understand the standards to which their projects are being held in order to ensure that project performance is emphasized appropriately (Crawford, 2005). The Field Guide to Project Management (Cleland, 2004) suggests that project management should be an easy sell to organizations because it enhances business performance and increases revenue. An organization can manage project effectively by identifying its goals in applying project management principles (Aladwani, 2002). For most organizations, these goals are to apply a proven practice, optimize resources, serve customer needs and save time and money (Turner & Cochrane, 1993). …

European railway transportation is not as efficient as it could be. Several factors contribute to this absence of efficiency, including a lack of private investment and exclusively public railway administrators and enterprises. Public-private partnerships can yield higher efficiency in railway transport. Within the high-speed railway sector there are a few implemented infrastructures through public-private partnerships and, in many of them, the result has not been the expected one. Hence, the purpose of this research is to develop a list of recommendations and good practices that allow governments, private investors, and railway stakeholders to take better and more efficient decisions on the implementation of new high-speed rail lines. Consequently, this research has analysed the Portuguese high-speed rail network called Rede Ferroviária de Alta Velocidade (RAVE) designed through public-private partnership. The research methodology is based on exploratory case study and on the identification of critical success factors. This article has made it possible to develop the following list of recommendations and good practices, cross-border cooperation for international sections, unique contracts for substructure and superstructure and an independent contract for signalling and communication systems.

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